Alien: Covenant/Alien Series thoughts.

[TheHarbinger]

Does Weyland-Yutani have a DEI policy to only hire the mentally retarded?

The beginning of AvP has them assembling the absolute best researchers, explorers, scientists, and military contractors in the world. Showing Weyland traveling from the desert all the way to the arctic. Just to pick up one person that might be vital to the mission. Weyland is funding one last mission to secure his legacy in history. It succeeds in that Weyland-Yutani becomes the most important company in human history. Predator and Predators also had only the most elite soldiers and killers as characters.

But Prometheus and Covenant went in the other direction. All of the crew are incompetent. But they are still supposed to be the most elite teams. So you get this cognitive dissidence of a crew constantly being described to the audience as "the best" then behaving like retards. We now can add Romulus and Earth to the list of Alien properties with incredibly unprofessional and unbelievably inept crews. You could arguably add Resurrection to this list.

 

[Aib Ld]

In more disappointing Alien news: Fede will not be directing the Romulus sequel and apparently his draft script can't be used either. Seems like Ridley/Disney got mad that someone is trying to make Alien back to its roots since Fede did say he will start shooting in October and booted Fede. But Fede will still be a producer.

Álvarez will produce the new installment alongside original Alien director Ridley Scott. They’re currently seeking a new filmmaker to direct.

Related events are happening lately, like Mike leaving Exorcist because the studio took back on their deal on giving him full control.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

one of the British Aliens mags that Dark Horse made in the early 1990s

those were baller af

 

[CervixHammer]

This is a truly autistic lore question, but has any of the expanded Alien(s) universe material ever said how these commercial crews are paid? I've always figured the Nostromo crew was getting a "share" of the profits from the ore being towed home.

The RPG has a bunch of tables for generating missions/jobs in campaign play (more sandboxy, compared to "cinematic" scenarios where all the characters are expected to die). Rewards are listed in (X + Y d6) thousands of UA dollars, but says nothing about shares. It does address the bonus situation, though: depending on the type of crew (space truckers, frontier colonists or military) and type of mission (not all missions include bonus rewards), you might get extra payment, equipment or ship components, debt cancellation or credit granted, story and RP hooks like NPC contacts, information, etc.

I always assumed they were just getting paid in shares of stocks, and had to dick around with the space stock market before getting spendable money out of it. Profit shares off of the refinery's contents, maybe, but with Hollywood accounting that insists W-Y actually lost money.

Alternately, my autistic head-canon is that the company assigns a number of shares to the ship and crew based on what the mission is. Actual pay determined when the job's complete and they're back on Earth.

Just for example using the Nostromo and extremely simple math, let's say W-Y decides the tow from Thedus to Earth is a 40 share mission. Captain gets ten shares, everybody else gets five, when they get back to Earth, they cash in those shares at whatever the exchange rate is in 2123 or 2124. Of course with Ash on board, he's not getting paid, and W-Y isn't dividing up those extra 5 shares among the rest of the crew. And then W-Y would take cuts wherever possible because they used too much fuel or there was a scratch on the hull that wasn't there when the Nostromo left Earth. So if they never landed on LV-426, Dallas might've gotten 7 shares, everybody else might've ended up with 2-3 shares and Ash would get his batteries recharged.

If they'd landed on LV-426 and most of the movie played out as it did, but they somehow managed to wrangle the Alien into captivity and bring it back, the survivors would be docked shares to "pay back" the company for breaking Ash, letting acid blood eat holes in ship, and the damage the ship suffered when landing, etc. Of course the shares for Kane and anyone else who didn't make it wouldn't be distributed among the survivors, but maybe they'd get a bonus for retrieving the xeno. So congratulations Ripley, Parker, Lambert and maybe Dallas: instead of being in debt, they might get one whole share each. Probably at a low exchange rate where they'd be taking home like ten grand (adjusted) or something insultingly low like that.

And of course this is without breaking it down further like how Brett and Parker would probably get less than Ripley, Kane and Ash. Or the likelihood that the bonus for retrieving the xeno would be a bullet between the eyes rather than shares.

 

[Adamska]

And of course this is without breaking it down further like how Brett and Parker would probably get less than Ripley, Kane and Ash. Or the likelihood that the bonus for retrieving the xeno would be a bullet between the eyes rather than shares.

