Bad Reader

Thoughts about Alien: Earth and bad reading skills

Author

Jesse Raub
September 25, 2025

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Let’s take that one more time

In an extracurricular literature club in high school, we read Catcher in the Rye. It wasn’t my first time reading Catcher in the Rye, and I was rearing to go when the discussion started up. I’m just not so sure what to think about the mental institution stuff, my clubmate said. What mental institution stuff, I shot back. All the stuff at the beginning, the preamble, they replied. That’s not about a mental institution, I shot back. Everyone around the table looked at me askance.

Folks: I was a bad reader.

In a household where TV time was limited and books were encouraged, I read almost everything I could get my hands on. I loved being transported into different worlds, I loved living in the thoughts of a character with a personality opposite to mine, but most of all, I loved narrative. I loved watching story beats unfurl and twist around each other until you finally reached some revelation that made all 240-odd pages worth it. And I missed a lot of details.

I read more carefully these days, but I miss the energy of my youth, when I’d blaze through books and had to flip back a few pages to figure out what I missed. As careless as that was, I can’t help but think about the classic Oprah/Toni Morrison anecdote. “It’s called reading,” is a grounding phrase for me when I get hung up in a book, going line by line. The pace of a book is whatever pace I set, and if I have to revisit a passage to figure out why the narrator has two free hands (where did that baby that she was holding go?), then so be it. What I get from a book is reliant on the effort I put into it. And so what if I’m a bad reader? Maybe I get to read a story about a character that no one else gets to. Maybe Holden Caulfield never gets committed.

I think Noah Hawley is a bad reader, too.

Aside from some procedural stints and creating a Jeremy Renner/Amber Tamblyn cop show, the bulk of his creative success has been through reimagining the movie Fargo for his five-season TV show, along with a more contemplative take on the X-Men character Legion for, well, Legion. Hawley’s version of these texts (especially with Fargo) pokes at the source material with a stick like a kid looking at a dead frog in the road. Ultimately, he’s interested in telling his own stories. Practically, he needs something to manipulate in order to tell the stories he wants to. Maybe if you’ve got an existing character, you can make them dance in an entirely new way that no one was expecting. Maybe if you poke that dead frog in the right way, it’ll dance for you, too.

Hawley’s Fargo is a pale shade of the original Fargo, a movie I’m somewhat of an expert on. In a way, Hawley keeps trying to remake the movie as best he can (the first and fifth seasons being the most direct one-to-ones), and somehow it never turns out the same. The mostly excellent second season, for instance, cribs the ending from the Coens’ The Man Who Wasn’t There. But that doesn’t mean that Fargo, the television program, is a wash. Hawley lets his stories meander around interesting characters, and he teases incredible performances from top-tier acting talent in a truly compelling way. To some degree, it feels like Noah Hawley is attempting to process Fargo by remaking it every two years.

As a Minnesotan, it’s easy to see where Hawley misses the details of the Coen Brothers’ movie. The accent work is rough in many places, and the mannerisms aren’t quite right. Jerry Lundegaard wears his beige parka with panache. Lester Nygaard’s blood red parka wears him. The color of the coat isn’t going to make or break the narrative, but it is a key detail as to who Jerry Lundegaard is, and how that comes across on screen.

With Alien: Earth, Hawley once again falls into the bad reader zone. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The Alien movies, or at least the Ridley Scott ones, are mostly about how the xenomorph is the ultimate psychological terror and a mindless killing machine, and woe to anyone who thinks they can create, control, or harness its wrath. Alien: Earth is precisely the opposite of that. Wendy (Sydney Chandler), a synthetic humanoid with a real person’s consciousness, can directly talk with and command the xenomorph. It’s Wendy (formerly Marcy) who cannot be controlled.

Alien: Earth is in direct conversation with Scott’s later films, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, where the director has become fascinated with the concept of creation. In those movies, an aging corporate magnate takes to the stars with his android companion to discover the creators of humanity. His android companion, then, decides that creation is the ultimate divine pursuit and sets about developing the modern xenomorph through trials and tests, with the idea that one day he might eradicate humanity with his newly engineered species. Wendy, to some degree, has the closest parallels to androids David and Walter from those movies, but conceptually, Hawley’s series doesn’t quite line up with its source material.

To a degree, the Scott Alien movies are about discovery. In all three, a space crew sets out to find something, only to discover terror instead. Hubris, of course, is the star of the show—but these movies exist to a degree of the audience knowing something the characters in the movie don’t. When a chestburster bursts from the chest of John Hurt in Alien, the crew has a simple reaction: “What the fuck is that?!?!” The audience has a different reaction: “Ah, so that’s the titular alien, huh.” Even Prometheus, which went out of its way not to be advertised as an Alien movie upon release, was soon saddled with word-of-mouth reviews letting everyone know: “Don’t worry, it’s an Alien movie.” Sure enough, here comes an alien.

The cycle of the three Scott movies is firmly rooted in horror, a genre that requires the audience to know more than the character on screen to build dread and tension as scenes develop. The movies progress as follows:

  1. Crew goes off in search of something (rescue mission, God, colonial lands)

  2. Crew finds something terrifying they can’t explain

  3. In grappling with the unknown, crew struggles to take decisive action

  4. Hubris

  5. Crew mostly dies to the alien (or in Prometheus’ case, an alien)

Above all else, the xenomorph is the Great Unknowable. Even when we’re told specifically that it was designed as a bioweapon, the honest answer as to what the xenomorph is hearkens back to H.R. Giger’s original designs: a psychosexual nightmare designed to trigger penetration fear. But as the off-screen bad guy, rarely shown for longer than ten seconds at a time, the xenomorph can be whatever you’re afraid of: greed, progress, motherhood—you name it. Facing the xenomorph is facing all of your fears combined.

