History Headscratchers / AlienNation

* What would the evolutionary advantage of having in essence a third gender needed for reproduction, and have this gender only occur in 1% of males? It seems incredibly dangerous

** One has to remember that the reason the "soldier" came calling in the fist place, is that a high-ranking Purist with connections in the scientific community ''sent a message'' to the Tectonese slaver empire and killed his fellow scientist who read and understood it, and the Tectonese Empire heard it. There are Purists who have such a strong IrrationalHatred to the Newcomers, that they're perfectly happy to call in the slavers to take them away, even if that means losing millions of their fellow humans in the process, and they have the power and the connections to make them very hard to stop.

** Many of the ship's systems were also scavenged by the Tectonese refugees. "The Soldier" was able to used his advanced medical scanner to help treat Emily because he "stole it from the ship" and nobody bat an eye at this explanation. (It was other things, like devolping a rash to the salt content in the air that actually tipped George off.) Also, the guy with the ship's beacon? A hobo who carries a bunch of trash in a stolen shopping cart.

** In Universe? BizarreAlienBiology. They made it a plot point that her SORAS was what allowed her to overcome the bio-weapon designed to kill her species beacuse of the massive hormone surge due to ''puberty.''

** Easily explained by politics and human nature. No one knows how to defend against an invasion by such a formidable force, it'd be unimaginably expensive if they COULD do it, and it might not happen anyway. On top of that, 99 percent of the world has no contact with Newcomers and so hardly ever thinks about them. World leaders and commonfolk alike ignore the issue and focus on the here-and-now business of life, gambling that it'll be somebody else's problem.

** The Newcomers claimed their masters were dead when they arrived. As far as anyone knew, no one ''was'' coming after them and there probably wasn't anyone to do so. But even if there was going to be someone coming after them... what were they going to do? They couldn't actually send the Newcomers away, their ship was screwed up. The only thing humanity could do was exactly what they did do... be practical about it and start reverse engineering the everliving hell out of the technology.

* How is it that they can eat raw, bloody meat, which contains both salt and water, they can beat a person bloody, without the salt water inthe blood burning their fists, and they can even have sex with humans, which also entails very, very close exposure to salty water-based fluid? Is there another chemical, common in Earth biochemistry, that neutralizes salt water? If so, why on Earth don't they all carry little spray bottles of it?

*** [[strike: wow... I hate to break it to you, but [[ArtisticLicenseBiology You Fail Biology Forever]]. Human (and close to all other land creatures) have bodily fluids of THE SAME salinity as sea water (the technical term is isotonic). this is, in fact, one of the most often cited pieces of evidence that all life came from the sea. the reason you "can't" drink it is that because it's isotonic it doesn't lighten the body's salt-balance (the body typically losses more water then salt, so you need to drink things that are hybertonic) so drinking sea water doesn't hydrate you anymore then drinking nothing at all, so if you drink ONLY sea water you'll eventually dehydrate.]]

* The Five Year Gap between the end of the TV series and the movies. The only possible explanation for the completely inconsistent off-screen aging of George and Susan Francisco's three children is barely reconciled by the Literary Agent Hypothesis: Emily goes from 8 or 9 in the TV series (which lasted one season before being canceled before its time) to 13 in the first movie (her age was explicitly stated in ''Dark Horizon,'' and we know that, at least until the end of adolescence and the onset of early adulthood in their mid-twenties (when their aging process apparently slows down), Tenctonese development fits the human pattern (with the exception that Tenctonese toddlers enter some sort of cocoon in which they develop additionally, as Vesna was shown to do before she became Richie Cunningham in the later TV movies, and was supposedly off at Daycare the whole time). Meanwhile, Buck is still in high school in ''Dark Frontier'' (he was at least sixteen in the series). And Vesna? Barely seen after ''Dark Frontier,'' the first TV movie, but she seems to have been in suspended animation or something for five years because she's still an infant (this was necessary, as with some otherwise minor retconning ''Dark Frontier'' is a direct sequel to the canceled series' unresolved cliffhanger.

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*** [[strike: wow... I hate to break it to you, but YouFailBiologyForever. Human (and close to all other land creatures) have bodily fluids of THE SAME salinity as sea water (the technical term is isotonic). this is, in fact, one of the most often cited pieces of evidence that all life came from the sea. the reason you "can't" drink it is that because it's isotonic it doesn't lighten the body's salt-balance (the body typically losses more water then salt, so you need to drink things that are hybertonic) so drinking sea water doesn't hydrate you anymore then drinking nothing at all, so if you drink ONLY sea water you'll eventually dehydrate.]]

