It’s been years since we first heard about the Alien TV show that Fargo’s Noah Hawley was working on for FX, and details about the project have been harder to find than a trustworthy Weyland-Yutani employee since then. Until now! Some vague details about the Alien show have now burst forth from our collective chest—like some kind of nebulous, ill-defined, out-of-focus Xenomorph baby.
Deadline is reporting that Timothy Olyphant has joined the cast in a “major role,” and while Hawley and FX won’t say anything about the show, Deadline’s sources say he’s a “synth” named Kirsh who “acts as a mentor and trainer” for star Sydney Chandler’s character. Speaking of, that character is apparently a “hybrid, meta-human who has the brain and consciousness of a child but the body of an adult.” That sounds weird, but there’s been weirder stuff in the Alien franchise. We can’t think of a ton of examples, because even the botched Ripley clones in Resurrection are a little less weird than that, but there’s definitely something.
The show reportedly takes place “roughly 70 years in the future” on Earth, before the events of Ridley Scott’s original Alien, which would put it in an odd, confusing place in the Alien canon that is more or less contemporary with Prometheus. But they… kind of find proto-Xenomorphs in that movie (even if old Peter Weyland suspects that there’s fantastical stuff out in the universe), which would make it hard for Xenomorphs to show up in any capacity, which would be weird for an Alien show. Luckily, all of that just represents a challenge, not an impossibility, so it could work if Hawley knows what he’s doing. At least it’ll be nice to see Timothy Olyphant full of the disgusting milk blood that androids have.