Kosmic Syren

The Cat From Outer Space Remake Pitch:

Two years before the story begins, a small spacecraft crashes into a rural area. A voiceover (Alexander Skarsgard) is heard of a pilot relaying a message to his homebase that he’s stranded on a non-hostile planet and his ship is damaged beyond repair. He agrees to find a safe haven and lay low while a rescue party is organized, but he’s warned that it will take time. The pilot then emerges from the spaceship, revealing him to be an Abyssinian cat with a glowing collar.

In the present day, Liz (Drew Barrymore) lives in a modest suburban duplex, which doubles as a cat sanctuary. Her house is full of cat-themed artwork, and she wears cat sweaters and cat earrings. Her living room is adorned with cat trees and wall shelves, and her backyard is an elaborate catio that provides a paradise for the 20+ cats in her care. She lists each one for adoption, but there are always more cats than people who want one, which is fine with her. She’s always liked cats more than people, anyway. 

Liz’s neighbor in the other half of the duplex, Frank (Rege Jean-Page), is a nerdy astronomer who spends his free time watching space documentaries and checking the telescopes in his back yard. He believes he found an alien artifact years ago, which he keeps hidden, not wanting it to be confiscated before he’s able to find proof. Sometimes, Frank is out at night with his equipment while Liz is refilling the cat food bowls, and they have friendly chats.

Unbeknownst to Liz, her favorite cat, whom she calls Jake, is the alien pilot who crashed on Earth two years earlier. She noticed early on that Jake was highly intelligent and required a specialized diet after refusing cat food, so she decided to keep him as her own. Jake watches TV with her and even seems to react to the scenarios taking place on screen. While petting him, Liz sometimes says, “Where did you come from, you little genius?” 

For her day job, Liz works from home doing boring data entry to pay the bills and fundraise for her sanctuary, so she’s basically always home. Sometimes, Liz thinks she hears Jake speaking with a human voice, but he always meows when she enters the room, leaving her to conclude that it’s an auditory hallucination due to her inoperable brain tumor. She was warned that there could be neurological side effects, so she tracks her episodes in a journal. More than anything, she worries about what will happen to the cats if her health deteriorates to a point where she can’t care for them anymore. 

One night, Frank’s boyfriend Norman (Dan Levy) is en route to Frank’s home when a flash of light crosses the sky. Stunned, Norman slams on the brakes and gets out of the car to watch the UFO, taking a quick video with his phone. Rushing to Frank’s house, he tries to describe what he saw, and Frank watches the video in disbelief. 

Meanwhile, Liz’s evening is interrupted by Jake hopping onto the kitchen counter and speaking to her directly, informing her that he’s not from Earth and his friends have arrived to take him back to his home planet. Liz responds to this with panicked laughter, believing she’s hallucinating. Jake, who reveals his real name to be Zunar-J-5/9 Doric-4-7, calmly tells her that what he's saying is true, and any other human can confirm that he’s speaking. Liz is like, “Oh right, let me just run outside and ask someone if they can also hear my cat talking, nothing wrong with that plan." Then Jake’s collar glows while he makes Liz and a few nearby cats float, and Liz is fully freaked out. 

Liz, holding Jake, knocks on Frank’s door, because if anyone might believe in spaceships and alien cats, it’s him. Frank and Norman let her inside, thinking there’s an emergency, but Liz only stammers something about her cat acting strange, so the two men try to politely tell her that they’re very busy with work. Jake recognizes the images they have pulled up on Frank's PC and jumps over to the desk chair, reading the charts and explaining that it's the ship that has come for him. Frank does a double-take between the cat and Liz, and says, “That cat is talking.” Overwhelmed with relief, Liz exclaims, “You can hear him, too?!” Jake catches them up on his story, and Frank reveals the artifact he found two years ago, which Jake identifies as a fragment from his own ship.

The four of them attempt to travel to the second alien ship only to discover that it’s been placed under the control of a special ops team, with the area restricted to the public. People have gathered wearing alien costumes and demanding the truth, while the official reports say that it was nothing more than space debris. Using his collar + telekinesis powers, Jake is able to track down his alien cat friends, who have been rendered unconscious via tranquilizer darts, for which he blames himself, since he reported that the planet was not hostile. HIJINKS ensue as the four work together to save Jake’s friends and get their ship back, while Frank geeks out the entire time and Liz and Norman keep him focused. 

