Ask A Genius 1523: Alien Earth, Craftsman Violence, and the Perils of Perfection
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/09/23
Can mid-tier spectacle still sing when character inevitability carries the load?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen asks for an update; Rick Rosner toggles from an OCD-shirt gym chat and a teen’s hair-tic echoing an Emmy winner to Alien: Earth’s mid-episode beats: Wendy/Marcy protests Nibs’s memory wipe, Hermit consults a fired scientist, and an insect-fed death nears discovery in real time. Rosner thinks machine-eating insects signal attrition without erasing the core cast. He rates the series 8–8.5 and contrasts spectacle with craft: Elmore Leonard’s inevitable, unsensational collisions versus Fast & Furious physics. Regretting not greeting Elmore Leonard (and passing on Harlan Ellison), he skewers clichés, praises fairer game-show mechanics, and warns perfectionism smothers output.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is up with your highly accurate shirt, by the way?
Rick Rosner: I am wearing my OCD shirt—it says “I don’t have OCD” six times, which is the joke. Also, I do have OCD. A 15-year-old kid at the gym said he liked my shirt. I said, Yes, and I do have OCD. He replied, “Well, I have got the combination of doom. I have got autism, ADHD, and anxiety.”
There is a school a couple of blocks from where we live for kids on the spectrum and with other conditions. Anyway, we had a conversation, but it was awkward: a teenager with autism and an adult on the spectrum with OCD. The kid kept tugging at his hair—putting his hand in it as a nervous tic.
Coincidentally, the Emmys were on tonight, and a 15-year-old kid won an Emmy for a performance in a show called Adolescence. Is that the youngest Emmy winner ever? Maybe. The Emmys have been going for 70 years, so someone younger has won before. But anyway, this kid had the same hair-touching tic. That coincidence was interesting.
All right, back to Alien Earth. I watched a little more. Wendy/Marcy is giving the scientist lady a hard time for erasing part of Nibs’s memory, because Nibs was freaking out. You cannot have them freaking out—they are super powerful and could kill humans.
Then Hermit, Marcy’s brother, is talking to the scientist who got fired and is on his way out. Hermit asks whether his sister is safe there, and the scientist shows him how safe everyone is by pulling up their vitals. They are just seconds away from discovering that one of the kids has been eaten by the insects when I paused the video.
I assume the scientist will go in to try to save him and will himself get eaten by the insects.
Jacobsen: What do you think the insects being able to eat machines—or “tinnies”—says about the future?
Rosner: The future of the show? The season still has a lot of ground to cover. More characters have to be killed, but enough must survive to carry the series forward. This is only episode six, so there is room for both mass casualties and continuity. Unlike Aliens—the sequel to Alien—which only brought back Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, this series needs a core group of survivors.
They can lose half the cast, but that will probably happen in the final two hours of the season.
I have been calling the show an eight, maybe an eight and a half, though I am not watching it fairly. I would need to sit down and watch for an hour at a time instead of in ten-minute chunks. There is also a limit to how good a story like this can be.
Take Elmore Leonard. He wrote around 80 books over a career of fifty years or more. His writing was always economical. He never wrote longer than necessary, and he followed the rule of avoiding unnecessary adjectives and adverbs. He did not pad scenes. In his later years, especially, his confrontations were stripped down—no excessive elaboration.
I once saw him at a book signing in Encino. The store was nearly empty—it was just him, me, my wife, and a couple of clerks. I did not buy a book or go up to talk to him. I should have. I was an asshole for not taking the opportunity to meet Elmore Leonard while he sat there alone.
I also saw Harlan Ellison once at a Mongolian barbecue place in Sherman Oaks, eating with his wife. I did not approach him either, but that made more sense—Ellison had a reputation for being mean, and interrupting his dinner would probably not have ended well. Still, it adds to my history of being timid around authors.
Leonard’s style was about inevitability. He put characters on a collision course because they wanted different things and only one could prevail. But the confrontations were never spectacular. Someone pulled a gun and fired a shot or two. Sometimes it was as simple as a loosened railing on a stilt house overlooking a hundred-foot drop: a character leaned on it, the railing gave way, and that was it.
