"Alien: Earth" - "Neverland" & "Mr. October"

Spoilers ahead, Noah Hawley’s “Fargo” series boasts some of the best storytelling I’ve seen in any medium.

So it’s with slumped shoulders that “Alien: Earth” saw me finding less-than-sound value for emotional investment, then any suspension of disbelief crowded out in the first episode, and tossed out entirely in the second.

The quirky, happy-go-lucky team of kids around our protagonist, Wendy, reminds us quickly that the xenomorphs are now fully-branded Disney IP now. We are literally beaten over the head with this fact via "Peter Pan" projected on ceilings, and a host of goofy names that feel like willful efforts to put distance from the artistry and sharpness of Ridley, Cameron, and Fincher’s visions in this supposedly shared universe.

The packaging overall feels aimed at a demographic I might be aged out of, which is puzzling when the menu for this meal inside the Magic Kingdom has chest-busting, gore by the gallon, and bioethics on deck.

That said, the issues at hand are worth the air time. The more people of any age we can get aware and talking about the evils of creating life for the explicit aim of manufacturing slaves and child soldiers, the better.

To be sure, the hybrids, synths, and cyborgs we see here aren’t about anything else. Don’t be fooled.

Still, I can’t help but laugh at an imagined 2120 equipped with god-tier genetic technology, off-world colonization as common practice, and faster-than-light travel held above a debate on artificial intelligence stuck in 2025.

As fast as we’re seeing AI change our world now, which is as fast as stock tickers can report it, the odds of such a conversation happening 85 years from now, to me, feel on par with the probability of the “Alien” franchise making a positive turn from here.

After strikes one and two in the idiot plots of “Prometheus," then strike three-“you’re out but I grew up with this team” that came with new fan-service bottoms dug out by “Romulus,” I’m resolved to the same weariness I have as a “Star Wars” and “Jurassic” fan. I’m getting a dish that is, at the very least, not boring, and hits nostalgic buttons that aren’t unwelcome, but speak to priority on revenue over creative courage.

Am I going to keep watching?

Sure, dunking is fun, and I’d love to be surprised by redemption.

“Andor" comes to mind for about-face franchise rebounds. But any comparisons of that haymaker of a win for a franchise that desperately needed one and “Earth” so far, for me, connects like Giger in Toontown.