It's confirmed at least for Wey-Yu that ship engineers get half-shares compared to officers and specialists in the more academic fields. Parker and Brett got half-pay compared to Ripley, Dallas, Lambert, and Ash and this pay gap was something they never let anyone forget about.

And they'd be forced to do the cargo haul for free if they didn't investigate due to corporate policy on responding to distress or communications asking for help. Total forfeiture if they didn't; it was the winning factor in them going planetside.

 

[Overly Serious]

This is a truly autistic lore question, but has any of the expanded Alien(s) universe material ever said how these commercial crews are paid? I've always figured the Nostromo crew was getting a "share" of the profits from the ore being towed home.

Alien Earth keeps throwing the shares language around again for the Maginot crew, but what are they getting a share of? How does one price a new alien species? I know that the writers are just copying the existing language of the universe, but it got me thinking. I also realize this is well outside the frame of the story.

I do like the thought that all the smart crew members were killed off collecting the samples and now we're left with the "just get us home in one piece" crew. Or the night shift as I call them.

I think the meta reason is that Ridley Scott just thought it sounded more "corporate" to talk about shares and it also has the convenient effect of not bringing in distracting absolute numbers into the dialogue. But that aside, in-universe I think the implication in Alien is that the crew are paid by means of a portion of the jobs profits. I actually like that means of pay structure as an aside, though it means the employee takes on more risk.

The relevant snippets of dialogue in Alien are as follows:

• "lets discuss the bonus situation".
• "we deserve full shares"
• "penalty of total forfeiture of shares. No money"

In the last one, Ash is talking in a general case so you can't read into the pluralisation or not, but the "full shares" implies that contracts can specify a percentage of a share, ergo we're talking profit, not being paid in company shares.

The bonus context might suggest that they're paid minimally and most of what they get is a share of the total bonus but the "no money" line suggests shares applies to the general pay as well.

We know from the sequel that W-Y own the Nostromo, the crew don't. And the fact that they can do things like assign a new Science officer suggests that the operation is done under licence to W-Y as well.

So the natural take to me is that W-Y tender jobs and some small company snaps it up, and pays its own contractors as per profit share for the job. And Brett and Parker having less market pull for their jobs sign on for a partial share.

As a purely hypothetical and speculative thing that would fit: Some small time investor(s) back on Earth is going through the company tenders and sees one for bringing a bunch of refined ore back to Earth and puts in a bid for it. Maybe the hiring company is a mining corporation and the ship is licenced from W-Y, maybe more likely the mining contract is via W-Y and they just want personnel to fly their ship. Investor finds a guy with experience captaining a ship on this sort of voyage (Dallas) and maybe he brings in some people he knows too or the investor does. Lots of paper work takes place and W-Y has various conditions as well, such as requiring all missions to include a Science officer and other conditions for the use of their ship. Total profit is uncertain because they don't know about commodity rates when they sell the ore refinery, or how much is waiting to be brought back or who knows what other variables. Investors may also not want to be on the hook for paying large crew fees if something goes wrong and they don't make as much as they thought, etc. So the small company that works with Dallas and all this low-level stuff, says "four core crew get a full share of the profits, company director back home and his legal exec get a double share. We're hiring two maintenance engineers who'll each get a half-share. And W-Y will be sending a Science Officer who is contracted to them separately."

That'd mean nine shares in total, meaning Ripley, Lambert, Dallas all got 11%, Parker and Brett with their half shares would get 5.5%, company director of this tiny little company back home gets 22%, etc. And all of these are percentages of what their little company makes from the bid, not what W-Y or the mining company makes from selling 20,000,000 tons of refined mineral ore back on Earth.

Profit shares are most commonly used by start-ups or small companies that are formed for singular jobs and don't have a lot of liquidity. That's why in my entirely hypothetical example, I went with some little company snapping up tenders. Dallas is probably an old hand at this stuff and someone he knows probably calls him up and says "I'm putting in a bid on a two-year mission to the Outer Colonies, you interested? Will be profit share. And still know that flight officer Ridley or whatever?" I'm thinking that sort of structure and scale.

All of which to say Noah Hawley just lifting and shifting all this into Alien: Earth and their directly reporting to the Ms. Yutani herself, isn't really planned out anymore than most other things in his show.

Does Weyland-Yutani have a DEI policy to only hire the mentally retarded?

In the future, there are only the mentally retarded.