Compare that with something like Fast & Furious. There are ten of those movies now, and every confrontation is an overblown shootout, car chase, or explosion. Leonard’s genius was in making violence inevitable but unsensational.
The physics and stunts in Fast & Furious continue to become more elaborate. In one of the later films—six or so—they drive a car from one skyscraper to another. They get a running start, jump a hundred or more feet, and crash into the next tower because it is their only means of escape. It is entirely ridiculous. Maybe the physics could be simulated to show it is barely possible, but the odds of pulling it off in real life are one in a million.
In Elmore Leonard’s stories, by contrast, nothing is elaborate. Two people dislike each other; one pulls a gun and shoots. Sometimes both are armed, but it is never flashy. Leonard had thought carefully about how people work and how violence unfolds, and he wrote it simply, without unnecessary embellishment.
That is the difference. Fast & Furious delivers spectacle—amazing, computer-generated stunts that may not make complete sense, but fit seamlessly into the plot. Leonard, on the other hand, was one of the greatest crime writers, and early on, he also wrote Westerns. He focused on character, motive, and inevitable collisions between people. The result is more satisfying, even if it lacks the spectacle.
The Alien TV series falls somewhere in between. It is constrained by its world. It must deliver people versus horrific aliens, with cyborgs and synthetics mixed in, while keeping the plot moving and production on schedule. That constraint limits how “perfectly awesome” it can be, but it also forces focus.
Certain clichés always crop up. “Chop chop” drives me crazy whenever I hear it—a lazy way of saying “hurry up.” Or vomiting as shorthand for emotion: a character is so overwhelmed that they puke. Lately, it has also been overused for comedy. Then there is the inevitable line in chase scenes: two people in a car, one driving, the other looking behind them. “We have got company.” It is a cliché, yes, but it is efficient. You could say, “We are being followed,” or “I think someone is following us,” but those are clunkier. In real life, someone might very well say the cliché because it works.
You cannot avoid situations that you have already seen a million times in movies and television when you are writing. Carole started watching a made-for-TV movie called The Wrong Paris, a rom-com built around a dating reality show.
It had all the usual dating reality show scenarios, the kind you have seen countless times before, so they were inevitably a little lame. But at least the writers and producers had thought about the dynamics well enough that the movie did not completely suck.
They even improved upon real reality shows. Usually, on a dating or competition show, only the last winner gets anything—the partner, the money, whatever the prize is. And the batting averages are terrible; most of the couples split up within six months. On other shows like Wipeout, two dozen people compete, put their bodies at risk, sometimes getting seriously hurt, but only the ultimate winner walks away with money.
This movie tried a different system. Contestants earned money for lasting longer—say, five thousand dollars for surviving a week. That was necessary for the plot, but it was also fairer than real shows. In its own way, it was bright and somewhat satisfying. However, it was still unappealing, as it was a rom-com based on a reality dating show.
And that is the truth: everything you create will be lame to some degree, because it has to be about something, and all subject matter is inherently limited. You also have to work with limited resources and limited time. I have been writing a book for forty years and never published it. It could have been the most awesome thing in the world. Still, my paralysis, for the sake of “awesomeness,” has kept me from writing ten other books that might not have been perfect, but still could have been good.
So Alien Earth is not “good” in an absolute sense, but it is good considering what can reasonably be expected. You cannot expect everything to be excellent. Sometimes you get lucky. Alien in 1979 was undeniably impressive, just as Star Wars was in 1977. They had new technology to make science fiction look real, great production teams, and in George Lucas’s case, a kind of genius—not in dialogue or plotting, but in making an exciting science fiction spectacle.
These were the first of their kind that we got to see. They had the awesomeness of breaking new ground, which made for a fantastic movie. But that was serendipity—something you cannot expect from every entertainment product you consume. Not everything can open up a whole new genre.
So there you go.
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