Quick one today, but a good one. Per MSN, Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant has landed on Peacock, so the internet's favorite argument-starter in the franchise just got a lot easier to rewatch.

I know what you're thinking. Covenant? The one with the flute scene? Yes. That one. The 2017 follow-up to Prometheus, where Scott took the philosophical weirdness of that movie and funneled it straight into a full-on slasher, complete with a Michael Fassbender performance (two of them, technically) that's genuinely one of the best things the franchise has ever produced.

I've made my peace with being in the minority here, but I love this movie. The back half, the shower attack and everything around it, is Scott in pure nightmare mode, and the opening 20 minutes with the colonization ship Covenant might be the most underrated stretch of sci-fi filmmaking anybody's delivered in the last decade. It's gorgeous, it's tense, it's obsessed with big questions about creation while also letting a neomorph rip somebody's face apart. Few directors can hold both of those tones at once. Scott does it while barely seeming to try.

The divisiveness is real, though. The movie killed off a major Prometheus character off-screen between films, pivoted hard from exploration to horror, and ended on one of the bleaker notes any studio franchise has dared. It fractured the fanbase so badly the series basically went back to the vault until Fede Álvarez's Alien: Romulus showed up to bridge the timelines instead. Covenant earned around $240 million worldwide on a budget north of $90 million. Decent, but not the kind of number that fast-tracks a third David chapter, which is a shame, because that ending was clearly pointing somewhere.

But that's exactly why it's worth revisiting now. Divisive movies age more interestingly than safe ones. Romulus came along and played the hits, fan service and all, and it worked. Covenant never played anything safe. It's a studio sequel that behaves like an art project about a narcissistic android and his god complex, and honestly the fact that it exists in that form at all is kind of miraculous.

Peacock also has the rest of the Alien library if you want to build a marathon, so you can watch the tone of the entire franchise snap in half in real time. My recommendation, if you haven't seen Covenant since theaters: go in cold on a weeknight, no refreshers. The dread works better when you're not sure where it's heading.

I'll probably throw it on tonight myself. Jess keeps telling me I need to stop rewatching movies I've already defended in public, but where's the fun in that. If you want the full rundown of what else is hitting Peacock this month, I covered that earlier, and Covenant is the crown jewel of the batch.