In the end, with Jake and his fellow alien cats ready to safely board their ship, Jake invites Liz to come with them. Her illness would be easy to cure on his home planet, he explains, but she’d have to live out the rest of her days there, since his superiors have deemed Earth unsafe to visit for several more centuries. She grapples with this, reasoning that she can’t possibly leave since her cats need her. Jake tells her he understands and will remember her kindness and friendship before leaving a heartbroken Liz in his wake. Frank and Norman encourage her to go if she wants to, offering to take over the sanctuary in her absence. After some deliberation, Liz rushes to follow Jake, shouting that she’s coming with him after all. 

After a small time jump, Frank and Norman check the telescopes in their backyard, which is twice as big now that they've removed the fence separating it from Liz's yard and expanded the catio, giving the cats more room to roam. Frank has also published a book documenting his research on alien life forms. Somewhere far away from Earth, Liz arrives on the cat planet with Jake, discovering a gorgeous, fantastical city full of flowers and gleaming futuristic buildings . . . and thousands of alien cats, who have gathered to celebrate the return of their catstronaut friends. Liz has never been happier.

~The end!~

Of course, when it comes to my character Cori Nova, I drew inspiration from multiple sources. My personal head-cast for her is Grace Harper in Terminator: Dark Fate (if that wasn't already obvious from the art commission I posted). But it's fun to think about how much early media shaped my taste in fiction and romance.

As far as ships go, my ultimate weakness is the dynamic of a Secretly Powerful Soft Nerd + The Pretty Badass They Fell HARD for ... and it finally clicked that I can trace that directly back to swooning over Clark/Lois at age 6/7.

I remember telling one of my friends back then that I liked "imagining Lois saving Clark." She scoffed at this, genuinely confused, and said, "No, it should be Clark saving Lois!" I think that was the moment when I knew she just didn't get it and that some people sadly aren't gifted with fangirl brains. I also feel deeply, deliciously validated every time Lois canonically saves Clark, so THANK YOU, new movie, for that gorgeous arc!

Now onto the part where I have mixed feelings. With confirmation that the series has been renewed by Apple TV+ for a second season, I am struggling to be optimistic. On the one hand, I'm super excited to see the Murderbot + ART dynamic play out on screen. Their friendship is the one of the most compelling parts of the books, in addition to being SO fucking funny. On the other hand, I am also bracing to be painfully bored if there's a subplot of the PresAux team doing human things in every episode, which seems likely given the amount of screentime allotted to them in S1. One of the book series' major strengths is that we don't see anything Murderbot doesn't see and therefore never learn anything that isn't important for Murderbot to know. Sit-com antics at the Preservation commune or whatever just aren't going to match up tonally, especially if they're given equal weight to Murderbot's journey . . . but I'd love to be proven wrong and for it to find a great balance.

If you're a book fan who loved this show, that's awesome, and I hope you continue to love it. Personally, I'm still hoping we get an animated adaptation someday that follows the book narrative more closely and better illustrates the far-future tech Murderbot uses. If you're a fan of the show who hasn't read the books, I REALLY hope you're inspired to check them out now. You will fall in platonic love with a cyborg who has anxiety, and it will be beautiful.

An animated Murderbot series would work extremely well for multiple reasons, but mainly: A) the show could stay in Murderbot's POV the whole time and let the rest of the cast stay minor characters and B) the tech and setting could be 900% cooler + more immersive and better reflect the far-future world of the books.

Just imagine an animated Murderbot series that keeps more of the character's narration intact, shifts to a split screen of multiple inputs when Murderbot checks the security cameras / drones / notifications, and features lots of groovy tech and gorgeously alien landscapes!!! In the book, Murderbot can feel when someone else is poking around in the same data it's reviewing—picture that playing out on screen vs the live-action character just having throwaway lines about it.

Maybe it's just me, but I can't think about animated Murderbot without getting chills.

Meanwhile, every scene in this episode was as silly and pointless as a knock-knock joke. The flashback to the PresAux team at a fancy dinner doing a convoluted sharing ritual? The alien creatures mating on top of the Hopper?? Murderbot barely doing anything in this episode?! (What show is this again???) Ugh.