FX Alien: Earth

[Big s]

4 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I have an idea to restore the horror aspect of the Xenomorph:

  Hide contents

Give it a suit and tie, a calculator and clipboard, and have it work for the IRS

 

Brutal

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I have an idea to restore the horror aspect of the Xenomorph:

  Hide contents

Give it a suit and tie, a calculator and clipboard, and have it work for the IRS

That would certainly add an unexpected dimension to the threat the Xenomorph poses to Weyland-Yutani.

I can imagine little else that would strike as much fear into the executives as this slavering unknowable horror from beyond the stars stalks their halls and... audits their corporate tax returns. 

Miss Yutani would probably dry up and die like she'd taken a hit from the wrong grail. 😆 

[Seto Kaiba]

All right, episode 3 is out...

Spoiler

Somehow, while they were offscreen, the Lost Boys started capturing and packing up all the loose xenofauna from the Maginot's laboratory.  Probably for the best.  I guess that shows Kirsh is serious about treating them as invasive species.  Possibly the first smart thing anyone in this series has done so far.

Meanwhile, one of the hybrids feels compelled to have her fellows Explain the Joke in their theme naming as the Lost Boys.  Are we really assuming the audience are that dumb and didn't get the very blatant Peter Pan references even with Disney's Peter Pan on prominent display?

"Genius" Boy Cavalier decides to show he's a real wall-licking idiot by overruling his synth chief scientist and ordering them to box up the aliens and bring them to the company lab on Neverland for study, even though he has to know by now that just a few of these things got loose and wiped out the Maginot's entire crew in record time.  He also wants Wendy brought in even though she's off chasing after her brother, which is sure to end well.  

Not an inspiring start.

Spoiler

Our clicky hostage-taker has set a trap, which is probably the first sign of anything resembling actual intelligence from a Xenomorph in five movies.  Unfortunately, it's too much of a drama queen to actually spring its trap and settles for letting Wendy stab it for no clear reason and then rage-flipping the freezer trailer they were in for some reason?  The acid blood conveniently only burns Hermit's jacket and not anything else.  What did he do to piss the Xeno off anyway?  It seems to really enjoy just messing with him when all the other people it met got the instant sashimi treatment.

Once again, it's a "dramatic" slow speed chase as Hermit crawls away from it and it crawls after him for... reasons.  Just so it can get up in his face and go "Hiss!" real loud for his benefit.  

The fight scene that ensues just feels really awkward, with Wendy essentially out-muscling the xenomorph to toss it on the other side of a reinforced door only for it to use its tail to grab her before the door shuts so then her brother has to race to reopen it while the fight concludes offscreen.

This is one of the more erect dick moves on the writer's part.

Once again, the actual action is all offscreen... and not in the horror movie gory discretion shot kind of way.  As in, "there was a fight, but it's happening offscreen so we don't have to choreograph or shoot it".

Spoiler

Wendy effectively solo'd a Xenomorph offscreen armed with nothing but a machete and her wits... another massive, massive L for the Xenomorph.  She cut the front part of its skull off, and the acid conveniently forgets to burn anything.  It just sort of pools on the floor and smokes a bit where it was aggressively eating through metal seconds earlier.

For a hot minute, it even looks like she did it without taking any damage.  Then we see she's bleeding and she collapses.  Whatever her brother sees makes him vomit... in a very unconvincing manner.  Then he collapses?  For reasons?  There's a spooky violin sting here.

Slightly's just been chilling out in the egg room this whole time, only to get almost jumpscared by one of the other Lost Boys.  Prompting a bit of stress-relief roughousing in this creepy cargo bay full of eggs.  

Little bit of meta commentary there... underground truly is a dumbass place to put a spaceship.

Spoiler

Somehow, despite all warnings that the building's collapse was imminent after, y'know, being rammed by a starship moving under power... the building is STILL STANDING in the morning and supremely unconcerned crews are going around picking up Wendy, Hermit, and the dead Xenomorph.

Seems rather risky to put the lethal aliens and still smoking xenomorph corpse on the ship with the flesh-and-blood crew of soldiers and not the one manned primarily if not exclusively by synths who are Not Food.

Well, I think we now know for sure how this incident stays contained.

Spoiler

Prodigy is shipping all of the alien monsters back to Neverland to be researched on the company's remote and secret private island facility that is almost certainly rigged to blow up or eminently nuke-able.  The self-destruct might even BE a nuke.  

Kinda feels like this whole two and a third episodes spent in New Siam was an unnecessary digression.  They probably could've just had the ship crash on Neverland and cut out having all these scenes of running through an inexplicably deserted 60+ story tenement.

"Welcome, to Jurassic Holocene Park"

Spoiler

There's this big dramatic scene of Kirsh getting to walk his Lost Boys in and Wendy and then all the specimens getting wheeled in behind them with a slow electric guitar playing over it that lapses into strings and tubas as the xenomorph corpse shows up.

An effort is made to convince the audience that Wendy is either dead or damaged beyond repair.  Not a convincing effort, mind you... since it seems to be more about Boy Cavalier's fragile ego trying to goad the science team into challenging him for sending their billion dollar largely untested prototype into a literal disaster area.  Even Kirsh thinks every part of it was a bad call, and he's actually brave enough to tell his feckless boss as much.  He wanders through the lab and hey, there's just this unsecured and completely unsupervised xenomorph egg just sitting out in the open because what's lab safety anyway?

 

Am I really seeing this?  Someone behaving intelligently and exercising caution in the name of self-preservation in an Alien story?

Oh my stars and garters, I am!  Boy Cavalier may be enough of an idiot that he goes and sticks his face directly in front of a giant wet space egg... but when his research bot explains to him what the xenomorphs do to people he quite sensibly decides that this is Too Dangerous for anyone made of meat and has the lab locked down as a Synths-only zone with Kirsh in charge.  

 

Slightly and Smee get reassured that Cyborg Bro will NOT show up there and murder them in their sleep.  This is so obviously telegraphing that he WILL show up on the island and might even kill one of or both of them that it's hard to take seriously.  It's delivered with a punishing lack of subtlety.  

 

Cut to Cyborg Bro wandering around New Siam stealing food and even a phone off the street.  He apparently calls the Weyland-Yutani head office from a random cell phone he steals in Prodigy territory and this sets off no red flags on either side?  Yutani tries to tell him to do the sensible thing and just come back to W-Y territory and report in, but he insists he has to go get the creatures back.

 

So, hey, Cyborg Bro can just talk into Slightly's head now.  Because he put a sticker on him?  So now he's creeping him out while he watches Epic.  I get that this is cultural posturing on Disney's part, but do they not have popular culture in 2120?  Why is everyone preoccupied with watching century-plus old animated movies?  Peter Pan is 167 years old at the time this is set, the first Ice Age is 118, and even Epic is 107.  We're literally watching a Stranger Danger scene here.  Cyborg-Bro is gonna groom a kid in a robot body to help him infiltrate Neverland.

