Here’s your first real look at Alien: Earth… through the eyes of a cat

Alien: Earth is easily one of this year’s most anticipated TV premieres. Despite this, apart from a brief teaser trailer and a few sizzle reel shots, we know next to nothing about Noah Hawley’s upcoming series set in the Alien universe other than it’s got Xenomorphs… and they’re on Earth!

On Monday, that all changed when FX shared an extended sneak peak of Alien: Earth… as seen through the eyes of one particularly precocious feline.

The trailer is framed as black box footage recovered from a crash site by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. Strapped to the collar of a crew member’s pet cat, we see the inside of the USCSS Maginot, a deep space exploration vessel en route to Earth after recovering… well, you can probably venture a guess. 

We see a lot of dark corridors, the inside of ship’s MU/TH/UR 6000 supercomputer chamber, a brief glimpse of what appears to be containment canisters (presumably holding facehuggers), and the crew of the Maginot go about their regular routines repairing the ship and shooting the shit. The clip ends with the cat cowering and hissing at the end of a corridor as emergency klaxons sound and the crew scrambles to put out a fire somewhere.

It’s not much to go on, but it does offer a bit more context to what we already know about the series. We know from the previous teaser trailer that Alien: Earth takes place in 2120, two years before the events of the original film. It’s safe to assume that the Maginot crashes on Earth, and the cargo aboard contains some variant of the Xenomorph organism. 

We also now know the name of the ship that carries them, which is notable for being among one of the few ships in the Alien universe whose name is not an explicit reference to the writing of Heart of Darkness author Joseph Conrad. There’s speculation online that the name might be a reference to the Maginot Line, the infamous line of fortifications built by France in the 1930s to rebuff a Nazi invasion that was nonetheless breached. Which, if true, is a particularly apt comparison in this case. With xenomorphs on Earth, there’ll certainly be plenty of defending to do.

Alien: Earth is slated to premiere on FX and Hulu this summer.