The Aliens TV Series Won’t Be About Ellen Ripley

You know how Aliens works–scrappy scientists and workers get trapped with Xenomorphs in a spaceship or colony, and they have to fight to survive. The upcoming Aliens TV show, though, won’t be a simple retread, says show creator Noah Hawley in an interview with Vanity Fair.

Instead of trapping humans with aliens, the show will be about “What happens if you can’t contain it?” the Legion and Fargo creator said. The show will not re-cast or revisit Sigourney Weaver’s iconic character Ellen Ripley.

“It’s not a Ripley story,” Hawley said. “She’s one of the great characters of all time, and I think the story has been told pretty perfectly, and I don’t want to mess with it.”

Instead, the show will head to Earth and tackle themes of class inequality. “What happens when the inequality we’re struggling with now isn’t resolved?” he asked.

“[The Alien films] are great monster movies, but they’re not just monster movies,” Hawley continued. “They’re about humanity trapped between our primordial, parasitic past and our artificial intelligence future–and they’re both trying to kill us. Here you have human beings, and they can’t go forward, and they can’t go back.”

Hawley already has two scripts for the show ready to go, but don’t expect it this year.

“The entire film industry had to take a year off, and now they’re trying to jam two years of production into one,” he said. “Everyone is racing to make up for lost time. So I figure, let that bubble burst a bit, and we’ll do it right.”

In the meantime, you can catch up on Hawley’s other work, which includes three seasons of the visually-stunning X-Men spinoff Legion and four seasons of Fargo–proof positive that Hawley is the right creator to turn a movie into a long-form series.