Mr. October - Episode 2 | Alien: Earth - The Official Podcast

Hermit (Played by Alex Lawther): I know he's not here. But see, this ball and the game–he called it proof. He said sometimes the world gives you one moment to shine. And if you do–well, there’s a name for that kind of hero. He called him Mr. October.

Wendy (Played by Sydney Chandler): Mister?

Adam Rogers: Welcome to Alien: Earth - The Official Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Rogers, here every week to grow and expand inside the chest of an episode of Alien: Earth and then burst outward in a gory shower of insight. This week, Episode 2: Mr. October. We're full of spoilers, so I'll understand if you bail out, but it would be a mistake! Because on this episode… y'all, I am verklempt. We have Man-In-Suit today, my friends. Cameron Brown, the Eponymous alien from Alien: Earth. After that actor, Essie Davis is here to talk about her character, Dame Sylvia, the Hybrid's own Dr. Frankenstein. And finally, co-executive producer Migizi Pensoneau is back to talk about, well, death actually and whether humans should try to beat it even if we could.

But let’s kick off with executive producer and episode director Dana Gonzalez on the literal ‘when worlds collide' vibe of Episode 2 and that weird Louis Couture party.

Dana Gonzales: I love Alien. I just like everyone else who was captivated by it. There's a lot of story, there's a lot of depth to it. I've been working with Noah Hawley since Season One of Fargo. Fargo is a remake of a fabled story, show and everything, and Alien is another one. There was a lot of people who said, don't do it. But Alien has different voices in the franchise, where Fargo had one, you know, the Cohen brothers, right? We tried to kinda stay into their filmmaking style and, and you know, we didn't want to jump the shark there. It wasn't like we're gonna do like this handheld version of Fargo. And Alien because you have, you know, the Ridley Scott, the James Cameron, the Fincher, there's definitely different styles in all that. So, it was more like, which one do we want to be more like, right?

When you're doing remakes on shows sometimes directors are like, don't even watch that original movie 'cause I wanna do this differently. We never approached it that way. You know, if anything, we were looking at the movies a lot, and then naturally Alien: Earth is, it's a different world. We have different characters, different character development. So, now it's like, how can we bring the successful story points that the Alien fans love and those timeless things, the chest burster, all these things. How can we bring those into our world? I, I think that's how we approached it.

Adam Rogers: There's kind of a literal moment where those two worlds crash together. The Maginot, the ship that you've created for the show literally crashes into Earth and it hits this skyscraper on, on Earth. So there's all the things that we know about, Alien stories that happen on confined spaceships, and now it comes to Earth. How are you thinking about that as a, you know, as a visual moment, as a storytelling moment? Like, okay, now this becomes our Alien show right here.

Dana Gonzales: Yeah. You know, that's when some of the creatures and the characters collide. That's kind of our new place, right? That's now ours. What is that world? It's a lot of water and humid and mold driven and it's ran by corporations. So it's like, you know, we never knew what Weyland Yutani was really, we just, it was just this corporation. Obviously the corporation 30 years ago was a different interpretation of what we think corporations are today. And then ironically you have these five billionaires that are running the world.

Adam Rogers: What could that possibly be like? I have no idea what that–it's very relatable actually.

Dana Gonzales: Yeah, we have this, civics thing that's happening in the world, you know, in front of us. That's where you can jump the shark a little bit too with a franchise. Because everybody's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. We're not in the spaceship. What the hell is that about? And that's where I think we make it our own. We spent a lot of time on the Maginot in the first hour. We kind of give the audience, ground them into like, here's the Alien world that you know. So we gave them that and then now we have to tell an eight hour story versus a one and a half to two hour movie. Right?

Adam Rogers: Well, you have a lot more room to spread out in a TV show and do different or unexpected things. For instance, there's this scene where the rich people are having a Versailles themed party and the Xenomorph just wreaks gleeful vengeance against these oligarch guys. It's one of my favorite parts, but it’s also a look at the socioeconomics of this world, right?

