The earth may have broken the continuity of the franchise-does that count?

Spoilers follow.

The greater your science fiction franchise, the more difficult it is to keep the right cannon. This is a problem that extends from “Star Wars” to “Star Trek”. Finally, once you have enough fallout, suites and prequelles under you, once decades have passed from the start, plot holes and continuity towers are inevitable.

The “Alien” franchise seems to have reached this point. Now, seven films, a big budget television series, two spin-offs “Predator”, and many video games and comics later, which was once a simple story of science fiction on unknowable terrors of deep space has become a massive saga filled with traditions. From the origins of the xenomorphs to the nature of the megacorporations of the earth, many details have been filled over the years, and “Alien: Earth”, the last addition on FX, does a lot of work in this regard by the simple virtue of television programs with much more screen time than films.

More specifically, I’m talking about chronology. You may have had the impression that something was happening in the first two episodes, but it particularly started to disturb me in episode 3, when the security officer of Weylan-Yutani Morrow (Babou Ceesay) calls to present himself to the head office and met the harsh reality of having left the earth for 65 years. However, given what we know about the chronology of the series, the order of events for its job has no meaning. Yes, Nitpicking deadlines are low fruits, and yes, the showrunner Noah Hawley admitted to having ignored certain parts of the barrel, but in a show that is all about business tensions, contradictions are exceeding.

“Alien: Earth” takes place in 2120. The original “Alien”, released in 1979, takes place only two years later in 2122. The two stories began on board the ships of Weyland-Yutani, which should have a meaning given their proximity. However, the mission in “Alien” is supposed to take less than two years in total, while that of “Alien: Earth” would be a mission of 65 years. The additional time is probably due to the fact that the Maginot goes much further in the deep space than the Nostromo, but that also means that the spectacle ship would have left the earth in 2057.

Immediately, this causes problems. On the one hand, the interior of Maginot in “Alien: Earth” seems almost identical to that of Nostromo, from Cryo pods in the MU / TH / UR computer room. It is probably because the creators of the show wanted to evoke the emblematic aesthetic of the film by Ridley Scott, but it is not really logical to know why the ships have launched more than 60 years of interval would be essentially the same brand and model.

The biggest problem, however, implies Weyland-Yutani himself. You see, this name trait of union is the result of a large corporate merger between two separate companies – Weyland and Yutani. We know this because in “Prometheus”, which takes place in 2089 – 32 years After The Maginot would have left on its mission in depth space – Weyland Corp is still just Weyland Corp. This means that the merger would have occurred more than the half of the trip, but when Morrow returns to Earth, he calls in the head office with an access code Yutani that still works, and we learn that he had a kind of relationship with the Grand Chief of the Yutani of Yutani, and we learn before space.

Noah Hawley said he was more focused on the history of the show and big strokes of the series than queuing every detail of the films, but he ceased to say that the direct series is not ‘Canon. “It is not that I did not have chronology around events,” the showrunner told SXSW this year (vice versa). “But I didn’t extend it to incorporate everything that had ever been written.” More specifically, he appointed “Prometheus” as part of the franchise to which he did not strongly adhere.

Is it possible that the Maginot mission began as an operation in Yutani, then became a Weyland-Yutani mission in the middle of Journey after the merger? Yes. Morrow’s security authorizations could have been updated while in space, and all the technology we associate with the Nostromo could have been Yutani Tech from the start, hence all the similarities between ships. There are ways to explain strangeness in the chronology if you really want to stretch.

Again, I know that it may seem nitpicky, but the “extraterrestrial” chronology established in “Prometheus” is not a foreign detail of a source book from the 90s or an obscure comic strip. This is not a Ki-Adi-Mundi situation, where the only redesigned thing was something that no normal fan would have heard. It is the great construction of the world of a basic film directed by the creator of the franchise.

Even if we give to the show the benefit of the doubt and say that everything is logical, the logistics of a 65 -year -old mission carried out during an extremely tumultuous moment for the corporate authority feels … strange. How do you follow or stay on the task with a mission that crosses several generations of corporate leadership? To be clear, I really appreciate my time with the spectacle for the most part, and things like this do not ruin it to anyone. But it is strange that in a show of everything on the corporate bureaucracy, and and entirely intended to expand the tradition of the franchise, the series of main events seems to be in the air.