I know the AvP movies aren’t considered part of the mainline canon but still, both of those movies have Xeno infestations on Earth getting destroyed in their entirety by explosions.
That’s the point that @Staggerlee was making. If we do finally get the “nuke them from orbit” solution, that essentially means the entire Alien Earth story, for as many seasons as they get, has to stay contained on Neverland. That will get pretty old.
They’ve really painted themselves into a corner.
I thought the show was planned for a 2 season arc?
Season 1 is the proof of concept. And if it works commercially, then season 2 is about building a model upon which we can envision making a season 3, 4, 5. [Alien: Earthis] designed to be a recurring series. I don’t know how many seasons that would be. I believe that endings are what give a story meaning, so I have a sense of where I’m going with it.
We’ll have to wait and see what Disney’s appetite is.
I always find myself unable to properly read ratings, but as best I can tell, the ratings were actually pretty good. A second season at least seems pretty likely.
I would be interested in a show constructed so as to (satisfactorily) dovetail into Alien, while also not violating anything in Aliens. But I’m skeptical that this is that show. The glacial pace of Season 1 argues for ‘futzing around for as many seasons as we can get, with lots of conflict between Wendy and her brother and Boy that leads nowhere near the world of Alien and Aliens.’
I hope I’m wrong. I’ll certainly give episode 02/01 a shot, whenever it appears.
That could be a really good show.
It’s true that it escape down a drain. But if it’s attracted to dead bodies, it could have come up through another drain inside the building fairly easily (to find a dead security person), instead of traipsing through yea-many yards of island terrain (to find ripped-open Arthur).
I mean they’re surely not going for “Dame Sylvia is torn with emotion by the re-appearance of her dead husband with his guts hanging out and one newly-enlarged eyeball, and therefore tries to protect the hybrid creature”….are they???
I was very excited when I heard Noah Hawley was making this show, because “normal people get thrown into dangerous/unexpected circumstances and get in over their heads due to their own greed” is exactly the kind of show he is good at (Fargo). That is just so perfect for an Alien show. Instead we got… kid synths.
I thought it escaped down a hole in the floor used to run cables. Basically the same kind of cable management an office building would have under a cube via a floating floor. Will have to rewatch to check.
Ugh, that has the stink of truth on it.
I wasn’t familiar with his work and never watched Fargo. But this show really feels like a guy without any serious Sci-Fi/Fantasy chops trying to moonlight in the genre.
Different tastes. That sounds very boring and repetitive to me.
I wonder if Hawley envisions a For All Mankind sort of thing and skipping multiple years, if not for S2 then for any possible future seasons. That of course only applies if the denouement is other than nuking all the Xenos.
For now the show works for me but yeah the interesting characters are either not or not entirely human, and that may be hard to pull off over a longer multi seasons arc. Joe is going to have to step up as a character in conflict with Wendy’s growing alliance of (right now mostly sympathetic) not humans.
Now that you mention it, 90% of the cast being robots who don’t age would simplify significant time jumps.
You could be right. I guess the point was ‘into the innards of the building,’ roughly speaking. As opposed to going out a window directly into the grounds (and eventually, to the beach, which I still find odd).
I can imagine a scenario, in TV world at least, where the plumbing drains out of the building near the beach. That would largely explain why the Eyeball Jockey decided to infect Arthur instead of any of the dead soldiers. So it being plumbing might be better narratively.
It being a random hole into the subfloor doesn’t work as well. Those floating office floors don’t really lead anywhere. That would mean that Eyelene intentionally traveled through the main building structure and hallways to the beach, which is a hugely contrived scenario.
Edit: Just rewatched the scene, and it’s 100% just a cable management grommet on the floor. Not a drain.
One thing with the eyeball is they keep acting like we don’t know what it will do when it is in a person but we do because we already saw it happen and at that point it didn’t do anything to indicate it was sentient. Just kind of moaned and hissed.
As far as the season, I think if you enjoy it as a sci-fi show that riffs off alien motifs it was not bad. The longer the story goes the less likely it will mesh perfectly with established continuity.
have as much experience observing humans and their language. Eyeball learns. We know that it now understands this language very alien to it, which would reasonably take some time and effort to accomplish, and that it can control the movements of its “host” …
It was watching the people on the ship for months if not years (depending on how long the crew was actually awake) so I am not sure that tracks but that could be the reasoning.
Most of that time with a single person at a time doing experiments the one whose shift we saw who was only muttering and talking out loud to herself for audience benefit.
I agree with these points. The creature’s cross-country journey seemed very implausible; your ‘drain discharging near the beach’ idea could have fixed it. (When is Season 2 due, anyway? Maybe you could apply for a job with the production!)
Also a good point. Yeah, okay, maybe it’s learned enough since that episode to start doing interesting things. Or maybe they’ll just make it abruptly ‘able to pass for a normal human.’ (I wouldn’t be surprised by such a development from this show.)
The giant gaping hole in Arthur’s chest may make that hard.
I wonder if there’s an upgrade to being in a living creature’s eye versus a dead one. I don’t think we know conclusively if the extreme pinkeye infection is lethal or not.
This presumes that those questioning Ripley know the truth of what the corporations were up to. We can infer nothing happened on earth or they would mention that. The rest looked like middle managers who only know what they are told, nothing near the truth, and trying to scapegoat Ripley to either get out of paying something or to get their insurance claim.
I knew of Fargo but never watched. No interest to watch it. I enjoyed Alien Earth.
The Matrix anthology used short stories to explain how the Matrix came about and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it because, as I remember it, it was generic about how the first Matrix came about but with no characters to care about or cheer for. The stories were generic robot abuse to explain why the robots don’t like us.
In contrast, the anthology Secret Level was really cool to me.
Thanks for the discussion!