Of course, it doesn’t make much sense for me to sit and moan about Disney deciding to pay out the money to Noah Hawley to be able to realize a second season of Alien: Earth. I have explained in several rounds what I consider to be radically wrong with this TV series and how little I really liked it, and thus I must have finished nagging? Reasonably yes. But I love to nag. I’m the nagger of all time and by that I hereby mean to nag a little more about how little I want to see a second season of Earth. Zero percent suction, from here. Zero. Absolutely zero. Because this TV series could have worked well if it (just like the Halo series) hadn’t been about an established, loved, staked out, well-studied, long-designed and defined film license where we already know the mythology, inside and out.
Alien: Earth should have been about a new space monster. Hawley should have come up with one of his own, stood on his own two feet, because then all his bizarre deviations from Ridley Scott’s wonderful universe would have worked, of course. Then he would have been able to fully realize his own mythology and his own premise. His androids who larped annoying children could have worked. That a thin little girl in Prince Valiant frippa bull-held a Xenomorph with a scouring stick could have worked, if it was another monster that we didn’t all know had slaughtered the girl before she even had time to snatch the broom – if Hawley hadn’t smoked dirty drugs before he wrote the script. All of that could have worked, if it hadn’t been Alien, because apart from ten minutes on the ship at the beginning of Earth, where everything happened – there wasn’t a single second of the entire season one that felt like Alien, in the right way. Not one.