One of the Lost Boys is just having a psychotic break for no particular reason... I guess PTSD from meeting the eyeball monster?  Meanwhile, Hermit is in surgery and we see them remove a lung and apparently cut into his spine too?  Wendy wakes up and goes wandering around while Kirsh and the others cut into an egg.  Somehow, causing the facehugger pain causes Wendy pain too?  Can literally anyone walk into this lab?  There are no guards, no secured entry... Wendy just walks right TF in in her pajamas.  We're just stuck watching Sydney Chandler make a variety of silly faces in a slight breeze before collapsing as they extract a larval chestburster from the facehugger.

Well, this definitely doesn't seem like a bright idea.

Spoiler

Prodigy, having acquired all of the logs and research data from the Maginot and being fully aware that a dedicated Weyland-Yutani research ship could not contain an adult Xenomorph and with full foreknowledge of how deadly and uncontainable it is decide their best course of action is to make another one by surgically mutilating the injured brother of their extremely protective, super-strong, super-fast, super-smart, technopathic posthuman prototype unbound by the Laws of Robotics who apparently has 24/7 unchecked access to the labs where you keep your recently acquired stock of man-eating extraterrestrial horrors in case she wants revenge?

Even by the low, low, incredibly low standards of the Alien franchise that shows a punishing lack of self-preservation.

It's not enough to lab-grow a psychotically insatiable man-eating horror from beyond the stars... they've got to make sure the leader of a group of what are basically low-rent Terminators wants them dead too?  Pick a lane, Boy Cavalier.  Death by monster or death by robot.  You can't do both!

 

In the final analysis, "Metamorphosis" is a pretty weak episode with some serious writing problems.

Its main flaw is that it clearly wants to commit to the horror bit but doesn't seem to know how.  They try to build some tension by keeping the Xenomorph offscreen for a while and show some evidence that It Can Think, but they can't bring themselves to stick to it so it has to poke its head into the frame and ask the cameraman to get its good side before it'll do anything.  It wants to go the route of the scientists experimenting getting in over their heads, except that it's already shot itself in the foot by revealing the scientists know what they're getting into from the start and are just too dumb to live.  They're trying to build anticipation for a human villain, but the delivery is so ham-handed that feels like accidental self-parody.  Every twist and plot point is telegraphed so aggressively that there's no potential to build suspense.

A lesser problem is that it also wants to do action, but it seems to be afraid to actually show action.  I wonder if it's because the Xenomorph is a purely CG construct.  They cheat and have the climax of the confrontation happen offscreen and only let us see the aftermath.

[Raikkonen]

After episode 3 this morning, I've checked out.

The Xeno completely degraded to a MacGuffin.

Too many new lore breakers.

Too many "WT# how" moments.

And...

Spoiler

And as previously mentioned, these new androids have superhero powers so the Mary Sue can go one on one with the Xeno. 🤦‍♂️

I'll stick to the first two films as to what Aliens is all about.

[pengbuzz]

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

All right, episode 3 is out...

  Hide contents

Somehow, while they were offscreen, the Lost Boys started capturing and packing up all the loose xenofauna from the Maginot's laboratory.  Probably for the best.  I guess that shows Kirsh is serious about treating them as invasive species.  Possibly the first smart thing anyone in this series has done so far.

Meanwhile, one of the hybrids feels compelled to have her fellows Explain the Joke in their theme naming as the Lost Boys.  Are we really assuming the audience are that dumb and didn't get the very blatant Peter Pan references even with Disney's Peter Pan on prominent display?

"Genius" Boy Cavalier decides to show he's a real wall-licking idiot by overruling his synth chief scientist and ordering them to box up the aliens and bring them to the company lab on Neverland for study, even though he has to know by now that just a few of these things got loose and wiped out the Maginot's entire crew in record time.  He also wants Wendy brought in even though she's off chasing after her brother, which is sure to end well.  

Not an inspiring start.

  Hide contents

Our clicky hostage-taker has set a trap, which is probably the first sign of anything resembling actual intelligence from a Xenomorph in five movies.  Unfortunately, it's too much of a drama queen to actually spring its trap and settles for letting Wendy stab it for no clear reason and then rage-flipping the freezer trailer they were in for some reason?  The acid blood conveniently only burns Hermit's jacket and not anything else.  What did he do to piss the Xeno off anyway?  It seems to really enjoy just messing with him when all the other people it met got the instant sashimi treatment.

Once again, it's a "dramatic" slow speed chase as Hermit crawls away from it and it crawls after him for... reasons.  Just so it can get up in his face and go "Hiss!" real loud for his benefit.  

The fight scene that ensues just feels really awkward, with Wendy essentially out-muscling the xenomorph to toss it on the other side of a reinforced door only for it to use its tail to grab her before the door shuts so then her brother has to race to reopen it while the fight concludes offscreen.

This is one of the more erect dick moves on the writer's part.

Once again, the actual action is all offscreen... and not in the horror movie gory discretion shot kind of way.  As in, "there was a fight, but it's happening offscreen so we don't have to choreograph or shoot it".

  Hide contents

Wendy effectively solo'd a Xenomorph offscreen armed with nothing but a machete and her wits... another massive, massive L for the Xenomorph.  She cut the front part of its skull off, and the acid conveniently forgets to burn anything.  It just sort of pools on the floor and smokes a bit where it was aggressively eating through metal seconds earlier.

For a hot minute, it even looks like she did it without taking any damage.  Then we see she's bleeding and she collapses.  Whatever her brother sees makes him vomit... in a very unconvincing manner.  Then he collapses?  For reasons?  There's a spooky violin sting here.

Slightly's just been chilling out in the egg room this whole time, only to get almost jumpscared by one of the other Lost Boys.  Prompting a bit of stress-relief roughousing in this creepy cargo bay full of eggs.  

Little bit of meta commentary there... underground truly is a dumbass place to put a spaceship.

  Hide contents

Somehow, despite all warnings that the building's collapse was imminent after, y'know, being rammed by a starship moving under power... the building is STILL STANDING in the morning and supremely unconcerned crews are going around picking up Wendy, Hermit, and the dead Xenomorph.

Seems rather risky to put the lethal aliens and still smoking xenomorph corpse on the ship with the flesh-and-blood crew of soldiers and not the one manned primarily if not exclusively by synths who are Not Food.

Well, I think we now know for sure how this incident stays contained.

  Hide contents

Prodigy is shipping all of the alien monsters back to Neverland to be researched on the company's remote and secret private island facility that is almost certainly rigged to blow up or eminently nuke-able.  The self-destruct might even BE a nuke.  