Dana Gonzales: I mean that, that building the rich people live on the top. The poor people live in the bottom. So when the ship crashed and they were subterranean, that was like all the poor people, like the movie Parasite, right? This is where they live underneath and then the Lordship, that's the who that guy is, he lives on the 65th floor and these people don't even know what the hell's going on in the world. And it's so absurd because the ships crashed in there and he is like, no, no, no, we're having this party.

Adam Rogers: Well, and it's dumping the Xenomorph into a JG Ballard skyscraper just for a second, as a way to introduce the world, but also to say here's the class stuff that's in a lot of the Alien movies coming much to the fore. It's gonna be a lot more important as the show goes on. So Prodigy is one of the corporations equivalent or co-equal with Weyland Yutani running the planet Earth in this world. Prodigy is run by Boy Kavalier, he's this trillionaire genius. And I wanna know do we actually think he's smart or does he think he's smart?

Dana Gonzales: He's obviously a genius and, I think, geniuses could go the wrong direction, just as easy as they could go the correct direction, you know. But he's stunted, so, so he's emotionally like a 12-year-old.

Adam Rogers: Okay so how does him being stunted change his motivations? Because he says in this episode explicitly that part of his hope in designing Hybrids is building something that he can have an intelligent conversation with. Does he really think that, that for something to be smarter than him, it’d have to be part robot?

Dana Gonzales: Yeah. you know, I think maybe the component of the Hybrids that Boy K didn't fully think through was the human part. And that humanity is gonna challenge them because Wendy has a brother, and wants to get back with him. That's like a human part. That's not the machine part. Arthur, he's tracking her and he is like, oh, she's, communicating with the brother. And then that's how she learns how to control the system. And they're like, holy shit, she's more powerful than we even thought. Well, that power is driven by her emotion, which again, no one saw that coming. I don't think they thought like her emotion would, mathematically, collide with her AI powers and teach itself how to run the system because that's how emotionally she's gonna get into Joe's life. So there's gonna be a, this kind of collision of humanity and machine and what wins, and, you know, we'll see more of that later.

Adam Rogers: There's a lot going on here already in these first couple of episodes. There's an article from the nineties by a postmodern feminist theorist named Donna Haraway called The Cyborg Manifesto, where she talks about cyborgs and being post gender and sort of post family and having technology embedded with you. And I feel like there's a lot more of trying to figure out what a cyborg is, what an artificial person is with this, and how those fit into notions of family. I wonder if that's something that you were thinking about too. How to learn to be a post-human cyborg entity in a post-human world?

Dana Gonzales: We explore this as the season goes on, especially with Wendy, let's say, as the protagonist of this all, like, which side is she gonna lean into, human or machine, what's gonna win out? So that's evolving. She's doing a bit of the party line at the beginning where she's like, when Boy K, took her from the family and told her father that he would save her life, but she'll never be able to contact them again. She's kind of holding that party line until emotionally she gives in. So the crash of the ship is the catalyst of their relationship getting back. She just reconnected with her brother, just convinced him that she is Marcy, and now he's ripped away from her, from the Xenomorph. You know, she has to save them, and, again, without giving away too much, you start seeing the choices that Wendy has to make.

Adam Rogers: Dana’s hinting there that the Hybrids are always kind of in-between the other character types on Alien: Earth. There’s a difference though between a robot implanted with human consciousness and a robot that thinks it has a human consciousness. I’m not even sure Dame Sylvia knows for sure which it is here, and she helped build them. So let’s go to Essie Davis, who plays Dame and can give a sense of what’s going on in the mind of one of Neverland’s adults in the room.

