Metamorphosis - Episode 3 | Alien: Earth - The Official Podcast

Morrow (Played by Babou Ceesay): When is a machine not a machine?

Slightly (Played by Adarsh Gourav): Get off me.

Morrow (Played by Babou Ceesay): When is a machine not a machine?

Adam Rogers: Welcome to Alien: Earth - The Official Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Rogers here every week to get this show into a med bay for careful dissection, you know, just to see what makes it tick. This week, Episode Three, Metamorphosis. Spoilers are inbound, watch the show first, or at least don't get mad at me in the comments. Today on the podcast, Migizi Pensoneau is back to help me dig into the deeper meaning behind the fight with the Xenomorph. Costume designer Suttirat Larlarb is here to talk about the couture and ready to wear of the Alien universe. And hey, do you like billionaires? How about trillionaires? Samuel Blenkin who plays Boy Kavalier, is here to put a human face on the extremely wealthy oligarch. He just wants to help people and be loved, probably. And finally, series creator Noah Hawley and the actor who plays Morrow, Babou Ceesay, are gonna wrestle with this episode's big question: When is a machine, not a machine?

But first, let's take a look at some of the key points of tension in this episode with writer and co-executive producer Migizi Pensoneau, starting with how Hermit and Wendy navigate their somewhat fraught reunion.

Migizi Pensoneau: Alex Lawther, who plays Hermit, was incredibly intentional about whether or not he was calling Sydney Wendy, or Marcy. He had complete intent behind every time with how Hermit was viewing her in that particular space in that particular sequence or scene, or whatever it was. So there are times when she's doing something superhuman, and he'll say Wendy, and because it's like the character of Hermit's brain has a block and can't see the sister within the Hybrid. Other times he is absolutely connected to the humanity within, and that's when he'll call her Marcy. It is a wonderful thing to watch and it's a wonderful choice that he made to know that the character of Hermit would naturally say one or the other given the space that their head was at.

Adam Rogers: So that's super cool, because part of Wendy…Marcy's journey of choices is going to be which aspects of what she embraces and which name she's going to have.

Migizi Pensoneau: If you remember episode one, she's looking over and the child is dying and her consciousness is about to be transferred. And she's the one that says she looks like a Wendy. Dame Sylvia calls her Marcy, and her last words are Wendy. She makes the choice of, of that name and taking on this new sort of persona. We were very intentional throughout the whole production about that, about when she's called that by whom.

Adam Rogers: That's cool.

Migizi Pensoneau: But going back, what's interesting about when he comes to accept that this really is his sister in this body, how do you play that? What do you do? And there's this sort of relief. He almost, like, collapses into Wendy, into Sydney's arms. It's one of my favorite moments of the, of the whole series really, where it's just like this brother and sister who have been ripped apart by circumstance and by corporate machinations find each other again. You'll see them through the series, one is bringing the other down to like have a conversation or they're moving each other around in a space to stay connected and at the same level. They were just connected as brother and sister all the time.

Adam Rogers: So this episode also has this action sequence, a fight with the Xenomorph, and it's a little unusual for a fight in the Alien universe because it's a little co-equal. Should I be thinking about a predator versus prey relationship theme here, or should I just be thinking about it as a cool fight?

Migizi Pensoneau: There is, um, that's so funny. You can seriously just watch that thing and go, man, that's awesome! And that's enough. That's totally cool. And you can get into the idea of, of the alien sense of self and its own vulnerabilities.

Adam Rogers: Going back to Resurrection, one of the more interesting sequences that happened there is where the two Xenomorphs team up and kill another Xenomorph because they know their blood is acid and it's going to melt through the floor and they're going to make their escape. There is a sense of self that these creatures have about when they are trapped, when there's nothing else to do, they're absolutely willing to rip themselves apart to get to the goal. They are single minded. If they find a place where they're vulnerable, it doesn't matter, they'll chomp it off and their hostility is the thing that wins out.

Migizi Pensoneau: In that scenario, we've never seen a–necessarily as, a Xeno hooked by the second mouth before. And, and when we see it here, there's a recognition of like, oh, I'm being dragged by this thing, chomp, and now I can get to my prey. Even in the movie canon of it, the Xenos definitely have a sense of like, self-sacrifice in order to survive. It's a wonderful thing to see because it's, like, oh man, it's, you see this sort of Xeno go, I might lose this fight. And then do something about it, which is also horrifying because it is so singular minded.

