<em>Alien: Earth</em>: What You Need to Know About the Five Corporations

"We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements ... profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster." — Carl Sagan, 1995

Welcome to 2120, when governments have lost power and corporations run the show. Such is the status quo in Alien: Earth, the buzzy new sci-fi series streaming on FX and Hulu and spun from the vast Alien film franchise. While past Alien movies have only alluded to the overwhelming power of corporations, Alien: Earth is explicit about the new corpocracy in which the world operates. In fact, there's a name for them in the show: The Five.

Here's everything we know about The Five, and what we don't know about them. (For now.)

In the near-future seen in the show, traditional world governments are no more. After their fall, The Five rose in power and influence. By the start of Alien: Earth, each one of The Five owns regional geographic territories, essentially turning Earth into a giant feudal landscape.

We know very little about the corporate-run world of Alien: Earth, at least not beyond the occasional ground-level look at the oppressively grim and lifeless governance by which The Five operate. (Recall Hermit trying to get out of his work contract early to attend medical school on a scholarship, and his requests falling on the ears of an indifferent robotic clerk.) Although the corporations fixed what the old governments had left broken, that doesn't mean life isn't bleak when power is wielded by the insatiably greedy.

Two corporations matter the most in Alien: Earth, while the other three are blank slates waiting to be colored in.

Samuel Blenkin as trillionaire CEO of Prodigy, Boy Kavalier, whose mission to become even richer brings an unknown danger onto our soil.

The first of the two important corporations is Weyland-Yutani, which is nearly synonymous with the Alien franchise itself. Weyland-Yutani, which owns virtually all of the Americas, provided the backdrop in Ridley Scott's original 1979 classic as the company that owned the USCSS Nostromo.

Throughout the Alien films, there have been plenty of references to the neutral evil of Weyland-Yutani; Alien 3 in 1992, for example, had a plot that hinged entirely on Weyland-Yutani sentencing prisoners to death to save their own hides. As a massive corporation whose business is built on colonization, excavation, and expending people for profit, Weyland-Yutani has long served as a stand-in for so many other real-world corporations that endlessly exploit for its own gain.

The second corporation, and the one most important to Alien: Earth, is Prodigy, which owns most of Asia, half of Africa, and virtually all of Australia and Greenland.

Framed as one of the newest members of The Five, Prodigy is run by the world's youngest trillionaire, Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin). Alien: Earth takes audiences deep into Prodigy, with Samuel Blenkin as Prodigy's CEO Boy Kavalier and described as the world's youngest trillionaire.

The show follows Prodigy's most critical top secret project: Early product testing for "hybrids," which fuse the consciousness of real, living people in the bodies of synthetic beings. It just might be the answer to immortality, and of course Prodigy is insistent on keeping the secret to itself until the time is right to profit.

Prodigy has a rivalry of sorts with Weyland-Yutani. With the New Siam crash site putting Prodigy at odds with Weyland-Yutani again, Weyland-Yutani has activated one of its own, Morrow (Babou Ceesay) to infiltrate Prodigy by any means necessary. His approach? Find the most vulnerable of Prodigy's secret "Lost Boys."

Amusingly, Alien: Earth has invented three other corporations that compose The Five—Threshold, Lynch, and Dynamic—but there's next to zero information about them nor do they have much of a role in the show. (For now, at least.)

Threshold owns Western Europe, while Lynch owns what used to be Russia. The last of the Five, Dynamic, owns the other half of Africa, the Middle East... and apparently, the Moon, based on a passing line of dialogue in the first episode.

In a corpocracy, and specifically the one that exists in Alien: Earth, it's hard to figure out what businesses and industries these companies specialize in. All of them are involved in what the show calls "the race to immortality," with cyborgs and synthetics a major part of the show's universe. (And of course, Prodigy has a goldmine in their cutting-edge "hybrids.") But you can't eat hybrids, nor can you wear them like clothes. When just five corporations run the world, well, perhaps these companies are jacks of all trades but masters of none. Maybe that's why the world is still so bleak.