In 'Alien: Earth', the Future Is a Corporate Hellscape

Seventeen years ago, Noah Hawley became a father during the Great Recession. If you look at everything he's written since having children--including the TV series Fargo and Legion--Hawley says it all revolves around the same question every parent faces: "How are we supposed to raise these people in the world that we're living in?" Hawley's new series, Alien: Earth, which premieres August 12 on Hulu and FX, explores this question even more directly than his previous work. Set two years before the original Alien in 2120, it imagines a future where the race for immortality has led to three competing technologies: synths (AI minds in synthetic bodies), cyborgs (humans with cybernetic enhancements), and hybrids (human minds downloaded into synthetic bodies). When a deep space research vessel, the USCSS Maginot, crashes into Earth carrying five captured alien species, a megacorporation called Prodigy sends six hybrids to investigate. The first-ever hybrid, Wendy, played by Sydney Chandler, was a terminally ill child before she was selected for the immortality experiment, just like the rest of Prodigy's hybrids, all six of whom wake up in super-strong, super-fast, synthetic adult bodies that will never age.