 

[Everyone i hate is a pedo]

I do wonder if the showrunner had it in his mind to originally cast children and was forced to hire adults along the way. but the writing/directing/acting is all crap. Especially in theater its extremely common for adults to portray kids, the Putnam County Spelling Bee famously uses adult actors to portray kids on the cusp of puberty, and its pretty much the only way the play works considering its focused around very lolcow-esque kids

if this piece of crap came out a decade or two ago people would admit its dogshit. in general, it feels like very few shows or movies get bad reviews anymore, i attribute that to streaming making it way harder to encounter shows that weren't meant for you. that and way fewer cult classics getting their timeslot stolen by some shitty show that vanishes after 6 episodes or watching your favorite show and being subjected to commercials about what's "coming up next"

I guess this is a first for Hollywood. It's clear that none of the writers in this show are nonces, because the 12 year olds that they write talk like they're actually 6 or 7 not 12. It's pretty obvious they don't ever spend time around children.

joking aside thats typical hollywood trope, i think tvtropes even had it called "every child is a retard" or something inflammatory, the rare exceptions are beloved because they're rare exceptions and it being such an annoying trope is the reason home alone even exists, the entire plot of the first film is kevin's family treating him like a little kid despite being 10-12 when he's capable of cooking, cleaning, buying groceries, laundry, talking to grown up, and self defense all on his own.

 

[draggs]

Dan O'Bannon (or whoever wrote that line about half-shares) probably meant "shares" like pirates or other long commercial sea voyages did. The value of the cargo (or more likely a small percentage of it, the rest is W-Y's cut) is divided up into however many shares W-Y decides it should be divided up into, and each crewmember gets however many shares their contract says they get. The company imposes all kinds of rules and regulations that allow it to maximize its revenue and control over the crews by reduction or forfeiture of shares being the penalty for breaking them

Parker and Brett talking about half-shares doesn't really make sense, unless the max the best-paid crewmembers get is one share. It's (minorly) sloppy writing. If they're contracted for 50 shares each but they only get half-shares, why not just contract them for 25 shares each. It's a pointless complication

 

[CervixHammer]

It's a pointless complication

I think the point is to make it overly complicated for the crew. Especially since, if it were a normal cargo run, they'd only do maybe two days of work and spend the rest of the trip asleep in cryo. The ship's mostly automated, and once the synthetics get good enough and cheap enough, W-Y isn't going to need human crews at all.

If W-Y used a couple of Ash/Bishop/etc level synths to do anything complicated and a bunch of Working Joe level synths for anything that just needs a pair of hands, they could probably handle something like the Nostromo's original mission easily. They could probably also land on LV-426, grab some eggs and toss them in a cargo bay without incident, too. But then of course you wouldn't have a movie. (Predator: Badlands aside)

 

[Calandrino]

Alien fans can bitch all they want but when the writers killed Hicks and Newt in the third movie, showing that there was no plot armor, people whined incessantly that their favorites should have been left alive.

Yeah whatever, that was gay

 

[Adamska]

The ship's mostly automated, and once the synthetics get good enough and cheap enough, W-Y isn't going to need human crews at all.

In Cameron's original working script, before he polished it, by the time of Aliens, starfreighters were completely automated due to advances in computer systems. It's a factor in Ripley not being able to find any work similar to her experience level. Even military assets can be run independently due to their ship computers being developed enough to fight out in space alone if the entire crew died. They fight somewhat less efficiently and are at risk of getting hijacked and boarded due to a lack of defenders, but they still can do it.

As for the shares thing, I kind of go with that being that they get half-payout or half of the amount of stock/scrip compared to the others, and they just said it like that since it's a long enough running argument Dallas immediately started to tune out.

Irony of ironies is that I bet Parker and Brett's roles on a Star Freighter were the last to be made obsolete if you go with them becoming automated. Though you can also yeet that idea due to other stories ignoring this and not covering it.

 

[regalterry]

But Prometheus and Covenant went in the other direction. All of the crew are incompetent. But they are still supposed to be the most elite teams. So you get this cognitive dissidence of a crew constantly being described to the audience as "the best" then behaving like retards. We now can add Romulus and Earth to the list of Alien properties with incredibly unprofessional and unbelievably inept crews. You could arguably add Resurrection to this list.

