Be forewarned: there are Alien Earth Season 1 spoilers ahead!

“In stuff I’m watching, Alien Earth is awesome. I’m absolutely loving it. Alien is one of my favourite films of all time (what a basic bitch) and so far Alien Earth has nailed the tone.” – Joab Gilroy, one month ago from today, about to be extremely wrong.

I guess at the time I was right. Alien Earth did nail the tone towards the start of the season. Retro-futurist cyber-punk, corpratocratic bickering, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl realised on screen, it took what I loved about Alien and expanded upon it wonderfully.

Then, like… I guess like a lot of Alien films, actually… it all started to fall apart.

I still subscribe to the idea that you get to handwave away a couple things over the course of a story. Especially when you’re dealing with the sort of Clarkian ‘sufficiently advanced science’ kind of magic that is modern sci-fi. Even hard sci-fi can do this a little bit. The Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy (The Three-Body Problem) presents itself as hard sci-fi but is happy to pull some tricks to which the answer is simply “the science is beyond our comprehension”. 

So when the xenomorph in Alien Earth decided to pose over Morrow’s shoulder instead of obliterating him, I gave the show a pass. Maybe it wasn’t hungry any more. Maybe he controlled his fear—that is what he claimed triggered the monster, after all.

But by episode seven I was handwaving so much it was altering global weather patterns. Why do these corporations only appear to hire 12 people total? Why are the Hybrid bodies seemingly so fragile? Why would the husband and wife who have worked together to create transhuman androids not talk to one another at all when one got fired? Why would nobody tell Wendy/Marcy that they were going to wipe Nibs’ memory? Or, if they don’t want to do that, why give Wency unlimited access to Nibs?

When Marndy started exhibiting the ability to control computer systems with her mind, why did they not… do something about that?

I’m not going to list all the issues I had. There were many. Too many. And eventually, the entire damn thing toppled over.

For me, that toppling came when Wercy placed her open palm on the snout of the Xenomorph. I wasn’t thrilled that she was talking to the thing in the first place, but that was a bridge too far. I probably should have just turned the show off right there and then.

Xenomorphs, in the canon of the Alien franchise, cannot be domesticated. They are a bullet already fired, a bomb already dropped. A catastrophe in action, the survival instinct given terrible form. Allowing our protagonist to control the thing at all is a terrible decision, in my opinion.

It should never have happened.

I think the intention is to demonstrate in Season 2 that our hybrid characters are exhibiting monumental hubris, and I believe in Season 2 we will see that come back to bite them. That is the arc, after all, already experienced by the other characters in Alien Earth. Each of them thought they could control the hybrids, and the season ends with them being fully aware that they had grabbed the tiger by the tail. Surely that happens to Wendy and her friends.

It shouldn’t have been held back to Season 2, however. I’m not entirely sure something like Alien Earth needs two seasons—and neither does Disney, because they haven’t greenlit a second season yet. Alien Earth might actually end on a cliffhanger where a human/synth hybrid is in full control of a Xenomorph.

What a colossal unforced error that would be.

Anyway, the other thing that is true is that Alien Earth being bad doesn’t make other Alien media bad. Alien and Aliens are still fantastic films, with the others exhibiting varying levels of quality. I think it’s helpful that the series has films like Alien Covenant and Prometheus, which helped me come to terms with that fact.

Also Kirsch, the Prodigy synth played by Timothy Olyphant, is an amazing character and I hope at the very least to see him in action again.

Before I kick onto a writing update, a quick little aside!

I am taking part in the Lift the Load challenge with my editor and writing partner Nathan Lawrence! We’re chucking on 10kg vests to cover 50 kilometers in an effort to raise money and awareness of the mental health challenges faced by young men.

October is Mental Health month in Australia, and 40% of all men face a mental health crisis at some time in their lives. It’s devastatingly true that 75% of all suicides are committed by men. Lift the Load raises money for the Top Blokes Foundation, a charity that focuses on advocacy and support for boys and young men as they face the challenges of life.

If you think that’s a worthy cause (and it is), chuck some money their way. You can donate as much or as little as you like. And you can check out my Instagram to follow along with my progress.

Anyway on to a writing update! Final Final Girl is going really well. I’ve got some great momentum and I am confident it will be out by the end of the year. I have, hilariously, started to tear down the skeleton of book two in the series as I no longer love it. But I have a good system now, so I don’t think it will cause as large a setback.

What might cause a setback is my schedule in October. I’m going to Japan for two weeks, I’ve entered a WritingBattles competition again… it might throw a bit of a spanner in the works. But I’ll do my best, which is all I can do, and I’ll try to stay on track.

In terms of reading, I picked up Victor LaValle’s The Devil in Silver at the markets the other day and I’m enjoying it, although it feels a little scattered. I can’t tell if that’s thematic or not yet. Time will tell.

In video games I am playing Silent Hill f, and I will have a review of it, as always, over on thegapodcast.com/ when I am done!

And in tv shows/films… I’ve learned my lesson. I’m watching stuff I like and I don’t want to jinx it by saying what it is.