Review

Aliens

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

13 November 2025

5 min read

Alien, Nietzsche and the death of dread: why the franchise lost its fear

Alien: Earth forgets what made the original so terrifyingly profound

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

Don't pet the alien.

26 Key Productions.

The credits are rolling on Alien: Earth and all I can think about is Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche is one of history’s most enigmatic and misunderstood philosophers, one of Christianity’s greatest foils and explains exactly why the TV series, to my mind, fell flat.

Oh, how excited I was for Alien: Earth! It looked like someone had finally nailed the look and feel of Ridley Scott’s original Alien and paired it with a script by Noah Hawley (who wrote, among other things, the first series of Fargo, which I still think is one of the best series of TV ever made). I couldn’t wait.

But far from understanding what made the original Alien so terrifying, Alien: Earth manages to undermine the franchise’s key premise at almost every turn, resulting in something truly baffling. While Alien is a deeply nihilistic piece of art that draws on its nihilism for its thoroughgoing sense of dread and unease, Alien: Earth is too cute, too pleased with itself to be truly nihilistic. And therein it loses the power to shock that Alien wielded so effectively.

Let me explain what I mean. (Spoilers ahead for both Alien: Earth and Alien – although Alien came out in 1979 so if you haven’t seen it at this point, where have you been?)

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”

So declares ‘the mad man’ in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, giving rise to one of philosophy’s most quotable moments. Nietzsche isn’t talking about a literal ‘death of God’ (he didn’t think there even was a God to kill!). Instead, he’s talking about the death of belief in God.

But, for Nietzsche, society’s collective loss of belief in God is not a trivial thing. It’s not like realising Santa Claus isn’t real (sorry if anyone was still clinging to that!). No, belief in God gave society structure, purpose, and meaning. Without belief in God, society needs to start from the very beginning and give itself these things all over again. We cannot stop believing in God and imagine that the rest of our lives are untouched.

For all Nietzsche’s faults – which are numerous – he is clear about the implications of what we might now call ‘secularisation’, in a way that is seldom recognised. In this respect, I often wonder if Nietzsche is the only real atheist who ever lived.

There is no grand ‘why’ behind the world. No objective meaning or structure to it: we must instead impose our own, individual meaning onto our lives.

Alien is a deeply Nietzschean film. The xenomorph (that is, the eponymous alien) does not come with a ‘why’. It has no motives other than to kill; no grand plan. It’s not really a villain, in this sense: it just … is. It is the chaotic unstructured whirlwind of a universe without God distilled into a creature.

It is pure, nihilistic, Nietzschean nightmare fuel.

At the end of the film, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) doesn’t ‘defeat’ the xenomorph; she just sends it into space and escapes. She doesn’t ‘overcome’ this nihilistic creature, she just about manages to escape with her life. She does what Nietzsche encourages us all to do and lives despite meaningless chaos of the godless world around us.

This is not what happens in Alien: Earth, however. The most telling parallel between Alien and Alien: Earth is the role science and technology plays in both. In Alien, the mysterious Weyland-Yutani company wants to capture the xenomorph to use it as a bio-weapon. But the xenomorph resists such human categories and just does what it does: kill, indiscriminately.

In Alien: Earth, again the xenomorph is seen as a potential weapon, as a potential piece of technology. And … that’s exactly what it becomes. The main character in the show – Sydney Chandler’s Wendy – a little girl whose consciousness is put into the body of a robot (to cut a long, tedious story short), eventually learns the xenomorph’s language and even befriends the creature. By the end of the series, the two have effectively teamed up, with Wendy siccing (setting) the alien on her enemies.

Excuse me?

She … ‘sics’ the xenomorph on people? Becomes its friend? Right …

The first time this happened I full-on laughed at the screen. This is so far removed from the utter nihilism of Alien. Here the xenomorph has agency, motivations, preferences, and even flipping friends! It is so deeply … unscary.

And that shouldn’t be a surprise. In Alien, Nietzsche’s godless anarchy is distilled into a creature of pure terror. In Alien: Earth, that creature is literally made someone’s pet. Alien continues to terrify because it shows us something of the full implications of what it is to be without God: a world of disorder, anarchy, and chaos. Alien: Earth domesticates that entirely and puts it on a leash. In so doing, lacks all of the potency of its muse.

In his recent book Dominion, Tom Holland (no, not that Tom Holland) reminds us of what Nietzsche said long ago: our values, ethics, and even our society structures, come from a shared and historic belief in God. Too often we want to have those values, ethics, and structures without the theologies that underwrite them.

Alien: Earth wants to have its cake and eat it in precisely this same way. It wants to tell a story about a marauding, indiscriminate predator … that can be tamed by a little girl. It fails to scare because it undermines the deeper, even more terrifying story underneath Alien: that without the structure afforded us by belief in a creator, there’s no God out there to hear us scream.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Give now

Review

Comedy

Culture

Film & TV

1 May 2025

4 min read

Last One Laughing: we’re less in control than we think

"Humour is human" and deeply strange.