Essie Davis: I was just so excited to have an Alien script land on my doorstep because I was a massive fan of Alien. My husband, Justin Kurzel, who's a fantastic film director, when he and I first got together when we were in our twenties and he said, “you have to watch this. Haven't you ever seen Alien? Oh my God!” And, um, so he introduced me to Alien and Aliens. And then when I met Noah and he said, yeah, we really want to base it mostly on that first and second on Alien and Aliens, that's the world we're going to be in, I'm going, I am totally in. My character doesn't get to go on the spaceship, but our first walk through the spaceship was like being a little kid and, you know, all of us walking through going, “The lights! Oh my God! The switches work!” Things like that. It's like, Wow. I mean, it's just like, gives me goosebumps thinking about it now, just walking into those sets is pretty extraordinary.

Adam Rogers: Okay, so you're seeing these incredible spaceships. You are on set in Thailand. There's like people from all over the world working on this set with you. What was that like? What was the vibe on set like and did it change the way that you approached the job?

Essie Davis: I just really loved working with the Thai crew as well as the international crew. We had, we had people from all over the world as we had actors from all over the world working together. It was a really international, fun, eclectic group of people. And it was huge. And, you know, we got together as a cast and we'd go and read in someone's room and read all of the episodes. Often not play our own characters, play somebody else's character so that we could just be free of having to do anything performance wise. And in a way that was nice because we didn't have the pressure of being watched by a bunch of producers.

Adam Rogers: Like, do you use those to work through options, or does that become like, here's how I'm going to do it?

Essie Davis: Sometimes, if we were playing our own characters, then sometimes, but quite often everyone would go, Okay, I'll be Wendy, or one of us was, you know, narrating all the, the big print. And so, yeah, we just had fun and sometimes people's interpretations were so stupid, you would, it would never ever, ever, ever be done in that way whatsoever. Um, actually up until the morning of my first day shooting, I was doing a different accent.

Adam Rogers: Really?

Essie Davis: I had this kind of, I would say hybrid French international school accent as if I'd studied pretty much around the world. Which is really beautiful and probably very accurate, but I guess a little risky as well. In the end I bravely became the Australian.

Adam Rogers: Even early on, you know, it's clear that Dame Sylvia is really central to the story. You must've realized that when you were reading scripts, how did you think about creating that character?

Essie Davis: Well, she's quite a complicated character because she's not only an incredibly successful scientist, she's a woman who had to do a hell of a lot to get into that position and maintain that position. Her aim is to make humankind immortal. But it has to be humankind, not just a machine that looks like a human. She has a very delicate struggle with helping nurture a human morality in a world where morality is very questionable. And she's also handling a boss who has given her this opportunity. And yet he's also highly volatile, because he's essentially been a child genius and has had very little good parenting.

Adam Rogers: He's always, it's right there in his name, right? He's fetishizing remaining a child.

Essie Davis: Yeah, but I don't, Boy K he wants to stay a child, but he never really was a child. He never had a childhood. So he's deluded. Anyway, he's um, you know, he thinks he's Peter Pan. She has been like a mother to him. They've been engaged in this relationship for at least the last decade, so she's managed this genius as a child who has never really had a childhood.

Adam Rogers: So she's managing a lot of different kinds of relationships. She's managing relationships with the Hybrids. She's managing this relationship with Boy K. She's managing her actual relationship because she works with her husband. There's a lot of different dynamics.

Essie Davis: There’s a lot of relationship management and it's quite, it eats into her time.

Adam Rogers: Right. It's hard to actually do science when you got all that going on.

Essie Davis: There is a lot of that going on, but it is so important to her that her creations remain human. I love Adarsh and Jonathan's characters. They're just constantly in child mode. They're still way down in the, I'm a boy I want to play.

Adam Rogers: Like Boy K's never been like that, right? Like he–

Essie Davis: He’s never been like that. He's never stopped to play. Children have this infinite imagination. Yes, they do. But he's never spent any time in the wonder of that infinite imagination. Whereas all of these kids have in their own way, they're essentially children that need the time that a normal human would take to grow into adolescence and to become adults. I guess that's where the real difficulty lies, is who are the moral guides in this world. Because, Kirsh doesn't give a – about humanity. And neither does Boy K, really. So Arthur and Dame Sylvia, we're in a very powerful position. But we've got to hold on to the reins of this horse really tight in order for that human element to be protected. She's basically going, I have made humankind immortal. But also, but also, it's gotta be very delicate, otherwise we're just gonna have a bunch of fucking brats, excuse my swearing, running the world forever and doing really naughty things.