Kinda feels like this whole two and a third episodes spent in New Siam was an unnecessary digression.  They probably could've just had the ship crash on Neverland and cut out having all these scenes of running through an inexplicably deserted 60+ story tenement.

"Welcome, to Jurassic Holocene Park"

  Hide contents

There's this big dramatic scene of Kirsh getting to walk his Lost Boys in and Wendy and then all the specimens getting wheeled in behind them with a slow electric guitar playing over it that lapses into strings and tubas as the xenomorph corpse shows up.

An effort is made to convince the audience that Wendy is either dead or damaged beyond repair.  Not a convincing effort, mind you... since it seems to be more about Boy Cavalier's fragile ego trying to goad the science team into challenging him for sending their billion dollar largely untested prototype into a literal disaster area.  Even Kirsh thinks every part of it was a bad call, and he's actually brave enough to tell his feckless boss as much.  He wanders through the lab and hey, there's just this unsecured and completely unsupervised xenomorph egg just sitting out in the open because what's lab safety anyway?

 

Am I really seeing this?  Someone behaving intelligently and exercising caution in the name of self-preservation in an Alien story?

Oh my stars and garters, I am!  Boy Cavalier may be enough of an idiot that he goes and sticks his face directly in front of a giant wet space egg... but when his research bot explains to him what the xenomorphs do to people he quite sensibly decides that this is Too Dangerous for anyone made of meat and has the lab locked down as a Synths-only zone with Kirsh in charge.  

 

Slightly and Smee get reassured that Cyborg Bro will NOT show up there and murder them in their sleep.  This is so obviously telegraphing that he WILL show up on the island and might even kill one of or both of them that it's hard to take seriously.  It's delivered with a punishing lack of subtlety.  

 

Cut to Cyborg Bro wandering around New Siam stealing food and even a phone off the street.  He apparently calls the Weyland-Yutani head office from a random cell phone he steals in Prodigy territory and this sets off no red flags on either side?  Yutani tries to tell him to do the sensible thing and just come back to W-Y territory and report in, but he insists he has to go get the creatures back.

 

So, hey, Cyborg Bro can just talk into Slightly's head now.  Because he put a sticker on him?  So now he's creeping him out while he watches Epic.  I get that this is cultural posturing on Disney's part, but do they not have popular culture in 2120?  Why is everyone preoccupied with watching century-plus old animated movies?  Peter Pan is 167 years old at the time this is set, the first Ice Age is 118, and even Epic is 107.  We're literally watching a Stranger Danger scene here.  Cyborg-Bro is gonna groom a kid in a robot body to help him infiltrate Neverland.

One of the Lost Boys is just having a psychotic break for no particular reason... I guess PTSD from meeting the eyeball monster?  Meanwhile, Hermit is in surgery and we see them remove a lung and apparently cut into his spine too?  Wendy wakes up and goes wandering around while Kirsh and the others cut into an egg.  Somehow, causing the facehugger pain causes Wendy pain too?  Can literally anyone walk into this lab?  There are no guards, no secured entry... Wendy just walks right TF in in her pajamas.  We're just stuck watching Sydney Chandler make a variety of silly faces in a slight breeze before collapsing as they extract a larval chestburster from the facehugger.

Well, this definitely doesn't seem like a bright idea.

  Hide contents

Prodigy, having acquired all of the logs and research data from the Maginot and being fully aware that a dedicated Weyland-Yutani research ship could not contain an adult Xenomorph and with full foreknowledge of how deadly and uncontainable it is decide their best course of action is to make another one by surgically mutilating the injured brother of their extremely protective, super-strong, super-fast, super-smart, technopathic posthuman prototype unbound by the Laws of Robotics who apparently has 24/7 unchecked access to the labs where you keep your recently acquired stock of man-eating extraterrestrial horrors in case she wants revenge?

Even by the low, low, incredibly low standards of the Alien franchise that shows a punishing lack of self-preservation.

It's not enough to lab-grow a psychotically insatiable man-eating horror from beyond the stars... they've got to make sure the leader of a group of what are basically low-rent Terminators wants them dead too?  Pick a lane, Boy Cavalier.  Death by monster or death by robot.  You can't do both!

 

In the final analysis, "Metamorphosis" is a pretty weak episode with some serious writing problems.

Its main flaw is that it clearly wants to commit to the horror bit but doesn't seem to know how.  They try to build some tension by keeping the Xenomorph offscreen for a while and show some evidence that It Can Think, but they can't bring themselves to stick to it so it has to poke its head into the frame and ask the cameraman to get its good side before it'll do anything.  It wants to go the route of the scientists experimenting getting in over their heads, except that it's already shot itself in the foot by revealing the scientists know what they're getting into from the start and are just too dumb to live.  They're trying to build anticipation for a human villain, but the delivery is so ham-handed that feels like accidental self-parody.  Every twist and plot point is telegraphed so aggressively that there's no potential to build suspense.

A lesser problem is that it also wants to do action, but it seems to be afraid to actually show action.  I wonder if it's because the Xenomorph is a purely CG construct.  They cheat and have the climax of the confrontation happen offscreen and only let us see the aftermath.

Perhaps a better idea would be to have the Xenomorph chase the writing team for this series through their own offices, spewing printer ink at them in a blind rage.

[tekering]

10 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I wonder if it's because the Xenomorph is a purely CG construct.

On the contrary, it's very much a guy in a suit...

...with cable-actuated animatronics.

Edited August 20 by tekering

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, Raikkonen said:

And...

  Hide contents

And as previously mentioned, these new androids have superhero powers so the Mary Sue can go one on one with the Xeno. 🤦‍♂️

In an extremely halfhearted and apathetic defense of the show's writing on this one point:

Spoiler

Androids/synths have always had superhuman abilities in Alien going back to the original movie.  Enough so that it was what gave away that the crew's token Wey-Yu synth wasn't Human in the first two films.  Ash near-effortlessly overpowered the combined efforts of Ripley, Parker, and Lambert.  Bishop gave away his robotic nature with that superhumanly fast game of five finger fillet in the Sulaco's mess.

It is, however, stupidly obvious that the writers bent over backwards and invented Hybrids specifically and solely so that they could have the mandatory dark-haired waif fight the Xenomorph one-on-one.

 

 

Just now, tekering said:

On the contrary, it's very much a guy in a suit...

Really?  Well, color me VERY surprised.

[Hikuro]

Okay, I'm gonna say Episode 3 was a lack luster.

