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If you're on the hunt for Alien: Earth Easter eggs, then you've come to the right place. The entire first season is now streaming. You can find out what we made of the first six episodes in our spoiler-free Alien: Earth review, or check out our fresh reaction to the season finale.
Set two years before the events of Ridley Scott's original movie, Alien: Earth is telling a new story, one that's designed to be somewhat separate from the movies. Despite that, there are still quite a few references and Easter eggs that connect it back to the wider franchise.
Every Alien: Earth Easter egg, listed
Episode 8 - The Real Monsters
Guns and ammo (aren't much use): The episode opens with crabs feeding on Arthur's corpse before we see the now adult xenomorph moving through the jungle. It's making short work of Boy Kavalier's security, killing almost all of them. Pointedly, we see the body of the soldier with the smart gun from last week's episode. Clearly, these soldiers aren't a patch on Colonial Marines.
The graves: Dame Sylvia pays her respects to the children by placing flowers on the graves where their human remains are buried. "It's just growing pains," she tells them – and perhaps herself – before the alien pounces.
Nibs is alive: There was doubt in some quarters after the end of last week's episode, but the finale wastes no time in making it clear that she was only stunned.
"Yeah that really would be an interesting f***ing conversation": Boy talking to the infected sheep calls back to his line in episode 2 to Dame Sylvia about being desperate for an "interesting conversation" with a smarter intelligence than him.
The favorite: Wendy has grown disillusioned with both Boy and the human race in general, which hints at bad things to come. She pointedly corrects Curly when she says that she was Boy's favorite, and then spells out the rest of the story: "In the book, Wendy Darling is Peter Pan's favorite. And then she grew up and that made Peter mad and so he kidnapped her daughter Jane." Jane is, of course, Curly's real name, suggesting that Boy was only ever interested in her as a backup if Wendy let him down.
"Me? Brain the size of a planet": Boy Kavalier is never shy of blowing his own trumpet. Here he directly references Marvin the Paranoid Android from Douglas Adams' iconic radio serial and novel series, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Marvin was a glum robot with a genius intellect, always called upon to do menial tasks. A sample quote: "Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to take you up to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cause I don't."
The lift has a self-destruct mode?: This isn't an Easter egg, it's just a bit weird. Perhaps Smee is just messing with the soldiers.
Noah Hawley: The showrunner appears once again in flashback and in a photograph as Joe and Marcy's father.
John Henry: Morrow invokes the folk tale of John Henry and his 10-pound hammer as he beats the hell out of Kirsh. In the story, Henry was an African American folk hero whose legend is told and retold in song and story. He famously raced a steam-powered rock drill. Henry beat the machine, but as Kirsh points out, he then died from exhaustion.
"Your time is done. It's our time now": Smee says this to the damaged Kirsh as he ties him up, unknowingly calling back to the conversation between Kirsh and Morrow in episode 6, where the older synth and the cyborg discussed their obsolescence in the face of the new Hybrids.
Slightly's Mom: She's fine, according to Morrow. So that's good. Except... we don't actually see her again this season and I'm not convinced we can believe a word he says. Hopefully, we'll get an answer to this very pressing question next season!
"Stay frosty": Rashidi echoes Hicks' famous quote from Aliens to, "Stay frosty and alert," as his team searches the laboratory.
D. Plumbicare: Finally! We've been waiting all season to find out just how dangerous the plant alien is. It finally makes its move here, scooping up and devouring Siberian (Diêm Camille).
"Wendy, darling, whatever I did, I'm sorry.": Dame Sylvia apologises to Wendy, calling her the character's full name from Peter Pan, Wendy Darling.
"You think you're a good person who did good things. All you did is put six children in the ground": The question of if the Hybrids really are children or simply synthetics with copies of human memories has lingered over the show all season. Wendy seems to have decided that it's the latter. The kids are dead and the Hybrids are something new.
"Now we rule": Marcie closes out the season with this deeply ominous line, flanked by two seemingly obedient xenomorphs. That can't be good for humanity – Hermit certainly looks concerned. But how and where it will all go wrong remains to be seen. Boy, for his part, looks amused and perhaps even proud of his creation. Season 2 can't come soon enough.
Episode 7 - Emergence
Tightening its grip: In a darkly amusing moment, the facehugger tightens its tail around Arthur's throat as Slightly tries to give him water. This strangulation is a familiar image in the franchise, happening every time someone tries (and inevitably fails) to remove one of the parasites, starting with Kane in Alien.
