As Romulus shows, the series is best when it keeps to its slasher-in-space formula – anything more and the old beast starts creaking like a colony ship

Spoiler alert – discusses Alien: Romulus

Back in the 1990s, the Alien franchise’s biggest problem was its inability to dispose of its iconic characters once it became clear they no longer had a meaningful part to play. Remember Ellen Ripley’s unexpected return as a xenomorph-human hybrid clone of herself in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection, at least two movies after she should probably have been retired? Honestly we’d have preferred her to come back from the dead as a holographic robo-zen life coach, floating serenely around a doomed space colony to remind everyone to breathe through their terror as they’re facehugged by an extraterrestrial octopus. Anything would have been better than watching Sigourney Weaver morph into a hybrid space gymnast with the strength of 10 forklift trucks who casually drips acid blood as if she were leaking engine coolant.

But that was then, and this is now. Since 1997 fans have had to sit in disbelief as pretty much the only character we did actually care about in 2012’s Prometheus, Noomi Rapace’s Elisabeth Shaw, was casually dispensed with before 2017’s Alien: Covenant, leaving us with only David the nutty android and an entire army of tedious dead Engineers to kickstart the next instalment. This would have been bad enough if it wasn’t a virtual repeat of the mistakes made by David Fincher’s Alien 3, which killed off Aliens’ Newt and Hicks before the opening credits.