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"...And because the Alien has this life cycle to it, where it goes from egg, to chestburster, to xenomorph, there becomes a certain routine to it."
Translation: The beast is cooked.
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He continued: "I thought it would be interesting if you could expand. If you're going to make something for television, you've got 10 hours let's say. Even if you have a lot of action, like two hours, then you're still going to have eight hours left. So what is the show about? That's what I tried to talk to them about. As I did with Legion, the exercise is: Let's take the superhero stuff out of the show and see if it's still a great show. What's the show about? Let's take the Alien out of the show. What's the show about? What are the themes, who are the characters and what is the human drama? Then we drop the aliens back in and we go, 'This is great. Not only is there great human drama, but there's aliens!'"
He's saying all the right things here. But nothing a good writer is unaware of.
"Let's take the Alien out of the show. What's the show about?"In TV, 9 times out of 10, if you take the X out of the show, what the show is about, is
family.
OK, a bit of exaggeration there, but it's true of
Madam Secretary, it's true of
Big Bang Theory, it's true of
Agents of Shield. Even a police procedural like
NCIS:LA - family.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's the way you tell it that counts. It would fit in with an Alien series too. After all,
Aliens '86 was about motherhood. That's pretty close.
TC