Noah Hess

I greatly anticipated this show as I’m a big fan of speculative biology, and unfortunately was disappointed by the content. Here are a few of my grievances: 1.) The organisms that were advertised as the heart of the show make little sense without any context of their evolutionary history. 2.) Evolution was portrayed as something that organisms “do” rather than a result of the blind force of natural selection. I felt as though the show’s narrating failed to explain that organisms are a product of their environments. 3.) Far too often it felt as though the earth “examples” were forced, and at best only contributed a surface level understanding to the biology of these organisms. I was frustrated with how incredibly complex and nuanced topics, such as sexual selection, were portrayed as being simple. 4.) There were also times where the earth analogies simply did not make sense in the context of the alien biota and we’re poor or wrong examples, such as trying to explain different morphology in the one species by polyphenism when it made zero sense. I feel cheated when I see so much passion, care, and attentive research put into speculative biology projects that never make it farther than a thread or webpage, only for Netflix to produce a show that flies the banner, but had criminally low levels of thought invested in the story, science, and intent of the show. Go give other projects some love, and hope that in the future we’ll finally get a legitimate specbio or speczoo documentary.