‘Alien: Earth’ has the right approach to canon — pick-and-choose and ignore the bits that don’t work

Fiction, by its very definition, isn’t real. A character can have an entire lifetime of backstory, the politics and geography of their made-up homeworld a matter of record, but none of it would exist if writers, actors, artists and other creatives hadn’t imagined it first. Pretend a pivotal moment from their past never happened, and history isn’t actually being rewritten. A hero isn’t going to sue anyone for defamation if they’re suddenly reappraised as a villain.

Yet it sometimes feels as if sci-fi and fantasy “canon” in sci-fi and fantasy is the most sacred of sacred cows. Movies and TV shows frequently tie themselves in knots trying to avoid contradicting throwaway lines of dialogue uttered decades earlier. Fans — and I’ll admit I’ve been as guilty of this as anyone — have always been happy to flag up inconsistencies in franchise lore, while the Marvel Cinematic Universe has built its entire brand on labyrinthine continuity. Lucasfilm even employs its own “Keeper of the Holocron” to stay on top of the vast timeline of a galaxy far, far away.

But while consistency is undoubtedly important, it shouldn’t come at the expense of good stories. “Alien: Earth” showrunner Noah Hawley and the rest of the creative team seem to have realized this, as the show has adopted a much looser approach to canon than most of its genre counterparts.

The show is set just two years before the USCSS Nostromo crew touched down on LV-426, and brought something very nasty on board. However, “Alien: Earth” never worries about the fact that the catastrophic crash of the USCSS Maginot — as well as Prodigy and the three other non-Weyland-Yutani corporations ruling the world — have never been mentioned before. Nor does it get hung up on its unlikely chronology, or get sidetracked by the events of the Prometheus and Covenant missions that departed a few decades prior. The multipurpose black goo that displayed magical properties in Ridley Scott’s prequel movies is, so far, conspicuous by its absence

Instead we’ve been introduced to a whole new ecosystem featuring acid-spewing bugs, and a freaky, parasitic eye on legs that may just be orchestrating the whole show. After being retconned as the result of a malevolent android’s morally dubious experiments in “Covenant”, the Xenomorph is — for now, at least — back to being a more evolution-adjacent apex predator.

Crucially, Alien: Earth has kept the key pillars that helped make “Alien” and “Aliens” all-time classics — the eggs, the Facehuggers, the acid for blood— and treated everything else as malleable. Other sci-fi sagas should probably take note.

Canon as we know it is a relatively new concept. When “Doctor Who” and “Star Trek” debuted in the 1960s, even the most forward-thinking writers would never have dreamed their ideas would still be impacting popular culture six decades later. There was no grand plan for the future — the Doctor wasn’t revealed to be a Time Lord until the show was six years old — and the creatives were often making things up as they went. “Who” continuity remains a notoriously nebulous concept.

And despite George Lucas’s earlier plans for the “Journal of the Whills”, the original “Star Wars” trilogy was effectively a blank slate, in which he was free to tell any story he wanted. Even the prequels had minimal existing lore to dodge, with the numerous novels, comics and cartoons of the Expanded Universe occupying lower tiers of canon — pre-Disney, only the movies (and, to a lesser extent, the CG “Clone Wars”) were gospel.

Even so, Lucas’s reliance on the “from a certain point of view” principle still managed to wind up a significant portion of the fanbase. Why would Obi-Wan describe Yoda as “the Jedi Master who instructed me” if Qui-Gon Jinn was his teacher? How did Princess Leia remember her mom if Padmé died when she was just a few minutes old?But canon’s a minor inconvenience when you’re only dealing with a few movies. It’s when you move into vast multimedia empires, straddling numerous interconnected films,TV shows, books, comics and cameos in “Fortnite” that it becomes a potential stumbling block.

Firstly, there’s the heritage factor, as “Star Wars”, “Star Trek”, “Doctor Who” and every other legacy franchise have decided that nostalgia is their not-so-secret weapon. Often the impact is minimal — bringing one-off “Star Trek” character Roger Korby into prequel show “Strange New Worlds”, for example — but leaning into existing canon can sometimes be a plotline’s entire raison d’être.

Han Solo’s sub-12 parsec Kessel Run was a casual, slightly nonsensical aside until it became a major set piece in “Solo: A Star Wars Story“. Meanwhile, Omega (the Big Bad in the most recent “Doctor Who” finale) hadn’t appeared on screen since 1983 Fifth Doctor story “Arc of Infinity” — a deep cut for all but the most hardcore of fans.

Much worse, however, is persisting with plotlines that don’t work. Few TV shows get everything right from day one, and any long-running series will have — in fact, should have — some less successful stories in the back catalogue. It shows that they’re trying to push the envelope, rather than just sticking to a formula.

Sometimes a franchise can make a minor course correction — the Leslie Knope of “Parks and Recreation”‘s second season was subtly different to the Leslie Knope of the first — but other times it’s best to just hold up your hands and consign an idea to the trash.

This is why we’re unlikely to ever see anyone following in Tom Paris and Kathryn Janeway’s footsteps by breaking the warp-10 barrier and turning into giant lizards, as they did in the infamous “Star Trek: Voyager” episode “Threshold”. Writer Brannon Braga later described the story as a “royal, steaming stinker” and it was rumored to have been excised from canon. For similar reasons, the revelation that the Doctor is half-human on his mother’s side has been conveniently brushed under the carpet since its one and only mention in the 1996 “Doctor Who” TV movie.

Arguably the smartest thing about “Alien: Earth” is the way Hawley’s been picky about the essentials. Even the franchise’s most strident fans would probably admit there hasn’t been a significant addition to Xenomorph mythology since the Alien Queen reared her ugly head in “Aliens”, four decades ago. But the decision to turn the TV show into a drama about child androids, feuding corporations and — crucially — an all-new menagerie of bizarre “Thing”-inspired fauna has given a 46-year-old saga a new lease of life, rather less reliant on its eponymous star beast — even Ridley Scott admitted after “Covenant”‘s disappointing box office performance that, “I think the beast has almost run out, personally.”

Cleverest of all, “Alien: Earth” has followed its path without (as yet) directly contradicting anything that’s gone before, instead being selective about what to include and what to ignore. Anything that didn’t make the cut? Well, maybe that’s happening in a distant star system, on the other end of a lengthy voyage in hypersleep. (Or maybe it didn’t happen at all.)

“Star Wars”, “Star Trek”, “Doctor Who” and the rest should all be watching with interest, because when you’ve got one eye on the past — even a freaky alien one with legs — it’s hard to truly embrace the future. And besides, none of it is real anyway.

The final episode of “Alien: Earth”‘s first season streams on Disney+ starting Wednesday Sept. 24.