Adam Rogers: You have to decide whether, in any of these stories, the alien, especially the Xenomorph–the final boss form of the alien, is a supernatural metaphor for death, or is an animal with agency and is making decisions of its own within a plot that their choices have an impact on the story, too?

Migizi Pensoneau: The thing that has always intrigued Noah in a guiding light through a lot of this is the original interpretation of them, which is that these are creatures that were evolved over millions of years. And I think that if you were to throw a stick in the way of some ants, they'd still somehow find their way to like make their way around or, as a unit sort of like make their way to their queen. And I think the Xenomorphs are no different in that way. I think that it's less that they are death and more that they are survival. The final form of it is this armored, constantly attacking thing. If that's what it means to survive, I'm like, humanity's doomed because that is not us. We are often vulnerable. We are often, we are unarmored in every sense of the word. And how would you ever survive against that?

Adam Rogers: So, let me throw Morrow into this mix now, too, he's unlike any of the rest of these–

Migizi Pensoneau: –Speaking of survival, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adam Rogers: He's a, a cyborg, he's different than all the other kind of folks that we've met so far, the monsters and the Hybrids and the people. What's he after, what does that kind of character want that's different than these other folks?

Migizi Pensoneau: Well, he's one of my favorite sort of anti-heroes. He is not necessarily a villain. He's not a bad guy. He's not motivated by anything, what we might perceive within this world is evil, but he's also not motivated by what we would perceive in this Alien: Earth world is good either. So he is, he's a person who sort of exists in his own moral sphere. And in that way, he is sort of related in some ways to the Xenomorph in that he will do what is necessary to survive and get things done and to complete his mission. That doesn't necessarily make him a bad guy, but he's definitely, it makes him capable of doing really bad things to complete that goal. So I think his singular focus makes him really ruthless. I feel like Morrow is as much of a wild card as the Xenomorph is. I mean, if you were to be going along with your day and the Xeno is lurking around in the background, you're like, man, this is not, the day is not going to go how I think it's going to go. If Morrow is lurking around in the background, you know your day is not going to go the way you think it's going to go.

Adam Rogers: He figures out that the Hybrids are kids and then presses on that as a weak point. When we find out he's living rent free in Slightly's head, he pushes on that. Saying, Oh they're kids, maybe I should be nice. That's not, that doesn't occur to him.

Migizi Pensoneau: No, no, it's, a hundred percent to, to achieve his goals.

Adam Rogers: He's also a window back into Weyland Yutani. Weyland Yutani is a company that people will know and remember, at least by implication, from the movies. They exist in this corporate ecosystem on Earth. And I'm meant to be as angry at this as I actually am at this idea, right? Like, I mean, because at the exact moment when I maybe want to look at this story and say, man, I sure wish that the United Nations treaty covering biohazards and bioweapons was gonna come into play and like, stop these people from studying these Xenomorphs, which always goes wrong. Like, no, there just aren't any.

Migizi Pensoneau: Yeah, instead of governments going at each other and creating sort of these agreements, it's corporations going in and sort of, everything has a dollar amount and everything is solvable by throwing enough cash at it. In the world of Alien: Earth, the planet is ruled by five different corporations as we state and it seems to be that they've taken over and that there was a sort of popular idea that autocracy might be the better way to go. The corporations just rose and decided we can handle this. And that's in our world, that's what happened.

Some of that's broken down in our series and some of it's not quite, but what we do know is that in place of laws, we have sort of corporate regulations and rules. And so when we're talking about treaties, we're talking about basically contractual breaches. What makes it criminal is probably just a contractual breach. I mean, Hermit it's not like he can just leave the army and stop being a medic. It's that he has a contractual obligation to the prodigy corporation, and he's going to see that out. Otherwise he'll be in breach of that and have to pay the penalty.