Spoiler

I can agree with Seto, all that action we could have gotten happening off screen was rather a buzzkill. And Now I got another reason to not like Slightly at all again as he's now considering the cyborg security officer a "friend" and not smart enough to realize he's being used. Nibs I think is going psychotic, and Curly I think has daddy issues clearly. 
We've now got a clearer picture as to the Xenmorph embryo which is interesting cause Romulus is is different, it's a pathogen that mutates is how it was suggested. But I'm not surprised as the unused Alien 3 script explained that the Xenomorph DNA can exist in different forms and a small amount of it can prove fatal and devestating altering the hosts DNA turning a Weyu employee into a hybrid. And to see them already using a chunk of the brothers body ie his literal left lung to grow a Xenomorph is rather a-hole-ish to say the least. I thought he had such a badly damaged lung they were gonna give him a synthetic replacement, nope, they're just using him. 

 

[Seto Kaiba]

Sanity check...

Spoiler

Did anyone else notice right away that Hermit had been stabbed in the chest by the Xenomorph's tail before being webbed up?  And that that's the reason he vomits and passes out after the fight and needs to be operated on when he gets to Neverland?

I somehow missed that among all the things going on in the episode, and it seems like a fairly important point that probably should have been obvious to the viewer.

 

[Big s]

Finally got a chance at the new episode. Now that the human soldiers are out of the way, I kinda like it better. Those guys deserved to die for their absolute stupidity. There’s also a few concepts that I really wasn’t into the last couple episodes that are kinda growing on me the more I think about them.

Spoiler

The idea that a robot with a super intelligent brain connecting with computers and gaining access to cameras and things kinda made more sense to me now. It’s a bit out there, but people are hacking computers and such with simple things like smart phones these days and these synthetic brains are already connected to Prodigy systems for monitoring them, it kinda makes sense that they would figure out how to do the reverse.

And then I kinda started thinking about how Wendy seems to connect with the aliens themselves in a way. And while Prometheus and covenant kinda make the alien seem highly biological, the og alien was very mechanical with odd pipes and hoses and metal teeth. And in Aliens they could connect with eachother. It kinda made me wonder about how mechanical they might actually be, like are they communicating with a sorta super sense or is it more of an electronic connection like how a phone can contact a satellite. Maybe the Aliens have a WiFi connection of sorts in that giant phallic head of theirs or something. So maybe that’s why Wendy is starting to pick up their signals 

Anyway, aside from my odd theories I still kinda like the show despite certain issues. And another Head Banger to end the episode. Whoever did the soundtrack to this show is probably a huge metalhead.

[tekering]

40 minutes ago, Big s said:

Whoever did the soundtrack to this show is probably a huge metalhead.

As a huge metalhead myself, I've been stunned week after week with the end credit music.  I mean, getting the rights to a Metallica recording used to be impossible (so impossible, in fact, that Paramount had to commission a whole new song just to get them on the Mission: Impossible 2 soundtrack), and not since Tool's debut EP -- 33 years ago! -- has any Tool music appeared in a movie. 🤯

When Stinkfist started playing over the final shot of "Mr. October," I honestly assumed it was some kind of software glitch on my computer. 🤨

[Big s]

2 hours ago, tekering said:

and not since Tool's debut EP -- 33 years ago! -- has any Tool music appeared in a movie. 🤯

There were actually a couple movies, the one I remember most was Escape From LA

Had to look up the song, it was Sweat. It did however take them a few decades to even stream their music. I think the only other holdout on streaming has been Samhain, and I’m still waiting on that since my tapes all died

 

Edited August 21 by Big s

[Hikuro]

8 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Sanity check...

  Hide contents

Did anyone else notice right away that Hermit had been stabbed in the chest by the Xenomorph's tail before being webbed up?  And that that's the reason he vomits and passes out after the fight and needs to be operated on when he gets to Neverland?

I somehow missed that among all the things going on in the episode, and it seems like a fairly important point that probably should have been obvious to the viewer.

 

The only one I saw was AFTER that not before. 

[sh9000]

 

 

[Bolt]

I just watched all 3 episodes and well.. i like the visuals, concepts and world building and the heavy metal is a bonus, i'm now looking forward to what we get to hear next.
But wow, some of the character writing is just not good. Clearly there isn't enough knowledge on real military and lab protocols here. Especially for such a high dollar outfit like what Prodigy is supposed to be. There's such a lack of caution , fail safe and common sense running around..

 

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Bolt said:

Clearly there isn't enough knowledge on real military and lab protocols here. Especially for such a high dollar outfit like what Prodigy is supposed to be. There's such a lack of caution , fail safe and common sense running around..

That, in all fairness, has been SOP for the franchise since Aliens.

Weyland-Yutani is an older and more established megacorp than Prodigy is and their immense wealth doesn't make them any more careful when it comes to the lives of employees.

The one time someone actually tries to exercise proper safety protocols is the original Alien, and Ripley gets overruled on that by Ash because he's got orders to bring the alien back no matter what.

Edited August 26 by Seto Kaiba

[pengbuzz]

16 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

That, in all fairness, has been SOP for the franchise since Aliens.

Weyland-Yutani is an older and more established megacorp than Prodigy is and their immense wealth doesn't make them any more careful when it comes to the lives of employees.

The one time someone actually tries to exercise proper safety protocols is the original Alien, and Ripley gets overruled on that by Ash because he's got orders to bring the alien back no matter what.

My guess is tht anyone below the c-suite level is fair game as far as expndability goes with W-Y.

I also suspct that the entire franchise's point about corporatons and the military is that their policies tend to work against them when it comes o the xenmorphs. You cannt reason or bargain with them, and bullets aren';t enough.

Then again: being stupid isnt a great tactic either.

(sorry...burnd my writing hand with hot oil in kitchn last night. typing is a problem.)

[Bolt]

Recognized the intro to Ocean Size and was stoked. 
I enjoyed this episode more so. Or maybe it was the Janes Addiction..

Edited August 27 by Bolt

[Hikuro]

except for the last 3 minutes, it was another lack-luster episode. Even still, a bit controversial. 

Spoiler

There hasn't been a solid canon decision on how Xenomorphs communicate with eachother. In the old Dark Horse comics it was via a psychic link with the hive, mostly controlled by the queen or a queen, even the mother. Even Sea of Sorrows kind of touched on this a bit that it's a psychic connection when Deckard, a decedent of Ripley (think the hybrid version in Resurrection) could read their thoughts and emotions.
In other books and various stories it was pheromones. A scientist even explored this by covering himself with a synthetic mixture he created from his research which did seem to work, even singing french songs very loudly in the open and the Xenomorphs ignored him until the end when it wore off. 

But here Wendy can communicate with the chest burster to a point it even accepted her. I'm gonna predict that WY is gonna figure this out and want her so they can figure it out and replicate her abilities so they can control the Xenomorph.

I'm also getting very sick of Nibs. She's gone full psychotic for some reason and they need to put her down ol' yeller style. 
 

 

[Big s]

3 hours ago, Bolt said:

Recognized the intro to Ocean Size and was stoked. 
I enjoyed this episode more so. Or maybe it was the Janes Addiction..

