In Space, No One... - Episode 5 | Alien: Earth - The Official Podcast

Petrovitch (Played by Enzo Cilenti): You can’t stop it.

Morror (Played by Babou Ceesay): Stop what? What did you do?

Petrovitch (Played by Enzo Cilenti): They want their monsters. Here they come.

Adam Rogers: Welcome to Alien Earth, the official podcast. I'm your host, Adam Rogers, like an out of control research vessel, each week crashing into the latest episode of this show and seeing what’s lying under its burbling surface. This week, Episode Five: In Space, No One. As always, we've got fast moving spoilers inbound, so shields up.

Today on the podcast, I have the return of series creator Noah Hawley to talk about our brief interlude in space. Then I’ll talk to the show’s editor Regis Kimble, about editing in the world of sci-fi and horror, and chat with actor Babou Ceesay about his decidedly non-mechanical performance as the partly mechanical Morrow. To round it all out, because we’ve got a lot of new faces in this episode, I have the accidental captain of the Maginot, Richa Moorjani.

Let’s start with this episode’s obvious departure from the series so far, as it interrupts our regularly scheduled Alien earth programming for some Alien space programming. For series creator Noah Hawley, that was entirely on purpose. Mostly.

Noah Hawley: You get to see the Alien movie of my dreams, that I've been wanting to make. And originally in the conception of the season, that episode was not part of what the season was going to be, but then I just found it irresistible. And I, and I also felt like if we were offering people, um, a series called Alien, we needed an Alien movie in the middle of it, we needed a spaceship journey.

Adam Rogers: Oh, that's very interesting that this episode wasn't sort of originally a part of how you imagine the series, because this kind of spaceship story is, as you've said, such an integral part of how the franchise has been shaped.

Noah Hawley: The series, as I've said, went through an evolution. I mean, it took us many, many years to get to it. And, the idea of doing a mid-season episode, which was the story of what happened on the ship, came to me, you know, as we were gearing up to go into production. And, you know, I shifted my directing from doing the first two hours to doing the first hour and the fifth hour because of course I wasn't gonna let anyone else make the Alien movie of my dreams.

Sitting down to write that, that episode was a really exciting opportunity for me. If you're going to play in these waters, you have to have a very clear vision for what you want to pull off and why you're doing it at all when, you know, it's been done before so well. We have an advantage that the movies don't necessarily have, which is: this story exists in the context of a larger story. You know, in television terms, this is the Morrow episode where you learn his backstory and you see what brought him to the moment where we met him in which the ship landed. It just also happens to be a mystery about who's sabotaging a spaceship full of alien creatures and the chaos of how they escape and everything goes to hell.

Adam Rogers: So what were the things that you…that were like, must-haves for your Alien movie?

Noah Hawley: Well, I liked that it was a mystery, you know, that it was driven by this mystery of who had sabotaged the ship I thought added some, some human stakes to it, some chaos, right? That the creatures could take advantage of. You know, one of the things that the season has introduced in what we call the Eye Midge, is a hyper intelligent creature that strategizes.

And so what I liked playing with was how the Eye Midge could take advantage of say, seeing the Ticks escape and then drawing attention to itself to allow them to do their thing. And so we don't know anything about these creatures that have just been invented for the series. We don't know that the, you know, what we first see as a, what looks like an octopus with an eyeball on it is going to pop your eye out and replace it. We don't know that–how the Ticks reproduce. We don't know any of these elements about these creatures which makes it very exciting for me as a storyteller. And the only rule is it has to be disturbing.

Adam Rogers: So how situated does that story have to be in an Alien canon in terms of like when it takes place and how–what happens in the other movies? Is there canonicity, is there canonical stuff that matters? Or do you just have to take the outlines and vibe and then you get to do what you want to do?

Noah Hawley: My philosophy is, you can make me care about that stuff. It's not my instinct to care about it necessarily. The big things that general audiences invest in are sacrosanct to some degree. And, and then the deeper you have to dive to find, you know, in this novelization they introduce the idea of how you make a queen, et cetera. You know, that stuff is speculative, that's some–another author's version of an Alien story. But, you know, for me the real canon is the first film.

