Emergence - Episode 7 | Alien: Earth - The Official Podcast

Nibs (Played by Lily Newmark): Mr. Strawberry says fuck off. We’re never going back.

Chief Nagg: Off the boat. Now.

Nibs (Played by Lily Newmark): I see you.

Adam Rogers: Welcome to Alien Earth - The Official Podcast. I'm your host Adam Rogers, and I fully agree that if we really wanted to understand this show, we probably should have just put Newt in charge. This week, Episode Seven: The Emergence. Of course, there are spoilers ahead. Make sure you watch the episode before listening today on the podcast we have Director Dana Gonzales. We also have composer Jeff Russo and music supervisor Maggie Phillips to talk about the sonic world of the show and why this show's closing credits always go so hard. We have Alex Lawther, Joe Hermit, to talk about going from dude in distress to making a great escape, and series creator Noah Hawley is back to talk about mad science and its costs.

So first up, somebody who was in on the filming of this show from start to finish and help build all the evolutions and changes that we’ve seen. Director Dana Gonzales is back to unpack the penultimate episode for us.

Dana Gonzales: We establish the kids and when you're starting out directing them from the beginning to the end, there's an arc there. When they first initially come out, they're kind of interacting like children. They're making children's decisions, and then episode seven comes along and they've been challenged. And the biggest thing is the kids have to learn about the world and how people are, seeing that, you know, no, they can't trust everybody and the world is not perfect.

And by the time they get to seven, they realize that Boy K is not the guy they thought he was. And they wanna leave the island, and you want the audience to to know everything I just said, you want 'em to feel that. And then you also want 'em to feel their loss and their challenge and the horror that they experience as children finding out about this cruel world we live in.

Adam Rogers: That's the significance of them finding the cemetery where their human bodies have been buried.

Dana Gonzales: Yeah. Wendy was brought in there going, we're gonna save your life, and it's all gonna be good. Uh, Curly she was in a wheelchair, so she basically, now she can walk and run and she's all in. She's like, I'll do anything because I love this life. So she, she's got a different perspective on it than even Wendy or the other kids do. And then you have Nibs, you know, she's questioning like, what is this? Wh–I don't think Boy K thought they were gonna be going through these personal independent dilemmas. It's an interesting dynamic.

Adam Rogers: It's interesting because he's supposed to be so smart. How did he not see that coming?

Dana Gonzales: I think there's a lot of geniuses that don't have street smarts. They could split an atom, but they can barely cross the street. I don't wanna give it away, but he's been controlling his destiny since he was a young boy, and like he's very stunted. You know, Kisch and Adam, they're the adults. They're the ones who have been like, no, no, no. You don't wanna do that. And he is like, well, why not? And he does listen to them. He does, he does. He gets mad at Kirsh, Adam tries to nurture him along. But, he's not making great decisions all the time and he is definitely not thinking it through.

Adam Rogers: There are big droll Kirsh moments in this episode and you have Timothy Oliphant playing, Kisch just dropping the kill shots on these lines. One of them is, when Isaac is killed by the fly. Somebody says, what happened to Isaac? And Kisch says science. Then he’s also got, after he captures Morrow who's come to the island to try to get all the aliens for Weyland Yutani, and he captures the Chestburster that's released, and Kirsh just drops,

“You two are grounded” to Slightly and Smee, right? They're great moments 'cause you have Tim Oliphant, but I wonder also they seem significant because they're funny first of all. But it's also Kirsh being elevated and I wonder what you think of those moments.

Dana Gonzales: So I think that those scenes like, are are really there to remind the audience who we're dealing with. They're kids. It's like earlier when Arthur says, let's go back to the island and we'll talk it all through, and then, and they're holding hands together.

Adam Rogers: So it's just interesting too the parenting relationships that the different characters have of the Lost Boys. Dame Sylvia and Arthur kind of in loco parentis, Boy K doesn't think they should be. You mentioned Arthur has that moment where they're holding hands and Arthur says, look, those who love you will always understand. It's very, like poignant moment right before bad things happen. But Kirsh is the only parent who actually punishes them for misbehavior.