Hadn’t heard that one in quite some time honestly. I still feel a bit down about how their breakup went.

 

3 hours ago, Hikuro said:

There hasn't been a solid canon decision on how Xenomorphs communicate with eachother. In the old Dark Horse comics it was via a psychic link

That’s why I’ve been kinda thinking they’re a mix of technological and a bit less biological. Like rather than just a psychic link, more of a sort of wi fi type of thing going on.

[Seto Kaiba]

Oh boy, what will I observe in "Observation"?  My hope is for a steady improvement in the quality of the writing.  My expectation... a lot of faffing about and not a lot else.

Spoiler

Not even two minutes in and I'm reminded how unlikeable all of these characters are in general.

Making Boy Cavalier hate-able is obviously the goal here, but everyone around him who humors and tolerates him is collateral damage and that's... well... everybody.  The only halfway likeable one is Kirsh and that's because he's got that Vulcan/Android "Don't react to anything" thing going on that makes it feel like he's checked out as hard as I have.

First big surprise...

Spoiler

Wendy's brother is up and moving and seemingly no worse for the wear after being near-fatally gored by the adult Xenomorph and having a lung removed!  Either this tiny Brit is made of iron or medical science has come a LONG way considering we saw him still on the operating table at the end of last episode!  Unexpected non-douchebag behavior from Prodigy not just patching him up but replacing the damaged organs and getting him back to 100% immediately.

Hermit is almost genre savvy.  He puts two and two together immediately after hearing mention of "the lab" and jumps straight to the correct conclusion that Prodigy brought the monsters in the Maginot's cargo back to the island with them.  

Oh boy, Wendy thinks the Xenomorphs picked her to hear them.  They start testing her hearing at the high end of what's audible for a normal human (20 kHz) and go up from there.  It seems like we're establishing the Xenomorphs communicate at ultrasonic frequencies somewhere in the 50 kHz band?  That puts them in the same audible range as dolphins and bats, and suggests that Xenomorphs might be using echolocation/biosonar to hunt.

Interesting if true, as this would concretely explain why animals and particularly cats seem to be much better at detecting the Xenomorph's approach than Humans.

Spoiler

Cat hearing tops out around 64 kHz.  Jonesy wasn't an Evil Detecting Cat, he could just hear the Xenomorph's ultrasonic vocalizations.

If this series were better written, I would suspect that Boy Cavalier's misquotation here is meant to show that even as a genius he is eminently fallible.

That was, after all, how they played a similar gaffe in Alien: Covenant when David 8 mistakenly attributes Ozymandias to Lord Byron instead of Percy Shelley.  

Instead, because this series is a mess and nobody corrects him, I'm just going to assume that the writers used some AI search tool and got hallucinated at because the statement he attributes to Isaac Asimov is actually Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

Spoiler

Of course, the glaring problem with his entire premise is that nothing here is Sufficiently Advanced Technology.

The Hybrids are just Synths, the kind of android that's mass produced by multiple large corporations on Earth and elsewhere.  They may have had a human consciousness put into them experimentally but the hardware and software they're made from is the modern day's technology in-setting.

Adjusting the pitch of recorded audio and replaying it is not exactly difficult either... or are we retitling this My Little Alien: Adobe Audition is Magic?

The prolonged zoom-in on Sydney Chandler's mouth as she does an unconvincing job pretending to make Xenomorph noises is profoundly unnecessary.

Boy Cavalier is for some reason mightily impressed by his billion dollar AI robot's feat of... adjusting the pitch of a replayed audio file? 

Show this boy WinAmp plugins or a Gen IV Pokemon game's Pokedex... it'll blow his f***ing mind.  Hell, show him the YouTube search results for "Nightcore" and we'll never hear from him again.

Spoiler

Wendy and the other Hybrids are apparently powered by Lithium-Ion batteries.  Either they solved the problem of hydrogen gas accumulation or one day Wendy is going to have a very flammable case of gas.  Her bed is a charging station, but her battery could allegedly run an entire city?  Either they've got room temperature superconductors or Wendy's basically a firebomb waiting to happen.

We have to listen to Boy Cavalier narrate over footage of Slightly walking around.  Kirsh seems to have realized something is up with Slightly.  Morrow's trying to talk Slightly into bringing him a Xenomorph egg.  Which seems like a situation pretty much guaranteed to go wrong and is almost unbearably tedious to watch.

With this, I come to the realization that I am bored.  Deeply and profoundly bored.  There is no sense of direction or momentum to this story.  This is a horror story with no tension.  No menace.  No sense of mounting dread.  Just a bunch of the freshman year Intro to Philosophy pseduo-profound navel gazing bullsh*t from a double handful of incredibly pretentious characters with some monsters hanging around in the background presumably even more bored than the audience is.

Someone really needs to tell Ridley Scott and the others that if they want to do Blade Runner spinoffs they can just DO Blade Runner spinoffs.  They don't need to waste everyone's time trying to turn every Alien sequel into a failed soft launch for a Great Value brand version of Blade Runner.

Spoiler

Slow pan shots over mundane objects with creepy strings in the background won't make a shot scary in and of itself, Noah.

There has to actually be some tension.  Some sense of palpable malice or of something deeply wrong.

So we're just letting the eyeball monster attack a sheep?  It would probably help if the monster were not so obviously CGI.  It doesn't look particularly convincing, so the sight of it scrambling across the floor on its tentacles doesn't evoke fear or dread so much as "Wow, someone got paid to animate that." and "Someone else said 'Yes, that's exactly what we want' when this was being animated".  

Also, so much for "Synths only" in the lab.  This is just gore porn.

 

The most interesting shot of the episode so far is a random monitor lizard swimming in the foreground.

Swimming monitor lizard has my vote for best character.

 

Spoiler

Another extended digression with two of the profoundly unlikeable members of the Human cast making terrible semantic arguments at each other like the output of an AI trained on Reddit posts.

Congratulations, your robot is mentally ill.  You didn't find the key to immortality, you just made a perfectly good robot violently psychotic.  It seems someone was thinking ahead since they have a panic button in the suite where they meet with the Synths and security protocols to contain and confine them.  Why all meetings with them are not monitored is another question, but hey... at least there's some semblance of security.

We get a little bit of rambling about transhumanism as Prodigy's execs explain to Hermit what Wendy and the Lost Boys are.  If they were actually going to take it seriously they could go somewhere with the idea about the Lost Boys being both more and less than Human, but it's just another unnecessary digression.

While all this is going on Kirsh and one of the Lost Boys have just been having a staring contest with the eyeball monster for hours? Days? 

Somehow, some way, Morrow went and found Slightly's family armed with nothing more than Slightly's fairly generic real name of "Aarush Singh".  How did he even know which country to look in?  Singh is an incredibly common surname anywhere with a Hindu population and he doesn't even know if Slightly gave him his whole name.  That's winning-the-lottery level odds FFS.  This is like being told "My name is John Smith" and trying to find a person's family based on nothing more than that.

