You’ve reached the end of your journey at last. As you touch down on the planet that you’ll colonise as your new home, you feel calm. Until you’re suddenly ambused from the field of cultivated wheat by critical appraisal of ALIEN: COVENANT offering insight into what elements of this best-of of the Alien franchise don’t work, what the film has to say about colonialism and genocide, and what we learn about the Xenomorph.

Content warning: body horror, death, chemical warfare, space travel, genocide, colonialism and imperialism, biological experimentation, serial killing, antisemitism, Nazism and fascism.

Our theme song is Alien Remix by Leslie Wai available on SoundCloud: ⁠https://soundcloud.com/lesliewai/alien-remix⁠

Full references for this episode available in Zotero at ⁠https://www.zotero.org/simonxix/collections/NTNK7XEN⁠

This podcast was recorded during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labour of the actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.