And, you know, to a major degree the second film also. And, you know, if you think about the fact that 40 years have passed between those first two films and Prometheus, right? It means that for those of us, who saw those movies when they came out, we lived for 40 years with that being what the story of a Xenomorph was. 40 years later it was introduced this idea of the black goo and, and the engineers. And, and I think that that is another great version of the Alien story. But in my mind it exists even, even though it was Ridley as a kind of alternate fiction about these creatures who had been described to all of us for 40 years as the perfect evolutionary predator, right? Who had existed for millions of years in this form. And so that’s, the reality of which, you know, I came to the series, and you know, the degree to which I'm introducing these new creatures allows me to create new, new canon.

Adam Rogers: So there's a storytelling challenge there which is how do you tell a new and exciting spaceship story. But there's also, I have to assume, a directorial challenge because a lot of very well-known directors have taken on Alien films. And directing this episode especially. I just wonder is that something you're thinking about, maybe hitting some of the same visual cues while making it your own?

Noah Hawley: As a filmmaker, uh, who didn't go to film school my motivation is only ever to try to create a feeling in the audience. Film as a medium has the power to control time in a way that other mediums don't. I have a photo of my camera operator with the camera mounted to the Xenomorphs, the animatronic head–

Adam Rogers: –Alien cam.

Noah Hawley: –as we're moving down the hallway. You know, it's a, it's a shot that lasts half a second in the show, but it gives you a, a visceral feeling of, charging and so I always think a lot about what things should feel fast and what things should be slow. You're, again, you're, you're creating a feeling in the audience when you do that. If you're in the middle of, an action sequence, someone is fighting the Xenomorph for example, that should feel like it feels, which is it's all happening too fast. But the moment you turn to run away, now things slow down because that's how it feels to be running away from a monster is like, you can't seem to move fast enough.

Adam Rogers: Right.

Noah Hawley: So those elements are always instinctual for me as I think about how to shoot these sequences.

Adam Rogers: So you were saying earlier that this is the Morrow episode, which it absolutely is. We get such great insight into that character, and I'm gonna talk with Babou Ceesay later in this episode about that. But he's interacting with exclusively a cast of characters that we know little to nothing about in this episode.

Noah Hawley: Yeah. And, and one of the challenges for a storyteller, you know, is I have to introduce, you know, a half dozen characters basically who exist only in this hour, although you see them a little bit in the first hour. And you have to invest in them to understand their relationships with each other, to have feelings about them, enough to care who lives and who dies. And, you know, it's the other reason that I wanted to shoot it myself because it's world building. And, I feel like I need to build each of those worlds.

Adam Rogers: In this case, we know who the survivor of the ensemble's gonna be at the very beginning. The only thing we know about these characters from the very start is that they're all gonna die except Morrow.

Noah Hawley: Well, we know that, and yet we forget as we're watching. I mean, it's a really fascinating thing about audiences and something that I learned early on. Even though it's in our brain, we're so focused on the, the narrative of the story that we forget. Because you're invested in them, you're rooting for their survival. You know I think that there's an energy to that, which is of course, only Morrow is gonna survive. But I think there are moments along the way where you want the others to survive and that's just as important.

Adam Rogers: What's interesting that you say that, you can give people clues along the way, but they won't remember any of it. They just remember how they feel about what was going on or how they felt about a character.

Noah Hawley: Well, I mean, film and television is an act of hypnosis. You're sitting in a room, whether it's a theater or, or your living room and you're a human being existing in that space. Maybe you're watching with your wife, maybe you're watching with your kids, whatever it is. But if the story is good enough, you exist nowhere but in that story. And that's why, you know, when you go to commercial it's, it can be so jarring for people and why horror is so hard to do on television because you're breaking the hypnosis and you're breaking the tension and the dread. You know, that's the challenge of making horror for television is the, those commercial breaks really kill you.

Adam Rogers: It can't be an accident that this is the fifth episode. It's the beginning of the second half of the eight. Up until this point it seemed like a driving coincidence that a Weyland Yutani spaceship hit a Prodigy City…sparking all this it turns out now that it's not a coincidence. How does that change what we're supposed to think about, like Boy K?

Noah Hawley: Well, I don't think that four episodes into the show people are thinking that Boy Kavalier's a humanitarian or necessarily a good person whose existence is gonna make the world a better place. But I, I do think that he is an exciting character in that he says and does whatever he wants. He doesn't even wear shoes. And to the degree that that's wish fulfillment for a lot of people. You know, we do find ourselves attracted to what we call the truth tellers, right, or the larger than life figures.