Jonny Torrance

Jonathan is a priest and theologian who researches theology and comedy.

A montage shows a group of comedians trying not to laugh.

Amazon MGM Studios.

10 comedians shut in a room. Last one to laugh wins.

It’s a simple concept, and with the addition of a few gimmicks, including games and surprise guests, Last One Laughing delivers on it. The show isn’t creative – there have been at least 27 previous versions in various languages – but it is successful and is a much-needed boost for Amazon Prime, whose content has tended to flop recently.

I enjoyed the show. It amused me, which is what it was supposed to do. I didn’t necessarily laugh out loud, and I think I probably would have enjoyed all the comedians doing their own standup better. Some of the comics have made their infectious laughter such a part of their charm that it was a bit bizarre seeing them crack jokes without having a giggle (I’m looking at you Bob Mortimer).

But overall, I had a good time watching Last One Laughing. I was entertained and I would recommend it. Jimmy Carr is unusually likeable as a host, though I wanted to hear more from Roisin Conaty, whose role as co-host was almost non-existent. Richard Ayoade was his normal genius self. And there were a few genuinely standout moments: I think my favourite was Rob Beckett whispering to Joe Wilkinson “you’ve doing a really really good job of showing off, lots of funny bits."

In fact, as that moment suggests, the show is probably at its best when it gets a bit meta, as the comedians reflect on their own comedy and what it is like to be a comic. Moreover, there is a genuine warmth between everyone, and an appreciation of each other’s talents, which gives the show a particularly endearing tone.

It’s good, mindless, not particularly clean (definitely not family friendly!), fun.

So Last One Laughing doesn’t tell us much we don’t already know. It’s not supposed to. It’s light entertainment.

Comics are funny.

Often the unexpected makes us laugh.

Not laughing can be very hard.

This last point, though, is perhaps worth thinking about a bit further. It is familiar to everyone. Who hasn’t felt the physical pain of trying to restrain the giggles in a moment when we really must not laugh?

But this is one of those things that is so familiar we often miss how strange it is.

Philosophers since Aristotle have speculated that laughter is one of the things that makes humans unique, since we don’t know of any animals that laugh. Whether the claim about human exceptionalism is correct or not (and I confess I remain agnostic about this), it does seem that laughter is a practically universal experience of human beings. As Philosopher Simon Critchley puts it, “humour is human.”

But if this is true, then laughter as a phenomenon also highlights some of the eccentricity of our humanity. For, as Last One Laughing shows us so clearly, laughter is only ever partially under our control.

Our bodies, our spirits, even our minds, can betray us at any moment. That something we don’t want, even something good like laughter, can erupt from within.

We often like to imagine ourselves as rational beings, whose lives are characterised by making informed and free choices. We think we are in charge, at least of ourselves, and that we move through the world intentionally, with purpose and direction.

And yet, into this nice picture of a life under control, laughter breaks in, often uncontrollably. Our muscles spasm. Our eyes stream. Our vocal cords erupt in strangely animal snorts and grunts.

The fact that professional comedians and actors can’t maintain a straight face, sometimes in the face of their own jokes (take a bow Daisy May Cooper), should remind us that there is much in ourselves that is beyond our conscious control. Our laughter almost always has cognitive content. It involves our minds. We laugh at things.

But it is always embedded within a body. Laughter, with all its bodily shakes and muscle twitches, sometimes just can’t be kept in, no matter what our minds and consciousness tells us.

Christianity has long been aware of our lack of control. Paul, writing to the church in Rome, lamented that “I do not do what I want to, but I do the very thing I hate.” St Augustine, one of the greatest theologians of the Western Church, wrote in the fourth century that “I had become to myself a vast enigma.” Martin Luther, the sixteenth century German theologian, began the Reformation and changed history, in part over an insistence that we are far less in charge of ourselves than we like to think.

Yet such writers do not counsel despair. Instead, they allow our lack of control to point to our need for God and his help. Paul, a few verses after the previous quotation, cries out: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

Now, for all these authors, the stakes are high – they are talking about sin, death and damnation. The comedians in Last One Laughing are playing a much more relaxed game, all that they stand to lose is pride. Yet they too, one by one, discover that they “do not do the thing they want.”

And so, they are learning a version of a Christian lesson – that we are less in control of ourselves than we might like to think. That our bodies, our spirits, even our minds, can betray us at any moment. That something we don’t want, even something good like laughter, can erupt from within.

Now most of us, most of the time, probably enjoy the uncontrollability of laughter. It’s one of the things that make comedy enjoyable, both to watch and to perform. But it should maybe make us aware of other, less benign losses of control. Or at the least it should remind us that there is much in us that escapes our attempts at self-mastery.

Last One Laughing reminded me that laughter is stranger than we think. Just as I am stranger than I think.