I’d advise a lot of roomy sweatshirts. Red ones.
I think it’s safe to assume that anyone working on Gateway station regularly travels to and from the surface. I don’t think it’s plausible that these people could be ignorant of the situation on Earth. They are corporate drones, not slaves.
Because it is a fairly large group of middle managers, I think the chances of these people all being in on some giant conspiracy to knowingly hide the truth of an infestation on Earth from Ripley is also implausible.
Lastly, Ripley appears to be living on Gateway station for some period of time after the meeting but before Burke recruits her to go back to LV-426. She’s in an apartment, she’s had a haircut, she’s been seeing a therapist, she’s gotten a job. She was living there for months at least, maybe a year or more. If there were Aliens running wild on Earth, there’s just no plausible scenario where that’s a secret. If there is no travel to Earth and no news or communication from Earth that would be wildly suspicious. Everyone on Gateway station would feel like prisoners. While the corporations are obviously exploitative, the people don’t view them as Fahrenheit 451-level suppressors of speech.
If there are aliens loose on Earth, especially Xenomorphs, it totally screws up the opening of Aliens. It would take a crazy retcon.
Or maybe even “pass as normal Arthur…with a new shirt”. Only three people on the island know he’s dead and none of them are in a hurry to reveal how they know that.
I apologize for being bad at what I said. I’m saying we can infer “nothing happened on earth [with regards to xenomorphs]” because the people questioning Ripley would have said something. They didn’t, so I’m assuming earth is okay and normal. They only questioned the aliens out in the different places where the Nostromo had been. I apologize that I wasn’t clear about this and hope this clears it up.
My point about that scene was it was middle managers, who were given a job to make as much money as they could, and discredit Ripley and her claims. I think this is what allowed them to blacklist Ripley to the bad jobs, maybe even so she would go when Burke came calling. I can’t tell if there was a claim or settlement as part of this. Was there a mediator there that might have given Ripley recompense for both her extended cryosleep and bad orders of the company?
Thanks for the discussion!
Gotcha, agreed. As far as this show goes, they don’t really have a choice but to conclude in a place where the aliens are contained/eradicated. They are pretty well boxed in narratively if they want to maintain continuity.
Before Alien Earth, the backstory was simple and made some sense. W-Y knew there was something on LV-426 that they were interested in, but they didn’t know exactly what. When the Nostromo went missing they sort of lost interest. Later they sent the terraformers ignorant of the threat. When they find Ripley, her story doesn’t jibe with the fact that people live on LV-426. Later, when they lose contact, they put 2 and 2 together. Burke concocts the plan to get a specimen after being intrigued by Ripley’s account. There are holes here, but it’s coherent.
After Alien Earth, that pretty much goes out the window, and we’re left with 2 possible ideas. Either W-Y knows exactly what’s going on on LV-426 and they know Ripley’s story is true and are gaslighting her. Or the knowledge is lost somehow in the intervening 57 years and all but the most clued in people at the upper echelons of W-Y know anything. In which case these execs and managers are just as ignorant as she is.
I don’t think any blacklisting was needed. She’s been lost in space for 2 generations. And the general story is that she was first officer on a transport ship that lost its crew and cargo for unknown reasons. She’s also suffering from PTSD and I’m guessing there’s no HIPAA protections in this world. She’s not exactly a prime candidate for anything.
In this messed up corpro-fascist state I don’t think employees get much in the way of protections. The crew of the Nostromo was disposable then and Ripley remains disposable now. They pumped her for info. Probably blamed the loss on “crew error” and kicked her to the curb.
I just finished the season. Something I don’t understand… did it really never occur to the boy (not) genius that the children he stole from their homes under false pretenses might “grow” to resent him? Maybe go rogue? And that their literally super-human abilities might make them a threat? He didn’t think to implant a kill switch?
And for that matter, how did the children not realize sooner that they were way overpowered and effectively unstoppable (mineral-consuming bugs and stun guns aside)?
I mean, it’s fine, but… well, it kind of relies on the “idiot plot” trope. Not unlike Alien: Covenant and Prometheus, I’m afraid.
I don’t think Boy Kavalier is so much an idiot; it’s more that he’s the Joker - he just wants to see the world burn. Chaos is fun for him.
And his massive ego means he thinks his wealth and “genius” will protect him personally from that chaos.
He’s not the Joker, except to the extent the Joker might have been lying about his own motivations and Alfred might have been wrong. Because he doesn’t just want to watch the world burn. He wants to own the world. It’s about control.