But I think what this reveal does is to show that oh, he is actually planning some things that, that you can only call evil. That he's so literally Kavalier about the lives of the people on the planet Earth that he's gonna crash a spaceship filled with aliens into, he hopes his own city, which means that his citizens will die. At worst, just randomly crash it somewhere on the earth to free these creatures. He doesn't have any belief other than that he'll be able to contain this thing once, once it gets out. But it reveals for Morrow that there is someone to blame for his life's work potentially going up in smoke. And so that turns him into a man with an agenda.

Adam Rogers: Oh right. Morrow has one mission and that's the guy who screwed it up.

Noah Hawley: Well, and we, we tease it in the first hour when Morrow asks the bound soldiers, “where's the one called Kavalier?” He's seen his face, he's heard him say, you know, that he's crashing the ship, and so he wants to find him because that's whose fault it is.

Adam Rogers: Noah faced a lot of challenges making a sort of condensed Alien movie to drop into the middle of a TV series. And you know, I've been a writer and an editor in print for most of my life. And that world is a lot like television in one very important way. It doesn't really come together until the edit. So let's talk to the Editor, Regis Kimble, about assembling a TV show's Lego bricks into a spaceship.

Noah Hawley: Episode five is a standalone. You know, it's a horror movie, and that's what made the ‘79 movie so great is that you have this long anticipation, these breathing moments, these empty frames, and we've tried to instill that feel throughout the series. You know, the Chestburster happens maybe in 45. Is it 45 minutes into Alien one?

Adam Rogers: Uh, yeah. It's a long time.

Regis Kimble: It's, a huge time for a, a creature movie to see the creature. And so here, you know, it's a, a measured metering out. It's not this fantasy of people floating through the room, but it's just this horrible, horrible, monster movie of the big thing is coming and these people are living in a world that's, uh, it's not gonna be comfortable for them in the long run.

Adam Rogers: So this episode, like you said, is kind of self-contained. But it has this large cast and they’re mostly new to the viewer. So we have to get to know them really quickly. How does that change your approach?

Regis Kimble: Working with Noah for so long, we kind of have a shorthand and an understanding with how we want things to sort of feel. For the most part, we try to tell the story in the least amount of cuts. Because his sensibilities are such that he doesn't wanna force feed the audience. He likes giving people shots with more than one character in them so you can see their body language and you can see how they're playing off each other. And it's a nice way to allow the audience to take from the frame what they want instead of always being in big closeups and force feeding them.

I mean, here we are in the Maginot, and, um. You're dealing with these characters that you just are starting to learn about. Just like in the ‘79 movie when they're in the mess hall and they're doing things, people are on top of each other. It's very dirty. I mean, Malachite, this poor kid who thought he was gonna be going on a geologic survey, ends up with these creatures all around him. You know, a love story in the middle of it with Zaveri and Bronsky. So this ensemble sort of drives the cutting pattern because you're dealing with broken people, people with an agenda. Then it sort of goes into a bit of this whodunnit. Where's this coming from? And then once it's finally revealed, it's kind of just an all out sprint to the end.

Adam Rogers: Is there an expectation that you're going to be solving problems that emerge, or, you know, ideas that emerge during shooting?

Regis Kimble: Well, yeah, things change all the time. I mean, what's on the page kind of helps but there's always challenges in production. There's always challenges with every actor that comes onto a set. And so you're trying to embrace those characteristics that the actor brings with them and then also embed that into the story that's trying to be told. That's the other thing is in working with Noah, he's got this writer brain and so you end up with these sort of modular emotional events that something from two thirds of the way down the script, an emotional beat that might actually line up better with scene three of a different character. So when you start butting these two scenes up with one another, a whole third kind of emotion is generated from it because they're informing each other in a totally different way than what was ever written or really conceived. And Noah, he's really adept in the cutting room and has a great sense of when things are working or when things aren't working, which is really, really a luxury and a great way to work with somebody.

Adam Rogers: You've actually worked on quite a lot of science fiction where VFX were gonna be a part of it, where you weren't gonna be able to see everything that's gonna happen. Does that make it harder to edit an episode of television, if you don't have all the pieces in front of you?

Regis Kimble: It does make it difficult. But, first of all, they had a Xenomorph on set. So that solves a lot of timing questions but with Ticks and Eye Midge and Orchid and, um, I know I'm missing one…

Adam Rogers: The Fly.

Regis Kimble: –Fly, that's, that's right? Yeah.

