That’s a good point, but it’s a half century in the future compared to the first one. They recruit Ripley because she had experience with the Xenomorphs and I had assumed they learned of them from the Nostromo’s logs. Not that they were common knowledge.
The marines being sent on a “bug hunt” definitely suggests that aliens are somewhat routine at this time.
Definitely need to rewatch that scene when I get the chance. It’s true they didn’t freak at the Space Jockey, but they also didn’t exactly approach the eggs with anything resembling caution or a protocol.
Yeah, but for that last bullet to make sense the Nostromo would need to encounter the Space Jockey really early on the journey. Alien makes it seem like the distress signal was a chance encounter. Did the Maginot find the Xenomorph eggs in the same place or did they find them elsewhere.
I think I misspoke. I meant the Hybrids, we never heard anything about them or cyborgs in the movie franchise.
I sort of agree. The Alien franchise isn’t really known for its score. Not sure what I’d prefer, but having outro music is a very prestige TV thing. I give it a pass event if it feels a little dissonant.
Related thought. The way the show is choosing to do “previously on scenes” is interesting. Not sure if it’s good or bad, but different. They use the quick flashes and cuts that they used in the Maginot flashbacks for the recaps. And they show the title card over the top of it. It definitely creates a vibe which I like, but it doesn’t do the best job of recapping where we just left off. Maybe in rhe era of binge watching that’s not a big deal.
Maybe the Hybrid project is a catastrophic failure (not just for the ‘annoying kid minds in super-synth body’ aspect).
The third episode was better I thought, mainly for leaving the confines of the crashed ship, which felt a bit like kids visiting an Alien theme park.
The timeline is confusing, as I think Yutani mentions to the cyborg that he was gone 65 years on that mission to collect alien life. But wouldn’t that mean he’d left Earth around 2055, so 30-odd years prior to the Prometheus mission; and I had the impression that alien life was still a mind-blowing novelty for the Prometheus crew. Maybe Weyland and Yutani have more distinct agendas than I’d thought.
Most or all of the other hybrid kids: still scared of small monsters like they are still made of meat. Wendy: casually hooks a xenomorph, drags it off, and decapitates it with a paper cutter.
Aliens: Bug Hunt was the title of a short story anthology. Many of the stories were about the Marines battling or exterminating non-xenomorph aliens (bugs).
We know from the movies Alien and Aliens (although a lot of this is from stuff only in the extended versions of both movies) that WY knew something valuable to them was on LV-426. This show is presumably explaining how they knew.
And they were explicitly ordered to investigate it which was not anywhere near their mission profile. As were the colonists who eventually settled there. The company saw all of them as expendable means to acquiring what they thought was there.
I have mentioned before that Arcturians appear in the comic “The Long Tomorrow.” What may belong in the Obvious Things About a Creative Work thread is that Dan O’Bannon wrote the screenplays for both The Long TomorrowandAlien, so that’s the connection.
About the song at the end: “The Mob Rules”, by Black Sabbath. I’m wondering if they included it because of a connection with two Dan O’Bannon projects. He was behind the original Alien, of course. But O’Bannon also wrote one or more of the stories in the animated film, “Heavy Metal”. The final segment in that movie also used The Mob Rules.
I knew xenomorph was a generic word but but it helps to have a name for them and that’s as good as any because, as the article also says, it’s a fancy word for “Alien” which is fitting.
I never took “bug hunt” to mean “snipe hunt”. I always took it that going in to clear out non sentient dangerous aliens was something these Marines did and they found it boring and easy.
No one in these movies including the working joes in the first one are ever surprised to see other life so you can assume (and the new show confirms) there is a bunch of creepy crawlies out in space.
Also, in Aliens one of the Marines asks why Ridley is on the mission and another dismissively answers, “she saw an alien once,” implying that they did not find that fact the least bit significant.
Also, there seems to be very little reason for such a thing as “space marines” to even exist if it wasn’t for dealing with aliens. Specially ones that carry flamethrowers as part of their default kit.
We know there are a lot of colonies and in this show we learn there are probably hostile opposing companies all over the place.
It’s highly likely that human colonies existing in far flung systems would be prone to bouts of rebellion, strikes, piracy, and warlords. Having a military policing force makes sense.
Also in this show we see how W-Y and Prodigy treat each other when it comes to territorial boundaries and espionage. I don’t recall if in Aliens they ever make it clear, but those Space Marines may more or less be W-Y mercenaries and/or elite corporate security forces.
There isn’t any obvious reason to think that their charter is exclusively defending humanity from alien threats, if at all.
This may just be a result of the writing and loosely constructed world in the original movies, but nothing a about the way these guys go about their business makes it feel like they are specialized for dealing with dangerous alien life forms. They don’t have any scientists, they don’t have any protocols to quarantine, they aren’t planning any capture, they use wholly conventional weapons common to traditional military.
While there’s some dialogue that suggests encountering aliens is not rare, these guys don’t act very prepared for it.