Review: Alien News Desk “Inane Utterings of a Brainwashed People”

How about that airline food?

Overview (Spoilers Below!)

Drexx and Tuva are back with yet more hilarious observations about our incomprehensible species. Today’s agenda includes brief snippets on party selfies, NASA, Brad Pitt’s marriage, Wisconsin fashion sense, babies, spring break, and Philadelphia (shout-out to Philly!). Drexx and Tuva are baffled that Trump is still holding rallies when he’s already the president; they theorize that he’s been using temporal loop technology from Area 51 (a la the educational film Groundhog Day) to relive a day in 2016 over and over again.

Drexx introduces the new segment “What is The Meaning of This?!” in which he and Tuva attempt to decipher Earth’s most convoluted and confusing rituals. This time, they cover the “taking a knee” controversy, exploring different scenarios in which a person would take a knee on a football field and attempting to predict which ones would draw ire from football fans.

Our announcers recount the horrors of cruise ships, which are obviously prisons that subject the elderly to brutal torture. Then Drexx and Tuva bring on expert Zygel Xaxxenborough—an alien David Attenborough stand-in—for new segment “Species Spotlight,” which covers humans’ evolution into the benevolent Colossomen (i.e. car dealership air dancers). Drexx believes that the curtain separating first class and the main cabin on planes is made of a poor person-repellent fabric, and he longs to make a suit out of it so that he can finally chew out his poor rival without fear of retaliation (Tuva reminds him that the network doesn’t like he when he goes on like this).

In the segment “What is Scalding, What is Colder Than Absolute Zero?,” our hosts cover a series of Earth behaviors that are on-trend or on their way out, including self-driving cars (scalding), brick and mortar stores (cold), eye contact (freezing), or shaving (hot as hell). Then Drexx and Tuva discuss ways that humans have historically attempted to achieve immortality, including mummification, cryo chambers, and ventriloquism. An in-world commercial for “abductile dysfunction” offers aid for limp spaceships.

Finally, Drexx and Truva discuss the convenience of drive-through Catholic confession and mourn the tiny, fire-hydrant shaped people that once roamed the Earth (with their perpetual fondness for silly hats).

Our Take

This episode isn’t quite as strong as the series premiere—the social commentary isn’t as sharp, and some of it’s been said before. At this point, I’m pretty sure everyone’s tired of jokes about how we’re all incapable of social interaction because we’re glued to our phones. Plus, we covered airplanes last week, and now we’re doing it again? What is this, old school standup comedy? But the jokes are still clever and still make me laugh, and many subjects are delightfully bizarre and unexpected.

My favorite moment of the evening, honestly, is the evocation of air dancers. Just looking at those things is funny.

The Donald Trump bit, though, feels like the same stuff I hear every time I’m with a group of liberals and the president comes up in conversation. Why is Trump still holding rallies, they’ll ask, when he’s already been elected? And the words “witch hunt” in relation to Hillary Clinton might come up at some point. These sentiments give voice to very real concerns about the modern state of America, but they’re not particularly fresh, nor does seeing them played out on an animated program tell me anything I didn’t already know. When the cartoon Trump breaks into Area 51, he sucks on the very phallic temporal loop device in one of the least subtle metaphors I’ve ever seen. I’m not trying to say that this show shouldn’t mock Trump to Hell and back—just that “haha Trump sucks dick” isn’t precisely the most intelligent or original joke they could be making. But I did love the absurdist image of Hillary fleeing into the woods, as “she, sadly, has gone feral.” And to this show’s credit, this is the first time I’ve seen a piece of media actually acknowledge Walt Disney’s raging antisemitism.

Some jokes, while not unoriginal, were actually too niche for me to appreciate—the crack at Wisconsin jeans flew over my head, as I’ve spent very little time in that region of America. Other segments are delightful in their weirdness—like the framing of girls taking sexy selfies as their attempt to arouse their sentient lesbian cell phones. Or how Drexx somberly declares, “Surveillance of babies has kept them from committing crimes, but is it infantilizing them?” Of tiny cheese cubes on toothpicks, Drexx announces, “Trees step up their game in the war against cheese.” Stage magicians are “professional liars” and recreational sports are “forced labor.” Fast food drive-through windows serve as a form of self-flagellation for Catholic sinners. It makes sense that brick and mortar stores are going out of fashion, as they were stupid to only sell two things. These bits are funny, sure, but they also allow us to look at the world in a new way, to remember just how hilariously weird everyday life really is.

The “What is The Meaning of This?!” segment starts off with a clever sequence of Drexx as a philosopher on a mountain, his head near-exploding from existential confusion. And the exploration of America’s views towards protest are ridiculous in the best way (What if an athlete took a knee to protest, but there was a tiny American flag on his knee? What if he was kneeling to step on a flesh-eating bug? What if that bug was decorated like the American flag?). The show’s handling of some other issues could use more direction and sensitivity—they evoke blackface without ever really making a point about it, other than that the practice is generally considered bad.

We’re allowed only a glimpse into Drexx and Tuva’s personal lives this episode—we know that Drexx is a bit of a dick, and he has a habit of speaking his mind even when it’s a detriment to his show’s ratings. Tuva’s displeasure with him—her serious face throughout the second half of the episode—is also pretty funny. Here’s hoping that we get to learn more about them in future episodes. I’m liking this SNL-style sketch comedy, but I’m a writer, after all. Everything’s always better with character development!

Earthlings might be prone to inane ramblings, but Alien News Desk sure isn’t.