So I believe that the final episode of the season (and if we're luck the final episode of the show) airs today. I wont see it today but I'm going to lay out a prediction anyway. If I'm wrong, so be it.
I predict Eye Thing will get Boy Kavalier and show will end with it in control.
I didn't spoiler that because I have no evidence, no foreknowledge. It's just my speculation. Seems like the trashy sort of thing Noah Hawley would think is cool.
I will return to this thread in a day or two when I've seen it. Probably wrong. Feels like the sort of "twist" we'll get, though.
So I was wrong, that's fine. I know why I was wrong. My fundamental mistakes were both underestimating how stupid Noah Hawley could be. Firstly, the eye-thing possesses a corpse. It's been dead... 8 hours by this point? It's hard to tell with the mess of editing. But Noah Hawley doesn't understand the distinction between realistic horror and "I'm going to have a dead guy get up again" horror. The dead guy has a giant hole in his chest - a crab was eating from it! Even if we grant that the heart might be intact (good fucking luck), how does the body respirate? How does it fuel muscles with the massive blood loss from the gaping chest wound? I could not have anticipated this because I could not have imagined someone doing something so stupid in an Alien show. The tone, the misunderstanding of the type of horror - it's all catastrophically flawed. And the second piece of stupidity is that I failed to realise that anybody could actually be attached to the Boy Kavalier character and want to keep him around. But Noah Hawley does. I now realise he actually thinks the Boy Kavalier character is cool and interesting. He wants to keep him around.
I did realise that the assistant guy was a synth the moment Kavalier told Wendy how he built his own synth as a figurehead for the company because he was too young. But then, so did a lot of people. So anyway, the moral of this story is
never overestimate Noah Hawley.
This episode, like all the others, was bad. Filled with an idiots idea of the profound and characters who are moronic. The only smart thing that anybody did in the entire episode was when Hermit dove
into the containment box to escape the eye thing. Though that was immediately undone by learning that the containment box has an easily traversable feeding slot and also when he leaves he does not immediately lock the box's door and tip it on its rear to prevent the feeding slot being opened again from inside.
I also laughed to learn that "Hermit" is his actual family name and not a call-sign, from seeing the grave marked "Marcie Hermit". The writer's contrived thing for meaningful names like this and "Boy Kavalier" is ridiculous. Does Noah Hawlely know a whore? Because the nominative determinism in this show is at that level.
The finale was shockingly bad. This is the mind of the retard who created this show. And the kind of mindless idiots that like it in the media. This faggot thinks that Alien fans want rock music instead of actual aliens and Giger designs.
I fucking HATE the closing rock music at the end of the episode. It, perhaps as much as any single thing about this show, highlights how Noah Hawley does not get it. And that in your quote he starts talking about how he knows what Alien fans like and it's Metallica, Pearl Jam and whatever the fucking third one was, by the gods this man is insufferable and I rarely use this word. He thinks it's scary being locked in a room with the xenomorph? My nightmare is being locked in a room with Noah Hawley. I don't even want to search him online because I'm certain he will look and sound like the most punchable person I could imagine and it will irritate me to no end.
Pearl fucking Jam. No you wretched ejectile from Satan's arse, that is
not what I think of when I think of Alien.
I was willing to tolerate the series, consider you all pessimistic assholes, and just see what happened.
But they fucked themselves into a bland, uninteresting corner. What's supposed to happen now? Now "we rule"? This is turning into a child's superhero scenario.
Nevermind all the obvious questions that come up, such as why the decision was made to give a child deus ex machina powers over all of your computer systems. There's no mystery. If Wendy wants it, she wishes it.
I'm disappointed.
All these people know how to write is cliff-hangers. They are emotionally fixated on them. When they start to write they're not thinking about something interesting happening, they're thinking about how they can leave you thinking something interesting is about to happen
I think it's sexual. I think the archetype of the brilliant unstoppable girl is a thing they find sexy. Like so many anime protagonists and other shows, they want their super-strong or super-fast or super-smart or super-all-of-this female character to fantasise over. It's a variation on the Mary Sue, not an idealised self-insert but an idealised fantasy woman. Wendy is his. If, gods help us, a second season of this, we'll get the actual self-insert which will be the "boy" who is Wendy's first kiss and her "growing up" arc. The signs are there.
Also, is there any explanation for what happened to all this tech? Because its not in the movies that occur after this chronologically.
