On Alien: Earth (Hulu), which just ended on a cliff-hanger, some of the most interesting plot lines involve the companies who run the Earth in 2120 (about a hundred years in the future).
In the world of Alien: Earth, the planet is controlled by five mega corporations, just as it was run by all-powerful Weyland-Yutani in 1979’s Alien, 1986’s Aliens, and 2024’s Alien: Romulus.
In the Alien: Earth universe, three other companies are mentioned (Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold).
However, the two companies featured in the series, are Prodigy and Weyland-Yutani.
Prodigy Corporation controls Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Weyland-Yutani owns North and South America (plus planets Mars and Saturn).
These companies run the planet, and control all humanity.
There are no governments.
Regular people have no guaranteed rights.
The only goals are more profit, and power, for the companies.
Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) is the owner of Prodigy.
Yutani (Sandra Yi Sencindiver) runs Weyland-Yutani.
They each are surrounded by servants (both real humans, and artificial beings), who obey (or seem to obey?) their whims.
In the opening crawl, for Alien: Earth, artificial beings are listed as three types: Cyborgs, Synths, and Hybrids.
Living conditions on Earth are extremely depressing.
There seems to be a wide division between the rich and the poor.
The wealthy elite live in giant sky-scrapers where they enjoy decadent parties.
The worker class lives in tiny slum apartments that don’t appear to have kitchens.
In episode 2 of Alien: Earth, a group of very wealthy people are having a costume party.
(The party was organized to celebrate the purchase of a famous baseball once thrown by Reggie Jackson in 1977.)
In that same city, members of the military live in drab, dark spaces with few amenities, and hang out together on a roof-top.
As I watched the series, I wondered if Alien: Earth is the future that the leaders of Russia and America have in mind for earth’s peoples.
Do they really desire a world in which only the oligarchs have autonomy, and in which most humans are subservient to them?
250 years after 1776, does the Right want us to go back to a version of North America (the 1600’s?) run by the Company of New France, the Dutch West India Company, Virginia Company of London, The Plymouth Company, and the Massachusetts Bay Company?
George III, and the British government, took over the rule of the thirteen colonies when private companies weren’t able to give British royalty the tax profits that they expected.
In 1966, the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991) told corporate sponsors that his show would be “Wagon Train in space.”
However, what he didn’t tell sponsors is that he envisioned an Earth in which class divisions, and racial divisions, were eradicated!
In the Star Trek world, the people of earth voted for a President.
It was a democratic (small D) society.
Thinking back, many of Roddenberry’s scripts were very “woke.”
Perhaps, that’s why the show was cancelled after three seasons.
After Roddenberry died (in 1991), new show-runners introduced the Black Ops group Section-31, and major wars against alien races, to the Star Trek canon.
In season 2, of Star Trek: Picard (2020-2023), Admiral Picard (Patrick Stewart) finds himself transported to an alternate time-line by the godlike alien Q (John de Lancie).
In one time-line, Earth is under a Fascist government that uses alien races (like Vulcans and Klingons) as slave laborers.
Season 2 tells the story of Picard, and his team, fighting to prevent this horrible time-line from beginning by traveling back to 2024.
While Earth in the Star Trek universe is a utopia, the Alien universe can best be described as dystopian: “an imagined state in which there is great suffering and injustice.”
It’s clear, in the first Alien (1979), that the Nostromo crew is not valued by Weyland-Yutani.
When they learn that their cargo ship is being diverted to investigate a mysterious transmission, the crew has no say in the matter.
They must check out the alien signal, or lose their salaries (or shares).
Later, Ash (the great Ian Holm) is revealed as an android.
Ash has obviously been placed on the Nostromo to make sure that profit is valued over human life.
Similarly, in Alien: Earth, the cyborg Morrow (Babou Ceesay) chooses loyalty to Weyland-Yutani, and the transport of his dangerous cargo, over the lives of his crew mates.
In Alien: Romulus (2024), the young mine workers (who we meet at the beginning of the film) are being forced to extend their work contracts by Weyland-Yutani.
It seems that the teenage “colonists” are trapped in an indentured servant situation.
They work under brutal conditions, and live in squalid, modified cargo containers.
Many of the parents (who brought them to planet LV-410), have already died from overwork and a toxic environment.
The older workers died, just as generations of immigrants died, building the United States of America.
Looking at world events, I guess that the future described in the Alien stories, is a lot more likely than the future described in the Star Trek stories.
Let’s pray that this isn’t the case.
In 1381, Wat Tyler (1341-1381), leader of the Peasant’s Revolt, demanded of King Richard II, that all hierarchy be abolished (except for the king’s lordship), and that serfdom be abolished in England.
The 14-year-old King agreed to Tyler’s arguments, but soon after, Wat Tyler was beheaded, and all agreements were rescinded.
People have fought for basic rights, and an end to hierarchy, for a very very long time.
How far have we really gotten in ending hierarchy?
Around 550 years later, on February 20, 1933, Chancellor Adolph Hitler, informed a group of 25 German industrial leaders that: “We are about to hold the last election. Private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy.”*
Does American society believe in continuing our democratic system?
Can a democracy be maintained?
How much democracy will be permitted by our AI, and human, overlords?
*Hitler’s Aristocrats: The Secret Power Players in Britain and America Who Supported the Nazis, 1923-1941, by Susan Ronald, page 84 (2023, St. Martin’s Publishing group, Macmillan).