So Kirsh fondles an egg for no reason after learning Slightly is being blackmailed into letting a person get attacked by a facehugger.

Thanks to Hermit's history lesson we get names for all five of the megacorporations that rule the world: Weyland-Yutani, Prodigy, Threshold, Dynamic, and Lynch.

Spoiler

He infers that Weyland-Yutani is pressuring some kind of inter-corporate governance council to make Prodigy surrender the xenofauna from the Maginot.  

Wendy wanders into the lab again somehow and witnesses the Chestburster pop out of the lung and the glass case it was in.  So then we have to watch her pet unknowable horrors from beyond the farthest stars, because nobody in an Alien sequel story has any sense of self-preservation.  That, if anything, makes the Xenomorph even less scary... knowing that you can pet the bloody thing.

 

I swear they put more effort into picking and licensing music for the credits than they did into actually writing this.

Someone help Noah Hawley, his horror series doesn't know how to horror.

[Big s]

17 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Singh is an incredibly common surname

I used to work at a distribution center and there was a particular trucking company that came down from British Columbia that had just about every driver with the name Singh. I one day asked if they were related since we had a pre holiday backup and a few of them were hanging around waiting to be let in and none of them knew  each other. I had never seen so many people with the same last name in one place, let alone that all worked for the same company and from the same location, yet was surprised that they didn’t know each other.

Anyway, I’m sure he did the complex google search of finding the family through searching if they had a child that recently died with that particular name.

[renegadeleader1]

So two things...

Spoiler

Wasn't it implied there was more than one chest busted corpse on the Maginot? Which means we might have an unaccounted for xenomorph running around off screen somewhere?

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Oh boy, what will I observe in "Observation"?  My hope is for a steady improvement in the quality of the writing.  My expectation... a lot of faffing about and not a lot else.

  Reveal hidden contents

Not even two minutes in and I'm reminded how unlikeable all of these characters are in general.

Making Boy Cavalier hate-able is obviously the goal here, but everyone around him who humors and tolerates him is collateral damage and that's... well... everybody.  The only halfway likeable one is Kirsh and that's because he's got that Vulcan/Android "Don't react to anything" thing going on that makes it feel like he's checked out as hard as I have.

First big surprise...

  Reveal hidden contents

Wendy's brother is up and moving and seemingly no worse for the wear after being near-fatally gored by the adult Xenomorph and having a lung removed!  Either this tiny Brit is made of iron or medical science has come a LONG way considering we saw him still on the operating table at the end of last episode!  Unexpected non-douchebag behavior from Prodigy not just patching him up but replacing the damaged organs and getting him back to 100% immediately.

Hermit is almost genre savvy.  He puts two and two together immediately after hearing mention of "the lab" and jumps straight to the correct conclusion that Prodigy brought the monsters in the Maginot's cargo back to the island with them.  

Oh boy, Wendy thinks the Xenomorphs picked her to hear them.  They start testing her hearing at the high end of what's audible for a normal human (20 kHz) and go up from there.  It seems like we're establishing the Xenomorphs communicate at ultrasonic frequencies somewhere in the 50 kHz band?  That puts them in the same audible range as dolphins and bats, and suggests that Xenomorphs might be using echolocation/biosonar to hunt.

Interesting if true, as this would concretely explain why animals and particularly cats seem to be much better at detecting the Xenomorph's approach than Humans.

  Reveal hidden contents

Cat hearing tops out around 64 kHz.  Jonesy wasn't an Evil Detecting Cat, he could just hear the Xenomorph's ultrasonic vocalizations.

If this series were better written, I would suspect that Boy Cavalier's misquotation here is meant to show that even as a genius he is eminently fallible.

That was, after all, how they played a similar gaffe in Alien: Covenant when David 8 mistakenly attributes Ozymandias to Lord Byron instead of Percy Shelley.  

Instead, because this series is a mess and nobody corrects him, I'm just going to assume that the writers used some AI search tool and got hallucinated at because the statement he attributes to Isaac Asimov is actually Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

  Reveal hidden contents

Of course, the glaring problem with his entire premise is that nothing here is Sufficiently Advanced Technology.

The Hybrids are just Synths, the kind of android that's mass produced by multiple large corporations on Earth and elsewhere.  They may have had a human consciousness put into them experimentally but the hardware and software they're made from is the modern day's technology in-setting.

Adjusting the pitch of recorded audio and replaying it is not exactly difficult either... or are we retitling this My Little Alien: Adobe Audition is Magic?

The prolonged zoom-in on Sydney Chandler's mouth as she does an unconvincing job pretending to make Xenomorph noises is profoundly unnecessary.

Boy Cavalier is for some reason mightily impressed by his billion dollar AI robot's feat of... adjusting the pitch of a replayed audio file? 

Show this boy WinAmp plugins or a Gen IV Pokemon game's Pokedex... it'll blow his f***ing mind.  Hell, show him the YouTube search results for "Nightcore" and we'll never hear from him again.

  Reveal hidden contents

Wendy and the other Hybrids are apparently powered by Lithium-Ion batteries.  Either they solved the problem of hydrogen gas accumulation or one day Wendy is going to have a very flammable case of gas.  Her bed is a charging station, but her battery could allegedly run an entire city?  Either they've got room temperature superconductors or Wendy's basically a firebomb waiting to happen.

We have to listen to Boy Cavalier narrate over footage of Slightly walking around.  Kirsh seems to have realized something is up with Slightly.  Morrow's trying to talk Slightly into bringing him a Xenomorph egg.  Which seems like a situation pretty much guaranteed to go wrong and is almost unbearably tedious to watch.

With this, I come to the realization that I am bored.  Deeply and profoundly bored.  There is no sense of direction or momentum to this story.  This is a horror story with no tension.  No menace.  No sense of mounting dread.  Just a bunch of the freshman year Intro to Philosophy pseduo-profound navel gazing bullsh*t from a double handful of incredibly pretentious characters with some monsters hanging around in the background presumably even more bored than the audience is.

Someone really needs to tell Ridley Scott and the others that if they want to do Blade Runner spinoffs they can just DO Blade Runner spinoffs.  They don't need to waste everyone's time trying to turn every Alien sequel into a failed soft launch for a Great Value brand version of Blade Runner.

  Reveal hidden contents

Slow pan shots over mundane objects with creepy strings in the background won't make a shot scary in and of itself, Noah.

There has to actually be some tension.  Some sense of palpable malice or of something deeply wrong.

So we're just letting the eyeball monster attack a sheep?  It would probably help if the monster were not so obviously CGI.  It doesn't look particularly convincing, so the sight of it scrambling across the floor on its tentacles doesn't evoke fear or dread so much as "Wow, someone got paid to animate that." and "Someone else said 'Yes, that's exactly what we want' when this was being animated".  