The Alien universe is large and has, we presume, wide gradations in wealth and availability of tech. I can be okay with the fact that the crew of the Nostromo don't have a cyborg on board or (knowingly) a synthetic. They're not shocked that a human-realistic robot exists, they're shocked that one is on their ship. Likewise in Prometheus I'm okay with the ship looking fancier than some cargo hauler like the Nostromo because it's their top of the line product.
This was air travel in the 1960's. Simply because it was less of a mass consumption product back then:
So a cyborg dude with an artificial hand and a data port in his head is something I can be alright with if done well. But the fact that the cyborg dude had this 65 years ago which would be... 2055AD in this shows timeline is a mess. Another one is how guns which do look similar and are apparently still named pulse rifles, now just bounce shots off the juvenile xenomorph's head whilst in Aliens they outright kill full grown soldier stage xenomorphs (the larger ones seen in Aliens with the ridged heads are soldier stage ones which is something a drone will shed into as a third stage, and exists to protect the hive).
And on the subject of its combat effectiveness...
People have rightly remarked on the stupidity of having the xenomorph shown clearly sitting in the sunshine, but equally as bad is the failure to sell its movements in combat. The number of times it's just leaping slowly down on someone from above how has their gun pointed right at it, and yet it's unharmed, I lost count of. Often enough it should be a trope. And these are trained soldiers. Lambert freezing in terror I can believe (and Veronica Cartwright is a phenomenal actress who can sell that). But every other episode, someone is standing there gun in hand, barrel right at the thing as it stands there or lazily sails through the air like a fucking flying squirrel.
Plagiarus praepotens? More like
Pteromyini praepotens!
I’m just catching up on the show now.
I hope we're not spoiling anything for you with the open discussion of all this. I'm usually very spoiler averse as I think are most others here - we try to spoiler things appropriately. But I think early on with this there was just a collective awareness that the show was trash and that 90% of discussion was just going to be people ripping apart the latest episode anyway.
Head security officer dropping lit stogies down acid holes, certainly nothing bad may have come of that.
Gah - I never caught that one amidst all the other stupidity. But yes - chucking around burning ciggies on a fucking spaceship. Add it to the list!
Why are the specimens alive after 65 years not being in cryosleep (I could be wrong here but nothing is indicating that they are)
You're not wrong and in fact the writing is so clumsy that it later confirms they're not frozen because someone says that they don't even know if freezing will work on the facehugger.
The worst part is, in the middle of the episode I went to IMDB to see other people hating on it and… it’s like 8-10’s all around, except for some.
Okay, first time anything about this show has scared me.
Is IMDB very subject to botting? Ratings are a messy thing anyway. To me, logically, a 5 out of 10 should be the midpoint, conveying something average. But to most people a 5 is something really poor. I don't know if it's the game industry that is most responsible and I feel it might be, but it's all fucking screwed up. FWIW, I'm look at IMDB episode ratings now and they're ranging from 7.6 for ep. 1 up to 8.6 for ep. 5 (the one that was almost entirely the Maginot flashback) and the latest one is at 6.4 currently. Though it also has a lower number of ratings as well.
Rotten Tomatoes seems to have 95% of critic reviews positive, which just backs up for me that critics are the last people to listen to on anything's quality.
There was no reason for this to be a prequel, they could have had the reason the maginot went out to get aliens was because of WY learning about them via the events of Alien/aliens and set this series 50 years or more after Aliens. Making it a prequel just creates a lot of inconsistencies, I don't know why this franchise is constantly doing prequels when none of them make any sense and they all contradict the original film.
Again, I think all these people can write are cliffhangers. And they don't do those well. I guess a prequel fits in better with that mindset. Their selling point for this show is that it's an Alien show and they hope to hook in Alien fans. In some ways you can hook people in more through their completionism and need to fill out what they already know, than to build on it further.
But those are marketing reasons. In terms of quality product - no, it just makes it worse because they trample all over the lore and make a nonsense of the timelines and setting. This is stated to be happening in 2120 which is two years before the Nostromo visits LV-426. Dallas, Kane and the others are already out there, probably hitching the ore refinery to the back of the Nostromo as events in this show are playing out. I expect
@Adamska can probably give us the fine detail if we ask!
Why did Wendy say that the aliens don’t lie? Didn’t the alien in the first episode “trap” her with her brother (for whatever reason), which is a lie and a trick?
That... is another good catch.
This show is a fuck-up of epic proportions. With a weird-looking cast.
EDIT: On second thoughts, I'm going to leave this with the words of the immortal Shakespeare:
"It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