** It's simple really, Emily's actress had obviously aged. There was no choice but to SORAS the character. Sean Six could still [[Main/DawsonCasting pass as a teen]] and babies can easily be swapped out without the audience noticing

* The Five Year Gap between the end of the TV series and the movies. The only possible explanation for the completely inconsistent off-screen aging of George and Susan Francisco's three children is barely reconciled by the Literary Agent Hypothesis: Emily goes from 8 or 9 in the TV series (which lasted one season before being canceled before its time) to 13 in the first movie (her age was explicitly stated in ''Dark Horizon,'' and we know that, at least until the end of adolescence and the onset of early adulthood in their mid-twenties (when their aging process apparently slows down), Tenctonese development fits the human pattern (with the exception that Tenctonese toddlers enter some sort of coccoon in which they develop additionally, as Vesna was shown to do before she became Richie Cunningham in the later TV movies, and was supposedly off at Daycare the whole time). Meanwhile, Buck is still in high school in ''Dark Frontier'' (he was at least sixteen in the series). And Vesna? Barely seen after ''Dark Frontier,'' the first TV movie, but she seems to have been in suspended animation or something for five years because she's still an infant (this was necessary, as with some otherwise minor retconning ''Dark Frontier'' is a direct sequel to the canceled series' unresolved cliffhanger.

* I have mixed feelings about ''Dark Horizons''. I'm glad they followed the series' premise through to its logical conclusion, but I can't believe human civilization didn't see it coming. Why was the Newcomers' arrival greeted more like a 3rd-world boatlift arriving in Florida than like Perry sailing into Tokyo Bay? ''No-one'' considered that being on the doorstep of a colossal, hyperadvanced, heartless, expansionist interstellar slave empire might prove slightly hazardous for planet-bound and technologically backward mankind? Even worse, ''Dark Frontier'' implies that even a brush with total destruction wasn't enough to spur the humans to try to close the technology gap with the Tenktonese. Yes, the soldier played along with George's scam, but noone on Earth knows that he did and they had no reasonable expectation that he would. And even if they had reason to be confident that they had tricked the Tenktonese rulers into staying clear of Earth forever, who's to say some other bunch of galactic thugs won't come calling in a century or two?

* How is it that they can eat raw, bloody meat, which contains both salt and water, they can beat a person bloody, without the salt water inthe blood burning their fists, and they can even have sex with humans, which also entails very, very close exposure to salty waterbased fluid? Is there another chemical, common in Earth biochemistry, that neutralizes salt water? If so, why on Earth don't they all carry little spraybottles of it?

*** Even so, kissing a human being should be at least as bad as slurping concentrated vinegar, which is 25% percent pure as opposed to regular 6% pure vinegar. Considering that salt water eats Newcomer skin like it was high-grade hydrochloric acid, even one third of that should be bad enough to cause extreme discomfort, especially in private places. Nevermind that most acids are actually pretty poisonous to humans even in low concentrations.

** LA seems to meet their physical needs perfectly, they require a warm environment so a lot of other place in the country are either too cold, too humid, or too dry (often all at the same time) for them. The other places that would suit them are simply too far and too expensive for the average Newcomer to relocate to permanently. You have to remember that they're refugees, it's the same reason why you see a lot of Cubans in Florida but not nessecarily in, say, Pennsylvania.

* Whatever happened to the Tenktonese ship? Wouldn't it be thouroughly studied and reverse-engineered? Even if their FTL drive is damaged beyond repair, there are plenty of other devices that would revolutionize human science. The ship was obviously hovering for some time, implying some sort of anti-gravity and/or repulsor technology. There are life support, medical, security and plenty of other systems that could be studied. Hell, the alloys that make up the hull would probably help us figure out how to make better spaceships.

*** In the comic, they have a depressingly convinient explenation: After the Tenctonese were evacuated from the ship, the ship went kablooey.

I'm imagining the "Office of Alien Contingency Planning" is a nerdy lieutenant in the Pentagon basement who spends half his time trying to justify his job existing at all so he won't be deployed to Afghanistan.

***** The confusion likely comes from how body fluids may be about as salty as the seas were, when ''complex animal life first emerged in them''. A heck of a lot of minerals have been eroded into the oceans since then, forcing even native marine fish to expel the salt through various glands and excretory organs, these days.

* As far as the [[BoldlyComing sex]] goes, [[TwoWordsOneTrope one word: Condoms]].