The really funny part about Prometheus is that the crew being complete retards was only really explained in the novelization, where it explicitly said the crew were picked because they were too stupid to ask pertinent and uncomfortable questions.

The writing in the movie was so stupid they had to retcon the casts as morons to explain away their behavior.

And we know it's not a fluke, because the characters in Covenant were even bigger morons. I remember people in the cinema laughing at the unintendedly slapstick scene of the chestburster leading to the landing ship blowing up.

Now Alien: Earth is the third project in the franchise where characters behave like no sane human would, to the point I'm having to question if the writers they keep selecting for these projects are actually pod people.

EDIT: Just listened to an excerpt of the Critical Drinker (I know, I know) about episode 5 and decided to watch it out of morbid curiosity.

Despite being as racist as you can possible get, I don't think even I could have come up with a more offensive caricature than this character:



Vain, stupid, sociopathic, incompetent, slovenly. All she needs is her weave and the nails to look like the Patrick meme.

Even the Jewish doctor lives up to the bigoted stereotype.

Also, the part where the security nigger wakes up from cryo and finds out that two of the crew are dead, I refuse to believe actual humans wrote that scene.

 

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

A:E was fine. My only gripe with Alien is the fact they try to keep pushing into new territory, and IMO do so poorly. Alien, egg, hugger, burster, alien. Aight. Add black goo, black mist, weird fog, shitting out bloodbursters? Uh okay, basically an alternate take on the same shit. But now, blood ticks and the eye fella? They're not even from the same art direction. Was the xeno a unique thing entirely, like a unicorn in a fantasy world devoid of color? He got assblasted by the oculus. The new monsters, not remotely iconic honestly, took over as the villain.

Is that the new Alien legacy? Fleshy horror "people die" monsters with no distinct design?

 

[Adamska]

Is that the new Alien legacy? Fleshy horror "people die" monsters with no distinct design?

It's just about what the people writing, directing, and acting in this movie can understand since they know shit all about anything. They have at best a cargo-cult understanding of anything they look at and would rather churn out agitprop and fake and gay reviews to self soothe at losing money and lying to investors about it than to knuckle down and THINK. Thinking is too hard.

I will state that it was a good idea to introduce more aliens; one of the big factors for why Alien and Aliens worked was the lack of understanding the unknown. New entities and creatures are a useful method to do this; it's why the first four Tremors series isn't too shabby. It also again establishes that space is cold, uncaring, and you humans are wandering it and likely to die. Any planet might have something horrific, like a bacteria that kills you by eating all the iron in your body, or some form of ruins made by an alien race that is nearly impossible to describe. There's a tad of Lovecraft in the mix, but that's too dry for these people. Besides his dad named his cat a slur so he's bad.

The problem was no one sat down to think "okay, now how do we have them sort of match the vibe of the setting, or what are some suitably terrifying wildlife we could use for this from the real word? What are some of the other examples in the lore we have?"

Because that's beyond these incompetent fucks. It's the same reason why the Jurassic films are too shittingly retarded to remember that for all the gene editing, the dinos are still animals. Their brains gurgle as they ignore one of the key things Spielburg and his compadres on the film like Crichton and Carter said about the dinosaurs.

That's too hard, and they just want bullshit numbers to justify why they shouldn't get fired and then have to scream ineffectually during another failed strike before more of them get fired and replaced with cheaper foreigners or fucking chatGPT. Why think when you can just have monster cgi puppet fights that can get the dumbest fucking people to try and sweep for the ass you made? Why not just make something that the audience will tune out of and just watch something else for most of it? I'm not shitting on this either, because that's another thing; Hollyweird is so fucking cooked they are relying on being background noise or the second screen.

Yes, that's something they use as a selling point nowadays. The same people who make slop on YT that you blast while cleaning the carpet is exactly what they're retardedly burning money to fail emulating.

 

[regalterry]

I have to rant about episode 5.

So, first, I'd like to establish 3 things about the original Alien:

1. The crew of the Nostromo were a tightly knit bunch - either the company or the job itself filtered out individuals that could not spend long stretches of time in a very small, confined interior with a small group of people, far away from human civilization.

2. The crew, despite being "truckers in space", were all highly competent and knew how to do their jobs, knew the ship systems inside out and leveraged them whenever possible against the creature.

