I also got the impression this was the crew of the Weyland-Yutani vessel Fuck These People in Particular.
To put extra sauce on it we did get a couple of scenes where various crew members were fucking each other for a goddamn percentage, which cements their status as Xeno food.
Not everyone is going to be a Ripley… but I did get the impression that the success of the mission was worth something to Yutani, and she hand-picked Morrow as someone who would take care of business. So why the likes of that XO, the traitorous engineer, the sloppy scientist, etc.? Were pickings that slim? I get that, out of all the crew, only Morrow had reason to be personally loyal rather than in it for a percentage, but one would hope for at least some basic competence and professionalism if you are picking people for a critical mission.
A 65 year mission? Only the desperate or stupid would sign up for that. Morrow seems smarter than that, but was he planning to be reunited with his 75 year old daughter on his return? I figure he used a signing bonus to pay for his daughter’s (ultimately unsuccessful) treatment, but that wasn’t spelled out, and doesn’t explain his fanatical devotion to Yutani.
Maybe all the best people died capturing the specimens.
In the end Granddaughter Yutani mentions something about his being taken in as a street urchin with a shriveled arm, so obviously Yutani paid fir that fancy Swiss Army Arm of his. That had to cost more than a replacement lung.
My god yes. I was thinking the whole show, “God, their quarantine procedures are complete crap”, and then they didn’t even live up to that level of crap. These people deserved to be eaten by aliens.
I like that it wasn’t an idiot plot because of bad writing but because they actually wanted these people to be idiots.
I love how she was eating a sandwich in the xenobiology lab, at the same table where they were studying deadly weaponizable alien parasites, no less.
Don’t forget Chekov’s water bottle.
Nah, the guy who drank it was more like a Packled.
He may have been as dumb as a box of rocks, but his job was pretty much to hand tools to the Engineer. He is not the one who drew a blank on undergraduate lab safety; the water bottle thing was not on him.
Well maybe on the ship … 
Morrow doesn’t get a pass either. Ultimately much of the events were security failures.
According to the show runner via the official podcast, he was trying to distract her. Not help.
I really liked that episode. I actually wish this had been the first episode. I understand why they did it this way, but this episode felt so much like an “Alien” movie that making this our first exposure would have gotten me way more invested.
We’re led to believe that Teng was a Synth but I thought it was a little odd that they never officially confirmed it when he died.
I think it as smart to save this for a few episodes in. We’ve already seen alien. making your first episode of alien is not a great first step. In fact the way the first episode had set thing up in theory we didn’t really even need this flashback. As it happened they did give us some new info but it was not absolutely necessary. The flashes we saw in episode one told us everything we needed to know about what happened.
I did assume they filmed this first so the could use the intact set and then trash it for the crash sight in episodes one and two but I read online they actually trashed the set and then rebuilt it again for this episode.
Well, it established that Boy Kavalier did engineer the crash, which was a valid theory but not confirmed until now. Making his willingness to send Wendy & crew out there somewhat more understandable, he may have been planning that from the beginning too.
Just checking in a few weeks to see if it gets any less stupid than it seemed after watching the first two episodes. Apparently not.
Stranger
Having characters who are stupid or who you have do stupid things as part of the character is not the same thing as the show being stupid.
Which does not mean you won’t find the show stupid. I don’t but that doesn’t mean much.
I’m just not looking for an Alien story where I’m cheering for the xenomorphs because the human characters are too stupid to live. I got enough of that with Prometheus:
Stranger
Yeah. I’m less forgiving than those who commended the scripts for having characters behave stupidly because they actually are stupid. For that to be reasonable, the show would need to be making some point about Hiring Stupid People to do your work, other than “it’s stupid to do that.”
As I’ve said, I’m willing to give Noah Hawley some benefit of the doubt due to the good work he’s done in the past. But at this point I’m wondering if he’s caught the dreaded Damon Lindelof Disease, wherein nothing can happen in the plot unless some of the characters are stupid. (I shouldn’t blame just Lindelof–Prometheus had Jon Spaihts (of Passengers infamy) as co-writer, and Covenant was perpetrated by John Logan and Dante Harper. But Lindelof has aroused my ire for so many projects that he just comes first to mind.)
I’m a bit annoyed by the show’s need to have tiny creatures who are posited to be so very smart. If those little slug things can think that logically, you have to wonder that on their planet they are apparently…alone in having that level of intelligence? (There’s no Earth equivalent for something that small being that smart.) No larger creatures on that world, who might have interfered with the Earthlings gathering the slugs?
I mean, it’s basically a jump-scare horror show. I guess I shouldn’t expect well-thought-out world building.
But it would have been nice to have.
I mean, with a show of that length and so many tonal shifts undermining any sustained tension, world building is really all it has. And frankly, even just going from Alien and Aliens there is a rich tapestry upon which to build a narrative universe. (I would prefer to avoid the prequels which, despite their production values contradicted the first two movies, themselves, and good sense, but I realize that for most viewers they are part of official canon.) But based upon the first couple of episodes this show just seems unsurprising and not well thought out, although at least it isn’t the continuous chain of unoriginal ‘homage’ and fan service that Alien: Romulus was.
Stranger
If it did mean that, I’d feel really stupid loving Elmore Leonard as much as I do.