Noah Hawley’s series doesn’t care about the xenomorph. The first episode opens with it wreaking havoc on a ship, and it tears through a housing block, murdering everything it finds after that ship crashes into Earth. We see the alien, we know the alien, but then again, so do the characters. Horror movie conventions out the window, Alien: Earth becomes something else.

Behind every Alien movie is the concept that a greedy corporation is willing to sacrifice life after life in order to harness the power of this pure killing machine. Alien: Earth puts that directive front and center, but wants to reimagine it for the modern tech crowd. Weyland-Yutani wants the xenomorph for unstated nefarious purposes. Boy Kavalier, the founder of Prodigy Corporation, wants the xenomorph simply because Weyland-Yutani wants it. His main goal is to upload human consciousness into synthetic bodies to create new hybrid androids, which, of course, to him are a new product line. The instinct to innovate solely for profit mirrors our modern-day tech dystopia, but this top-secret research lab also provides the sandbox in which Hawley’s characters get to play.

There are interesting ideas explored, top-notch actors, and a plot that shifts in some thoughtful ways. But there’s also a feeling that this isn’t a very good Alien story, even if it is a good story. The alien itself is used in the wrong ways, but it’s also cast aside somewhat into the background. In Scott’s movies, the xenomorph was the Great Unknown. In Alien: Earth, that title belongs to another creature: the Eye. Boy Kavalier's disinterest in the xenomorph suggests a similar disinterest in Hawley himself: it’s a half-sentient apex predator. We know how it works, we know what it wants. The Eye, however, after implanting itself into a sheep, after being prodded for six or so episodes, reveals itself to be fully sentient and capable of basic communication.

In a world where the xenomorph is no longer the unstoppable killing machine it was designed to be, it no longer functions as the catchall metaphor it once did. But that’s perfectly fine: Hawley’s Alien might not fit well with the Alien canon, but it doesn’t necessarily have to in order to stay compelling and watchable. In some ways, it feels like Hawley is constantly making art as a way to process the art that inspired him. That is to say, like Dave Grohl at the 50:00 mark in the Sound City documentary wanting to be the Beatles, I sincerely believe that Noah Hawley wants to be Ridley Scott or the Coen Brothers. It’s just that when he tries to do exactly what they did, it comes out looking like the things that he makes. His pastiche never falters into parody, but it often lacks enough of the elements that made the originals what they were to truly fit the franchise.

That is to say, Noah Hawley, like me, is a bad reader.

But that doesn’t make him a bad creator, even if I find myself frustrated by some of his choices. And for anyone else lamenting Alien: Earth’s lack of Alienness, like me, they can just rewatch Episode 5 to get their fix before diving back into Hawley’s world of creation, control, and hybrid synths. And if that doesn’t take, well, it might just be time to rewatch Season 2 of Fargo, again.

I don’t think there’s ever been a better TV character than Bokeem Woodbine’s Mike Milligan.

Read

In an attempt to stay current, I snagged a pile of new releases across the street and am trying to catch up on all of them. I remain affected, however, by Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Black Flame. It winds itself through a single, pulsing narrative of a young film preservationist attempting to restore a brutal sexual horror film discovered in a Nazi’s hidden personal stash. Visceral, tense, brutal, and gut-wrenching, Black Flame digs into a single question with absolute tenacity: What if you can’t stop doing something even if everything in the universe tells you it’s wrong?

Watch

Jane Campion’s characters howl their way through displeasure in ways that can only exist in her works and real life. They bristle at good decisions, they wallow in discomfort, and they can’t stop themselves from spitting in the face of everyone around them. Top of the Lake: China Girl teases out themes from Top of the Lake and twists them around into an absolute mess. It’s nearly impossible to describe this show as anything but a raw wound whose scabs you keep picking at. Gone is the whodunnit plot device of the first series, giving way to a whydunnit momentum at which most characters can only say, “I don’t know.” Truly compelling. Truly like it.

Listen

I didn’t know what to do with this song the first time I heard it. In my youth, I wanted Dismemberment Plan to be explainable, like Death Cab for Cutie or Pedro the Lion: at some point in time, punk music evolved to be more emotional, slower, and slightly experimental. “Sentimental Man,” however, kicks off their 2001 album Change with a trip-hop-inspired break beat and looping guitar melodies instead of a straight-up chord progression. With lyrics like “I like my coffee black and my parole denied,” the song teases out the edges of aging ungracefully, fighting against whatever it is you wouldn’t have in your youth. All-time banger.

Consume

There’s an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations in Singapore where he has his mind blown by Hainanese chicken and rice. It’s a simple dish of poached chicken over rice with a flavorful broth and sometimes an added sauce. At our house, we often make a version inspired by the Thai version: Khao Man Gai. I probably wrote about it here before. But what I didn’t write about is the sauce from Nong’s, a Khao Man Gai staple in Portland. The sauce is lightly spicy and sweet with a base of soy sauce and fermented soy beans. It’s extremely craveable and goes great on everything, though it’s extremely excellent on Khao Man Gai, specifically.

Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.