This post contains spoilers for the two-episode FX premiere of "Alien: Earth," as well as season one of Apple TV's "Silo."
What pop culture will survive our future? Plenty of works of art have attempted to answer this question before, from Anne Washburn's mind-boggling, "The Simpsons"-obsessed stage drama
"Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play" to Shakespeare-loving "Star Trek" to Apple TV's "Silo," which builds its conspiratorial drama around illegal "relics" like a children's picture book.This question
about the endurance of pop culture is important and thought-provoking, but I've never seen answers as weird as the ones given by Noah Hawley's new "Alien" prequel series, "Alien: Earth." In the first two episodes alone, the show – which is at least in part set in the year 2120 – has dropped at least a dozen different references to J.M. Barrie's "Peter Pan" and its Disney counterpart. That's all well and good for a show about the human pursuit of eternal youth, but each episode also ends with its own time-travelling musical non-sequitur, from Black Sabbath's "The Mob Rules" to TOOL's "Stinkfist." The show's main characters, presumably born in the future, display an encyclopedic knowledge of 20th century Major League Baseball.
Most incredibly, though, the show that's been tasked with continuing the legacy of Ridley Scott's 1979 classic and its many prequels and sequels is obsessed with "Ice Age 4: Continental Drift." Like, really obsessed.
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Our Hero Really Loves Ice Age: Continental Drift
To be fair to Hawley and the team behind "Alien: Earth," it's actually protagonist Wendy (Sydney Chandler) who's hooked on the 2012 animated sequel. Wendy is told early in the show that she's the world's first "hybrid," a human consciousness plugged into a synthetic body. She's a girl who seems to be around 12 years old inside the body of a twenty-something superhuman, and that's bound to lead to a weird sense of arrested development. In Wendy's case, that tends to come out when she's seeking comfort among her legion of stuffed animal pals, with whom she often watches – you guessed it – "Ice Age: Continental Drift."
Hawley, the creative force behind FX's "Fargo" anthology and the three-season mindf**k that was "Legion," is no stranger to bizarre pop culture references. Just last year he dropped the Marilyn Manson cover of "This Is Halloween," originally from the stop-motion holiday film "The Nightmare Before Christmas," into an extremely tense scene in "Fargo," and that choice still wouldn't even make the top five most eclectic Easter eggs featured in his work to date. The "Ice Age" bit would, though, in part because it plays out so earnestly in the show. As we learn more about Wendy and her human brother Hermit (Alex Lawther), it's revealed that one of their cherished childhood memories involves watching the film together and giggling at a joke in which Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo) mixes up the words "fury" and "furry."
What Could A 2012 Movie Mean In 2120?
There's no doubt more to the "Ice Age" memory than meets the eye. The kids clearly had a strained relationship with their father, and Wendy ended up terminally ill and living at Prodigy headquarters, without the option of returning home, just a few years after this rose-tinted memory. Was this one of the only good times she had with her brother? In a flashback scene set just a day before the ship that reunited the pair crashed into a New Siam apartment complex, Wendy also manipulates a robot at a government building to make it quote the film to her brother. Hermit seems to recognize the line "have a heart or face my furry," and the moment aims to be a lot more existential and heartfelt than you'd expect for a reference to a movie with a 37% Rotten Tomatoes score.
Thematically, there isn't much to tie "Continental Drift" to "Alien: Earth" (though both are now Disney subsidiary-owned), but it's also possible that the timing of the film's release will matter later. The show's timeline already feels intentionally ambiguous, with potentially large gaps of unaccounted-for time between the initial scenes on board the Weyland-Yutani vessel and the crash, as well as a murky timeline surrounding Wendy's years spent on Neverland Island. On-screen captions clarify that the spaceship crash and Xenomorph debut take place two years before the original "Alien" film, in 2120, but the pop culture references Hermit and Wendy remember range from the 1970s to the 2010s. The home decor and TV set in Wendy's memory aren't particularly modern, either. Is it possible that they've somehow been around a lot longer than we think, or that their memories are false?
Maybe so, but this could also simply be another case of art imitating life. Hawley, after all, grew up in the 1970s, while his son Lev, who according to Deadline makes his acting debut in the show, was born in the 2010s – not too long after a certain Pleistocene era animated sequel made its big-screen debut. What pop culture will endure in the future? Maybe it's just whatever we grew up with.
New episodes of "Alien: Earth" drop on FX and Hulu on Tuesdays at 8 PM ET.
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