3. If established protocol had been followed, as Ripley demanded, the alien would never have gotten on the ship, but W-Y took a calculated risk to secure the specimen.
4. Even though it's much farther down the timeline, where space travel is significantly faster, and despite all the resources a the disposal of W-Y, they still had to reroute a space truck to inspect the first confirmed "sighting" of alien intelligence.

Now let's compare these aspects to how Alien: Earth handles them:

1. The crew are blatantly and gleefully uncaring that two of their own (including the captain) were attacked and infected by an alien parasite, one of the two victims dying in the attempt to remove it. In fact, not only are they seemingly completely unbothered by this, but the security guard was cracking jokes and telling his superior the latest ship gossip, while the sheboon scientist was struggling to keep a straight face, breaking into a smile on multiple occasions during the scene. Their main concern, while standing over the still warm bodies of their crewmembers was asking the chief of security why he was in his underwear. Him prioritizing the death of two people over putting on pants is somehow strange to these inviduals.

2. The crew are completely and utterly incompetent. The sheboon scientist eats in the laboratory, grabbing her food with the same hand she used to stuff a dead rat straight into the container for highly dangerous space ticks, somehow managed to miss that one container was not properly locked in the despite the very obvious red/green indicator informing her whether the container has been secured or not.

The Jewish doctor has a cigarette in his mouth while near medical equipment, while operating on people, while standing next to oxygen tanks, he doesn't wear a mask or gloves when operating on individuals and seemingly nobody can be bothered to put on hazmat suits when dealing with highly aggressive alien lifeforms.

The chief of security manages to miss that the second-in-command is having sex with another crewmember (and this has been going on for months) and has to be informed of the fact by his dimwitted subordinate. He seemingly has trouble remembering where the cryo for each crew member is, and instead of figuring out who the saboteur is, he has to be spoonfeed the answer by the resident creep. His one saving grace is that he is the only character on the whole ship that treats the situation (escaped alien parasite, two crew dead, saboteur on the ship, navigation and fuel gone) with any sort of gravitas.

The second-in-command behaves like a diversity hire. She talks tough to the chief of security, but the moment the situation requires her to step up, she hesitates. freezes and panics, and is completely incapable of keeping the crew in line.

3. For whatever reason W-Y decided to send these morons on a 65-year journey to secure alien samples. They fail to screen them for intelligence, psychological profile and mental illness. The ship has zero failsafes, the crew are allowed to experiment on the specimens instead of keeping them in cryo until they reach Earth.

4. The cope on reddit is gong with is that these people were selected because they were expendable, yet any sane company that genuinely wants to get those alien samples wouldn't have spared any expense on such a long and ambitious project and would have found professionals. Let's not forget that W-Y sent an FTL capable ship onto a 65-year-long journey to get these samples, and yet they picked the most retarded and incompetent people they could find for the job.

This is the third time they are invoking "crew are retarded and incompetent" in the same franchise, despite both Alien and Aliens going out of their way to portray the people involved as professional and skilled individuals.

Other questions I have:

1. Why are the critters out of cryo and being "researched"?
2. How did the Zuckberg expy manage to contact, let alone organize, the sabotage, if the ship departed 40 years before he was born or founded his company? Or put another way, how did the traitor know how to get into contact with the CEO of a company that hadn't existed when he had set off into space?

The one thing that bothers me above all else is the opening scene of the episode. Chief of security wakes up, gets informed two of the crew are dead, immediately decides to assess the situation, and when he gets into the room the first thing anyone asks him is why he's not wearing any pants.

 

[Overly Serious]

@regalterry You've nailed so much of what is wrong with this show. How are we the audience supposed to treat deaths seriously when the people themselves don't? And how are we meant to care about someone's fate when they brought it on themselves?

One point of detail I wanted to nitpick on - and it's easily missed because it's so stupid you'd just assume otherwise, but:

4. Even though it's much farther down the timeline, where space travel is significantly faster, and despite all the resources a the disposal of W-Y, they still had to reroute a space truck to inspect the first confirmed "sighting" of alien intelligence.

Alien: Earth has been stated to be taking place in 2120. The Alien movie takes place in 2122. The Nostromo is likely already in flight at this point either on its way to or back from wherever it gets that ore refinery. It's Aliens that is much further down the timeline. I'm expecting some very twee and forced tie in at the end whereby they send the Nostromo to investigate because of the events in Alien Earth.

None of it makes sense. For the Maginot mission to launch 65 years ago, that means it predates the Prometheus mission.

