Alien TV series (Alien Earth) : 2025

Finished the series and feel like I have been cheated. What began as an interesting take on Alien devolved into utter farce and it seemed to do so at an increasing rate from 4/5ths of the way through EP5 all the way to the end of EP8.

I genuinely thought we were on to a good thing here; interesting world-building, decent acting, fantastic set design and call-backs to the better movies all added up to me wanting to know more. But by the end I couldn't have cared less.

What an utter waste of time and money. Very, very little of what played out made any sense and I never want to find out what mental gymnastics Hawley was going through to try and steer this mess into a place where he thought S2 might pick-up from.
 
I would love to know how she managed to work out how to communicate with the alien and control it...

The other children have the exact same bodies and capabilities and some are even older than Wendy ? Yet can't hear or understand


Makes the alien look like a dog rather than an actual alien that is uncontrollable and intelligent.
 
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Makes the alien look like a dog rather than an actual alien that is uncontrollable and intelligent.

I'm not a fan of the use of it in the show - I think it is poor writing which goes against the grain of Alien(s) but:

It is established lore that the xenomorph queen is able to both direct and control drones using psychic, ultrasonic and pheromonal abilities. The drones when acting as part of a hive seem to act less intelligently than when isolated from a queen where they seem to be able to act relatively smartly.

Wendy appears to have been able to tap into that ability, the alien may not be able to distinguish between orders from Wendy and orders from a queen and/or Wendy may be able to essentially assume control. Though in established lore they seem to have some conscious awareness of the queen and don't simply dumbly follow orders for reasons they don't understand except when directly commanded.
 
I quite enjoyed this.

It did lose it a a bit towards the end (after episode 5, which was was fantastic).

Not sure Wendy communicating with the Xenomorph and making it her pet was a good idea really. That seems to be the thing which rubbed most people up the wrong way. It isnt clear how, or why she is the only one who can hear it/do it, which was frustrating.

Overall i thought the atmosphere and cinematography was pretty good, although the Xeno looked a bit too much like what it was at times...a human in a monster suit. The other aliens (like the mega ticks and octopus eye thing) were cool.
 
That’s the thing I found the most fascinating, that Wendy could speak to the aliens. It was something they haven’t really done before.
 
So that eyeball creature left the facility, went in the jungle then on the beach revived the Dr who's chest was busted. Yea... Na.

How is it boy genius didn't have a fail safe for these droids if they went rogue? Again Wendy making the xenos into pets which is silly. And how did the Xeno hear Wendy from the jungle.

It ended really silly.
 
So that eyeball creature left the facility, went in the jungle then on the beach revived the Dr who's chest was busted. Yea... Na.

How is it boy genius didn't have a fail safe for these droids if they went rogue? Again Wendy making the xenos into pets which is silly. And how did the Xeno hear Wendy from the jungle.

It ended really silly.


Boy genius was warned that Wendy was able to hack into systems (including security cameras) but didn't think it was a threat, because he was the genius (forgetting that a human intelligence in an artificial set of hardware is likely to process stuff much faster), and it was shown on screen that at least some of the safeguards (the monitoring of their location and status) could be easily turned off via a simple management interface with it potentially not being possible to turn it back on remotely (you've closed the link down, in the same way it's entirely possible to shut down a connection to a remote computer now, and have to have someone go over and turn that link back on).

She didn't turn them into pets, she was communicating to them in a way that the either saw as a command from a more senior xenomorph type (queen, royal guard, warrior) or that they were willing to go along with because it works for them, a good portion of the better extended Aliens universe books explore that to some degree as the xenomorphs are smart enough to understand risks and play for time. Even Aliens had Ripley who was not able to "communicate" to get the warriors/drones to understand a threat to the eggs/hive and stay back waiting for a chance, and the queen very much understood it.
The noises the aliens use are explained in both the TV series (and books etc) to often be outside normal human hearing rage, Wendy was being shown very early on to be able to hear them (and IIRC the scene where they were testing her hearing showed she was capable of hearing well outside human range), and there are frequencies of sound that travel very well even in the human hearing range (one of the reasons we use things like whistles for emergencies and sports is the sound carries very well), yodelling and similar human forms of communication were developed specifically to allow simple messages to carry for miles, now think of how "loud" you could "whistle" and it not really be noticed by people if it's well outside the range our ears can pick up? especially a range that's not in use by the main local fauna ;)
Remember you don't need to be able to send very complicated messages over long distances, a very simple call can carry a lot of information just in the tone/repetition, as someone once put it, a scream doesn't actually have much information in it and varies a lot, but it gets your attention and tells you something (probably bad) is going on and an idea of where it is
 
So that eyeball creature left the facility, went in the jungle then on the beach revived the Dr who's chest was busted. Yea... Na.

How is it boy genius didn't have a fail safe for these droids if they went rogue? Again Wendy making the xenos into pets which is silly. And how did the Xeno hear Wendy from the jungle.

It ended really silly.

In it's defence, they did seem to write the boy genius as someone who just wanted to see what happened/watch the chaos evolve.

Even at the end when he is tied up in the cage, he was sorting of insanely smiling at what was happening
 
In it's defence, they did seem to write the boy genius as someone who just wanted to see what happened/watch the chaos evolve.

Even at the end when he is tied up in the cage, he was sorting of insanely smiling at what was happening


I think he is meant to be a sociopath at the very least, if not completely divorced from reality and any sense that anything bad could happen to him, he can't imagine something hurting him as almost all his life he's been the one in control, with the power and ability to hurt others whilst protected by both his human subjects, and his utterly loyal synthetics.
 
Yeah they are channelling a bit of Peter Pan there - lives on his island which is his own kind of fantasy realm and thinks he is untouchable basically. I think they've leaned too hard on that material to the detriment of the show in my opinion.
 
Yeah they are channelling a bit of Peter Pan there - lives on his island which is his own kind of fantasy realm and thinks he is untouchable basically. I think they've leaned too hard on that material to the detriment of the show in my opinion.
Maybe it's a play on the silicon valley tech bros who think they are untouchable.
 
I'm 50/50 on this. S1 ended open ended enough to leave it as a one and done series. No idea where the story goes now, and I don't really want it to be following the kids with their new pet Alien (and possibly changing things that happened in Alien (1979))

I'll still watch it to give it a chance though.


rp2000
 
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