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.

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Column

Books

Character

Culture

Time

19 June 2025

4 min read

The true myths we tell about how we got here

Memoirs are the stories that make us who we are

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

I’ve been asked to write a memoir. It’s because I’ve been an Anglican priest for 20 years and it’s been quite a ride – deployed to a tube station when the terrorist bombs went off on 7 July 2005, served the Archbishop of Canterbury as the child-abuse catastrophe unfolded, been the religion editor of a national newspaper and helped countless people to die and to marry as a rural parish rector.

So, I suppose it meets the minimum criterion that a memoir shouldn’t be about me so much as the events through which I passed. But it also raises questions about what a memoir is for, as well as what it’s about. I wonder about its purpose and that leads to choices of style.

I had in mind a hybrid fiction model, in which the only made-up character was me, heightening the drama of it all by being maybe bisexual and a cokehead (neither of which I have been) who encounters all the real and interesting people that I have. That might at least make it a bigger challenge for libel lawyers.

A publisher at lunch this week persuaded me that this is a very bad idea. Commercial fiction is where the action is and literary fiction (even if I could do it) is dead. It has to fit in one of the silos that people will buy – crime, romance, fantasy and so on. And I’m an old, white man, to boot.

But memoir is a good stable, she said, and it didn’t need to be a dull, linear narrative. In fact it mustn’t be that. I’m beginning to think it must be a drama and, as such, as creative an act as fiction.

So, not history. Or maybe, like history, it depends on how you look at it and how we remember. As someone quite famous remarked recently, recollections may vary. And we all have an agenda in relating them. Memoir is not a record, it’s about experience, emotion, interpretation and score-settling (I’m looking forward to that last bit).

The most obvious exemplar of this is the political memoir, which lately has ticked towards being written by the spouses of politicians. Salacious revelation seems to be the currency here, all the better if a former prime minister is alleged to have said he’d like to drag you into the undergrowth and give you one.

Memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub.

One rather hopes, for reasons of aesthetics as much as decorum, that this indicates that memoir is as much about what times were like as about being a simple record of them. This makes sense as I face the prospect, for example, of relating being with a 26-year-old mother of two as she died.

If it’s such an essentially subjective exercise, then memoir is a poor country cousin of history. Some have made it consciously so in their titles – Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs and Python Graham Chapman’s A Liar’s Autobiography come to mind.

Incidentally, memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub, rather than the marshalling of peer-approved facts. This is what makes it so sensationally subjective. I remember standing alone in a boorish institution, heroically speaking truth to power. You remember a blithering idiot. The difference is I’ve got a publisher.

In this sense, memoirs are the stories that make us who we are. Or, naturally, who we’d like to be, or like to be seen as. In ancient Greek terms, we deploy our mythos rather than our logos, our allegory rather than our empirical reality.

But, again, these stories make us who we are. And not just the stories we tell. The stories of our nations are similarly formative. The stories that the world’s major faiths tell also define us, whether we believe them or not.

The Christian gospels are memoirs. The first three of them attempt to describe what happened. The fourth, John, is rather more allegorical. But they all, in the Jewish tradition of storytelling, in one way or another seek to describe what it was like to be in the insurgent Nazarene movement, as much as what actually happened.

Matthew, the tax-collector, writes for his audience of Jews. Luke is concerned with what it all means for the poor – and not just those economically so. Mark, first out of the trap, wants to consider what it all means for non-Jews. Their recollections may vary. But it’s reckless to suggest that this invalidates their testimony.

My memoir will contain no gospel truth. But there’s no point in embarking on an exercise that is only about what happened over 20 years of priesthood. It has to be about what it was like too.

I think that its epigraph may read: “Nothing in this book happened. Everything in it is true.”