‘Alien: Earth’: Noah Hawley’s inspiration, USCSS Nostromo Easter eggs

An inside look at the Maginot spacecraft in FX’s “Alien: Earth.” (Patrick Brown / FX)

For those wondering if they’ll recognize this “Peter Pan”-influenced bit of the “Alien” universe, well, one of the first choices Hawley had to make was environmental. “Are we doing retro-futurism? Are we doing the the cathode ray tube screens? Are we doing all of that stuff that in 1979 felt super futuristic, and to us now, feels like 1979?” he says. “And the answer is: of course we are. That is what ‘Alien’ is. What I had to wrestle with were the choices that Ridley made later on in ‘Prometheus,’ which was a prequel to ‘Alien.’ I was like, ‘I can’t really grapple with that in a way that makes sense to me. So I’m just going to adapt [the] first two films and focus on that aesthetic.’”

The original script had the prequel opening with a “Once upon a time …” parable about Wendy and the Lost Boys. But that, he says, “didn’t say ‘Alien’ right away.” After some conversations with FX, the opening moments morphed into a truncated version of the original film’s initial sequence that created a sense of unease by gradually drawing viewers into its deep space cargo ship.

Jeff Russo, the show’s composer, wanted the melodic cues to evoke one feeling: “Oh f—. ‘Alien.’”

“It’s tension, release, tension, release,” he says. Russo used a hybrid metal-stringed instrument made by an Austrian company. “I could use it in a lot of different ways — I can hit the metal and it makes very weird, otherworldly sounds; I can bow the strings and it has a very deep, very rich, very emotional yet scary sound.”

The sound set up the tension inside the show’s retro-futuristic space craft, which was designed to resemble the original film’s famed vessel, the USCSS Nostromo. Andy Nicholson, the show’s production designer, said his team meticulously studied the film and books featuring fan renderings to help replicate its labyrinth of metallic corridors, cramped compartments and blinking command center. It wasn’t until construction on all but one of the ship’s sets was complete that they were able to track down and access archived drawings from the original film’s art department. Nicholson says there was a team of people who policed placement of Semiotic Standard, the color-coded information symbols designed by Ron Cobb for the Nostromo spacecraft, on Maginot.

“It was a huge responsibility and I didn’t want to mess up,” Nicholson says. “There’s a history for the fans. You can’t mess up the Easter eggs. There are specific things you can’t get wrong because you’ll just lose people.”

Larlarb says about 2000 costumes — maybe more — were made, with 90% done in-house (“We didn’t want it to feel like it was ‘off the rack,’” she says). And the looks for the Maginot crew had to riff off the well-established uniform basis of the Nostromo and the Weylan-Yutani system. The palette is muted in creams and earth tones, with practical utilitarian jumpsuits and jackets.

“I made sure to create a uniform system that could reside unquestionably in that canon,” she says. “Our Maginot is on a different kind of mission — a research exploration mission — so the crew uniforms needed to reflect a different branch from the original.”

With the vessel’s collision on Earth, the retro-futuristic aesthetic carries over into the sleek cityscape of Prodigy City. Nicholson says he pulled references of car interior designs and European furniture designs from around the late ’70s — “That was futuristic. It was the first time you saw, very briefly, digital displays in car dashboards” — as he thought about what Earth should look like in their version of the future.

A piece of tech they decided to add? Tablets.

“They didn’t really think about tablets in those first two films, but we have tablets,” Hawley says. “So, what are those like?”