Also, so much for "Synths only" in the lab.  This is just gore porn.

 

The most interesting shot of the episode so far is a random monitor lizard swimming in the foreground.

Swimming monitor lizard has my vote for best character.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Another extended digression with two of the profoundly unlikeable members of the Human cast making terrible semantic arguments at each other like the output of an AI trained on Reddit posts.

Congratulations, your robot is mentally ill.  You didn't find the key to immortality, you just made a perfectly good robot violently psychotic.  It seems someone was thinking ahead since they have a panic button in the suite where they meet with the Synths and security protocols to contain and confine them.  Why all meetings with them are not monitored is another question, but hey... at least there's some semblance of security.

We get a little bit of rambling about transhumanism as Prodigy's execs explain to Hermit what Wendy and the Lost Boys are.  If they were actually going to take it seriously they could go somewhere with the idea about the Lost Boys being both more and less than Human, but it's just another unnecessary digression.

While all this is going on Kirsh and one of the Lost Boys have just been having a staring contest with the eyeball monster for hours? Days? 

Somehow, some way, Morrow went and found Slightly's family armed with nothing more than Slightly's fairly generic real name of "Aarush Singh".  How did he even know which country to look in?  Singh is an incredibly common surname anywhere with a Hindu population and he doesn't even know if Slightly gave him his whole name.  That's winning-the-lottery level odds FFS.  This is like being told "My name is John Smith" and trying to find a person's family based on nothing more than that.

So Kirsh fondles an egg for no reason after learning Slightly is being blackmailed into letting a person get attacked by a facehugger.

Thanks to Hermit's history lesson we get names for all five of the megacorporations that rule the world: Weyland-Yutani, Prodigy, Threshold, Dynamic, and Lynch.

  Reveal hidden contents

He infers that Weyland-Yutani is pressuring some kind of inter-corporate governance council to make Prodigy surrender the xenofauna from the Maginot.  

Wendy wanders into the lab again somehow and witnesses the Chestburster pop out of the lung and the glass case it was in.  So then we have to watch her pet unknowable horrors from beyond the farthest stars, because nobody in an Alien sequel story has any sense of self-preservation.  That, if anything, makes the Xenomorph even less scary... knowing that you can pet the bloody thing.

 

I swear they put more effort into picking and licensing music for the credits than they did into actually writing this.

Someone help Noah Hawley, his horror series doesn't know how to horror.

 

Alright I'm calling it now....

Spoiler

Five bucks we either end up with a "friendly" xenomorph that's semi controllable or someone's consciousness will end up in a xenomorph's body and either one will have to fight another "evil" normal xenomorph in a battle that gets the whole place nuked from orbit.

 

[Graham]

Just about a third of the way though episode 2.

There's a few things bug me, some of which have been mentioned by others already.

• No attempt by Earth's military shown to stop the ship crashing / shoot it down / divert it's course etc. Yes, the ship had to crash to move the story forward, but at least they could have had a short scene referencing this.
• No evacuation warning shown being given to the population of Bangkok. I'm sure the ship was being tracked and the approximate crash site would have been known.
• The crashed ship doing increadibly little damage to the city and the building it crashed into.
• Bangkok having almost no traffic, yeah, no.
• The Prodigy soldiers were supposed to be on a rescue mission, but were not carrying any sort of rescue gear, not even ropes.  Were they supposed to be rescuing survivors with their rifles? 🤣

[Hikuro]

2 hours ago, Graham said:

Just about a third of the way though episode 2.

There's a few things bug me, some of which have been mentioned by others already.

• No attempt by Earth's military shown to stop the ship crashing / shoot it down / divert it's course etc. Yes, the ship had to crash to move the story forward, but at least they could have had a short scene referencing this.
• No evacuation warning shown being given to the population of Bangkok. I'm sure the ship was being tracked and the approximate crash site would have been known.
• The crashed ship doing increadibly little damage to the city and the building it crashed into.
• Bangkok having almost no traffic, yeah, no.
• The Prodigy soldiers were supposed to be on a rescue mission, but were not carrying any sort of rescue gear, not even ropes.  Were they supposed to be rescuing survivors with their rifles? 🤣

Earth "Military" or government is actually controlled via the 5 Mega-corps in this series. Which is quite interesting as the novels and comics depict things very differently. 
In the novels up to today, you have the United America's (Us), Union of Progress People (all communist groups like China and Russia), Three World Empire (UK & Japan), Independent Core Systems Colonies/ICSC (Colony worlds), New Albion Protectorate (broken away group from TWE, almost like Australians and New Zelanders) then finally Interstellar Commerce Comission/ICC Which we hear about in ALIENS who take care of all trade and regulation enforcement in space to the colonies and earth. 
What's odd is NONE of these organizations are even mentioned and are supposed to be the world governments that control yet influenced by the Mega-corporations. In ALIEN: Enemy of my enemy, All of these organizations were supposed to link up on a colonized world to talk about the terroristic attacks brought on by some rogue group who's dropping pathegon bombs on colony worlds. 
And in the early drafts of ALIEN 3 the UPP play a rather important part of the script. All these organizations are supposed to exist yet never mentioned, they even exist with Amanda being an adult so I can't believe they all just sprouted up over night either. 

So yeah, I do rather feel Alien Earth is half baked and no one really did their research and no one at Disney/Fox even gave a rats-ass about it.  

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, renegadeleader1 said:

Spoiler

Wasn't it implied there was more than one chest busted corpse on the Maginot? Which means we might have an unaccounted for xenomorph running around off screen somewhere?

Spoiler

We see two different ones.  The first one is still in their cryopod and the Prodigy crew miss the presence of the facehugger corpse in the next pod over.  The second chestburster victim is somehow still strapped to a bed in the ship's sickbay even after the crash.

Given that we see the Maginot leaking a fair amount of atmosphere as it approaches Earth, I assumed the second (or first?) Xenomorph got taken out either by spacing it or by killing it such that its acid blood ate a hole in the hull.

 

4 hours ago, renegadeleader1 said:

Spoiler

Five bucks we either end up with a "friendly" xenomorph that's semi controllable or someone's consciousness will end up in a xenomorph's body and either one will have to fight another "evil" normal xenomorph in a battle that gets the whole place nuked from orbit.

Going full Terminator 2 would really, REALLY bad a bad idea.

 

4 hours ago, Graham said:

• No attempt by Earth's military shown to stop the ship crashing / shoot it down / divert it's course etc. Yes, the ship had to crash to move the story forward, but at least they could have had a short scene referencing this.

Earth's governments and militaries are under the control of "The Five" megacorporations.

It's not until Weyland-Yutani collapses between Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection that the government regains some control.

