FX/HuluAlien: Earth is the first Alien TV series, and during Episode 1, the show did something that Severance might have been building towards for the last two seasons.
Severance is currently our TV show of the year, with Season 2 equalling, and at times surpassing, the brilliance of Season 1.
The show features multiple mysteries, one of which concerns future applications of the severance procedure itself.
The internet is filled with fan theories on that front, and one of them is remarkably similar to something Alien: Earth pulled off at the start of its very first episode…
Who wants to live forever?
Apple TV+Severance is a surgical operation that separates a human being’s consciousness. In the show, it’s used to divide a person’s working life from their personal life via the installation of a special chip, so that one side has no memory of the other.
But Lumon Industries – which invented the procedure – continues to do secret experiments with the procedure, on both animals and humans.
So while the Innies and Outies at the heart of the show have just one split, between office and home, the Gemma Scout character has multiple Innies, including wellness counsellor Miss Casey.
Apple TV+There are theories that the company is making these multiple breaks to eliminate emotions, perfect mind control, or create clones.
But a popular belief is that Lumon is working towards a point where one person’s consciousness can be loaded into another human being, as a way of continuing to live when your body has died, and thereby achieving immortality.
As one Redditor puts it, “all of the creepy cult-like stuff seems to talk about rebirth and living forever. The chips aren’t about just separating minds, they ARE minds.”
Alien: Earth has already created immortals
If Severance is about trying to live forever, then Alien: Earth has already achieved that goal. At the start of the series, we’re told that “in the future, the race for immortality will come in three guises,” one of which is “synthetic beings downloaded with human consciousness.”
They’re called ‘hybrids,’ and the first of their kind is ‘Wendy,’ a young girl dying of cancer, whose brain is loaded into a new adult body. Several more children undergo the operation, and inspired by Peter Pan, they become collectively known as ‘The Lost Boys.’
This aspect of the show asks major moral questions of the procedure, not the least of which is that Jurassic Park adage of whether they should just because they could.
FX/HuluIt also poses big philosophical questions, most obviously about identity, with Wendy now somewhere between adult and child. But she’s also stuck between human and machine, and if Wendy picks a side, that decision could have far-reaching consequences for the human race.
So if the transfer of consciousness is where Severance is heading, Alien: Earth got there first, and is already examining the real-world consequences of such a scientific breakthrough.
For more Alien content, check out out our guide to the Alien: Earth soundtrack and details of that weird Ice Age connection. We’ve also got Dexerto’s ranking of every Alien movie, as well as how Predator: Badlands connects to Alien and the latest news on Alien vs Predator 3.
