Episode Details

The Tastemakers |Talking Alien: Earth with Stephen Fishbach

Each week, The Tastemakers reviews television and movies, advising listeners on “what you should and shouldn’t watch”.

This week, with Taran on “Big Brother duty”, Grace is joined by “off-brand Taran”, Stephen Fishbach.

Watch on this episode on Youtube:

https://youtu.be/-e-akyIX4jI

Key Topics and Discussion Points:

The main topic of the episode is the recently concluded show Alien: Earth, which Grace and Stephen discuss in “full spoiler detail”.

Alien Earth Analysis:

Stephen, a fan of the Alien franchise, argues that critics who complained about the characters in Alien Earth behaving misunderstand the premise of an Alien movie. Grace and Stephen agree that the show contained “a ton of really interesting ideas,” but they felt that many were not executed perfectly, leading to a “disjointed” feel. Grace believes that Noah Holly, the show’s creator, felt constrained by being asked by FX to do an Alien show set on Earth before the events of the first Alien movie. They discuss Holly’s strong central idea of putting human consciousness into synthetic bodies as a means of saving humanity. However, they felt this Peter Pan idea often clashed with the necessary inclusion of aliens. The metaphor was described as “really heavy-handed”.

Both hosts praised Episode 5 (the Imaginino episode), which Steven found “so perfect”. They also found the “eyeball alien” to be “much more interesting and cooler than the actual xenomorph” in the show. They agreed the show was “really beautifully done” and looked “great top to bottom,” praising its “cassette futurism” and the way it successfully nailed the Alien visual identity. Steven felt the character Maro, played by Baba, was the most exciting part of the show and suggested he should have his own spin-off series. They noted that the Xenomorph model looked a litt