 

4 hours ago, Graham said:

• Bangkok having almost no traffic, yeah, no.

I feel vindicated that someone else noticed this and felt that was unrealistic. 😆

Bangkok at midday, with no traffic on any visible road?  Talk about unrealistic.

 

4 hours ago, Graham said:

• The Prodigy soldiers were supposed to be on a rescue mission, but were not carrying any sort of rescue gear, not even ropes.  Were they supposed to be rescuing survivors with their rifles? 🤣

From the dialog, apparently they were supposed to put GPS tags on any survivors they found so follow-on teams could extract them.

[pengbuzz]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

  Reveal hidden contents

We see two different ones.  The first one is still in their cryopod and the Prodigy crew miss the presence of the facehugger corpse in the next pod over.  The second chestburster victim is somehow still strapped to a bed in the ship's sickbay even after the crash.

Given that we see the Maginot leaking a fair amount of atmosphere as it approaches Earth, I assumed the second (or first?) Xenomorph got taken out either by spacing it or by killing it such that its acid blood ate a hole in the hull.

Earth's governments and militaries are under the control of "The Five" megacorporations.

It's not until Weyland-Yutani collapses between Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection that the government regains some control.

Wait... W-Y is defunct? I must have missed that when I saw Resurrection.O.o

[Seto Kaiba]

34 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

Wait... W-Y is defunct? I must have missed that when I saw Resurrection.O.o

It's a minor detail that comes up in a conversation between Ripley 8 and the doctors in the Auriga's mess hall when Dr. Gediman doesn't know what "the Company" means.

"Weyland-Yutani.  Ripley 8's former employers.  Terran growth conglomerate.  They had defense contracts under the military.  Oh they went under decades ago, Gediman, way before your time.  Bought out by WalMart." - Dr. Wren

 

[pengbuzz]

6 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It's a minor detail that comes up in a conversation between Ripley 8 and the doctors in the Auriga's mess hall when Dr. Gediman doesn't know what "the Company" means.

"Weyland-Yutani.  Ripley 8's former employers.  Terran growth conglomerate.  They had defense contracts under the military.  Oh they went under decades ago, Gediman, way before your time.  Bought out by WalMart." - Dr. Wren

 

Walmart now runs everything? O.o

No wonder autogun bullets are out of stock! 

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, pengbuzz said:

Walmart now runs everything? O.o

Nah, the implication in Alien: Resurrection is that the corporatocracy that ruled Humanity in the previous (and subsequent) Alien films collapsed or was overthrown somewhere in the early 24th century and replaced by the "United Systems".  

Being bought out by WalMart was, at the time the film was made, intended to be a corporate Fate Worse Than Death.  (WalMart was still an up-and-comer at the time the film was being written.)

[Big s]

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Being bought out by WalMart was, at the time the film was made, intended to be a corporate Fate Worse Than Death.  (WalMart was still an up-and-comer at the time the film was being written.)

Wal Mart being in charge would definitely be pretty bad for the population. They’ve had so many controversies over employee pay and overtime discrepancies over the years, it might make Wayland seem generous and caring

[Axelay]

I think one of my biggest WTFs about this show is that Morrow is supposed to be a cyborg apparently incorporating tech which is over 65 years old... but yet can still interface with modern tech like it's not an issue. That seems like a bit of a stretch to me. TVs from 65 years ago aren't exactly going to be able to interface (easily) with tech from 2025. Trying to imagine that level of future-proofing is very difficult for me to accept. I hope there's some bit of explanation for this. I honestly really want Kirsch to catch him.

[sh9000]

 

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Axelay said:

I think one of my biggest WTFs about this show is that Morrow is supposed to be a cyborg apparently incorporating tech which is over 65 years old... but yet can still interface with modern tech like it's not an issue. That seems like a bit of a stretch to me. TVs from 65 years ago aren't exactly going to be able to interface (easily) with tech from 2025. Trying to imagine that level of future-proofing is very difficult for me to accept. I hope there's some bit of explanation for this. I honestly really want Kirsch to catch him.

Aside from his communications with Slightly, we mainly only see Morrow interact with the computers on his own ship (the Maginot).

Spoiler

Kirsh definitely seems to be aware that something is wrong with Slightly, though it is a bit odd that Prodigy's private island doesn't have secure communications that would detect a rogue transmission like that.  Neverland is supposedly Prodigy's most secure secret facility so you'd think infosec would be a priority.

 

 

56 minutes ago, sh9000 said:

In space, nobody can hear FX lazily rip off the original Alien in the hopes that that will make this mess less unwatchable?

[M'Kyuun]

2 hours ago, Axelay said:

I think one of my biggest WTFs about this show is that Morrow is supposed to be a cyborg apparently incorporating tech which is over 65 years old... but yet can still interface with modern tech like it's not an issue. That seems like a bit of a stretch to me. TVs from 65 years ago aren't exactly going to be able to interface (easily) with tech from 2025. Trying to imagine that level of future-proofing is very difficult for me to accept. I hope there's some bit of explanation for this. I honestly really want Kirsch to catch him.

I'm not so sure that Kirsch is interested in catching Morrow; I think Kirsch is playing on his own team, as I don't think he likes being condescended to by Boy Kavalier (Stupid name. It's more like a descriptive phrase than an actual name). I think on some level he cares about the hybrids, certainly more than Kavalier does, but being more analytical than sentimental, I think the Morrow-Slightly situation interests him from a point of gaining knowledge or perhaps some position of power or leverage over his maker. I'm just waiting for his Soundwave moment: "Kirsch superior, Kavalier inferior!" 😄

26 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

  Hide contents

Kirsh definitely seems to be aware that something is wrong with Slightly, though it is a bit odd that Prodigy's private island doesn't have secure communications that would detect a rogue transmission like that.  Neverland is supposedly Prodigy's most secure secret facility so you'd think infosec would be a priority.

 

 

 

Yep, but Kirsch is not telling anyone, which points to a probable agenda. And yeah, on an island that one would assume would have the absolute state of the art info security and monitoring systems in existence, created by the world's smartest douchebag, Morrow's ability to avoid detection by all but Kirsch, whose sole ability to detect it remains mysteriously unexplained, shoots a huge hole in the presumptive infallibility of said douchebag and his technological wizardry. But then again, so does psychologically unbalanced Nibs, as one would think the super-computer brain would be equipped to deal with errant thought patterns and such, but hybrids with flat affects wouldn't make for good tv, I guess.

26 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

In space, nobody can hear FX lazily rip off the original Alien in the hopes that that will make this mess less unwatchable?

LOL. I'm enjoying the show, but it requires tabling a lot of WTF issues. It's apparently getting great reviews now, but I wonder how it'll hold up under the microscope of time.

Edited August 29 by M'Kyuun