One of the most perfect things about the original Alien is its fiendish simplicity. Driven in part by technical limitations, the movie largely confines its glistening monster to the shadows, and keeps the reasons for its existence similarly obscured. Driven purely by the instinct to drive and reproduce, the xenomorph—a designation the creature didn’t even acquire until the second movie in the series—is both a perfect killing machine and the ultimate plot device. It not only requires no explanation but allows none, because the alien’s very nature means that no one who might be in a position to pass on information about it survives to do so.

Simplicity, however, is not really Noah Hawley’s thing. His FX series Fargo was five seasons of elevated fanfiction, riffing on the collected w

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