Marooned! On Mars With Matt And Hilary

We're back with Bill, tracing the adventures of new mom Ellen Ripley through the vast reaches of space as she returns to LV-426, now a colony (in every sense of the word) being terraformed by the Weyland-Yutani company. Jones has been left behind to... guard the grain. OK. James Cameron's 1986 entry in the Alien franchise takes the form of a war film, but Matt argues it's more like a western. The series from this point begins to focus on reproduction, and we begin to try to make sense of how that fits in with the settler colonial discourse, with a plot that's initiated by an attack on a nuclear family from an indigenous population. A question we end with is, if survival and survivability are so important to the corporation, or to the xenomorph, why would reproduction be necessary at all? This seems to be a contradiction, and we try to resolve it. Along the way we note the film's move into 80s-style militarism, a la Schwarzenegger and Stallone (Ripley goes full Rambo on the Queen), compare Linda Hamilton and S