And one final comment about the Reddit cope of the crew being picked because they're expendable. In addition to it being stupid for the reasons you give, Morrow is revealed to be someone that Ms. Yutani herself (original Yutani) hand-picked off the streets and groomed for his role, regarding him as the most dangerous person she knew or somesuch. So how is he expendable? It's all stupid.

1. Why are the critters out of cryo and being "researched"?
2. How did the Zuckberg expy manage to contact, let alone organize, the sabotage, if the ship departed 40 years before he was born or founded his company? Or put another way, how did the traitor know how to get into contact with the CEO of a company that hadn't existed when he had set off into space?

Point #1 can only really be addressed as writer stupidity. You'd want your best people in the best conditions doing any studying. So either these are the best people (contradicted by everything seen and said on screen) or they're disobeying orders and doing research off their own initiative.

Point #2, though - well it's shown that there is real time video calling between the saboteur and Boy Kavalier. So communication is apparently possible. But then why does Morrow not know what the state of things on Earth is or that Ms. Yutani - who turns out to be his foster-mum / personal sponsor of some kind - not even know she's retired? And real time interstellar video calling? This is a VERY new thing to Alien. In Aliens, the colony chief talks about how "it takes two weeks to get an answer out here." Now you can video call across the galaxy?

Unless the sabotage was done after they drop out of FTL back in Earth system. Actually that might explain this and a few other things. Okay, blast - I think I've managed to resolve one of the shows plot holes. Oh well, plenty of others in this Swiss Cheese.

 

[regalterry]

And how are we meant to care about someone's fate when they brought it on themselves?

This is another thing that Alien, and most other good horror movies, tend to avoid. It's difficult to get the audience to empathize with the characters and share their fear and dread, if the characters themselves behave like such idiots they only invite contempt.

Sometimes competent writers do use this to their advantage, usually in slashers like Friday the 13th, where the whole point is the atavistic thrill of seeing a bunch of degenerate asshole get their comeuppance.

Did anyone watching the episode feel sad when any member of the cast died?

All this episode managed to do was make me empathize with Morrow, even though he's shit at his job, he at least treats the events that unfold with the necessary gravitas.

He genuinely feels like a character that had been written for a completely different script.

Morrow is revealed to be someone that Ms. Yutani herself (original Yutani) hand-picked off the streets and groomed for his role, regarding him as the most dangerous person she knew or somesuch. So how is he expendable? It's all stupid.

Great observation, and pretty much the killing blow to the cope that the crew were expendable dregs.

Unless the sabotage was done after they drop out of FTL back in Earth system

I'm still not sure how it would all work.

So, a member of the crew is angry because his wife died on the mission, so he waits until the ship drops into the Solar System to contact W-Y's rival.

Question is, how does he know who their rival is? The crew has been away from 65 years, and unless they've received updated data upon entering the system, they wouldn't have any way of knowing what the current situation is. Plus, the rival corporation didn't even exist when they departed, and I assume W-Y would be careful about what kind of information the crew would see while on the ship.

But okay, let's assume he somehow managed to get update on current political and economic affairs on Earth, how does he contact the Prodigy CEO?

Does he just call the public number of Prodigy and tell them he's a member of the crew and wants to fuck over W-Y, and then hopes the underpaid wagie doesn't dismiss this as a prank call and kicks it up the corporate ladder?

They could have avoided all this idiocy by simply saying the spy had been planted from the start, maybe mention that he was part of an operation of a corporation that had since been absorbed into Prodigy?

Also, now that I think about it, how exactly did he manage to wake himself up from cryo? He either needed an accomplice to wake him up regularly, or had to have modified his cryopod beforehand, which brings into question the idea that the sabotage plan was only corbelled together once the ship enters the Solar System. He must have planned his betrayal years in advance (relatively speaking), while they were still lightyears away.

And furthermore, how the fuck did nobody notice one extra person was missing from the pods? How did he manage to time his cryopod when nobody was around? Where did he pick up all his skills? He seems to be a master mechanic, engineer, hacker, an expert in infiltration and a decent shot.

The more I think about the whole thing, the less sense it makes.

On a completely unrelated note, the helmets of the W-Y guards at the end look completely idiotic. Even the trades are now being destroyed from within by DEI hires.