Adam Rogers: Now that we've set the scene with Migizi, let's take a step back. There's a word you might hear a lot if you're a sci-fi nerd or if you're listening to a podcast hosted by a sci-fi nerd, it's world building. And that means putting together the backstory of an invented world, like the Earth of Alien: Earth. One way you build a world is through its look and feel. Everything on a show like this gets designed from scratch, and clothing especially can make a world feel specific and lived in. Costumes in Alien Earth have a huge impact on how viewers perceive our planet's sci-fi future. And who better to help us understand where those ideas came from than Suttirat Larlarb, the show's costume designer.

Suttirat Larlarb: Noah has such a specific way into the stories, as well as then exploding the stories. The ideas were very full on the page, very evocative. It's easy to come to the table with ideas because you know, you're sort of inspired from the minute you pick up the script. I'm not drawing from fashion and I certainly am not a science fiction designer who, you know, there's a sort of trope of science fiction where everybody's in Mandarin collars and like skin tight suits and I've, unless it calls for that and there's a specific reason, I'm never, that's never gonna be my default.

Adam Rogers: Tell me how you go about building out the look of the specific science fiction world then. The show's said in 2120. It's almost a hundred years in the future, so you've gotta think not only about the characters, but also the environment, what's happening in the past century, what's happening at the time, right?

Suttirat Larlarb: I think inventing for inventing sake, for me personally, is not…I need something to chew on. I need something to react to. I need to know what the world is. What are the politics of that world? What is the temperature of that world? These are all things that very, very much informed every part of the design. I'm not even talking about just the costumes, but everything has a sort of logic to the world that we are trying to create and then express on, on the screen. The production design was going to sort of try and reflect this very hot, humid world. So all the prodigy uniforms were built with ventilation. So sometimes that ventilation was hidden in a pleat and you could do your very physical work and the pleat would open up, and then inside that pleat was an air tech layer that just allowed air to pass through. A lot of the technical trousers, most of them had the ability to unzip from below the knee, make shorts out of them. So it was literally about keeping people able to work in a climate like that. All of those things, which we'll never, you know, there's not a scene dedicated to somebody like deciding they're too hot and unzipping a thing. But you will see that it's just sort of like this world in which that would be required, right?

I would also say that, I am so research oriented and if I'm told that we're going to be entering a very well loved and known and documented franchise like Alien, I'm gonna do the homework and take that all in. What was the world in the first two Alien films? What was the story behind every design choice that you could find out about or think about or–and how did that relate to what we were doing? And then we can choose to break away from things when ideas need to be new or a new scene or a new kind of event happens that wasn't thought of from the first chapters of this universe.

Adam Rogers: Specifically, when you get presented with a new character, what's the first move? What do you do?

Suttirat Larlarb: I kind of start by breaking down all their scenes. So I can kind of understand how we're gonna see them as a viewer. When they first come in, what is their first introduction? Because the first introduction says so much. I then have a very in depth conversation with the actor, because I truly believe that if we're trying to get a sort of truth out of something, they have to be fully on board with what they're wearing, because to me the costume is an extension of their behaviors as that character.

Adam Rogers: So I wonder, you know, you have in Alien: Earth, there's this group of a new kind of character for it, the Hybrids, the Wendy and the Lost Boys. What were you trying to make sure that they looked like? What should I be looking for when I look at those outfits to say, oh, that's how I know this about those people.

Suttirat Larlarb: Yeah. Well, I mean essentially they're a product that's being developed, right, in this corporation. So they needed to have a crisp, new feeling to them. Compared to when you look at the uniforms on the Nostromo, or in our case the Maginot, those are crew uniforms of people who've been on a mission for umpteen years and these Hybrids, however, are new. And they don't have the same bodily functions. So everything about the clothes needed to reflect, like, a packaging for this product that was appealing, that was practical but also I didn't want the clothes to get in the way, like it's literally, you shouldn't even be thinking about that. They just come out into their scenes. And they're whole and almost like a figure, and the clothes are sort of an expression of their perfection. But you will see that even when the five Hybrids go on their first mission, that they all sort of customize how they're wearing their mission suits. Smee and Slightly play, you know, zipping up their zippers to varying lengths and playing with the hood and undoing the hood. Just like, oh, look at all these bells and whistles we have in this new cool suit. You know, it just things like that give the characters agency when we're trying to say that these products actually have will, and to just show a little bit of an inkling of their personality in the beginning with these small decisions they can make with the thing that they're sort of standard issued, you know?