Adam Rogers: –right? Yeah. I took that. They didn't, they don't name it for a long time, so I think.

Regis Kimble: I mean, these are characters that are sort of, again, they're, they're paced out how much you actually see of them until they start to make their full grand appearance and their horror. You know, you fully start to understand exactly what that Eye Midge is all about. That horrible thing that happens in two. You don't see how it gets in the cat, but in five you start to see, well, holy shit, this thing is fully sentient, it's fully engaged.

Adam Rogers: I was totally okay. Not seeing how it got into the cat, I gotta tell you.

Regis Kimble: Yeah, well, it gets worse. Uh, lemme tell you, it gets a lot worse.

Adam Rogers: Great.

Alright, so this week we got a little Alien movie, a ship in a bottle episode, if you will. But did you notice we also got some backstory on why a Weyland Yutani spaceship full of dangerous aliens crashed into a building in Prodigy territory? And we got the story on Morrow, the obsessive Cyborg. This is Babou Ceesay who plays Morrow.

Babou Ceesay: My first encounter with the Xenomorph was watching it pop out of John Hurt's chest. As a young person, living in Africa at the time and I remember watching this on TV and I couldn't get my head around it. It just scared me so much. And this, um, audition came in. They'd sent the first three episodes. So when I was reading it, I just had that sense of tension of these people don't know what's coming for them, you know?

Adam Rogers: So I take it you were excited then to have these scripts in front of you.

Babou Ceesay: I was already a big fan of the franchise so one of the first thoughts I had was that, it's too good for me. I just immediately discounted myself. I'm like, this is too good. It's like a dream. Forget it. For three days when I was waiting to hear the final confirmation, I didn't leave my flat. I would just walk to the kitchen, walk to the lounge, and I don't really–

Adam Rogers: –Just waiting for the call.

Babou Ceesay: Indeed, and I'm quite calm about these things. But I don't know, this one just got under my skin. So when I got the call, I finally went out for a coffee.

Adam Rogers: Noah has written ensemble shows before. There's intertwined characters, multiple plot lines. But Morrow as a character, is a load bearing character. Moving action forward and in the way a scene has to feel. When Morrow shows up in a scene, you're supposed to feel a certain way. It's like, oh shit, Morrow's here–

Babou Ceesay: Here we go.

Adam Rogers: You know something, right? I wonder what that's like for you as an actor in those scenes, in those moments, in a show where there are so many stories, but you're at the middle of so many of 'em.

Babou Ceesay: Yeah, I love the way you put it, is that he's load bearing. He takes a lot of the weight of certain elements of the story. And yes, very early on I felt that pressure that I'm gonna be under in some of those scenes. So yeah, I've always felt there was some of that, but I love Morrow. He's a complicated character. And I love complicated characters. Some of the research that I did is I went and watched There Will Be Blood, checked out Daniel Day Lewis's performance.

I went and watched Javier Bardem again for like the 10th time in, No Country For Old Men. And of course those are phenomenal performances. But I was looking for clues as to how is the actor solving this problem? And I also watched, God rest him, Heath Ledger. I watched The Dark Knight again and watched The Joker. And what's incredible is the way he moves in there, like everyone else is quite upright and stiff and ready to go, but he just kind of rolls around in these scenes and I watched all of that and I thought, okay, I have to make a decision on how Morrow moves. And the clue was in that scene when he's talking to mother, when he's trying to get into the impact room, he isn't rushing, he's keeping his head. He's got one sweat. He's humming. He's maintaining his pace because he knows if he rushes, he's gonna ruin everything. And so once I had that set in, I thought, okay, great.

Now of course not to spoil anything, but when Morrow needs to move quickly, he really does.

Adam Rogers: And so how’s he able to remain so cool in the face of all this horror and bloodshed?

Babou Ceesay: If you imagine at some point he was part of the special forces, this is how he's risen right up to the top. So he's put himself in extreme cold, extreme heat, extreme situations, and being able to take extreme situations without reacting. In a way it's the simplicity of it. This is the situation I'm in. What does fear do to me? If I keep a clear head, I can do something useful.

So I just went down that path of he's just got incredible strength of character. It's not that he's unfeeling, especially with the introduction of a daughter. I even feel that part of his lack of fear is to do with the fact that he's lost his daughter.

Adam Rogers: Sure.

Babou Ceesay: So it puts him in this place where, what's worse than that?

