The Ice Age franchise is canon in the Alien universe, thanks to the opening episodes of Alien: Earth – but what if there’s a darker meaning behind its inclusion in the show?
While the new series revolves around a Weyland-Yutani ship that crashes on Earth, it primarily follows Wendy (Sydney Chandler), Prodigy’s first hybrid. In the first episode, her consciousness is transferred into a new adult body – but she still has many of her childhood memories.
Specifically, she remembers watching a movie with her brother Joe (Alex Lawther): Ice Age: Continental Drift, the fourth entry in the animated series. In one scene, she casts her mind back to watching the moment Manny, Diego, and Sid meet Captain Gutt, where he tells them, “Surrender your ship or face my fury.”
In another (surely intentionally) amusing scene, Sid fades into view next to Wendy. However, while Ice Age is key to the Alien show’s plot – words I never thought I’d type – it could be teasing something else.
What if Ice Age is setting up the ending of Alien: Earth?
Bear with me, because I know that sounds ridiculous – but the use of Ice Age could feasibly be interpreted as a faraway tease of Earth’s fate.
Right now, Ice Age serves as nothing more than a link between Wendy and Joe; in Episode 1, she secretly communicates with him by hacking a Prodigy robot attendant, saying, “Or face my furry what?” when he quotes it to the monitor. Like Alien, it’s also owned by 20th Century Studios, so it’s an easy piece of IP to integrate into the show without rights issues.
However, think about what happens in the Ice Age movies. In the first film, animals head south to avoid the ice age. In the sequel, the ice age comes to an end. In the third film, Sid discovers a lost, underground world inhabited by dinosaurs.
This is where it gets interesting: in Continental Drift, a cataclysm (caused by Scrat) sets an entire continent adrift, and in Collision Course, Scrat accidentally sends a giant asteroid towards Earth.
You’re probably asking, “What the hell is this guy on about?” Well, things don’t go well for Earth in the Alien franchise. As Michael Fassbender’s David says, “[Humans] are a dying species clutching for salvation.”
Its fate is assumed to be similar to Earth’s in the Avatar franchise: dwindling resources, pollution, wars, and mankind slowly reducing it to a wasteland; why else do you think Alien: Romulus starts on LV-410 around Mars?
There is a comic (Aliens: Earth War) that sees the Xenomorphs take over the world, leading to a barrage of nuclear detonations across the globe and leaving the planet uninhabitable for humans. That’s no longer considered canon.
Alien: Resurrection is the key point of reference here. The film ends with the USM Auriga crashing into Earth, causing an enormous explosion that wipes out most of France (yes, really). Just as Scrat sends an asteroid towards Earth, the crew is forced to send the spaceship towards the planet to save themselves and eliminate the Xenomorph threat.
Okay… maybe they’re not quite so one-to-one, but excluding the end of Resurrection, the fate of our planet is largely unseen in the franchise. Given its title, perhaps Alien: Earth will explore exactly what happened here while screams fell on deaf ears in space.
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