The SIHA 2022 Awards

Search for Interesting Hollywood Aliens

 Anything Interesting in Hollywood? As a fan of Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories, I forced myself to watch Season 1 of Foundation on Apple TV+. Yes, I know that Foundation was first broadcast in 2021, but I did not get access to it until 2022. You can read my comments for the series from back in April. 

S.I.H.A. I live in a fantasy world where I imagine that it should be easy for people in the business of making films and television shows to craft stories about interesting space aliens, so each year I Search for Interesting Hollywood Aliens. Some years, the new crop of space aliens is so miserable that I open up my search for ANYTHING interesting in Hollywood and it was in that spirit that I watched Apple TV's Foundation. In particular, I was hopeful that there might be some interesting robots in the show. However, the show failed to do justice to Asimov's robot vision.

image source

 Aliens in 2022. What about other science fiction appearing in 2022? There was a 10 episode television series "The Man Who Fell to Earth". I've never read the novel, which sounds about like what I would expect from an English professor who was asked to write about a Martian who visits Earth. Yawn.

I'm not a fan of military science fiction, so I could not even be bothered to investigate Halo. ..."alien races determined to eradicate the human race"... Sorry, but this is not my cup of tea.

Season 2 in 2022. I confess that I am intrigued by the premise behind Raised by Wolves, but nothing I've read about it makes me want to actually watch an episode. I view Raised by Wolves as another entry in the special SIHA category of "robots are honorary aliens".

Raised by Robots

 Season 6 Ending in 2022. Apparently The Expanse ended in 2022. I have not seen a single episode. I'm not a fan of fictional politics. Are there actual aliens in this story or just the remnants of gone aliens?

Strange Trek. Back in July I began the 2022 SIHA (Search for Interesting Hollywood Aliens) by watching the first season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and asking: are there any new aliens and are they interesting? Sadly, my verdict was: NO.

last year (2021)

For the first 7 years of the SIHAs (starting here), I actually awarded a SIHA to a movie or television show for that year. However, for the past three years, I've awarded a retro-SIHA, preferring to honor an old alien from some previous year. For 2022 I'm going to continue that trend.

AI-generated image

  Going Retro. Back in August I nominated "The Unnatural" for a Retro-SIHA award. I suppose the two Hollywood productions that had the most influence on me were Star Trek and The X-Files.

While reading old science fiction stories during 2022, I took time to look at quite a few really bad  science fiction television shows. For example, I watched several episodes of The Time Tunnel that featured space aliens. 

I also hunted down some episodes of Probe, which was almost an early X-files, but I was not impressed. 😞

Also: 1966 television's The Wild Wild West delivered a very silly flying-saucer episode called "The Night of the Flying Pie Plate".

night moves

 Natural Obsession. Fox is obsessed with baseball. He can tell you how many home runs a switch-hitting baseball player hit from both sides of the plate. In "The Unnatural", Fox ends up arranging for access to a baseball field and a pitching machine so that he can show Scully how to swing her hips a bat.

Shape Shifting. There are two shape-shifting aliens in "The Unnatural". One of them kills the other. This is particularly stupid and annoying because the murdered alien just wants to play baseball, and since he can take on human form (complete with red blood; alien blood is green), he has been quietly playing minor-league baseball for years. 

suck it, Fox

But hey, this is Hollywood and since this hour of television had no senseless car chase, they had to put in a senseless murder. Most of the rest of this hour of television is fairly sedate including Scully sucking a Nonfat Tofutti Rice Dreamsicle.

I want to suck it

I Want To Believe Suck. At first, Fox thinks that Nonfat Tofutti Rice must taste really bad, but by the time Scully has finished wrapping her lips around it, Fox can't resist getting a taste for himself. Scully says: "...you've got us grabbing life by the testes", however in Hollywood you can show endless murders but no genitals.

I sell latex.

In filming "The Unnatural" the makers of The X-Files may have spent their entire year's latex budget in just one episode, but we finally learned why the aliens came to Earth (to sell latex masks). When the shape-shifting alien dies, he retains his human form rather than revert to his alien body form. Maybe the CGI budget was also shot and they could not afford another morphing scene.

 Interesting Aliens?

He never laughs... hmm, he must be deep...
Retro-SIHA winner: "The Unnatural".

 Space Aliens 1999. But are they interesting aliens? In "The Unnatural", the baseball-playing alien claims that the aliens "don't have a word for laughter". Yet, upon witnessing a game of baseball, the alien laughed. I have to wonder if this is how David Duchovny felt much of the time while filming The X-Files. Science fiction should not take itself too seriously and Duchovny wrote a pretty humorous Sci Fi episode. Many of the horror-focused The X-Files episodes were simply disgusting, and may have been a hard slog for Duchovny.

Related Reading: The 2021 SIHA. SIHA 2023.

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