Dana Gonzales: He's the babysitter. He is a reluctant parent. He doesn't want to be the parent, but he is. Yeah. He's the disciplinarian parent. That's who he is.

Adam Rogers: You just wait till your artificially intelligent dad gets home

Dana Gonzales: Yeah. That dynamic is interesting and I think it's important to, to hold onto that.

Adam Rogers: Do Dame Sylvia and Arthur see themselves as parents of the children who were, of the human children, or of these new things of the hybrids, do you think? Which do they do?

Dana Gonzales: I think Arthur, I don't think he likes the science. It's a little bit more kind of like, what are we doing? And then Dame you know, she's going along with it and she thinks about them as children more than she thinks about them as hybrids. She's definitely guilty of the death of these children. But she doesn't think about them the same as Boy K does.

Adam Rogers: Both Joe and Nibs become violent, in episode seven where they haven't been before. They finally have a turn. Joe has been the hostage and in distress for much of the series until he finally pulls a trigger, chooses a side essentially, and Nibs finally becomes a hybrid. Like she's no longer that little kid anymore, right? In the same scene.

Dana Gonzales: Right. He definitely chooses a side. I'm gonna save these human lives. He's not even thinking and in Eight, there'll be a little bit more discussion about that and why he has to make that choice. And then Nibs it's like she's had enough. Is that the maturity of her? Is that the robot taking completely over? Is it malfunctioning? What's going on with that? I think that's gonna be more explored.

Adam Rogers: The aliens always get out in this universe. They try to put them in a box and then they always get out and wreak havoc. I keep thinking about a joke like Chekhov's alien, you know, if there's a Xenomorph imprisoned above your mantlepiece in Episode Two, then it gets out and murders everyone in act Three. Usually it's a bad guy who does the releasing, but here it's Wendy doing it.

Dana Gonzales: That really is a big center point for this whole series in a way. Like, which side is she going to go? Machine or human? Penultimate episodes in our world have sometimes more action than the finale because the finale is like the things coming together at a certain place to propel the next season. So the penultimate episodes definitely are a lot of things colliding. I think the main heavy lifting of Seven was to show the big challenge between Wendy and, and Hermit and again, going back to that, which side will Wendy go – human or machine? This is definitely the fracturing and and for the audience, I think for them to ask themselves that same question. And that sets up Episode Eight kind of perfectly. Has this event that happened at the end of Seven really forced her over to the machine side?

Adam Rogers: Every character has building locks that assemble into the humans or machines or aliens that we now see. But all of that happens in response to some extent to the world of the show. Now I've banged on about world building a lot here on the pod, but there's a last critical tool in the world building toolbox. We haven't yet talked about music. Like I said, at the top, Alien: Earth's tunes did not have to go that hard, but they do. Why? Well, here are composer Jeff Russo and music supervisor Maggie Phillips to tell us.

Jeff Russo: At the beginning of, of all projects that I do typically with Noah, I try to find some new instrument or some new way to make a sound that will be unique for that particular show. And this show, I, I found a company in Austria that makes these bespoke weird stringed instruments. So it's this big metal piece that you can do a lot of things with, including use a bow on and what it ended up–there are moments I can make it sound like groaning, right? It sounds like metal on metal bending. It's a very musical instrument and it can play melodically, but it also can make this very dense, very discordant sound. I bring discord out when you don't know what's about to happen. So that sort of can create this tension between the visual and the listener.

Adam Rogers: Okay, you've both been working with Noah for a long time, it’s a decade and a half at least. Tell me what the collaboration looks like?

Jeff Russo: I've been working with Noah for, um, uh, what year is it? 2025. So about 16 years. I've worked on pretty much every, not pretty much, I've worked on every one his creations.

Maggie Phillips: Yeah, I came on five years after Jeff, so I've been working with him for 11 year.

Jeff Russo: Oh, yeah. It was five years after, because it was, it was Season Two of Fargo.

Maggie Phillips: Season Two of Fargo. Yep. But like what Jeff says, we have done everything, so there's no pause in the working relationship. It's just going from one to the other and sometimes overlapping.

Jeff Russo: I think part of the thing that, that is great about our working relationship with Noah is that we typically are starting when he's starting, right?