Adam Rogers: You mentioned the weird position that Dame Sylvia and that Arthur, her husband, are in. Their relationship is also, another dynamic in among all of these things that, you know, you wonder how aligned they are. Do they agree with what they're doing, do you think? With each other, I mean.

Essie Davis: I think that, in the privacy of their own home, they probably have a lot of, how are we going to handle Boy K, um, conversations. What are we going to do? How are we going to tackle this? Initially, they're very aligned but actually, in their dynamic, Dame is the boss. She's way higher up the food chain. And, is privy to much more classified information than Arthur is. Which is pretty tricky. You know, they love each other, they love each other deeply, but their work has been completely all consuming of their lives and relationships and Dame Sylvia's got, she's got to reach the absolute top of her game and there's no time to stop and have children if that's where she's, she's got to get to. And as much as he would love them, here we have them. We have them. Look.

Adam Rogers: Alien movies always have like weird kinky maternal stuff going on. That's one of the great–especially the Sigourney Weaver cycle has a lot of that happening, but you're the scientist here too. You know, you, you actually did create them. It's not just found family stuff. So where on the, I made up this spectrum between, you know, Mom and Dr. Frankenstein, where do you put Dame Sylvia?

Essie Davis: I think she's on a sliding shifter between those poles.

Adam Rogers: Right.

Essie Davis: I think that she genuinely has a great love of these children, but she has chosen them to experiment on. I think she does see them as her amazing creation. But as much as she loves Marcy, she loves her in her Wendy body.

Adam Rogers: OK. Essie is digging into complicated human emotions. As a completely human person myself, I am obviously familiar with them. But…look, are you going to hate me if I say I’m kind of here for the Xenomorphic alien with acid for blood? For the reason colonial marines nuke sites from orbit? An organism whose perfection is matched only by its hostility? You know, I’m here for, I’m saying, Cameron Brown, who plays the Xenomorph.

Cameron Brown: I got sent a self-taped briefing with a list of movements and requirements that they wanted to see for a, um, nondescript creature for an untitled show. It was about 14 different specific movements they wanted to see including crawling and walking and jumping and lunging and attacking, and things like how the creature would start in a smaller shape and expand outward and then from an expanded shape contract again.

Adam Rogers: We want you to extend a teeth lined tongue outward. If you can just manage that for us. Had you done that kind of movement work in addition to stunt work? I would make a distinction between those things, maybe I'm wrong and those are actually all part of the same talent and skillset.

Cameron Brown: Everything performance-wise is connected in some way. So in stunts you get bleedthrough into acting when you have a character that's slightly more featured or you might be given dialogue. And creature performance is another one that bleeds over. While auditioning for this show I was working on the Planet Of The Apes movie, the latest one, as a stunt performer on that. As part of that, we were required to play chimpanzees and gorillas. So a lot of the creature movement from that bled over into not just the fight scenes and the action, but performance capture of those creatures.

Adam Rogers: So describe the costume. Like what are you actually wearing?

Cameron Brown: The costume itself was designed by a team of technicians at Weta Workshop. It's made predominantly of foam latex with silicon additions through it as well. And then it's got fiberglass, which holds the shell of the headpiece together, but it's kind of like a giant thick wetsuit.

Adam Rogers: Famously, the headpiece is the heavy, is this heavy part. Is it like a helmet that you're putting on or is it above your head and you're inside it? Are you in it like a mask?

Cameron Brown: Yeah. If you can imagine the shape of the creature, my head lives within the neck and then the head sits on top of my head, and it's about a meter long and our hero, full animatronic version of that head, weighed close to eight kilos. So it's still got a fair bit of weight to it.

Adam Rogers: Wow. Right.

Cameron Brown: Yeah.

