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One of the biggest thrills for me this year was seeing Legion creator Noah Hawley put his signature weird thumbprint on my beloved Alien franchise, when Alien: Earth debuted on Hulu over the summer. I was also excited to finally dive into Star Trek: Lower Decks (I was late to the party, I know), so imagine my disappointment upon discovering that a combination of the two was once a reality, but got blasted into hyperspace.

Yes, Noah Hawley was at one point tasked with playing in the Star Trek sandbox, and in a recent interview, the showrunner explained why the idea fell through.

The story comes from a discussion Hawley recently had on the SmartLess podcast, hosted by Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett. At about the 57-minute mark of the show, Hawley got very honest about his aborted mission into the final frontier, and gave us a teensy window into what the show would've looked like.

"It’s all franchises," Hawley explained of his thinking before the pitch, "And I thought, 'yeah but everything’s war, right? Star Wars is war and Marvel is war, but Star Trek isn’t war — Star Trek is exploration, right?' It’s people solving problems by being smarter than the other guy."

(I mean, there is a very important Star Trek plot arc revolving around a little thing called the Dominion War, but to your point Noah, that's kind of the exception that proves the rule. Deep Space Nine, after all, could do very little wrong.)

"I went in, I talked to Paramount," Hawley continued, "I sold [Jim Gianopulos, former head of Paramount Studios] this original idea. It wasn’t Chris Pine, it wasn’t anything [pre-existing]. I wrote it, they said, 'we love it, let’s prep it.'"

But as I don't need to tell you, scifi fan, all the project love in the world can't match studio red tape. I'm getting ahead of myself, though - let Hawley tell it.

"I was going to move to Australia," he expounds, "We were booking stages, whatever. And then, as happens in Hollywood, [Gianopulos was] like, ‘I’m going to bring in somebody else under me, and they’re going to take over the film studio,' and the first thing they did was kill the original Star Trek movie, because they said, ‘Well, how do we know people are going to like it?’ You know, 'Shouldn’t we do a transition movie from Chris Pine, play it safe?' So it kind of went away."

Besides the disappointment we feel in potentially never seeing a Hawley-directed Star Trek, there's also a little frustration here in knowing that the Star Trek fanbase is always hungry for more, whether they're familiar with how it fits into the franchise or not. I mean, just look at Lower Decks, right?

Ah well, at least Noah Hawley got the chance to tackle another giant scifi franchise. And to be honest, the world dominated by Weyland-Yutani is maybe a bit more fitting than the one gently guided by Starfleet anyway.

Alien: Earth is streaming on Hulu now.

The two greatest sci-fi monsters of all time are crash-landing in the heart of pop culture once again, and Popverse is here to tell you how to survive. Explore the interconnected Alien and Predator universe with:

• Popverse's Alien watch order
• Popverse's Predator watch order
• Popverse's Alien timeline
  

...and more. Keep your eyes peeled and remember, if anybody can hear you scream in space, it's us.