People fundamentally misread what this franchise is about.

I first got into this franchise in the summer of 1987. I read the novelizations of *Alien* and *Aliens* and was completely hooked. My local library had VHS copies of both films, so I watched them both in one day after I was done with the books (my librarians were cool).

I liked the creatures, sure, and *loved* the marines in Cameron's film (the motion detector is my wake-up alarm), but the whole point of the story, at least to my seven-year-old mind, was that "The Company" was the villain. The plot twist in *Alien* that the *Nostromo* was supposed to bring back the creature at all costs--"crew expendable"--was a huge reveal, and the dramatic thrust of the story; the fact that Ripley begins *Aliens* getting screwed over by The Company, then has to deal with Burke being the more insidious threat, was the interesting concept.

This concept was what elevated the series from just "trope-y monster story with unique creature design" to "pop culture mega-artifact." Even the vastly-inferior *Alien3* knew to make the same observation Ripley explicitly verbalizes in the preceding film:

*"I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage."*

Something happened over the ensuing three decades since Fincher's film, though; at some point, people became convinced that the creatures themselves were the whole point of the franchise. I'm not sure how that happened; most of the comic books and other expanded universe novels kept the theme pretty clear. Here we are, 46 years after "crew expendable," and people are seriously asking why *Alien Earth* is focusing on the corporate intrigue *like that's not the whole point of the story in the first place*.

Every time I see some complaint about why *AE* isn't focused enough on the creatures, or some expression of surprise that the corporate drama is the interesting part of the show, I feel genuinely confused.

Do people *not* understand that the creatures *aren't* the point of the story, and that they're meant to watch the first three films and consider their place in a neoliberal market economy that grants increasing control over their lives to corporations?