Did Alien: Earth just steal Severance’s thunder?
Alien: Earth is the first Alien TV series, and during Episode 1, the show did something thatSeverancemight have been building towards for the last two seasons.
Severance is currently ourTV show of the year, withSeason 2equalling, and at times surpassing, the brilliance of Season 1.
The show features multiple mysteries, one of which concerns future applications of the severance procedure itself.
The internet is filled with fan theories on that front, and one of them is remarkably similar to somethingAlien: Earthpulled off at the start of its very first episode…
Who wants to live forever?
Severance is a surgical operation that separates a human being’s consciousness. In the show, it’s used to divide a person’s working life from their personal life via the installation of a special chip, so that one side has no memory of the other.
But Lumon Industries – which invented the procedure – continues to do secret experiments with the procedure, on both animals and humans.
So while the Innies and Outies at the heart of the show have just one split, between office and home, the Gemma Scout character has multiple Innies, including wellness counsellor Miss Casey.
There are theories that the company is making these multiple breaks to eliminate emotions, perfect mind control, or create clones.
But apopular beliefis that Lumon is working towards a point where one person’s consciousness can be loaded into another human being, as a way of continuing to live when your body has died, and thereby achieving immortality.
As one Redditorputs it, “all of the creepy cult-like stuff seems to talk about rebirth and living forever. The chips aren’t about just separating minds, they ARE minds.”
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Alien: Earth has already created immortals
The ‘ALIEN: EARTH’ cast breaks down their hybrid and cyborg roles in the showpic.twitter.com/Tl8ANx54SS
If Severanceisabout trying to live forever, then Alien: Earth has already achieved that goal. At the start of the series, we’re told that “in the future, the race for immortality will come in three guises,” one of which is “synthetic beings downloaded with human consciousness.”
They’re called ‘hybrids,’ and the first of their kind is ‘Wendy,’ a young girl dying of cancer, whose brain is loaded into a new adult body. Several more children undergo the operation, and inspired by Peter Pan, they become collectively known as ‘The Lost Boys.’
This aspect of the show asks major moral questions of the procedure, not the least of which is that Jurassic Park adage of whether they should just because they could.
It also poses big philosophical questions, most obviously about identity, with Wendy now somewhere between adult and child. But she’s also stuck between human and machine, and if Wendy picks a side, that decision could have far-reaching consequences for the human race.
So if the transfer of consciousnessiswhere Severance is heading, Alien: Earth got there first, and is already examining the real-world consequences of such a scientific breakthrough.
For more Alien content, check out out our guide to theAlien: Earth soundtrackand details of thatweird Ice Age connection. We’ve also got Dexerto’sranking of every Alien movie, as well ashow Predator: Badlands connects to Alienand the latest news onAlien vs Predator 3.
