Warning! This article contains SPOILERS for Alien: Earth season 1, episodes 1 & 2.Five corporations rule the world inAlien: Earth, and here’s everything we know about them.Alien: Earthtakes place early on intheAlientimeline, and it focuses on a moment when five companies ruled the Earth. Those companies - Weyland-Yutani, Prodigy, Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold - are all racing to find the secret to human immortality.
As the five corporations ofAlien: Earthcontinue their quest for profits and immortality, they’ve taken over the entire planet. In lieu of governments, the corporations are assigned massive areas of control covering the entire Earth. Each company is responsible for their territories, and they all lay claim to anything within them, including the ship that crash-lands on Earth while carrying a live Xenomorph.
Knowing what areas each ofAlien: Earth’s corporations control and how they go about governing it is crucial to understanding the show. Weyland-Yutani and Prodigy, for example, have already been set up for a massive confrontation. This is everything we know aboutAlien: Earth’s companies, including what they do, where they’re based, and how they’re trying to achieve immortality.
5Weyland-Yutani
Weyland-Yutani is easily the most recognizable corporation in the entireAlienfranchise, and it’s a longtime antagonist of the entire series.Weyland-Yutani was first introduced in the originalAlien, as the corporation owned and operated theNostromo, the ship Ellen Ripley was on when it encountered LV-426 and the Xenomorphs. Since then, Weyland-Yutani has been a mainstay of the entireAlienfranchise.
Weyland-Yutani is, as the name suggests, the result of a merger between the pre-existing Weyland and Yutani corporations. Weyland was created and owned by Peter Weyland, as seen inPrometheus, and merged with Yutani in 2099, after he made his voyage to meet the Engineers. Weyland’s business practices seem in line with Peter Weyland’s goal of achieving immortality.
Alien: Earthshowrunner Noah Hawley described Yutanias a matriarchical company passed down between mothers and daughters. By the time ofAlien: Earth, the company had acquired and merged with Weyland. With Peter Weyland in cryosleep, however, Yutani is presumably the defacto leader of Weyland-Yutani.
The Yutani side is a matriarchal corporation. Her grandmother ran the company, and then her mother ran it, and somewhere there was a merger with Weyland. Now Yutani is trying to navigate being the second name in the corporation, holding on to power and managing the geopolitics on a planet where there’s five corporations that control everything. In the end, they all just want to be a monopoly.
Since Weyland-Yutani has such a long history withAlien, we know quite a bit about the company. Weyland-Yutani has financial interests in a variety of areas: it manufactures many of thesynthetics inAlien, such as David and Bishop, as well as mining and terraforming equipment and other scientific pursuits. Additionally, Weyland-Yutani had a huge presence in interstellar travel and shipping, as well as the colonization of extraterrestrial worlds.
About 65 years before the events ofAlien: Earth, Yutani’s grandmother commissioned theUSCSSMaginoton a mission to collect specimens of alien lifeforms. Yutani now views the specimens on board the ship as her “birthright,” and desperately wants to stop Prodigy from claiming them. Yutani also believes the specimens can change the race for immortality from a technology-driven venture to a biological one.
Thanks to Morrow, the USCSSMaginot’s security officer, we can surmise that Weyland-Yutani was also involved in creating cyborgs, cybernetically enhanced humans. As the intro toAlien: Earthstated, there is an ongoing race to achieve immortality, and cyborgs seem to be Weyland-Yutani’s best bet at the moment.
Thanks to a conversation between the crew members of theMaginot, we also know how much power Weyland-Yutani has over the Earth.Weyland-Yutani reportedly owns and controls all of North and South America, in addition to the entirety of Mars and Saturn. Weyland-Yutani’s colonization efforts have also spread the company throughout the galaxy.
Later on in theAlientimeline, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation begins experimenting with Xenomorph samples, as seen inAlien: Romulus. Weyland-Yutani presumably wanted to bioengineer the Xenomorphs to create biological weapons, thoughEarthmay suggest that the company is also interested in extending human lifespans. That’s just the start ofWeyland-Yutani’s history inAlien, however.
