Alien: Earth on Hulu.

Boy, this show was a roller coaster of good ideas, bad ideas, and hit-or-miss execution. I absolutely hated the first 2 episodes, to the point that I really didn't want to watch any more of the show. But my partner was liking it (I guess?) and she wanted to keep watching, so I watched it with her. I'm not sure if I'm happy that I stuck it out, or not. It does get a little bit better -- for a little bit -- but then it completely shits the bed.

I wasn't keen on the show being about children's minds being implanted into android bodies. Going on to treat them like a super hero team was one of the cringiest things I've ever seen in this franchise (and that includes Alien: Resurrection and Prometheus).

But then the show starts to get into the ethics, morality, and metaphysics of putting someone's consciousness into an android body (and other questions regarding trans-humanism), and the mind-body dilemma that is inherent to such an idea. Here Alien: Earth starts to get genuinely good. Are the androids really the same people? Are the original people dead? Are the androids property of the company that manufactured them? Does that company have the right to control what that android does? Does that company have the right to wipe parts of that android's memory, or change the android's personality, in order to fix a "glitch"?

Of course, all of these questions can be adequately explored without having the gimmick of implanting children's minds into the androids. The writers could just as easily have written a story about regular androids becoming sentient, and pose the exact same questions about whether they are "property" or "people". It's been done a billion times before in science fiction, so even though these are all interesting questions, it's nothing particularly new or innovative. I think the use of children was done to make the audience more sympathetic and "human-like", because the people in charge don't have any respect for the intelligence of their audience. It could also have been a decision made in order to justify the characters doing stupid, illogical things, but I'll get to that later.

At the same time, there are completely new aliens that have never been seen in this franchise before, that get a lot of screen time. There's a creepy, parasitic eyeball alien thing that is probably the single best idea that this entire show has going for it. It's gross and disturbing on a visceral level, but also the idea of it tunneling into your brain and taking control of your body is terrifying on an existential level. Honestly, an entire show (without the Alien title and branding) about that eyeball parasite probably could have been worth watching on its own. But Hollywood is averse to new IPs and can't make anything that doesn't have a recognizable brand attached to it -- again, because executives have no respect for the intelligence of their audiences.

Alien: Earth season 1, episode 1 - © Walt Disney, Hulu

Treating these cyborg children like a superhero team was so stupid.

I really did not like Prometheus. The characters kept doing stupid things in order to create conflict and tension. The android antagonist seemed to act belligerently with no real reason to do so, and with the audience having no real idea what he was even trying to do. The tie-in to Alien also felt completely unnecessary and [more importantly] unwelcome. Apparently, the writers of Alien: Covenant saw those complaints and decided to double-down on all of them.

Covenant completely lost me as soon as the crew steps off the lander without any sort of environmental suits or helmets.

I could overlook the fact that the crew decides to land on the planet immediately instead of waiting for the storms to pass. Maybe they thought this was a rescue mission and time would be of the essence. Whatever.

I could excuse them for somehow completely missing the ruins of an alien city being within walking distance of the source of the transmission.

I could maybe even excuse the rapid pacing with which the alien gestates after being implanted by the facehugger, and how fast the alien grows. In the original movie, the facehugger was on the guy's face for like a whole day, then the chestburster doesn't pop out till the next day, and then it takes about another whole day for the xenomorph to grow to maturity. In Covenant, the whole process takes a matter of minutes or hours.

I could overlook all that stuff in a cleverer movie. But setting foot on an unknown alien world without even bothering to protect yourself from potential contaminants, and then setting the entire movie's conflict on infectious agents, is just unforgivable. Even Prometheus at least got that right ... until the crew decided to all take off their helmets because scans indicated that the "air is breathable".

Why aren't you wearing environmental suits?!

You know what else is unforgivably stupid? Following a duplicitous android into his bio-weapon research lab and then sticking your face in an alien egg sac because he kindly asked you to. As soon as the captain found out that David had killed and/or experimented on Shaw, why didn't he just shot and killed him?

The movie is also a structural and pacing nightmare. The first 20 minutes of movie feels like pointless filler; while the last 30 minutes is a lazy, rushed rehash of the first Alien movie without any of the tension, suspense, or mystery. I could buy into the first thirty minutes being a "world-building" exercise, but not when you then go on to fail so miserably at world-building by not having your protagonists follow the most rudimentary of sci-fi safety procedures.

Aside from establishing the terraforming module, that first act really does absolutely nothing to set up anything later in the movie...