As regular readers might know, I am deeply conflicted about Ridley Scott’s Alien prequels. For every step forward Scott makes he takes three giant leaps backward, and those talented peeps at Screen Junkies agree as their latest Honest Trailer sets its sights on Alien Covenant. And as usual, they’re bang on the money.

Like many fans of Alien, the promise of Scott returning to the fold to right the wrongs of the sequels and whatever AVP was meant to be (an expensive joke? a dare? We just don’t know) and get this franchise back on track. Well, they say the road to heaven is paved with good intentions, but Scott’s much-hyped return resulted in Prometheus. No matter how many times he told us it would only contain elements of the original Alien, we all thought we’d still get some payoff. At the very least, some ruddy answers.

Much like the Trojan Horse used by the Greeks to gain entrance into Troy, Prometheus looked like an Alien prequel that fans wanted to see, yet lurking inside was a movie nobody asked for or wanted. It appeared as though Scott listened to the fans when that first trailer for Covenant arrived, everything you love about the Alien franchise was back including a ship Captain named after an American state. Little did we know that Covenant was a Trojan Horse within a Trojan Horse, an Alien prequel that looks like an Alien prequel that’s actually a Prometheus sequel.

Before Covenant was released, Scott was talking about making the next Alien movie within the next eighteen months and this one would take place after Prometheus but before Covenant. The poor performance of Covenant has forced 20th Century Fox to reexamine what’s next (if anything) for the franchise. I’ll just go ahead and say it, make an anthology TV series with each season taking place at a different point in time.