Mr Strawberry: Nibs has named her stuffed toy Mr. Strawberry, which seems a little random but may just be a reference to Twin Peaks: The Return. In that show, Mr. Strawberry is an unseen character referred to by Mr. C (Kyle MacLachlan, playing the evil version of the saintly Agent Cooper) who threatens the corrupt prison warden, Dwight Murphy, telling him that he will "call Mr. Strawberry." With its often stately pace and dreamy ambience, it totally makes sense that Noah Hawley would be a David Lynch fan. Indeed, he confirmed it back in 2017 as The Return was airing, explaining to TV Insider how the show influenced his work on Fargo and Legion.
Guns and ammo: The security forces on the island are clearly armed with a smart gun, as seen in Aliens, as well as what seems to be a range of different pulse rifle types. Later in the episode, we see a traditional M41A with the underslung grenade launcher (also from Aliens), while Hermit eventually wields one with a stun capability.
Gas leak: OK, this is a major stretch, but when Smee and Slightly told Arthur there had been a gas leak, which explains how he ended up outside and why everything feels so weird, I immediately thought of the sitcom Community and the way the patchy fourth season (which had different showrunners to the rest of the series) was often referred to as "the gas leak year," a jokey reference to why everyone was suddenly acting so strangely.
Chestburster: The speed at which an alien embryo turns into a chest burster and kills its host has varied wildly across the franchise. In the latest movie, Alien: Romulus, it was near instantaneous. That seems to also be the case here: it's a matter of minutes from Arthur waking up confused with the boys to his sad death and the infant xenomorph escaping. Given that Arthur and Dame Sylvia desperately wanted to have children, this is a twisted resolution to his story.
The xenomorph bonds with Wendy: As the season draws closer to its endgame, it seems like Wendy and the teenage xenomorph have formed a genuine connection. This is pretty new for the franchise and will likely raise a few fan eyebrows. It's not the very first time something like this has happened, though. In the patchy fourth film, Alien: Resurrection, the cloned Ripley 8 bonds with the monstrous alien "Newborn," which sees her as its mother. It's not the first time that the show, with its focus on experimenting on the aliens, has echoed that film, but perhaps the most direct.
Episode 6 - The Fly
Peter Pan: Boy Kavalier is back on his BS this week, his intermittent narration reading from J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan plays throughout the episode.
"She might invent faster-than-light travel": Kirsh's comments to Hermit about Wendy's potential is interesting, as it implies that the Alien universe does not yet have FTL travel. This seems... unlikely? The Maginot was away on a deep space mission for 65 years. It's vague on where it was in the galaxy, of course, but without FTL that would still be comparatively close to Earth – space is really very big, after all!
While the films have largely avoided the subject, the wider Alien extended universe has certainly touched on the technology. The Alien roleplaying game, which is considered to be Tier 2 canon (ie. accurate unless the films contradict it), goes into a fair bit of detail on the technology, stating that FTL was "first developed by Weyland Corp in the 2030s" – so before the events of Alien: Earth.
Or perhaps it's not that deep and Kirsh is simply saying that Wendy has the potential to create such technology. Still, this is one of the weirder examples of the show not quite fitting in with the universe established by the films.
"In the future, where I live, we move fast and we make trillions": Boy Kavalier's cocky line to Yutani in the corporate meeting scene is consciously evoking the heavily criticized "move fast and break things," philosophy coined by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. That's not surprising, given that Kavalier is so clearly riffing on the obnoxious tech bro persona of figures like Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
"Deep space biological specimens… in direct violations of, like, 15 corporate laws": Another bit of interesting lore here. Boy Kavalier implies that there have perhaps been previous examples of people bringing extra-terrestrial biological entities (hello Fox Mulder!) to Earth – and that such things are strictly regulated. That makes sense and is presumably related to the Brubaker Accords that the Five's lawyer refers to.
The facehugger's victim: And so poor Arthur (David Rysdahl) becomes the unlucky recipient of a facehugging. Given that he's just been fired he's not having the best day! Kirsh, notably, does not intervene.
"Affirmative:" It's a stretch to call this an Easter egg, really, but Kirsh echoes the Colonial Marines and Newt in Aliens by saying "affirmative" to Boy Kavalier.
Ventilation tunnels: Likewise, not an Easter egg, but this episode features a popular Alien-verse location: some ventilation tunnels, which Slightly pulls Arthur's prone body into at the end of the episode.
Episode 5 - In Space, No One...
The title: Let's start with the episode's name, 'In Space No One Can...'. This is an obvious reference to the famous tagline from Ridley Scott's Alien, "In space no one can hear you scream." It's fitting for an episode that is basically an extended homage to that movie.