 

[Adamska]

1. The crew of the Nostromo were a tightly knit bunch - either the company or the job itself filtered out individuals that could not spend long stretches of time in a very small, confined interior with a small group of people, far away from human civilization.

Besides Ash, the crew went on at least one trip together prior to the Thedus haul. They don't specify for how long, but I'd argue that it was likely at least two or three.

2. The crew, despite being "truckers in space", were all highly competent and knew how to do their jobs, knew the ship systems inside out and leveraged them whenever possible against the creature.

Dallas was a military trained pilot who managed to via grit and a willingness to look the other way managed to regain his flight certificates running dangerous disposal missions after losing it during the War due to disgrace. Kane was a medical student who wasn't quite able to snag the doctorate due to a drug habit but has a lot of experience as an XO, managed to kick the pain killer and booze habit and stay clean, and has a lot of experience on how to manage ships. Parker and Brett were a seasoned pair of engineers who worked together on the same ship for years before going onto the Nostromo, where them and Dallas would first meet (Brett was Parker's mentor on his first assignment). Ripley has a master's in engineering and also served a stint as a copilot; she was good at most roles on a team due to this. The only rookie was Lambert, who did damn well in her schooling and was a whiz with calculating and navigating just by star positions. They weren't stupid at all.

2. The crew are completely and utterly incompetent. The sheboon scientist eats in the laboratory, grabbing her food with the same hand she used to stuff a dead rat straight into the container for highly dangerous space ticks, somehow managed to miss that one container was not properly locked in the despite the very obvious red/green indicator informing her whether the container has been secured or not.

Don't worry, the flipper handed mongoloids who feel the need to accept the crap and defend it because brand will cope by gargling that Ash drank the milk in the medlab. Ignore how he did that while studying Kane, who was at that moment in one of the medical scanning beds and behind glass. It certainly wasn't during his autopsy of the facehugger.

4. The cope on reddit is gong with is that these people were selected because they were expendable, yet any sane company that genuinely wants to get those alien samples wouldn't have spared any expense on such a long and ambitious project and would have found professionals. Let's not forget that W-Y sent an FTL capable ship onto a 65-year-long journey to get these samples, and yet they picked the most retarded and incompetent people they could find for the job.

Why would you want disposables if you want to get the biosamples? Wouldn't their deaths possibly or in reality very likely cause the ship and all samples to become lost? That don't make no sense.

Also why would you waste what looks like a top of the line starfreighter with decent science bays and kits for the mid 2050s, being nicer in some regards to the Nostromo? The thing probably cost at least 40 million credits, maybe more if you adjust from those times. And for what? The possible finding of new life forms in an era where life was at best only somewhat recently discovered. And then you need to figure out the supplies, ports of call, infrastructure to support this thing. Because it also would break canon if this thing expects them to be asleep for all 65 of those years.

Let's not even begin to add all that money to keep Weyland, Seeg and Son, and whatever other retarded corporation they're trying to hide this from too.

It's amazing to see people try to justify why they need to watch shit and call it good. Especially since I know they just watch the shorts with the alien killing the baroque lookin' aristocrats. They probably zone out and don't remember a fucking thing, and they never watched any of the anime and other sci-fi this thing rips from.

Alien: Earth has been stated to be taking place in 2120. The Alien movie takes place in 2122. The Nostromo is likely already in flight at this point either on its way to or back from wherever it gets that ore refinery. It's Aliens that is much further down the timeline. I'm expecting some very twee and forced tie in at the end whereby they send the Nostromo to investigate because of the events in Alien Earth.

Nostromo was just shipped under Dallas, Parker, Brett, and the Science Officer Ash replaced if I did the math right on when they got assigned to it. It's not even at Thedus yet; it's doing some other cargo hauling mission. Lambert and Ripley aren't even on staff. Hell, Jones might not even be on board yet.

But yes, this is going to be the massively pathetic and completely unneeded "real reason" they got the signal to check for the alien.

 

[Overly Serious]

This is another thing that Alien, and most other good horror movies, tend to avoid. It's difficult to get the audience to empathize with the characters and share their fear and dread, if the characters themselves behave like such idiots they only invite contempt.

Sometimes competent writers do use this to their advantage, usually in slashers like Friday the 13th, where the whole point is the atavistic thrill of seeing a bunch of degenerate asshole get their comeuppance.