Adam Rogers: But parts of the suit are animatronic. So are you controlling that from inside the suit, or—it was built by the VFX company Weta, are they controlling it?

Cameron Brown: That's a part of the Weta team who's puppeting it externally using remote controls to power all the servomotors and animatronics and make the lip snarl and the teeth move and the tongue come out, and all of that.

Adam Rogers: That means there has to be a lot of collective teamwork, right? So that while you're doing the large body movements, somebody else is doing the facial expressions essentially. So that's, that has to be timed. You have to be working with them, they've gotta be watching to make that complete.

Cameron Brown: The real spirit of the creature performance is collaboration. So, so much of it is the team who was working with me. And by team I mean the Weta technicians who were surrounding me, puppeteering the tail, puppeteering the teeth, and looking at the overall image of what is their art, right? Like the suit is their piece of art that they've designed and how that can be presented best on camera to show that this creature is scary.

Adam Rogers: How long did it take to get into the suit?

Cameron Brown: It wasn't too long to be honest, and by the end of it we had it down to a pretty fine art I think. At the start of the show, we were allowing about 40 minutes to get fully kitted up, and then by the end of it we could have that halved. So about 20 minutes to get everything on.

Adam Rogers: That's not bad at all. But if you're wearing it outside, in the heat in Thailand, I suppose that would make it more of a chore walking around craft services. Waiting for your–waiting for the scene.

Cameron Brown: Oh man, I was so well looked after. They always had aircon tents and if not tents, then these big pipes that they pumped through the jungle to pump aircon over and things like that.

Adam Rogers: That's cool. I mean, literally cool.  So once you're in costume, you're on set, what kind of direction were you given on how to move in that space?

Cameron Brown: I remember one of the notes that Noah gave quite early on was despite the size of the creature, cause in the suit with everything on the creature stands at about eight feet tall. So you can imagine standing next to that and it looming over you. It's already quite a presence. One of the notes he gave was he wanted me to play against the size of the creature. So despite it being very large, it should still have this grace and kind of fluidity to its movements. And something I took from that was the different ways the creature moves in different states. So in a state where it's not actively attacking and it's kind of stalking through the ship, it's more slow and everything's more like graceful and fluid, but then it has that sudden like explosive kick as soon as it's go-time and ready to attack. It changes from this sort of drifting movement to very direct and straight on and on-target.

Adam Rogers: It is interesting because you worked on Planet Of The Apes, so there's a living creature to draw from there for those movements. But it’s not like you can go to a zoo and look at a Xenomorph and see what they're really like. So were the films source material for you?

Cameron Brown: I watched the first one and the second one over and over, and then the third one. I took a lot from Alien vs. Predator as well. There's a lot of really cool movements in that movie. I think it would've been silly for me not to try and incorporate what was already a very, you know, solid and well established character portrayed by these incredible performers, and try and pay homage to them and continue their legacy. Like you said, there is no zoo or anything where you can go see this creature, but there is a ridiculously large fan base and so there's so much fan art and concept art and everything out there showing the Xenomorph in different poses that fans think are cool in ways that they wanna see it. So I looked at a lot of those as well and tried to take those freeze frames and then see how I could incorporate those through the movements as well.

Adam Rogers: There's a scene that I've been asking a lot about in Episode Two. The Louis XIV costume dress dinner. Can you talk about what it was like to film that and what your movement through that scene was? My understanding is that it involved getting, like, really swung down like, that it was a real plunge into the room, onto the table. So I wonder what that was like for you.

Cameron Brown: When we first walked onto that set and saw the other artists in costume, ‘cause all of the corpses in that scene were all artists who were fully dressed up. They weren't dolls or anything like that. So they all went through makeup and then had all of the gore and stuff added to them and, and the art department having designed that space as well. Walking in straight away, it was very contrasting to everything else we'd seen on the show so far.