Adam Rogers: That's just fascinating in comparison to Boy Kavalier, right? Who's at the top of that hierarchy and is clearly not part of it. Like his, what he wears is clearly meant to indicate a lot of stuff about class and about where he sits in that hierarchy, right?

Suttirat Larlarb: Absolutely. He can buck all of that. That trope of the, the hoodie, which is like, I'm so powerful I don't have to show up in a suit and tie like the rest of you. If you take that gesture and you put it through the meat grinder of a different person who has an aesthetic sensibility, and especially in this world that we're talking about, it's all about that heat and humidity, right? And also there's a peacock-ness about him. You know, he definitely wants to be looked at. Um, he doesn't wanna disappear in any setting that he is in. But he's the only one who gets to do that, really.

Adam Rogers: It's really different than Yutani though, right? I mean, because then you have Yutani as a figure who's much more formal, right?

Suttirat Larlarb: Presentational. Yeah, exactly. There is obviously vanity there, but it's vanity in a much more like, I have access to these things that mere mortals wouldn't have. There is a bespoke-ness to her as well, but you know, it's influenced by other things. And she's also older, more mature. She respects the rules of how you present yourself in a business meeting in a way that he completely doesn't give a flying F about, you know.

Adam Rogers: Can I just ask, because I'm kind of obsessed with the Louis the 14th dinner scene in that early episode, that I'm just wondering what it was like to figure out what those folks are gonna be wearing and what you were hoping to show cause it's such a great moment.

Suttirat Larlarb: Yeah, It was a very instinctual response to what I was reading on the page. Because I knew we were ha–we had this sort of retro, futuristic vibe. What I was looking at was sort of hedonistic party scenes and performance art from the late seventies, early eighties. And I had this great photograph of this, um, New York performance artist who, basically she had photographed herself as a mess on the ground. She's wearing like a tutu or like something, and it's just shredded and it's like deflated on the ground. And this is why the, the homework of looking at the original series really pays off. Something right away clicked in my head and it reminded me of the scene of Ash on the floor with innards, and the white fluid and bits of fiber optic beads coming out. And those beads became pearls, and in my head, like the pearls became the parts of the dresses that the women in this dinner party in our series were wearing. And then maybe they could have all this red accoutrement so we could extend the blood and the gore that would happen from the aftermath of an alien attack by having dresses and costumes that had details that once you tore them apart, like a corset could become a rib cage that was like a flensed whale on a dock of a whaling ship, or you know, just I tried to extend through costume the gore that would be there as well. So it just became this baroque aftermath.

Adam Rogers: Suttirat’s clear about how much work goes into the world building here. The clothes really do sort of make the man, the woman, and the robot. And maybe that's especially true for Boy Kavalier who dresses–well his external performativeness clearly hints at a certain interior monologue. So here's the maker of that monologue, actor Samuel Blankin.

Samuel Blenkin: I normally get cast as people who are quite young and people who are very vulnerable or they're broken in some way. I don't often play people who are verging on psychopathic, and he has to pretend that he's a normal member of society. Noah gave me an uh, a reference for a Twilight Zone episode. It's the episode set in a rural town. There is a young boy who has omniscient telekinetic powers, and what he's done is he's removed the town from reality and placed it in his own reality, and he can read everyone's thoughts. And if anybody thinks a thought that isn't happy, he instantly hears it and he sends that person to the cornfield, which is kind of like a horrendous purgatory and they never come back from the cornfield. This kind of thing. That was such a potent reference for me, that told me everything I needed to know about the way that this character carries himself. Obviously he doesn't see himself as that boy, but it was really useful for me to think of the impact he might have on a room and the potential for destruction from this character, I think.

Adam Rogers: Well, the armchair psychology on a tech oligarch is usually narcissistic personality disorder, right? And then you sort of have to calibrate that with like, okay, narcissist, but are they also a genius?

