Quote from: Immortan Jonesy on Jul 02, 2019, 03:38:15 AM
You can make a great design if you want, but the Space Jockey was just a generic extraterrestrial being and the first victim of the Alien. It's just a prelude to what is about to happen to the characters, and no relationship between the two species is required. The Derelict is found stranded in the middle of space by the Nostromo's crew, near a strange formation of asteroids.
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After the discovery of a pyramid-shaped symbol drawn by the Space Jockey, the crew leaves the alien ship and begin to explore the asteroid field. Once there, they find the fragments of the Old Ones' home world and an ancient pyramid.
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Inside the pyramid everything is biomechanical in design, and Big Chap is a teenage/middle state, so to speak; of an intelligent organism. At the end of the story one can appreciate the final metamorphosis and shape of the Alien. But of course, the site "Alien Explorations" explained it better:
"Expanding on this in the original conception of the Alien race, the inhabitants of the planetoid are seen as tough and primitive, and with an extremely complicated sexual cycle. Reproduction was very difficult for them and had therefore become central to their religion. And this pyramid was a temple to reproduction. The inhabitants of this world had three entirely different stages in it's life-cycle which are featured as very stylised hieroglyphs on the wall of the birthing temple."
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I'd only replace the octopus-like monster with the beautefull Giger's beast, plus the final state or "evolution" of Big Chap with Giger vibes as well, and the interiors of the temple with the biomechanical aesthetic. The true life cycle of the creature involves eggmorphing. The Queen is an abomination created with military purpose in a research facility by Weyland Yutani. The latter fits with an Aliens reboot, though.
Hey! That's cool.
Now I'll have a go...
Here's a reboot idea, this one for a TV series. But first, some thoughts, following on from preceding posts:
Remember
The X-Files? (which I think has been mentioned in relation to this topic before). Ultimately that entire series is held together by its mytharc, the story of the impending alien colonisation of Earth, even though there were many other side stories that filled out each season. And sometimes stories that seemed to be unrelated or only tenuously connected (the black oil, the bee virus, the secret cabal of scheming industrialists), turned out to be part of the mytharc after all.
An
Alien TV show could follow the same format - the overarching storyline being the discovery of the origins of the xenomorph.
So even if there are episodes that don't feature an actual xenomorph onscreen, as long as their presence is there to motivate events and characters, I think it could still work. It might even be preferable to use the xenomorphs this way, because if every episode features the xeno then you run the risk of overusing them to the point where they lose impact (there's a reason why the Daleks only show up once per season of
Dr Who).
OK. So in my imaginary
Alien TV series, I'm going to make one of the new protagonists a bit like Sean Connery's Federal Marshall from
Outland. (Maybe he could be played by William Hope, who played the Marshall in
Alien Isolation.) From his office on Thedus, he has to field all sorts of mysterious distress calls and emergencies the likes of which he's never experienced before. This is because this region of space has only recently been opened to human exploration, and unlike every other part of the galaxy humans have visited, this one shows signs of having been inhabited by an intelligent, space-faring species at some time in the past. To assist the Marshall in his work, he deputises a Colonial Administration exobiologist called Dr Elizabeth Shaw. (And there I've got my Mulder and Scully of the show.)
To further spice up the story, I'm putting a reboot of the movie events into the background. So while the Marshall is dealing with a case of Working Joes running amok on some space station, he hears a report that one of Weyland-Yutani's space-freighter refineries just blew up. And in another episode when he and Dr Shaw are investigating a hibernation-ship that suddenly appears after being lost for 50 years, he receives a call for assistance from a colony called Hadley's Hope which is experiencing a sinister case of child abductions.
Into the mix I'll throw in the corporate warfare between rival tech companies Weyland-Yutani, Seegson, Con-Am and Tyrell, as well as the social upheaval of robot and AI technology, clones, and colonial tribalism. And I guess I'll chuck in a military story or two for good measure.
So there's plenty of opportunity for conflict and drama, requiring investigation from our stalwart heroes. And by the end of the first season, once you've added all the episodes together, I'll have Dr Shaw summarise the mytharc so far: that the xenomorph is an artificially engineered organism, seeded in this corner of the galaxy at some time in the past by a technologically superior alien race, for some mysterious purpose. What is this purpose, where is the alien race now, and are they returning any time soon?
And so to season two...
TC