The ship: As previously noted, the interior of the USCSS Maginot is designed to look almost identical to that of the Nostromo, the ship that Ripley worked on in the first film. We get a much better look at the set in this episode and it's a beautiful re-creation. No wonder Scott was so impressed when he saw it!
Removing the facehugger: Rahim (Amir Boutrous) says that he made an incision on the tale of one of the facehuggers to try and get the creature off of Bronski. As in Alien, when the creature is attached to Kane, it's basically impossible to remove.
Cryosleep: It seems like Weyland-Yutani already has protocols in place for alien encounters. Anyone infected is to be immediately placed in cryosleep for the remainder of the journey home. We can't help but think that's more for the company's benefit than the unlucky victim...
"Whether or not the crew survives": Morrow echoes Weyland-Yutani's "crew expendable" directive from the first film when he talks with Zaveri (Richa Moorjani) about his mission.
Morrow's backstory: If Morrow wasn't already your favorite character in Alien: Earth then perhaps this episode will change that. We get some insight into his past and the fact that he had a daughter who he left behind on Earth. Who does this recall? None other than the greatest Alien-verse character, Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley. She also left a child on Earth to go on a deep space mission – though in Ripley's case it was intended to be a matter of months, not decades. Sadly, like Ripley, Morrow's daughter died while he was away. It's a tragic backstory that helps explain his callous attitude to life throughout the series.
Fagehuggers can't be frozen: This is an interesting new detail. The first chestburster punches out of Bronski (Max Rinehart) while he's in suspended animation. Rahim speculates that perhaps something about the facehugger's unique metabolism resists freezing, saying that they know they can survive in the vacuum of space.
"So what, we find some nets? How big can it get?": This seems like a direct call back to Alien, where Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) suggests using nets to catch the recently born creature. This is also quite a telling exchange, as it implies that Morrow knows exactly what this creature is and how deadly it will be.
"It's a xenomorph": Related to the above is this interesting statement from Zaveri. The way she says it seems to suggest that she (or perhaps more likely Morrow) is somewhat familiar with the species they are dealing with. Perhaps this is from when the crew picked up the xenomorph eggs on that "distant moon" we heard about at the start of the series. Even so, it fits slightly awkwardly with the show being a prequel to the original movie and further muddies the question of precisely what Wey-Yu already knows about the species.
Oh, while we're on the subject, "xenomorph" is not the species' name. It's a combination of two Greek words, "xenos" and "morph", and which translates as "strange shape". In the wider canon, the closest thing the creature has to a name is the species classification number XX121.
Acid blood: Zaveri points out that shooting the xeno would cause it to bleed acid that could eat through the hull of the ship. This was also a major problem in Alien and Alien: Romulus.
Boy Kavalier: The only recurring character we see this episode aside from Morrow is Boy Kavalier, who convinces chief engineer Petrovich (Enzo Cilenti) to sabotage the ship in order to crash into Prodigy territory.
Running on all fours: The alien chasing Zaveri on all fours once again recalls similar scenes from Alien 3. We also get some creature POV shots, like in that film.
Sealing doors shut: Fleeing the xenomorph, Zaveri tries to seal a door shut with a blowtorch – a technique also employed by the Colonial Marines in Aliens.
Reverse-facehugging: Surely the funniest/coolest moment in the show so far comes when the eye (referred to on screens as the T. Ocellus) effectively tries to facehug the xenomorph, which seems genuinely afraid of this tiny-but-deadly critter. Also of note here, the xeno makes its distinctive scream from Aliens.
Back to the beginning: The Maginot flashbacks end with Morrow leaving Zaveri to her fate and climbing into the impact room as the ship crashes into Prodigy City, just as we saw in episode 1.
Episode 4 - Observation
'Observation': Let's start with the name of the episode, which perfectly sums up the major theme of the episode. This is the paranoid middle point of the season, and everybody is carefully watching each other. Morrow is manipulating Slightly; Kirsh is observing both Slightly – he knows that he has been compromised – and the aliens; Boy Kavalier is watching Wendy, as she develops her strange connection to the xenomorphs; Dame Silvia is observing Nibs following her disturbing episode, and so on. It's the season's quietest and most uneasy instalment so far.
The doll's head: The eerie image of a doll's head washing up on the shore recalls Casey, the similarly damaged doll that Newt carried around with her in Aliens.
RoboCop: The very early POV shot of Silvia and Kirsh leaning over Wendy feels like a deliberate nod to a similarly framed shot of RoboCop coming online in the classic 1987 movie. That too is a story about someone – police officer Alex Murphy – who dies, but is brought back to life in a robot body.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic:" Boy Kavalier attributes this famous quote to Foundation author Isaac Asimov. He's mangling the origin – the quote actually belongs to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama author Arthur C. Clarke, first appearing in the essay 'Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination,' published in 1962.