The action piece that you are speaking about, which is the Xenomorph leaping off the balcony and attacking one of the characters, was possibly one of the biggest standalone stunts I've done in my career so far? And also one of the most enjoyable. Everything on the show we tried to do as practically as possible, and I think this stunt in particular shows the whole culmination of this. We had all the departments working together. The, the camera movement was, on a dolly, not on tracks, just a free dolly. Alex, the actor in the shot as well, down below. I was positioned in the costume, up the top, on the balcony. Then we had special effects with detonated glass for a chandelier, a balustrade and then a table down the bottom. And of course, the stunt team directing all of the action and having me positioned on wires ready to leap off this thing. And then all of that preparation we do comes down to maybe two seconds of flight time in the air where everything has to go off at once the debts go bang, bang, bang. And I leap, Alex looks up, sees me for a split second and gets out of the way, the camera moves at exactly the right time and captures everything. And I don't think many people get the opportunity in their career to do something like that, and that felt really special to be a part of.

Adam Rogers: That's super cool. So how many takes did you get, is it just the one take?

Cameron Brown: Two takes. We did two takes of it.

Adam Rogers: Of the whole thing. So you did, so they, they reset all of that stuff that gets detonated, do it again to come through. Wow.

Cameron Brown: All of the rubberized glass that they fired out, they had to sweep off the floors. All of the breakaway stuff had to be reset, the chandelier reset, the camera reset. All of that. We did a few block throughs before without all of the dets obviously, but as far as cameras rolling, yeah, I believe it was two takes.

Adam Rogers: So from Cameron’s wreaking Alien havoc in the Xenomorph sequences to the more kind of weight flashbacks of Hermit’s life with his family – Episode 2 really runs a real gamut. But I want to lean into the pathos here a bit more. When Wendy finds Hermit, her brother, she explains that their father approved putting Marcy's mind into the new Wendy body. But are those memories enough to make a Hybrid human? And do they make the Hybrid the same human? If you knew you pretty much couldn't die, what would keep you human? Those are all very easy questions for writer and co-executive producer Migizi Pensoneau.

Migizi Pensoneau: Kirsh lays out to Wendy, you used to be food, really. To him, to this synthetic being, that's what humans really were. They were just a part of the food chain. And it's really our consciousness, our sense of self that makes a human, human. And for me, I would take it one step further that it's not just our relationship to ourself or the awareness of us having a self, but instead it is a relationship to others and how we care for, or how we feel about others. That connection, to another person, another being, another creature, whatever, whether you go even deeper and get into, you know, quantum entanglement or any of that, we are connected on some level to other beings around us. And I think that the Hybrids, even though their bodies are synthetic, their consciousness is constantly reaching out towards others. And I think that for me, that was enough for me to say: they're human.

Adam Rogers: So, perhaps they are human in some way, but after the transference, are they still the same human that they were before? Or are they human in a new way? I don’t know, is this even a question worth asking?

Migizi Pensoneau: For me, I would, I would say that the more important question comes down to autonomy and it's how do they see themselves? Whenever you're dealing with artificial intelligence or any of that in science fiction, it's like, we know for a fact that these were human children that came from human bodies and are now transplanted into this synthetic body. And it's like, well, that's one step past AI. Or is it really? Are we just taking the sum of the parts of the brain and putting it into this thing? Does that make it not human now? These are fun questions and I don't think we have a solid answer. I don't have a solid answer for myself.

Adam Rogers: From a storytelling perspective, they exist in tension with all the other categories of character. They're not quite human, they're not quite monsters, they're not synthetics, they're not cyborgs, they're not adults, they're not corporate, they're all the things that all the, everybody else isn't, and that means that the dynamic is always one of opposition with anybody they're talking to.

Migizi Pensoneau: Yeah, not just opposition. I feel like relationship just regardless because it's like, to whom do you identify is as interesting a question as how you see yourself. Like, the search for a sense of self within others. And I think that you know, we've socialized, we form groups, we form relationships with people and animals and all that with a sense of self we reach out to recognize ourselves through other people. And I think that is fundamentally what makes up, A, good drama, but B, the search for this humanity is made up of that question. And I think that each one of these characters goes through that constantly. And it's really a question of then where do you stay? Which side do you stick with? And that question of like, am I a human? Am I a monster? Am I a creature? Am I something else? Again, there are no answers, but the question is always in flux for each of the characters.