4Prodigy
Prodigy is the newest corporation in theAlienfranchise, but it’s already one of the most well-known.Prodigy was founded in about 2110, a decade before the beginning ofAlien: Earth, by Boy Kavalier. Boy Kavalier is described as a former child prodigy with a genius-level intellect. Led by his scientific knowledge and talents, Prodigy made huge waves among Earth’s mega corporations.
Alien: Earthalso briefly reveals that Prodigy is mostly focused on research and experimentation as well as the production of both synthetics and artificial intelligence. The company’s crowning achievement is its hybrids: android bodies that have had human consciousnesses transferred into them. Prodigy’s prototype group of hybrids was dubbed the “Lost Boys” due to Boy Kavalier’s interest inPeter Panand their inability to physically age.
Samuel Blenkin, who plays Boy Kavalier, also offered his thoughts on howProdigy is different from Weyland-Yutaniand the other corporations ofAlien: Earth. Blenkin noted that Weyland-Yutani is too big and “swollen,” while Boy Kavalier views Prodigy as lean and “cutting edge.”
I mean even in our universe, Weyland-Yutani is like a hulking behemoth of a company. That’s how we imagine it. They have so much power and so much control, but they’re almost swollen. They’re too big, they’ve got too much influence, and we are a 10-year-old company. I feel like I’m actually at a meeting, a shareholder meeting. ‘Listen, we’re a 10-year-old company. We move fast!’ Boy Kavalier sees himself as the cutting edge and, obviously, in our series, the technology that he’s created, these hybrids, he sees them as the ultimate thing that will change humanity’s course forever and will lead ultimately to us transcending our human bodies and moving into synthetic bodies forever. That’s ultimately the aim.
We also know from the conversation among the crew of the USCSSMaginotthat Prodigy took over a huge swath of the Earth in the 10 years precedingAlien: Earth. By the time theMaginotcrash-landed,Prodigy controlled all of Asia up to the border between Russia and Mongolia, all of sub-Saharan Africa, all of Oceania and Australia, and both Greenland and Iceland.
Part of Prodigy’s territory also includes Prodigy City, where the USCSSMaginotcrash-lands in the premiere ofAlien: Earth. Boy Kavalier claims theMaginotand its cargo as his own since it landed in his city, but Yutani wants it back as her company commissioned the ship. Evidently, companies communicate mostly through lawyers and - occasionally - with threats of armed retribution.
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The crash-landing of theMaginotalso exposes how the corporations ofAlien: Earthrule the planet. Rather than publicly owned and government-operated emergency response teams, Prodigy is responsible for any emergency services required in its territory. Prodigy, at least, employs mercenaries as crisis response and trauma teams, such as the one Hermit is employed by.
3Lynch
Unfortunately for the remaining three companies that control the world inAlien: Earth, almost nothing is known about them yet. The first of the three remaining companies,Lynch, controls a relatively smaller area compared to its competitors: all of modern-day Russia. The two-episode premiere ofAlien: Earth, however, did not delve into what Lynch does as a business or any other details.
2Dynamic
Like Lynch, the Dynamic company is currently a mystery inAlien: Earth.Dynamic presumably isn’t as powerful as Weyland-Yutani or Prodigy, as its territory only includes Northern Africa and the Middle East, approximately from the Western border of Turkey to the Eastern border of Afghanistan, and Earth’s moon. Again, little is known about Dynamic’s operations or leadership structure at the time of writing.
To speculate, given the areas that the Prodigy Corporation controls, combined with its recent emergence, it’s possible that Prodigy’s creation and rise to power had a bigger impact on Dynamic, Lynch, and Threshold than it did on Weyland-Yutani. Prodigy’s range of control is steadily encroaching on all their territories, such as sub-Saharan Africa, southern Asia, and Greenland and Iceland.
1Threshold
The last company inAlien: Earth, Threshold, is just as mysterious as its contemporaries.Threshold lays claim to all of Scandinavia and Europe from the Caucus mountains to the Turkish border, as well as the British Isles, which include England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. UntilAlien: Earthcan progress further, Threshold, Lynch, and Dynamic will remain mysteries.