Adam Rogers: Oh, he's already been through kind of the emotional trauma. What difference does the rest of it make? Wow.

Babou Ceesay: I mean, I don't know that he's dealt with it–

Adam Rogers: Right.

Babou Ceesay: –but he's in the process of going through that trauma. Not that it's made him numb, but it's made him maybe a little bit more fool hearty. A bit more extreme.

Adam Rogers: Can I ask, though? This is a bit more of a process question, but we see early on flashes of the kinds of things that Morrow does on the Maginot, once the alien is loose and his broken containment and he goes into mother and drops into the escape pod and all that stuff. But as I understand it, a lot of that was filmed early and then you went back and expanded the tale of that for Episode Five, the separate flashback to what actually happened. So I wonder, did your opinion of what he does on the Maginot change over that time?

Babou Ceesay: Yes. When I was shooting the first episode, I didn't know at that point that he had a daughter. And what her fate was. So by the time I went to do the longer version, I had that information and knowing it, some questions came up in terms of, okay, so some of the actions he takes, sealing out our new captain of this room, protecting himself.

But you know, with Morrow, it always comes back to the mission. He cannot let his human emotion–things like empathy, sympathy–get into the way too much. I think he spends a lot of time suppressing what he…I'm not gonna say really feels, but those feelings when they come up where it's like, okay, do I open this door and let Zaveri in? No, because there's a risk. The monster will come in. And not only that, this impact room takes one person. What's he gonna do? At the end of the day, who's he gonna trust to complete it, to get this thing on the ground and get these species into Yutani’s hands? He's not gonna trust anybody else on that ship to complete that job. I love this line that he says in Episode Five, he says, “I don't need 10 more people with emotions, with feelings about what's happening. Let's not wake up the rest of the crew because it's just gonna make it more complicated.”

Adam Rogers: So he knows that this is a trillion dollar mission. He's gotta do it for Yutani because he owes her and he owes the company for who he feels like he is. He has to show utility. When he gets back to Earth and sees what Earth is like and sees that there are Hybrids who he meets early on, first couple of episodes. But that doesn't change, does it? What he's thinking, like his motivations continue to be that like all mission, all Yutani, no compromise. Even though he knows that things are different now.

Babou Ceesay: She's the one that built this thing and she made him an integral part of that. From someone abandoned on the streets to being somebody who can have an impact on the direction that the world is going in. He wants to be on mission. Like imagine, he left his daughter there when she was about 11. If he comes back in 65 years, she's old enough to be his mother, right? It's a sacrifice he's made. Who would he make that for? Yutani. And his own sense of need to have a purpose. So even after he sees everything that's happening, the place still remains the same. We need to get these creatures that I've given 65 years of my life to–a daughter as well. I need to get the mission complete.

Adam Rogers: I guess you, you wonder what kind of moral determinations he'll make about himself once he's completed this mission. But then he can also compare at that point what he knows about the Yutani with Boy Kavalier. And by Episode Five, he's got another enemy besides the aliens.

Babou Ceesay: Yeah. A hundred percent, and that particular character represents in some ways a graver danger. The Xenomorph is purely instinctive. But you have Boy Kavalier who is uncontainable. He just wants to achieve his goal. He's playing global–universal chess. Whereas Morrow's like, listen, we're not nothing and you've messed with the wrong person because I'm not gonna take it, you know?

Adam Rogers: Right.

Babou Ceesay: What I love about the Morrow character is no one sees him coming, really. He's under the radar. What was it? The greatest trick the devil ever played was pretend it doesn't exist. So he has this wonderful thing, and when we're discussing his costume very early on, or discussing how he represents himself, I always said, he wants to be the kind of person that in a crowd, you wouldn't notice him. He's just there. But he sees everything, you see nothing, you know? And Kavalier for him represents an existential threat to everybody. Because he's reckless. Also, if he gets older of these dangerous species, who knows what the future of Earth is?

Adam Rogers: There's a song that he hums when he's thinking about his daughter, what's the significance of that? And because he hums it when he closes Zaveri out of mother too, right?

Babou Ceesay: Mhmm, yes. I mean, we talked earlier about his–how he tries to manage his emotions. So, I have a few phobias. I ain't gonna talk about them in case anybody finds out uses it against me, right?

Adam Rogers: Smart. Yes. Good.