Samuel Blenkin: Imagine if you're a person who has that level of natural intelligence, but also you're the kind of person who's never been told no in your entire life. I don't think he ever has a question that he doesn't know best. You know what I mean? Every room he walks into, there's an assumption that he's the cleverest person. He definitely thinks that he's doing good for the world. It's just in order to do good for the world, people need to get out of f-ing his way, you know? He sees himself as the person who's gonna save everything. But obviously that comes at a cost in, in order to save everything, you have to go by his rules.

Adam Rogers: That description suggests that he's not introspective at all. And I wonder if you think that that's right or if he is tamping down introspection. If that confidence is performative or it's actually just, he's just pretty sure he's the smartest kid in the room.

Samuel Blenkin: It's a classic, it's ego, isn't it? His ego is in the driver's seat, I think. But a character who was only driven by that wouldn't be interesting. You know, a character who just walks in and wins every scene seamlessly is not interesting. There are definitely fault lines within this character with, within any interesting character. And I think, you know, sitting underneath that like ice wall of confidence I think he's driven by rage. And I think that all rage is driven by fear. I think ultimately it's fear, you know. He has to be in control. And there's some interesting ground there about maybe who he was before he became this person that has led him to this place of absolute sort of self-belief, and this theme about childhood and this theme about kind of Neverland and never wanting to grow up. There is some thread in here which is connecting him to this idea that he can bend the laws of life and bend the laws of reality because he's held onto his child-like nature.

Adam Rogers: He has some confirmation that he's right about stuff because he's a trillionaire, so he's made a lot of money and if that's the way you count score, then that he's got that going on. There's been kind of a technical confirmation of his philosophy that having a childlike brain is a skill, or is a useful thing to have because it works on the Hybrids because he's made these, he's used kids' brains to put into the robot body. So it's confirmatory in a way.

Samuel Blenkin: Yes, totally. It's like, normally it's really good, beautiful advice you might hear from somebody, which is that you need to keep that childlike innocence in order to fill your life with kind of meaning and like rediscover yourself. And it's funny that, you know, Noah's brilliant vision for the character that is like twisted on its head. And one thing that I really fought for was the, you know, having bare feet, like–

Adam Rogers: –Good, I wanted to ask about, we see a lot of his feet. Yes.

Samuel Blenkin: I'm barefoot in every scene and obviously there is a, there's a Peter Pan reference there, but also it's something about this facility is where I live. Like I own all of this. I own you and I own the floor that you walk on. So why would I ever need to wear something that would protect my feet? I'm gonna be fine.

Adam Rogers: But also the episode has a conversation with Yutani, and I wanna ask why this happens. Boy K holds his phone in his feet to have this conversation with Yutani and I–I feel like there's a key to character there, and I wanna know if that's true. Why, why, why he does that.

Samuel Blenkin: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. There is a key to character there, and it's this other energy that is part of him, which is, like self-destructive. It's like, well, what if I just smashed everything? What would it look like if I just like, broke everything? And that little gesture of him putting his feet, it's because why not? Like, what if I drop it? She'll hate that, this is meant to be a formal meeting. It's like somebody who's pushing at the limits and the boundaries, and that kind of self-destructive tendency that secretly actually may be wanting to like, ruin everything really, you know, like burn everything to the ground. Is part of that rage that I was speaking about, part of that fear, which is like, yeah, I think as the episodes roll on we might see that particular self-destructive trait begin to develop.

Adam Rogers: So a lot happens in this episode, but I wanna focus on all these new aliens because Boy K brings them all back to his lab. And we as viewers who have seen an Alien movie know that this is a very terrible idea. Can't possibly go well. So what's happening with Boy K here? What's he thinking?

Samuel Blenkin: So the Lost Boys have been a project for a long time, and at the start it was really exciting. They are, you know, revolutionary and they're gonna change the whole tech world. And, you know, suddenly this spaceship crashes and this is the new shiny thing. This is my new shiny thing, and I think that it's like an encounter with the unknown.

There's a great scene in episode two when I'm talking with Dame Sylvia about the fact that, you know, maybe one of the motivations for him making the Lost Boys is that he just wants to have a conversation with somebody that's actually gonna challenge him or blow his mind, or is gonna like, change his perspective. I think he wants to be changed. You know, I mean like, he wants to be surprised. He's like looking and everybody just disappoints him. Kirsh disappoints him, Dame Sylvia, you know, 'cause they're not, they don't have that thing and, and suddenly the encounter with the other, like the aliens being something unknown that he knows nothing about, is a big thing for him.

