Televisual Entertainments

I wasn't all that interested until Noah Hawley's name showed up. He's bought enough goodwill with Legion and Fargo that I'll give this a couple episodes at least.

I haven’t seen any Alien movies outside of the first three, but doesn’t the concept of Aliens on Earth set as a prequel rather undermine the entire point of the whole series?

Kinda, maybe. There's a theory (which I'm not convinced is supported by the text) that Weyland-Yutani knew about the alien ship on LV-426 and deliberately routed the Nostromo there so it would pick up xenomorphs. Personally, I always read the "crew expendable" note as standard operating procedure if the science team discovered something valuable enough to risk the rest of the team, and the fact that colonists were on LV-426 for years before any of them were told to go looking where Ripley pointed to suggests that they didn't have that much intel. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

From what's in the original Alien, Ash is definitely learning about the facehugger as he's studying it, so I don't think they expected to find that specific creature, but I always assumed that the Company knew there was something there. I suppose it depends when Special Order 937 came in - if Ash reported Kane's predicament and the Company sent it in response, then maybe they had no idea (although the Aliens Special Edition suggests there's about a 2-week turnaround for messages).

I was thinking about this the other day, but the crew of the Nostromo don't exactly seem overwhelmed with philosophical awe at humanity's place in the universe when they find the derelict - which implies that extraterrestrial life (potentially even spacefaring extraterrestrial life) is known to exist in some form?

EDIT: Just remembered, Ash was a last-minute replacement on the Nostromo, too, which (even ignoring all the expanded universe novels and bollocks) suggests that the Company knew the beacon was there, and may have already been intending to redirect the ship.

which implies that extraterrestrial life (potentially even spacefaring extraterrestrial life) is known to exist in some form?

The "another bug hunt" line in Aliens also suggests that they've encountered (non-sentient?) life on other planets with some regularity.

I just hope that the woman in the trailer with the sword has been trained by a Predator or she's going to have a very bad day.

I watched Department Q on Netflix. It was absolute shit in bits, but lovely to see Edinburgh and bits of Scotland. It's basically grumpy English detective in Scotland solving a kerayzee missing person mystery (a woman being held in a bariatric diving chamber for…. reasons). Really needed to be a villain of the week, Mentalist style, as 9 episodes of tortuously slow UK programming just ain't it. I doubt it'll get a second season.