Sometimes the appearance of certain Egyptianising motifs in literary or audiovisual works can only be described as anecdotal, without any clear impact on the plot or relevance to the analysis of the cultural reception of Ancient Egypt. In Ovni(s) we may find such a case. In the first episode, a female flamingo who becomes the official mascot of the G.E.P.A.N., the French ufological research agency, is named Hatchepsut. Despite a possible link between the Egyptian in this case to UFOs and aliens (to the potential delight of supporters of the ‘ancient astronaut hypothesis’) the name of the flamingo as evidence of this civilisation’s relationship to UFOs in the series seems difficult to justify in the absence of other references. The same can be said of Thutmose the pig in the second season of the series.
In episode 8, on the other hand, a more interesting reference appears. The members of the agency try to find an explanation for enigmatic vertical stripes written on paper by those who supposedly experienced UFO sightings. To do so, they compare different ancient writing systems, including Egyptian hieroglyphs. Faced with the difficulty of deciphering a possible alien language, one of the protagonists states:

Champollion, il lui a fallu 20 ans pour comprendre les hieroglyphs

The same retort is repeated later in the same episode in the face of government pressure on the G.E.P.A.N.'s chief scientist to obtain irrefutable proof of the existence of UFOs.
The mention of the French savant in the series is clear evidence of his notoriety in France, as his portrait, painted by Leon Cogniet in 1831 and exhibited in the Musée du Louvre, is a familiar French cultural reference point, and is present in the decoration of many of the country's official buildings.
Let us not forget either that the release date of this series on different platforms (2021) anticipated the centenary of the decipherment of the Egyptian language by Champollion in his famous Lettre à M. Dacier (1822).

Author: Abraham I. Fernández Pichel