Ridley Scott fans have often argued that his movies Blade Runner and Alien exist in a shared universe, where the Tyrell Corporation of the former becomes a rival to the latter's Weyland company.
In this theory, they both start making synthetic lifeforms androids, leading to Tyrell replicants like Blade Runner's Roy Batty (played by Rutger Hauer) becoming Weyland androids like Prometheus' David (Michael Fassbinder). Those viewers, however, have also been watching the latest Scott-affiliated project, HBO Max series Raised By Wolves, and think that the TV series could also be part of this shared universe, which thanks to Alien vs. Predator also include the Predator movies.
In Raised By Wolves, we follow two androids, named Father and Mother, who are tasked with raising human children on a planet named Kepler-22b following a gigantic Earth that destroyed the planet.
Rather than just showing that Scott is a little bit obsessed with androids (ones who dream of electric sheep particularly), some fans think that Father and Mother may also be Tyrell-Weyland products in a timeline a few decades ahead of the first Alien movie, which ends in around 2122 CE. The great war on Earth, meanwhile, takes place according to Raised by Wolves around 2145 CE, as seen in a flashback in an early episode.
So far, the link between Alien and Raised By Wolves has not really been confirmed in the latter, despite the androids in RBW having white blood, as did the synths in Aliens. This has not stopped fans, however, from theorizing about the worlds of RBW, Blade Runner and Alien could be linked.
Writing on the Raised By Wolves Reddit, for example, one viewer wrote: "Raised By Wolves finds us ultimately 100 years into the future after Blade Runner 2049, and continues the implication it established: that Tyrell found a way for replicants to reproduce.
"Replicant reproduction...created a rift. Humanity always hated skin jobs, finding Weyland's approach a little more easier to digest than the eerily more human than human replicants that were now breeding.
"Replicants, always second class, were living in squalor & as their human counterparts did centuries before, rebelled against the increasingly zealot like humans. Using synthetics, again—Weyland's answer to Tyrell, they waged a new crusade (or jihad) cloaked in a new form of spirituality." It is this, they argue, that leads to the war that sends Mother and Father to Kepler-22B.
Other viewers, however, are less convinced by the links between the three worlds. Replying to another fan theory, for example, a fan wrote, "if you have to ignore/cherry-pick that much stuff to make your theory work, it's a bad theory. Sorry. You could make it fit the Harry Potter setting if you do enough mental gymnastics.
"It's VASTLY more likely that they share some similarities because they come from the same dude's imagination."
Some fans have noted, for example, that for this theory to work you have to forget the events of the Alien sequels, which imply that the Earth is still alive and thriving when Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) wakes up in Aliens, 57 years after the events of Alien.
However, as Scott has shown a willingness in recent years to return to the world of Alien via sequels Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, fans might want to tune in when Raised By Wolves airs weekly to see if the executive producer has a few more clues about the like between the worlds up his sleeve.
Raised By Wolves episodes are released weekly on Thursdays on HBO Max.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
