Ask A Genius 1521: Blackmail, Facehugger Trap, and Today’s Culture Wars
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/09/23
Are Alien’s new terrors about technology replacing us—or just mirrors for today’s politics?
In episode six, Scott Douglas Jacobsen hears Rick Rosner’s mid-watch recap: Slightly is blackmailed by Morrow to lure Hermit into a facehugger trap as Prodigy braces for Weyland-Yutani. Rosner pivots to the shooting of Charlie Kirk, noting online grief-policing and Jacobsen’s satirical “heaven press release.” He contrasts 1979’s eroticized Alien—phallic menace, vulval eggs, Sigourney Weaver’s empowered Ripley—with the series’ new dread: technological displacement by synthetics and erased sexuality, including trauma edits of a red-haired child. He flags bomb threats shutting campuses, including HBCUs, and a West Point scare, while observing the right’s rush to scapegoat colleges and broader political anxieties.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What happened in episode six of Alien Earth?
Rick Rosner: I am about halfway through it. Slightly, one of the kids whose brain was transferred into a synthetic body, is being blackmailed by Morrow, and he is trying to get Hermit—
So, slightly, the kid whose brain was transferred into a synthetic body is being blackmailed by Moro, who wants him to get Hermit to stand next to a xenomorph egg and be attacked by a facehugger. Hermit, being an adult, responds that it is bizarre for a child to ask him to do this.
Hermit is part of a team of medical commandos. He is less combat-trained than his surviving teammates. Still, they are medics who go into dangerous situations to save lives. He is called away to patrol with the others because Prodigy Corporation suspects that Weyland-Yutani will come for the aliens Prodigy has been holding on the island. They talk about how they fear the aliens themselves more than any human threat. That is where I paused the episode.
Jacobsen: Any updated thoughts on Robinson?
Rosner: The shooter, Tyler Robinson, was academically capable. A video shows him receiving a scholarship offer to Utah State University worth about $32,000 over four years. That makes him the type of person who can unravel catastrophically. Think Ted Kaczynski: brilliant but warped. Yet the pictures of him circulating do not suggest instability—he looks normal, even wholesome. One photo shows him in a diner, eating pancakes topped with sunny-side-up eggs and sausages. Ironically, that just made me hungry. Carole and I are going to IHOP, and I might try the all-you-can-eat pancakes. Some “good” has come out of this, but I say that jokingly.
There has been fierce debate online about joking in this context. People are attempting to cancel anyone who appears to celebrate Charlie Kirk’s death. I have not done that. There is an important distinction: you can strongly disagree with Kirk’s rhetoric and public commentary without dancing on the grave of someone murdered. There was also debate about whether he went to heaven.
Some said he certainly did not. Others shot back, “You cannot know that, and you are cruel for saying so.” That argument unfolded online in real time.
Let me finish up here. So, I responded to the argument over whether Charlie Kirk is in heaven with a parody press release “from heaven.”
Rosner: You published a fake press release of Charlie Kirk in heaven on Twitter?
Jacobsen: I published a tweet that acted as a press release, saying that, yes, Charlie Kirk has officially been admitted to heaven, but was only awarded a “residence fourth class,” which is 12 square meters with a 400-millimetre porthole, an in-room sink but no shower, and seating at the 5:30 buffet.
Rosner: That is not an unfair joke.
Jacobsen: Right. I do not feel it is celebrating. What would you call it, though?
Rosner: Anyway, so, they are making fun of me again. Let us get back to Alien. The initial Alien movie came out in 1979, though production began around 1976. The film is rich in sexual themes. The egg was designed to resemble the opening of a vulva. Initially, it was depicted with two lips, but the designers thought it looked too much like “two vulvas,” so they altered it into a four-leaf design. Still, it looks unmistakably sexual.
The alien’s head has phallic features, and the horror is bound up in penetration—from the facehugger implanting embryos, to the chestburster’s violent emergence, to the secondary jaws.
Culturally, this was toward the end of the disco era. The United States was experiencing a herpes epidemic and other rising STDs. After half a decade of sexual liberation, there was also a growing awareness of its darker side. At the same time, feminist critiques were highlighting how “rapey” American culture was. Against this backdrop, Alien embodied anxieties about sex, control, and violation.
They cast Sigourney Weaver—nearly six feet tall—as a commanding, physically powerful woman who only grows stronger when she straps into the exoskeletal loader. That choice emphasized the interplay of sexual horror and gender dynamics.
By contrast, the current Alien series reflects different cultural anxieties. Instead of sexual dread, it emphasizes humanity’s inferiority. Humans appear weak, fleshy, and vulnerable compared to various artificial beings: Moro, who retains a human brain in a cybernetic body; Kirsch, whose brain and body are both robotic; and the children whose minds are implanted into adult synthetic bodies.
The aliens, importantly, do not reproduce through facehuggers with inorganic beings. Thus, the newer narratives shift the horror from sexual violation to technological displacement—mirroring today’s fears of being supplanted by AI and advanced robotics.
All the sex is stripped out. For one thing, the six kids might have adult-looking bodies, but their brains are still those of 10- to 12-year-olds. So the idea of sex has been taken away, except for one—the red-haired girl. Faced with trauma, she was attacked by the eye monster. The eye monster starts claiming, impossibly, because she is in a synthetic body, that she is pregnant. This seems like a callback to the original Alien, which had themes of impregnation. They have to shut her down and erase the trauma from her brain.
So she forgets that she had the encounter with the eye creature. She forgets that she claimed she was pregnant. There is an erasing of sexuality in this version of Alien and a replacement with anxiety about being the inferior species.
Also, a bunch of schools got shut down for bomb threats, including five HBCUs. All it takes is a phone call to shut down a college. There was also an incident at West Point Military Academy where a call about a threat may have led to actual gunplay. The right is trying to blame the college for radicalizing the shooter, even though he had little college experience. They are just trying to mess with them.
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