What makes a being sentient ? It’s an incredibly tricky question, one that has vexed philosophers (and science-fiction writers) for generations. And before Alien: Earth , it’s a question raised mainly just in passing in the Alien movies. There’s some idle speculation in the films about where the Xenomorphs sit on the evolutionary ladder, and nearly every Alien story at some point deals with the question of whether synthetic creations care about their makers. Ridley Scott’s divisive prequels, Prometheus and Alien : Covenant , also weigh the roles that killer aliens and godlike creators have played in humanity’s origin story.

Still, in Alien: Earth , Noah Hawley more explicitly explores some of the ideas that have just been hinted at in Alien before. You could contend (a

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