Of course, Hawley would flaunt such rules, as he did in his previous successful series Fargo and Legion. The former used the Coen Brothers’ masterpiece as a starting point for a variety of stories that played on the brothers’ key themes. The latter ignored Marvel Comics lore for an exploration on identity.

Hawley’s previous comments about Alien: Earth sound like he’s continuing in that vein. The series will star Sydney Chandler as Wendy, a mysterious woman whose mind appears to be much younger than her body, and Timothy Olyphant as her synthetic teacher. While the crash landing described the show’s official synopsis certainly teases a xenomorph attack, Hawley has seemed more interested in exploring the relationship between humanity and synthetics than he is chest-bursters and face-huggers.

Anyone who’s seen Ridley Scott‘s most recent Alien movies knows that the esteemed director shares that interest, which takes some of the pressure off Hawley’s decision to break an unspoken rule and go to Earth. The originally reported setting for Alien: Earth doubled that slack, as it placed the story far from the franchise’s best entries Alien and Aliens and around the time of the more controversial Prometheus.

But by setting Alien: Earth right before Alien, Hawley runs the risk of undermining the original movie. Alien worked, in part, because of its isolation, the desperation of Ripley and her crewmates as they encounter a creature they’ve never imagined. We didn’t need to know the name of the Company or how they learned of the xenomorph to get scared. Scott’s filmmaking and the actors’ outstanding performances did all that work for us.

Worst of all, by making Alien: Earth a direct prequel to Alien, there’s now an expectation that we’ll see overt references to that film, a problem that diminished the often quite good Alien: Romulus. And given the way that film treated CGI representations of legacy characters, well… let’s hope Hawley is going in a different direction.

Alien: Romulus debuts on FX and Hulu in 2025