There are two possibilities here: either writer Noah Hawley got the two authors mixed up or – far more likely – it's a deliberate, subtle choice pointing to Boy Kavalier's arrogance. Yeah, he knows a lot of stuff, but he isn't smart enough to get everything right or check his sources.
It should be noted, however, that Asimov was responsible for the '3 Laws of Robotics,' in his 1942 short story 'Runaround'. These feel particularly pertinent to the story being told in Alien: Earth.
Ice Age: Continental Drift: Yep, footage from the fourth Ice Age movie once again recurs this week. Who had that movie being so prominent on their Alien: Earth bingo card at the start of the season?!
"Go home and we'll bill you": Atom Eins makes it clear that Hermit can't leave Neverland if he wants to hang onto his new artificial stomach. The phrasing here feels like an echo of Ellen Ripley's indignant "they can bill me!" at the start of Aliens.
"A bad couple of days": Morrow tells Slightly to infect someone in the lab. He explains that if a human goes near an egg, it will open and a facehugger will come out and attach to the person's face before eventually falling off. He omits the rather nasty long-term effects, however…
The Five: Curly asks Hermit to explain "the Five" – AKA the corporations that rule the world. He reminds us that these are the as-yet-unseen Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold, plus Weyland-Yutani and Prodigy. Hermit's comment that "apparently they fixed all the problems" with the world feels bitterly sardonic.
A new chestburster: The episode ends with Wendy witnessing the next xenomorph erupt from her brother's injured lung. But rather than attack her, it seems uniquely receptive to Wendy.
Episode 3 - Metamorphosis
Bio-weapons: Boy is thrilled that the ship has crashed in his territory. He refers to the alien specimens as being intended for Weyland-Yutani's bio-weapons division, something that was often cited as the reason the company wanted to get hold of the Xenomorph in the movies. (Alien: Romulus tweaked this interestingly, suggesting that Wey-Yu wanted to study the alien as a way to enable humanity to thrive in space and on other worlds – though their reason for doing so is certainly more mercenary than altruistic.)
Cocooned: Wendy chases after the alien to try and rescue Hermit. She finds him gooped up inside a shipping container – just like Dallas in Alien and Newt in Aliens.
Concentrated acid for blood: While in the container, Wendy manages to wound the alien with her sword. Of course, the aliens have acid for blood, which melts through the metal and drips onto them.
White "blood": Wendy is badly injured in her fight with the xenomorph, causing white blood – the traditional color of synthetic "blood" in the Alien universe – to stream down her head.
Read the fine print: Morrow talks with Yutani for the first time, noting that everybody that he knows has died. She glibly tells him you "should have read your contract." Business contracts in the Alien universe tend to be bad news, as we saw with Hermit last episode, and with Rain at the start of Alien: Romulus, when she was trapped on Jackson's Star.
"Don’t let the bed bugs bite": Morrow says this to Slightly at the end of their deeply creepy call. "Bugs" obviously has some resonance with how the Colonial Marines refer to the creatures in Aliens. More specifically, the evil synthetic David says it to Katherine Waterston's Daniels as she slips into hypersleep.
Episode 2 - Mr. October
Incident code 1562: Not a specific reference as far as we know, but an interesting new detail. Incident code 1562 means alien involvement.
The Lost Boys: Let’s quickly talk about the other members of Wendy’s squad, who get more screen time here. They are all named after Peter Pan characters – other children who never grow up. Adarsh Gourav's character is named Slightly, Erana James's Curly, Jonathan Ajayi's Smee, Kit Young's Tootles, and Lily Newmark's is called Nibs.
The blue mist: The clutch of eggs on the Maginot are bathed in an eerie blue light. Long term Alien fans will know that this strange membrane covered the eggs in the crashed ship on LV-426. It was also seen again in Alien: Romulus. The franchise has never officially explained what it is, or how it is created, though it seems to be a membrane of some kind that breaks when someone interrupts it – note how the alien only comes for Joe after he has breached it.
"Have a heart or face my fury!": Joe/Hermit quotes this line from Ice Age: Continental Drift – clearly a film he and Marcie loved as kids.
Mr. October: The episode title 'Mr. October' is a reference to legendary baseball player Reggie Jackson. The star earned this nickname for scoring three home runs for the New York Yankees in the World Series Game 6 on October 18, 1977.
"We don't like that word": Slightly suggests that the hybrids don't like being referred to as "synthetic," just as Bishop in Aliens preferred to be referred to as an "artificial person."