Adam Rogers: He does get pushback about that from a bunch of different characters…

Samuel Blenkin: Yeah, he does.

Adam Rogers: ..in the episode. Dame Sylvia argues the point from the perspective, essentially of the Hybrids. Kirsh basically says, don't do this. So they get into fights with him about it, and I want to kind of distinguish those from the way Curly pushes back as a Hybrid. Because it's different, right? He's finally maybe seeing somebody who is having an interesting conversation. Is that what I meant to be thinking here?

Samuel Blenkin: I think so, yeah. I mean, anyone who is claiming to be better than him, greater than him, actually daring to say that that's exciting to him. Even if it's exciting that he's gonna watch her fail or he's gonna watch her sort of crumble. That is exciting to him. And there's also the very, very weird, paternalistic, kind of like, I made you vibe. Like that conversation is different 'cause he's sort of talking to something that he feels like he, A, he owns, and B, he's invented. You know, yes, there is a beautiful scientific fascination about them, but they are also a product.

Adam Rogers: But that, the other thing that comes out of that conversation with Curly is that Wendy is his favorite. For nebulous reasons, for some reason, he says, 'cause she's first. Do you think that's right? Do you think that he's being disingenuous?

Samuel Blenkin: I don't think he's telling the whole truth. I think that this is a moment when he is watching his invention and watching her humanity and seeing how she reacts. Because him seeing them as property means that in order for them to be really good inventions, they have to come across as human as possible. So every moment he's interacting with the Hybrids, to me, is a moment where he is watching them very closely to see how they react and that they react. As he would expect them to.

Not that he has a great idea of how humans would react, him being him, but his twisted version of that, you know, so. Yeah, I think he's normally pulling characters' arms or he's twisting to try to see the way that people react. Because there is also joy in this character. There is like joy at mixing everything up and his own twisted joy at watching things fail, but also loving it when things go together. And this sort of, hopefully strange, disturbing joy comes out of this character, you know what I mean? That it's, um, it's my world. It's my world, and everyone else is just living in it.

Adam Rogers: For all of Boy K's having a great time watching things come together and fall apart, he doesn't seem to think too much about the philosophical implications of his creations. In this episode, we see Morrow download digital information into his own mind. We see biomedical scans of Wendy that don't look biological at all. What makes all that even more challenging, is that we're talking not just about intelligent robots or robots with human minds, but also humans with robot parts. Amid all that, Morrow asks a question that I haven't really been able to stop thinking about 'cause it has a lot of nuance. I've asked a couple people to help parse it. First series creator, Noah Hawley.

Noah Hawley: Morrow, who is part machine, right, and the worst parts of a man, you know, and says, “when is a machine not a machine?” I mean, if you went through your whole, whole life thinking you were human and then in the end you realize you're a machine, what does that mean for you? And B, can I get in on it? You know, can I maybe be a machine as well? He's been gone for 65 years. He's lost the only family he ever had. Everyone he knows is dead. If being a machine means maybe you feel it all less, that would be attractive to him.

Adam Rogers: The mechanist in me wants to say we're all just machines, just because we're made of meat, it's still a mechanical thing. Like, they're asking about whether there's a ghost in the machine, right? Whether there's something more that's intangible.

Noah Hawley: Yeah, I think so, and we see some of that with Wendy and her ability to hear and communicate with these creatures, right? The other Hybrids don't have that ability. So is there something more? The question always, I think, comes down to the soul, right? If you move from a human body to a synthetic body, does your soul move with you? Are you still, you know, does the Lord know where to find you when the time comes for you to pass from this world? These questions are part of, I think, the way that we struggle with identity and what it means to be human.

Adam Rogers: Does, does Morrow want to be less of that or more of that? Does he want to not feel the loss of his family? Or does he, does he want to be in another body that can feel it?

