Be Reel

The Alien franchise’s five-decade journey has crossed genres, intersected the careers of preeminent filmmakers and wavered wildly from classic to culty to catastrophic. With the recent release of the disturbing and philosophical “Alien: Covenant,” we set out to reappraise all the chest-bursting and face-hugging in Part One of our franchise retrospective: 2:02 - Noah and Chance give some franchise background, and Noah wonders why “Covenant” is two movies. 14:15 - Vulture’s Kevin Lincoln joins the show to discuss what contemporary franchises can learn from the villainous android David. 29:10 - Chance stands up for the headiness of “Covenant” and Noah makes a superb “Frasier” comparison. 38:00 - The New Republic’s Josephine Livingstone stops by to assess the role of androids in the franchise and their centrality to the new film. 54:10 - Your hosts try to identify if there’s anything wrong at all with 1979’s “Alien.” 1:04:20 - A disagreement ensues about whether “Aliens” deserves classic status like its p