The original post: /r/television by /u/Boobegon-Frehley on 2025-08-18 01:31:52+00:00.

Hawley says that he wasn’t inspired by any of the other movies other than Alien (1979), and vaguely discusses his disinterest in the rest of the franchise, particularly the prequels. This worried a lot of fans, but I realised that perhaps all of his statements were misleading, because I’ve already noticed several paralells and connections to the prequels/sequels in Alien Earth.

  1. Teng the android lustily staring at women when they sleep. This strongly calls back to Prometheus, where David creepily watched Elizabeth Shaw’s dreams. Teng disappears from the story for two episodes, but I’m sure we’ll see more of that thread.
  2. The motif of people being programmed by movies. In Prometheus, Weyland’s obsession with greek mythology and “Lawrence of Arabia” was transferred to David. The Peter Pan analogue isn’t simply an on-the-nose reference- it symbolizes the way that media can shape the way we see the world. Even Wendy’s love for her brother is personified by what media (Ice Age) they watched at an impressionable age. Like Lawrence of Arabia, the message of Peter Pan is ignored or misinterpreted, in favor of the power/immortality that is flaunted in the first two acts of the story.
  3. The fact that the Maginot was launched by Ms. Yutani’s grandmother (as mentioned in the Vanity Fair article by Noah Hawley), strongly connects to the only other time we’ve seen a Yutani onscreen before- Cullen Yutani in AvP: Requiem and later in The Predator (2018). It explains why the Maginot knew where to find the specimens (BEFORE the Prometheus mission ever launched).
  4. The existential crisis of Aliens on earth is depicted in the original quadrilogy. We never actually get to see earth until the end of Resurrection, when its all destroyed. All mentions of earth or scenes in earth’s orbit can be interpreted as- none of the colonists have any idea whats happening because interstellar commnications are controlled by the company.

TLDR; Noah Hawley says that he isn’t interested in movies outside of Alien (1979), but so far (there are only two episodes out when I wrote this) there are seeds that seem to take influence from the entire saga.