Or it's used for morality lessons. The whole "the moment you have sex you die" thing called out in Scream. The slutty girl dies and the virginal girl lives. Though I think writers have stopped doing that now. It's not a morality they seek to promote.

Did anyone watching the episode feel sad when any member of the cast died?

You're joking? The closest I got to caring about any of them was thinking the captain was attractive. And most of them I actively disliked.

All this episode managed to do was make me empathize with Morrow, even though he's shit at his job, he at least treats the events that unfold with the necessary gravitas.

He does. But I feel that the director probably just told the actor "look serious, Morrow is a serious person" all the time and that has the indirect consequence that he appears to treat the deaths properly because he's the serious character. He has resting serious face.

Just on that subject, I actually don't blame any of the actors for this (nearly none of them anyway). It's truly amazing how bad directing and poor editing can make even a talented actor look bad. About the only one who manages to really elevate the role is Timothy Olyphant who manages to do mainly through really making his character talk and move in interesting ways and perhaps gets away with it because he's a synthetic.

Regarding the communication with the ship. We see other stuff such as Morrow's telegram informing him that his daughter is dead. I can't remember if that was before or after he last emerged from cryo, indicating they were already in the Sol system or not. There's enough wiggle room in some of this stuff that if the show were less stupid generally I could head-canon up stuff for them that made sense. But it's one more wrong note in an orchestra of failure so I wont bother.

And furthermore, how the fuck did nobody notice one extra person was missing from the pods? How did he manage to time his cryopod when nobody was around? Where did he pick up all his skills? He seems to be a master mechanic, engineer, hacker, an expert in infiltration and a decent shot.

So he's said on screen to be the chief engineer. So in that sense he should be technically capable, know where to hit the ship, etc. But that just offsets how stupid the rest of his behaviour is. Also, it's a Hell of a reach to me that he manages to set it up so that the ship crashes on Prodigy territory. A Hell of a reach. Especially as we know from on-screen discussions about it they have enough fuel and control to adjust their flight somewhat and try. At those sorts of speeds and distances, hitting one island on Earth deliberately is preposterous. Surface area of the Earth is 510 million sq. kilometres. The island can't be more than 500 sq. kilometres and the Earth rotates at 1600km/h. You could do it with good instruments and planning. I don't believe you could do it with a random explosion and an indeterminate amount of fuel and manoeuvrability time left.

Plus the sheer pointless stupidity of releasing the face huggers as previously mentioned.

On a completely unrelated note, the helmets of the W-Y guards at the end look completely idiotic. Even the trades are now being destroyed from within by DEI hires.

I noticed those too. On the one hand I like the Samurai-influenced armour on the guards. On the other hand they can't go through doors.

 

[regalterry]

Why would you want disposables if you want to get the biosamples? Wouldn't their deaths possibly or in reality very likely cause the ship and all samples to become lost? That don't make no sense.

Pretty much, yeah. For the whole mission to work the ship needs to come back intact, with the samples alive, yet everything in the show works against this premise.

I could, perhaps, justify to myself why they wouldn't want to cryo the aliens, what with them having a completely alien biology, but if that's the case then the whole mission was a failure even before it had begun.

I doubt most of the critters can survive a voyage of 30+ years, let alone do so stuck in jar without direct human supervision (since there's no synth on the crew that we know of), so we must assume the animals were put in cryo, which then begs the question of why they'd thaw them out a few weeks before arriving to Earth.

The possible finding of new life forms in an era where life was at best only somewhat recently discovered. And then you need to figure out the supplies, ports of call, infrastructure to support this thing. Because it also would break canon if this thing expects them to be asleep for all 65 of those years.

I'll give the showrunners a pass for this.

Corporations and governments wasting ungodly amounts of money to get their hands on dangerous alien animals is a repeating trope in the franchise, even though it doesn't make a shred of sense, nor does it justify the sheer amount of assets W-Y lost over the centuries trying to tame the xenomorphs.

You're joking? The closest I got to caring about any of them was thinking the captain was attractive. And most of them I actively disliked.

I still don't understand if it was done on purpose, or unintentional. I must assume it's a product of DEI writers, since that's a running theme of so many of their shows.

Also, it's a Hell of a reach to me that he manages to set it up so that the ship crashes on Prodigy territory.

And even if he managed to aim true, what guarantee is there that the ship wouldn't break up in the atmosphere or explode upon landing, or that the critters wouldn't die from the sheer force of the impact?