A statuesque killer: The xenomorph concealing itself against the statue before slaughtering everyone at the party in Prodigy City felt a little like a callback to the way the original beast emerges from the pipes at the end of Alien.
Episode 1 - Neverland
The opening titles: The show starts with an electronic beep plucked from the sounds of the Nostromo in 1979's Alien – the film that the new show borrows from the most. The titles then start to slowly fade in, just as they did in that film.
The USCSS Maginot: The doomed ship that brings the various extraterrestrial lifeforms to Earth is a Weyland-Yutani science vessel. It's a very different sort of ship from the USCSS Nostromo, as seen in Alien, but the interior has a lot of visual similarities, with the mess hall, cryo chamber, bridge, and the room where Morrow talks to Mother all being based on the look of the Nostromo's interior. It's so accurate, Noah Hawley revealed to SFX Magazine that Ridley Scott, on seeing the Maginot for the first time said "Wow, f**k me, I know that ship!"
2120: The series takes place two years before the events of Alien, despite some bizarre early comments from Hawley suggesting that "It's somewhere around the events of the second film, either before or just after." Perhaps the date was changed during production.
The alien: We haven't yet seen the host that gave "birth" to this xenomorph, but it's interesting that it often runs on all fours, like the creature from Alien 3, which came from either a cow or a dog, depending on which version you watched.
The ship's cat: As we saw in some of the promo material leading up to the launch of the series, the Maginot has a ginger cat, just like Ripley's feline friend Jonesy, in Alien and Aliens.
Neverland Research Institute: Boy Kavalier's island-based outpost is named Neverland – a nod to the island home of Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up, in writer J. M. Barrie's work. Peter Pan is clearly an obsession of "boy genius" Kavalier's, as we will see throughout the series.
The doom of the Maginot: The scenes on the ship play out like a speed run of the first Alien movie, with the crew of the ship busy at work when something goes wrong, the xenomorph gets out, and the crew are killed.
This seems like a good time to bring up the significance of the name Maginot. The Maginot Line was a line of defensive obstacles and weapons installations built by France in the 1930s (and named after the French Minister of War André Maginot) that was intended to prevent invasion by Nazi Germany. While it was built along the borders of Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium, the result was that the Germans simply circumvented the defenses by invading through the Low Countries in 1940. In other words, it was an expensive failure that led to disaster...
MU-TH-UR/MOTHER: Morrow has high-level access to the Weyland-Yutani AI, just as Ash did in Alien. It seems to be the main point of contact between Morrow and Wey-Yu command.
"Will I dream?" Before Marcie has her consciousness transferred into the synthetic body of Wendy she asks if the process will hurt and if she will dream. This feels like a deliberate call-back to Newt in Aliens, who asks Ripley, "Can I dream?" as she prepares for hypersleep.
The space station: We see the Maginot partially smash into a space station in the orbit of the Earth. The only previous such installation we've seen in the Alien movies was the Gateway station that Ripley was temporarily based on in Aliens. It looks very different to the station we see here, though, so we have to assume that they are different facilities. Fan theory: Perhaps Gateway is built to replace this one after the Maginot trashes it!
Ice Age: Continental Drift: Wendy's human brother Joe appears to be watching the fourth of the Ice Age movies just before the Maginot crashes into Prodigy City.
Disney's Peter Pan: As Marcie has her consciousness seemingly transferred into the synthetic body of Wendy, clips from Disney's 1953 animated version of Peter Pan play on the screens above her. The name Wendy is, of course, another reference, with Wendy Darling being one of the main character's of Barrie's story, as are the names of the Lost Boys. It's interesting that Marcie chooses the name herself, though, rather than Boy Kavalier.
Guns and ammo: The search and rescue team that enter the downed Maginot are heavily armed with guns that look very similar (but not exactly the same) as the M41A Pulse Rifle from Aliens. Certainly they have a similar silhouette, and the distinctive ammo counters, though they appear to be lacking the underslung grenade launcher. There's also a glimpse of what looks like a M56 Smartgun, also from Aliens.
Facehuggers in jars: In a scene that recalls the Colonial Marines investigating the deserted Hadley's Hope outpost in Aliens, the search and rescue team discover some dead facehuggers in jars.
Noah Hawley: Yep, that's showrunner and writer Noah Hawley playing the part of Joe and Marcie’s father, as seen in flashback.
The score: The distinctive horn motif that occasionally pops up throughout the first two episodes sounds like a sample from Jerry Goldsmith's Alien score.
Alien: Earth season 1, episodes 1–3 are now streaming on Hulu in the US, and on Disney Plus in the UK. For more, check out our Alien: Earth review, and our Alien: Earth timeline explained.
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