Then I turned on my laptop. Not just any laptop, this one-it’s one some creatures would, literally, kill for… because it alone contains the complete and perpetually updated List of Alien Outlaws on Terra Firma.

I can shape The List as anything from an interactive scroll to a heads-up display visor, but I usually access it as a laptop, since I like to practice not standing out. Plus, that way-when I’m not researching-I can download movies from Netflix.

So I logged in and did a little research on the stinking outlaw I’d just missed at the diner. Number 5 hailed from a remote swamp planet with an unpronounceable name that makes the Siberian tundra seem cosmopolitan.

But since leaving his provincial home and finding his way to the bright lights and big megalopolises of the central star clusters, he’d been working his way through the ranks, and now he was an up-and-coming entertainment mogul. Kind of an alien version of Aaron Spelling, if Aaron Spelling were a few degrees more bloodthirsty than Attila the Hun.

His MO was to find technologically evolving but still largely defenseless cultures-such as Earth’s-where he could easily move in, steal some of their better entertainment ideas, enslave their unwary populations, and then walk away with a treasure trove of exploitive, derivative programs that he’d then proceed to syndicate to networks across the cosmos.

So what made this swamp creature worthy of the number five spot on The List? His signature cinematic flourish: to kill his cast as the last act of their skits. In fact, because they always died at the end, he was considered the founder of a new style of alien program that they called-in typically lame alien fashion-endertainment.