Warning! This article contains spoilers for Alien #4Hadley’s Hope is a name that any Alien fan will immediately recognize, though many may not fully grasp its significance as it was recently revealed that the off-world colony first introduced in Aliens actually changed humanity forever.
In the 1986 film Aliens, a colony of humans has terraformed the moon LV-426 and created a settlement called Hadley’s Hope. This was a part of Weyland-Yutani’s “Building Better Worlds” campaign as the company was committed to terraforming viable moons and planets across the cosmos. However, this moon in particular is one fans of the first film should find familiar as LV-426 is the world the crew of the Nostromo went to investigate after receiving a distress beacon from a derelict vessel–a vessel that contained an entire chamber of Ovomorphs. As expected, those Ovomorphs are later discovered by explorers living on Hadley’s Hope, leading to a full-scale Xenomorph takeover of the settlement and Hadley’s Hope’s eventual annihilation.
In Alien #4 by Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Julius Ohta, a synthetic spec-ops team known as Steel Team has been deployed for a mission on a planet that had been overrun by Xenomorphs–a terraformed world called Tobler-9–to extract an Ovomorph on behalf of humanity. While the mission itself is an exciting, action-packed tale of synthetics vs Xenomorphs that is sure to leave one on the edge of their seats, the real interesting aspect of this particular issue is the background information readers are given on the title page–information on the Tobler-9 itself. According to the data page, “The planet relies on two advanced terraforming engines modeled off the technology that established the colony Hadley’s Hope”.
Hadley’s Hope Paved the Way for Future Terraforming Efforts in Alien
The technology used to establish Hadley’s Hope was used experimentally, and that tech was further developed to build much more advanced worlds like Tobler-9. This piece of information gives Hadley’s Hope a much wider impact on the Alien universe as it establishes the settlement as humanity’s first real breakthrough in terraforming technology–effectively turning a classic location from the original films into something incredibly influential in the realm of advanced technology.
Hadley’s Hope was always destined to go down in history within the Alien mythos, as it was the location of perhaps the most devastating Xenomorph attack against humanity–but this issue reveals that the impact of the settlement went far beyond just being a place where something unthinkable happened as Alien confirms Aliens’ Hadley’s Hope actually changed humanity forever by leading the way in terraforming development.
Alien #4 by Marvel Comics is available now.