Alien Nation

I just got the Alien Nation DVD set today. This was a great show. Sadly only the pilot had commentary. Will the TV-movies be released on DVD too? For the most part the creators made an effort to develope the Tectonese and their culture. Not one but 3 different alien religions were created. Still some things don’t make sense. If Newcomers are US citizens (would that take a special act of Conress) why can’t they vote? Wouldn’t the 15th amendmant give it to them (what is the legal defination of race)? Why were they given new names in the first place? The INS doesn’t make people change their names; all that would be needed is a way to write them with our alphabet. Are there any prequel novels that deal with the crash and quarantine? Are their any plans for new TV-movies?

Alas, I think some of your questions may be trying to dig deeper than the bottom of this particular sandbox; particularly in the case of the TV series; many of the circumstances appear to have been laid out only because of the immediate situations they provoke, rather than being drived from some deep and consistent (implied) backstory.

At the risk of stating the obvious, Alien Nation’s gimmick was taking elements of the history of race relations in the United States and giving them a sci-fi gloss. Newcomers are given English names because Africans were given English names. The don’t have democratic rights because they’re modelled on an underclass without democratic rights. If the writers started with assumptions based on the current state of American civil rights, the theme of the show would be a much subtler sort of alienation – and subtle didn’t go very far on television in the eighties.

A show that showed extraterrestrials being treated exactly like any other immigrant group wouldn’t have had legs. (Not that Alien Nation had much in the way of legs, anyway.) :wink:

On a purely practical within-the-scenario thing, wasn’t it the case that their own alien names were unpronouncable to a regular English speaker (didn’t they have clicks or glottal stops in them)?

A couple things I recall:

  1. I thought the aliens took English names of their own initiative, so as to integrate faster; could be wrong.

  2. another aspect to the immigrant/race-relations thing: the aliens were not just another group of human beings who were just as good as those born in the US, and were being kept down artificially by the system; the aliens were actually SUPERIOR to human beings in most measurable ways (strength, intelligence, … not necessarily lifeguarding or surfing skills …). So the native-born Americans had a deeper-than-usual interest in keeping down the aliens, lest they overtake humans and make them irrelevant.

I was wrong:

So it’s just the old Ellis Island story of lazy/misguided Immigration Officials.

I don’t think that link either refutes or supports your earlier comment about why they were given English names; it’s talking about the character being given the name Sam Francisco; Sykes recognises that someone assigning the name has played a lame joke and decides to call him George Francisco.

(that is to say, the integration issue, not the fact that they were assigned).

There is in fact one, called Day of Descent, by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens. #1 in the novel series. (Most of which got made into the TV movie series.)