So out of sheer perversity and so that I could rant some more here, I watched the third episode. I experienced moments of self-contempt when I found a few small things that I actually liked in the show, but thankfully those were mere drops in the desert so I'm not in danger of liking this rubbish.
FWIW, the two things are Timothy Olyphant as Kirsh - he manages to imbue the character with some presence, one of the kids... "Curly" I think, I actually found likeable. She's the one who went to the CEO guy and asked if Wendy was his favourite. I appreciated a character with some actual motivation and pro-activeness. And the third thing was that they actually addressed the Peter Pan thing with one of the children asking why they weren't allowed to keep their own names and had to be assigned characters. Moving this (partially) from a stupid obsession of the director's to a stupid obsession of the character's. Though it's still a really weak attempt to make the show deep.
But a few minor candles in the void do not illuminate. The rest has so much stupidity, so much poor directing. And occasional franchise-inappropriate montages set to 80's guitar riffs.
Lets pick on something canon breaking. We've talked how it fucks with the wider lore but I think this episode fucked with the core movies, even. The Cyborg guy calls Ms. Yutani and thinks it's someone else because she's too young. Ms. Yutani tells him the Yutani he knew was her grandmother. This leads to him explaining (more exposition) that he's been away for a "lifetime". And I think 65 years was mentioned, iirc. So Alien Earth takes place in 2120, right? That's a couple of years before John Hurt has the worst snog of his life. 60+ years ago puts the cyborg dude going off on his "life's work" of collecting the menagerie in 2160. That's
before Prometheus which took place in 2093. So he predates Synths like David. Okay... maybe as he's "just" a Cyborg. But a giant research ship touring alien worlds and collecting monsters three decades before the Prometheus mission where they're all excited at the prospect of discovering alien life? You can lawyer your way through it I think, in that I don't think Prometheus explicitly states it's the first time they encounter alien life (though it's implied). But still, this is really reaching. Also, it's weird that his ship has a whole crew of people who are recent enough to be talking about the new upstart company Prodigy from a few years ago and also have young members who look 19-ish, but it's a 60 year mission. Did he come back to swap in a new crew but never get in touch himself to learn that his boss had passed on? Did they fly a whole new crew all the way out there only to crew the ship on its way back to Earth? I guess the latter or some variation on it but for a show that is half-exposition, seems a bit of a fuck-up to leave such gaping mysteries. I believe the real answer is that the writer just doesn't give a fuck about existing stuff, except to steal a few memberberry tropes. Are we looking at this being such a fuck-up that the Alien TV show ends up non-canon?
The guy really doesn't understand the point of the xenomorph. Having Wendy solo it in single-combat with a blade she ripped off a paper cutter is terrible. And oh yes, she's still standing there afterwards with a trickle of white synthetic blood coming down from above her hairline. It makes the xenomorph non-threatening. I believe the term is "Worfed" where something is set up to be a badass purely so that you can show how your pet character is more badass. And what the Hell was the Alien doing in that scene anyway? It made no sense. So it kidnaps Hermit to lure Wendy into a trap. Why? Simple question, no discernible answer. And once it's lured her there its goal is to... leave. Why? If it sensed she was synthetic and no good to her, fine - but why set up a trap for in the first place? If it wants to kill her, why leave when she's trapped in the trailer?
They also do a torture scene for the alien where Wendy is breaking down at the screams of the face-hugger as it's dissected. Even momentarily, humanizing the xenomorph and introducing empathy for its suffering via your view-point character, is a mistake. The point of the xenomorph is it's supposed to be alien, unknowable and unrelatable. It is the perfect organism, purely hostile, inimicable to life. This director wants to show off his Mary Sue's empathy by having her hear it in pain being tortured by the humans. The alien isn't just a creature - it embodies the hostility of the universe, the way the universe doesn't care about humans. That was the theme and even Romulus picked up on that theme and worked a plot around it.
Also, showing the xenomorph lying there, being carried around on stretchers, etc. Just bad. There's so much wrong with this show. The things that are wrong for the Alien franchise and the things that are wrong because they're just terrible ideas or directing.
Don't they establish in Alien (through Ash exposition) that W-Y had already decrypted/translated the distress signal, and set the Nostromo's route so it would pick it up and then be 'forced' by interstellar law to go investigate? Though why they'd send a half-dozen space truckers, and then a whole colony of civilians decades later, and finally a single squad of USCMC does point to their general derpiness. They could have sent a scientific team with overwhelming USCMC firepower as security from the start, or any time between Alien and Aliens, instead they keep doing things the perfect way to make sure the xenomorphs run amok every time. If they want to see how good xenomorphs infest and fight they could have easily secured the Juggernaut and done all that in a controlled setting but nooooooooooooooooo
Already got one answer from
@Adamska but I'll give you one more. Despite their power, Weyland-Yutani are not all powerful. We can reasonably guess that maybe they want to pick up this thing on the downlow. We know in Aliens that there's ICC quarantine that he would have to smuggle the embryos back through and there are references to quarantine procedure in the first movie, too. If you want the expanded lore there was also a plague that damn near wiped out an entire large colony of millions of people and caused a big beefing up of quarantine laws. A mining hauler stopping off as per procedure is a lot easier to say "hey, these things happen" than doing a proper scientific expedition. They also likely don't have a full idea of what they're getting into (though Alien Earth or other events might retcon that somewhat). I also think there could be a time element to it. Ash is swapped in at the very last minute. They want to get this stuff before either competitors or independents (both of which exist at this point) find it or the authorities get wind of it and start locking stuff down.
There's also the fact that W-Y is a big and cut-throat corporation. The very fact that by the time of Aliens nobody has a clue about the Nostromo or the diversion to LV-426, tells you that it was most likely somebody's personal scheme. All that stuff I wrote about keeping it secret from the authorities. Hell, it might have been someone trying to keep it secret from Dick down the hall who keeps rearranging departments to get himself the best projects.
I think the chief difference though, is that in both Alien and Aliens the characters and setting is well done enough and believable enough that faced with mysteries like that we think "hmmm, maybe it was this thing going on, that would make sense" and fill in gaps in a fun way. Whereas in this show the "gaps" are more just outright errors that are stupid and everything else is stupid as well, so you're not inclined to.
Reminder that intelligent alien races like the Arcturians were not discovered yet, so this would be a big goddamn find that could be a big break for a lot of its divisions.
I'm convinced that the Arcturians were never meant to be aliens, but were just the result of some writer being too autistic to understand that when a couple of marines are joking about "it don't matter with those arcturians" that they're probably just a weird and fruity lot, like some non-binary society or lots of lady-boys or something. That the colony is just Space Bangkok. But Mr. Autistic writer goes "Ah - they are a hermaphroditic alien species" and put it in the lore.
Now the RPG made them a human variant put there by the Engineers (probably). But damage done. Stuck with sentient talking aliens in the franchise.
