Netflix's Alien Worlds

A new Speculative Biology mockumentary showing how life could potentially evolve on different planets. Watch the trailer here.

Just binged it. Pretty interesting. I liked how they used the rules for life on Earth to see how life on the speculative planets would be like.

True but I'm somewhat disappointed after watching it myself since the trailers seemed to advertise it as a full blown SpecEvo documentary in a similar vein to Alien Planet and this series seemed to use the alien stuff as an excuse to talk about astrophysics and earth biology.

Yeah, I appreciate the science behind it, but the series could have used more aliens. I wish they had shown us more stuff on the third planet instead of spending the entire episode focusing on the relationship between a mere three species. What was the deal with those giant jellyfish things!?

I feel the series would have been much better if they focused solely on the third planet (which seemed to be the most diverse) and looked at four different facets of it over the course of four episodes. I really do feel this series was wasted potential.

Feels very much like a period drama (honest!) that keeps cutting back to the present day for 90% of the runtime. Or a Transformers film that spends 90% of the time with the humans.

Last episode had some interesting ideas (intelligent aliens) but dropped the ball badly by giving them antigravity and 'brain in a jar' and terraforming tech, but somehow stopping them from using it on their own planet. Oh, and apparently they still care about planets. For some reason. Feels rather childish, or pulpish. Or both.

Edited by ANTIcarrot on Dec 5th 2020 at 12:38:35 PM

Neat documentary. It's probably better if you haven't watched Alien Planet before because it's very much entry-level material with the whole focus on "basic science". As a Spec Evo fan, I'd have wished for more creative aliens than the usual carbon-and-water based animal-analogues on Earth-like planets. However, the market for hardcore Spec Evo fans isn't too large, so their choice was sensible. Focusing on aliens that are just a bit different makes it easier to explain Earth evolution and Earth ecology. I presume that their choice to spend most of their runtime on Earth and limit their number of aliens had to do with limited CGI budget. After all, most dinosaur documentaries that aren't WWD or knockoffs of it use a similar approach.

Just finished watching myself, and I quite liked despite not being entirely happy with everything it did. The alien designs were interesting for sure, although the jump from the very physically alien pentapods to the space monkeys and space rabbits was a tad jarring. The way the episodes kept jumping between the aliens and real-world ecology and astrophysics was also something I wasn't too fond of. Then again, like Auraptor pointed out, not everything can be for the hardcore market — you do need some entry-levels stuff, if only to get people interested.

Honestly, I also feel the biggest issue for me was simply how little time was given to each world. All of the things I saw were interesting, and I really wanted to see more — Eden especially had a ton of potential, and with all the talk about it being a lush and thriving garden world I really did expect to see a couple more species.

All in all, I felt this was a pretty good show — I just wish it had gone farther.

My understanding was that the planet was going to be physically engulfed by the aging star, which terraforming really wouldn't do much to fix, and the aliens also lack strong radiation shielding to protect themselves from bursts of stellar radiation when in space. How probable that last bit is I couldn't begin to guess, but that's the way it was presented.