Noah Hawley: I think he's conflicted. I think until he meets these Hybrids he–it's never occurred to him that he could be in a fully mechanical body. Instead he has this synthetic arm that at some point was attached to his body through a surgical procedure and you have to wonder, is there still pain that happens? Obviously he's downloading data, they've clearly shoved his brain aside and then inserted some kind of hard drive in there. It's all a really kind of violent and Frankensteinian process, right? For a, for a human to become part machine is not pain free. And certainly, to have your consciousness transferred into a mechanical body seems like a dream in comparison.

Adam Rogers: That's what Noah was thinking, but it was the actor who played Morrow who had to put it into action. He saw trying to figure out when as a machine not a machine, as integral to the character. And don't worry, this won't be the last time you'll hear from actor Babou Ceesay on the podcast.

Babou Ceesay: I don't want to go deep into defending him just yet, but I could see that what he was doing was cold and I wanted to understand why he was behaving the way he was, and initially there wasn't any clear reason. He just seemed to have that personality. Fearlessness and intense focus on one goal, and was gonna achieve it at all costs. I just needed to know what it was that was triggering him to behave that way. And in the end, what I settled on was this idea that he felt he had to be useful. He's a cyborg. And as a cyborg that spent 65 years off the earth, you come back, you're an iPhone 1 and everyone else, the modern day cyborgs are probably iPhone 20’s. He hasn't been upgraded. There's a whole bunch of stuff going on. What's his utility? How useful is Morrow in this world that he's coming back to?

It's not, that's always front of mind for him, but I dunno if you know his background. He was abandoned as a child and it basically put him in a situation where Yutani essentially saved his life or picked him up. And he learned on the streets how to be fierce, how to be focused. And that's what she saw in him and loved. And I imagine the moment where it was defining, he had to show up in a way that was more clear, more extreme than anybody else. He was supposed to be–he needed to be willing to do more than anybody else so that if there's ever a question as to whether he needs another upgrade, which I'm assuming this cyborg additional things he has inside his body cost a lot of money, are they going to think this is the person to put it in? You know, he has to be the LeBron James of his, of the cyborgs, you know?

Adam Rogers: You've added something to this hierarchy that I've been trying to build in my head of the different kinds of post humans. In the show there's humans and then there's alien monsters, okay, But then there's also Hybrids and Synths and a Cyborg. And there's clearly some prejudices that get traded all around with the way that humans feel about the synths and the way Morrow as a cyborg feels about himself, about his own cyberneticism. But I didn't think about the time thing. That, as a cyborg, he's an earlier model than when he comes home and meets Synths or meets a Hybrid. And that's remarkable. Am I right that there's some self-loathing here about the being cybernetic also that those parts, he says, I'm the worst parts of a man, right?

Babou Ceesay: Indeed. I mean, I did some research actually into modern day cyborgs, like right now that exists. And there's a guy called Neil Harbison, an artist that's colorblind, and he's had this antenna added to his head that means he can hear color. And I was just, I just watched a lot of his content trying to understand who he was and what he was thinking. And at one point he made a comment around how he felt that it was an enhancement. It was something that made him potentially more than human. And so when Morrow says the worst parts of a man, he's talking about the parts of him that are not infallible, that make mistakes, that are emotional, that make him less efficient, make him less capable of achieving what he needs to achieve as a person. So those were the things that I focused in on that he's not happy with. And also this is a body that ages, that starts developing man boobs, that gets weak, that he needs to keep strong and he needs to keep fed. He can't be hungry for too long. You know, all of these things. And I'm thinking Morrow’s the kind of person who pushes himself to the limit. However, there's always this potential threat, of the human side of him letting him down in some way. And I think he really rests on his mind and his ability to make difficult judgements in tough situations that other people would run away from, you know? And if he had that mind in a synthetic body, he'd be Superman.

Adam Rogers: Huh.

Babou Ceesay: You know? Or could be.

Adam Rogers: Alright, spray the alien container bag foam on us. This week's Alien: Earth - The official Podcast is officially podcasted. Next week, are the Lost Boys okay? Curly thinks the show's about her actually. Wendy just cast Speak With Animals, but for Aliens. And Nibs has a very special announcement. That's Episode Four of FXs Alien: Earth.

Be sure to rate, review and follow Alien: Earth - The Official Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Adam Rogers, and I'll see you here next week.