So why didn’t he take precautions to control his creation, the same way he controls everyone and everything else?
I don’t get that impression of him at all. Nothing about him says chaos. He’s a Narcissist who thinks he is always the smartest guy in the room.
In the future no one gives a fuck about quarantine. The Nostromo was a mining ship and they still knew what to do, this medical ship was staffed with the worst biologists the future has to offer.
It was like watching Idiocracy as a sci-if horror flick.
It’s quite possible such a kill switch exists but BK hasn’t found reason to use it yet. Things are just getting interesting for him as of the end of season 1.
Intentionally, W-Y was cleaning house and deliberately picked the worst crew in the hopes that this would happen.
I think he’s clearly an idiot, at least outside his areas of expertise. It’s pure hubris. I think it’s the main theme of the show - how the powerful and wealthy are very often just as dumb as anyone else.
He’s certainly an idiot in that his actions will create bad outcomes. But my point is that it’s not that he has thought things through and made bad decisions due to lack of intelligence. Instead, he doesn’t care if bad things happen, and his hubris makes him think those bad things won’t happen to him.
He smiled and laughed when Wendy said “now, we rule” at the end of the episode. That isn’t someone who wants absolute power, it’s someone who wants disruption.
I think that’s someone who channels their fear and nervousness into false cheer and humor.
He was smiling and laughing because he was watching his “daughter” be just like him and was a proud papa.
Given that Boy is supposed to be one of the great geniuses of all time, did he ever do anything in the show that showed particular intelligence or insight? We’re told that he’s a powerful corporate figure who created an empire from an early age, but that’s tell not show – we’re not actually seeing him do anything clever at any point in the show that I can recall. If we weren’t told he was a genius a dozen times, would we have any idea that he was even smart?
I do agree with the posters that think he views himself to some degree as an agent of chaos/disruption. The workings/feelings/thoughts of normal people are below him and the world is his plaything.
This is nitpicking but I was very annoyed in the scene where Eyelene finished the pi sequence. Knowing if it had an intelligence/civilization/education by seeing if it could ascertain pi is interesting. However, showing it “3.14” would still be meaningless to it. How would it know what our numerals represented? How would it know we use base 10? There are other ways they could’ve made this same point – for example by tapping out the first few prime numbers and having it continue the sequence.
I too saw no evidence of the Boy’s ‘genius’. At one point he even said that he hoped the super-hybrid creations might at last provide him with interesting conversation - but spent most of the series himself banging on tiresomely about Peter Pan. Not exactly the sign of someone well-read.
I feel it would have worked better had Boy K been explicitly delusional about his genius, having inherited the empire from his parents, as he showed no signs of business aptitude.
Overall, I’m not thrilled with the writing on this show. Too many people have to act like idiots to advance the plot. How many times did the plot rely on some stupid character letting something in the lab get loose because despite being a multi-trillion dollar operation they don’t have full time professional lab staff and their procedures are a joke?
I’m not sure yet if I’m on board with Wendy turning to disregard humanity. I would’ve liked to have seen her spending more time distrusting the various adults around her, feeling as though she’s being used before rebelling. It’s plausible that a 10 (?) year old given incredible power would turn out to be dangerous because she wielded her new power carelessly, but I feel like the journey was rushed. She looked at her brother as someone as important and to a degree as someone she could seek for moral guidance and adult judgment, but she was so horrified when he stunned nibs even though it was an obvious situation where she was out of control and murdering someone. It shows that Wendy has no regard for the life of any humans and only her peers matter to her – and that’s a pretty severe character turn that I don’t think was fully developed.
It’s hard to make sense of Kirsch’s behavior. He’s really interesting because he seems to have his own agenda, but are we supposed to interpret the whole time he monitored all of Morrow’s plotting and allowed it to come to fruition as a plot to capture the Yutani attacking troops? Because he certainly was unprepared for their invasion. I thought perhaps he had some sort of anti-prodigy agenda, but he and Morrow tried to kill each other when given the chance. I’m not sure he actually has a consistent and hidden motivation or if they’re just plotting shit at random that seems mysterious but has no real meaning.
But he did have controls. We saw he could turn their senses on and off, that he could see through their eyes without them knowing about it (at first), and that they could even erase memories.
The problem was, they exceeded what he thought they were capable of, and so his controls were inadequate. Wendy being able to manipulate technology was a complete surprise, remember.
Here’s a theory I just pulled out of my ass. What if Kirsh is the first hybrid…made by…and from Boy? Human boy is just some deluded clone or meat puppet needed to retain control of Prodigy.