This article contains spoilers for Alien: Earth episode 4.For the past 46 years, the Alien franchise has been immortalized by the tagline, “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Just four episodes in, and Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth is making it clear that the mantra doesn’t apply to our little third rock from the sun. While Alien: Earth takes place some 27 years after Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, and two years before his OG Alien, it’s already filling in some important gaps in the ever-convoluted series timeline.Scott’s 1979 opus focused on the doomed crew of the USCSS Nostromo, with the Weyland-Yutani employees ending up on the shadowy surface of LV-426. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and the rest of the Nostromo grunts simply said they worked for “the Company,” although eagle-eyed viewers picked up on it being Weyland-Yutani. The various movies and expanded media have taught us that Weyland-Yutani are far from the good guys, but in Alien: Earth, Sandra Yi Sencindiver’s Ms. Yutani is a mere side character as we focus on Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) as the head of the equally shady Prodigy Corporation. cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Since the first movie, there have been questions about what happened to Earth and why the subsequent movies never went there. David Fincher’s notoriously troubled Alien 3 promised to be an Earth-set story before eventually settling on the prison planetoid of Fiorina 161, Meanwhile, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection only went there in an alternate ending…but that ending might now be significant in the context of Earth.The scene sees Ripley and the rest of the USM Auriga survivors looking out on the desolate backdrop of Paris. The same movie referred to Earth as “uninhabited,” but away from popular fan theories that a xenomorph outbreak turned things to shit, Alien: Earth backs up another theory that corporate greed is responsible for Earth’s demise. Despite Hawley stating he drew from only Alien and its sequel Aliens for Earth, episode four “Observation” pushes us one step closer to Resurrection’s grim future when it reveals how five corporations run the planet. The first episode mentioned Weyland-Yutani, Prodigy, and Dynamic before it cut off the final two, but episode four adds the final pieces in the form of Threshold and Lynch. The conversation unfolds between Alex Lawther’s Joe Hermit and Wendy’s “Lost Boys”, with Hermit explaining how the old democracy of Earth fell apart. This forced “The Five” to create a council, meaning “now they work together to run things.” As the race for the alien specimens aboard the USCSS Maginot and the frosty relationship between Kavelier and Ms. Yutani prove, it’s not an easy alliance. This isn’t the only time other corporations have been mentioned in the Alienverse, with Seegson, Jĭngtì Lóng Corporation, and Hyperdyne Systems (as a potential wink to Terminator’s Cyberdyne) all being Weyland-Yutani rivals. We don’t know what the newcomers all do, but Alien: Earth has established that Weyland-Yutani lays claim to most of the Americas as Prodigy controls Asia, half of Africa, and most of Australia and Greenland. Rounding off the pack, Threshold has a stake in Western Europe, Lynch is in charge of what was once Russia, and Dynamic plants its flags on the other half of Africa, the Middle East, and the Moon.As for what happens next, Hawley previously teased how these megacorporations could be responsible for Earth’s loss, telling Den of Geek how he wanted to mirror real life and the idea that just five companies running the world is only “two or three steps ahead from where we are right now.” Reminding us that we’re working toward private currencies like crypto, he added: “How’s that going to work? That doesn’t seem like it’s a great idea. It’s going to make a lot of people really rich, but as a structural concept for a society, it’s not the world’s best version.”It just so happens that Weyland-Yutani had collected five unique specimens and stored them on the USCSS Maginot. We know that Weyland-Yutani will soon be hunting after the xenomorphs during Alien, while Boy Kavalier looks to be particularly drawn to the terrifying eyeball monster (T. Ocellus). This could leave the Blood Tick, Fly Nest, and Orchids/D. Plumbicare for each of the other three corporations. Picture the scene where Earth’s ruling powers each take a piece of the alien action like they’ve carved up the planet. We could learn about each corporation and species in (potential) further seasons of Alien: Earth or the wider Alien universe. There’s still a lot of ground to cover before the events of Resurrection’s grim finale, and even though the alternate ending isn’t considered canon as it tried to set up a series future that never materialized, Hawley has already proved he’s adept at knitting the complex web of facehuggers and androids together.The post Alien: Earth Might Be Making Sense of the Alien Timeline After All appeared first on Den of Geek.