Quote from: BlueMarsalis79 on May 12, 2022, 05:14:19 PMYou have to accept that the androids and artificial intelligence are replicants in all but name in the Alien franchise, it's not just an emulation of humanity to Ridley Scott and pretty much everyone else to touch the series in any capacity, but an extension of humanity itself.
What franchise have you been watching?
Androids in the Alien franchise are obvious. They bleed milk and are made of spaghetti and glass beads. They cannot pass for human like the organic androids of Blade Runner.
Ash wasn't an extension of humanity, he was the ultimate corporate plant. He didn't pose any real philosophical questions for the crew.
Bishop has programmed behavioural inhibitors. Synthetic crew members are taken for granted. His artificial nature is used to sow doubts as to his loyalties, not reflect on the nature of mankind. In Alien 3 he's used as a glorified terminal.
Call is again treated as a glorified toaster oven when she's revealed.
The expanded series regularly features android soldiers that are barely more than robotic.
Occasionally the series has dipped its toe into more-human-than-human robots (the first comic series has androids that don't know they're androids), but it wasn't until
Prometheus that we went to
Blade Runner-esque existentialism about the nature of creation and identity.
The Alien franchise pretty consistently treated androids as yet another alien force within the universe, an uncanny valley of almost-real.
And for what it's worth, replicants are just organic androids with a fancy name because they thought people calling them "andies" like they do in the book would sound silly. It's not meant to indicate they're something more than androids -- they're just particularly sophisticated.