Babou Ceesay: But, you do these things called box breathing or you hum. Something to take your mind off whatever you're doing, however difficult it is. That humming is 100% a comfort blanket for him. It's his teddy bear. So when he's in the most high pressure situation with a Xenomorph knocking at the door, having to do what he does to get everything right to get into this impact room, he starts humming. It was actually Noah's idea, the song and that moment of humming, he came and I had to sort of make sense of what it was for me. Snd in my mind, it's something linked to this time in his life and what that song represented. It's a moment of absolute peace.

And that song, he relates to that. That's the way I take it anyway. But it is just such a beautiful song and I love that he put the French version into it. The way crescendos at the end with the flashes with the daughter, which we hadn't discussed. The fact that Noah's edited that in, it's like, okay, good. Any kinda synergy would Noah' s a good thing.

Adam Rogers: So Morrow develops this relationship with Slightly, and I had thought that was irredeemable for a long time. That was just manipulative. But what you're describing now sort of paints that in a very different way. He had a daughter who he no longer has a relationship with, and now he's got a relationship with this kid. I've been unjustifiably mean to Morrow, you're telling me. There's more to it than that.

Babou Ceesay: I think there's more to him. But what he does do to Slightly it's all the things. You see what I'm saying? It is manipulative. There's no getting away from that–

Adam Rogers: Yeah, it's pretty bad.

Babou Ceesay: –It's bad. I mean, bad in a sense that I don't think it's lost on Morrow. That he's looked for the weakest link. There's one question he asks when he's downloading into his head. Morrow is about utility, so he’s using every opportunity to understand what's happening, and as he talks to them, he's already figured out they're synthetic. As he's talking to them, he sees that Slightly is the one who says, “Well, it depends.” It depends on a certain situation whether or not you should punish someone. And he said, why is that? Well, you know, they were your parents, for instance, aha. Now he's seen a weak spot there. So later on when he's approaching the pair of them Slightly is the person he focuses on. He doesn't know if it'll be useful later, but it might be.

And so when the opportunity comes up, it's definitely manipulative. But you know how it goes. You get into the–the weeds. You start doing everything that you need to do and suddenly you go, oh, hold on a second. This isn't as easy as I thought. There is an emotional connection. And I'm not gonna spoil anything, but as the series goes on, if you imagine that they're meshed in a certain way, he learns how to manipulate even better if he needs to. What buttons do you press? What is it that makes human beings react?

Adam Rogers: Babou talked about that loaded moment when Morrow closes the door and seals Zaveri’s fate. So now let's go to the other side of that door. We can talk to Zaveri herself. This is actor Richa Moorjani.

Richa Moorjani: Something that was so exciting to me was I actually got to name my character.

Adam Rogers: Really?

Richa Moorjani: Yes. Because, after Noah cast me, he emailed me and he said, you know, you're Indian, do you want your character to have an Indian name? And I appreciated it so much because to me, to have a character that does have an ethnic name that resonates with me, really does help me as the actor to feel an actual connection to the character because there is something about names and about where we come from. And I sent him a list of first names and a list of last names that I felt like could work. And he went through both of the lists and he put together, he picked the name, the first name, Zoya, and the last name Zaveri. And he's like, “I like, I think this has a ring to it.” And I said, “So do I.” And so we named our child, Zoya Zaveri.

Adam Rogers: Well also you, you're playing kind of a classic character you were playing the commander of a spaceship where an alien gets loose. Big science fiction deal.

Richa Moorjani: Yeah, definitely. I mean, and I didn't take that lightly and there was definitely a lot of similarities between my character and Ripley's character, and part of my research was just watching tons of interviews with Sigourney Weaver and hearing how she prepared for the role and her experience and talking about her character, and that really helped with my own preparation.

Adam Rogers: What was one of the things that you took away from that? I mean, what did you bring that was useful?

Richa Moorjani: One thing that I remember Sigourney saying in one of her interviews was how Ripley doesn't succumb to the sexism, she just keeps doing what she has to do to do her job and to save her crew. And that's kind of exactly what happens with my character. She's dealing with this crew that she loves them because they're her people and they've been in space together for 65 years. But now that the actual Captain has suddenly died and she's put in this position that she wasn't expecting to be put into, she's dealing with this whole new level of sexism, but she doesn't let that stop her. One of my favorite scenes to shoot, which is probably not Zoya’s favorite moment in her life, but it's in the really fun scene in the mess hall when everyone's there getting food and she's there to tell everybody what the reality of the situation is. Look, we're all about to die, but they're not taking it seriously until Morrow has to come and slam his big robotic arm on the table and, um, just get everyone to listen.

