The Onion AV Club, to which I turn for pop-cultural bedazzlement on a fairly regular basis, has launched a new series, “Better Late Than Never”, in which writers who’ve managed to miss out on an acknowledged masterwork experience said masterwork for the first time, and then write about it.

This weekend, Kyle Ryan discovered Ridley Scott’s “Alien” — an experience I wish I could have all over again. I do believe “Alien” is one of a handful of truly perfect films, and though I’ve seen it at least a dozen times, it continues to enthrall me with its terrible beauty, and its uncompromising ferocity.

Ryan’s piece is a great read, and — as is always the case with the AV Club — the comments that follow are informed and witty and dense with intelligent discussion about the relative merits of the sequels, which leads to an almost mesmerizing back-and-forth about whether Fincher’s “Alien 3” is better or worse than Jeunet’s “Alien Resurrection”.

As someone who’s long contended “Resurrection” is an unjustly spurned work of outsider art, I was pleased to see I’m not alone. And I’d never considered Joss Whedon’s script as a test run for his “Firefly” characters, but now that they mention it …