Adam Rogers: The Hybrids have built into a capacity for like, human adjacent feelings. They have approximations of hormones and emotions and all that stuff’s kinda designed into their software and hardware, but obviously they can be manually adjusted or turned off entirely. What does that do to their humanity?

Migizi Pensoneau: Yeah, it still exists in this way and they've quelled some of that as they say to Wendy in the first episode, they've turned down some of the simulations of serotonin and all of that kind of thing, but the ego is still there and the consciousness is still there and I think that, they're in a battle with like, well, it's as Dame Sylvia said, we can't keep messing with these kinds of things because we're exploding human potential. We're trying to like make humans, you know, this is the idea. And I think if you were to look through Dame Sylvia's eyes and look at the sales pitch of it, I think the important thing to her is that you still get to be yourself if you go into this synthetic body. We're not making you into a machine, you still get to be you. Just, you know, immortal and indestructible. It's an important thing for Dame Sylvia. It is absolutely unimportant for Kirsh. I think if Kirsh had his druthers he would absolutely turn off everything that's human about the Hybrids. I think he would want to see what their potential is unencumbered by the feelings, but still being human.

Adam Rogers: Dame Sylvia is you can transcend death but retain your humanity. Kirsh has no, he's like, I didn't have that humanity in the first place, so…

Migizi Pensoneau: Yeah, so it's absolutely unimportant to him for sure.

Adam Rogers: Right.

Migizi Pensoneau: But I think that it's important to him in the same way that it's important to Boy K. I mean Kirsh is tied with Boy K’s wants and needs in that way. And I think that he recognizes it, but it's, I think, you know, for whatever autonomy Kirsh may have I think he would just rather work with more synths. Maybe not.

Adam Rogers: So you've got all these different types of beings, different levels of humanity, different kinds of simulated humanity. What were the conversations like with the actors about how to play it so the differences come across?

Migizi Pensoneau: One of my favorite sort of anecdotes was watching two, sort of, masters in this craft. It wasn't a conversation I was a part of, but I got to sit back and watch, of Noah and Tim Olyphant talking about…Krish doesn't have the capacity to display sort of anger or that kind of thing. It's not really a part of his coding. But he clearly has some motivations so how do you display these kinds of things? And, it might not be in a way that's necessarily obvious or apparent to people, but are the occasional smiles that Tim gives to Boy K. And you're like, Oh, there's something else behind that, which is really, I mean, the best actors do. It's their–whatever's on their face isn’t necessarily the feeling that's being emoted behind that. So if you can convey that underlying feeling while doing something completely different with your body and face, I think that's a really interesting challenge.

Adam Rogers: I imagine there's a little something behind every character's facial expressions when they're talking to Boy Kay. He's not someone you can stay neutral on, especially the way Samuel comes at the part.

Migizi Pensoneau: There is one bit of trivia that you won't ever see that I, I will give you because it is, it is a thing that I am sad to have lost, obviously in the sake of time, it needed to be cut. But the scene between Dame Sylvia and Boy Kavalier where he is chomping away on the proverbial apple of knowledge, the end of that scene originally had him just throwing that apple on the floor, which I absolutely loved. And, that now is no longer a part of the scene, but you know, it's a nice little bit of IMDb trivia. If anybody ever listens to this, so there you go.

Adam Rogers: That's another episode of Alien: Earth - The Official Podcast sealed into hypersleep. Next week: Boy Kavalier gets some alien-shaped toys to play with, and this is what it sounds like when facehuggers cry. That’s your teaser for Episode 3 of FX’s Alien: Earth. If you get a chance, you can rate, review, and follow Alien: Earth - The Official Podcast wherever you get us from. I'm Adam Rogers, I'll see you here next week.