Adam Rogers: So Zaveri’s response and Morrow’s responses are very telling and very different from each other. Can you say a little more about that?

Richa Moorjani: I do think that, you know, Zoya Zaveri and Morrow have very different priorities, and his priority is to protect the cargo because that's the mission and that is what mother says is the number one priority. Whereas Zaveri, her priority is her people. These people have been her crew for 65 years and she very much has this inner conflict when Mother tells her to acknowledge that the cargo is the number one priority and she just can't seem to accept that because for her, the people are the most important thing. And I think that's, you know, a theme throughout this whole franchise is this idea of what kind of person are you when you're put into a situation like this, and you really only see that when these monsters come out.

Adam Rogers: It is interesting though because as a viewer, the episode gets me to a place where I kind of understand–

Richa Moorjani: Yeah.

Adam Rogers: –and at least sympathize in some ways with Morrow. Especially–

Richa Moorjani: Yeah, because I don't think he hates my character. I don't think he's doing it just to be cruel. I don't think he's doing it to be evil, but he's doing it in that moment because to him, he is doing what he has to do. I mean, I think the way that he still brought humanity to his character, you almost feel sorry for him. And I was so blown away by his performance.

Adam Rogers: There's the kind of surgery scene with the ticks and the, you know, the people die in the lab and there's gases and aliens on people's lungs and stuff. And after that, Morrow does take command. Zaveri, allows him– defers or allows him to assume command. So I guess I'm asking why that is the moment that she finally does give up? Is that too strong?

Richa Moorjani: No, I don't think you're wrong at all. And when it comes to that scene and she's, and it's literally a life or death moment for multiple people, and she goes with her instinct, which is for the doctor to do the surgery and take that risk. And of course it doesn't go well and they all die. And I think she kind of freezes in that moment and she realizes that well, I failed. I was trying to save my crew, but I failed. And maybe it would be better for Morrow to take over now. And then she sees the alien behind her and I think that snaps her back into reality. And that's really the turning point for her. Where she goes from this really thinking, um, methodical person to just plain warrior and she has to just act.

Adam Rogers: It's not really fair though, right? Like in the, that first movie, Ash, the, the synth does the same scale, the betrayal, but he gets his head knocked off and in this one it's sort of the inversion, the, the robot wins. It's, it's, uh, it's, it's a little frustrating.

Richa Moorjani: It is. And originally the scene when you see her die in the first episode, they had actually shot that with somebody else because I had not been cast yet, because I don't think this episode had been written yet. I don't think that they knew there was gonna be this whole storyline. So they had actually already shot that scene with a different actress, and it was in Episode One. And then later when Noah decided to write this episode and then he cast me, we had to reshoot that whole scene. I mean, there was no way that there was going to be a happy ending for my character, which we knew from the get go. But he tried to bring as much heart and humanity as possible so that the audience really does feel just a total sense of grief and despair when you see her die because in the first episode you don't really have that context. Then you see Episode Five, you see who she is, you see what she was trying to do, and then it's really, really depressing.

Adam Rogers: Yeah, it's amazing. That means that Babou had to like, betray two captains, basically had to do that–

Richa Moorjani: Yeah had to, he had to go through that traumatic experience twice.

Adam Rogers: Uh, since we're talking about it, that death scene. Getting killed by the alien and that, was it Cameron?

Richa Moorjani: It was Cam. And you know, when he is in that costume and when the cameras are rolling and he's chasing me. He really did chase me, by the way, and he really did tackle me to the floor and all those things. Of course, I was safe. I didn't get hurt. I did get a few bruises but I was proud of those bruises. And then, when the cameras were off, the team would come in and take his head off. It would just be his Xenomorph body with his beautiful face poking out of it and his beautiful Australian accent. And also both him and I are vegan. And so we would just talk about eating plant-based food in between scenes. This scary Xenomorph creature who's a vegan. I just thought that was hilarious. But no, he, I mean, he was incredible when he had the head on and when the cameras were rolling he was absolutely terrifying and made it very easy for me not to have to act much.

Adam Rogers: That's this week's episode of Alien: Earth - The Official Podcast brought in for another safe and comfortable landing. Next week, Morrow's plans start coming together. Wendy's plans start falling apart, and I'm not gonna lie, there's some body horror on Episode Six 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.