Maggie Phillips: Yeah.

Jeff Russo: Like he's starting to write scripts for all these shows and he'll send us scripts and we'll start thinking about music right at the get go, which is why I say things like, oh yeah, I've been working on Alien for four years, which is not typical for a composer and certainly not typical for a music supervisor. Um, so that gives us the opportunity to do our best possible work.

Adam Rogers: How do you know like, okay, this part needs music and it should sound like this. Or we want, uh, we want it to do a certain thing? Like, what are you, how are you thinking about what the musical life of what you're seeing on those pages will be?

Jeff Russo: For, for me, my process is I read the script and I'm thinking of overarching themes. I'm not thinking of like, oh, in scene 22, I need a piece of music here. I don't really break down scripts like that. There are–script supervisors do that for editorial and, but, but when I'm reading a script, I'm thinking like, oh, okay. There's a character, this character's definitely gonna need a theme. This, these two characters that have this interesting relationship that might need some sort of thematic material. And I think of it that way and start writing on a very broad sense and it's really most–mostly about tone and what does the show feel like? And that's a conversation that I have with Noah early on.

Maggie Phillips: Yeah, it's a little different for me. We do have to do script breakdowns. I mean, on other shows a lot, there's a lot more scripted music.I mean, there's, there's not a ton of songs within the episodes, so,

Adam Rogers: Right, right, right.

Maggie Phillips: So those are, like the, Somewhere Under the Sea and Accentuate the Positive. Are songs that Noah scripted and were very integral to his narrative process. And I think somewhat nostalgic for him, like songs that are important to him, I think personally least Accentuate the Positive 'cause we've used that in Fargo too. He loves that song. And so–

Jeff Russo: –I would say I do too.

Maggie Phillips: Oh, I do. too. I do too. But I think it, I, I, my guess, and I have not ever talked to Noah this, I think that song holds a special place. But, for me on this one, I didn't really know until I got some visuals where we were gonna go with the songs. Because it wasn't as, it's not as as song driven as–it was very, it was very Jeff forward in the beginning.

Adam Rogers: Adam Rogers:Okay. Well I will come back to the songs in a moment because obviously songs play a big part in the show. But let’s stick with the score cause I wanna understand what you’re looking for when you read a script. What are the steps? How do you go from ideas while you’re reading the script to an actual musical score?

Jeff Russo: To me, typically, I also ue melodies to connect characters to the audience. So the siblings have a theme, I call it The Siblings Theme, and when it, it plays and you, you sort of feel the connection between the two. But now that you've seen Episode Seven, as Wendy is, I wanna say, separating from her brother, what I tried to do was take that theme and deconstruct it. So what started as this feeling of emotional connectivity between those two characters ends up feeling like emotional separation.

Adam Rogers: That's slick.

Jeff Russo: Mm.

Maggie Phillips: And what's really slick about the way Jeff does it is he does it very subtly. I've always said this about you, but it's not like you're not being spoon fed. You know? I think it's, I, think–

Jeff Russo: –That typical for what, for everything that we do with Noah. It's like we, we typically, I feel like it's respect for the audience.

Maggie Phillips: It's respect for the audience. To watch a show on their own.

Jeff Russo: We never put music in, and I'm talking about score I’m not talking about songs,

Maggie Phillips: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeff Russo: But we never utilize music or score unless we have emotionally earned it in a scene. We, we would much rather be quiet than put music just to fill space, right? You know, we really talk about how is this feeling, what is the feeling behind this entire sequence? If they're running, I don't need running music. How are they feeling when they're running? Why are they running? Are they running away from something that's going to kill them? Are they running towards something that they want to grab a hold of and kiss? You know what I mean? There's like all kinds of feelings that that go into it. And I feel like we've always gone in the direction of, we, we can only play the music that the characters are demanding, and if they're not demanding it, then don't do it.

Adam Rogers: But I, I'll push back a little bit. There's a jump scare noise. There is a cue for the jump scare.

Jeff Russo: Okay, so what I will say is this: it's Alien.

Maggie Phillips: Yeah.

Jeff Russo: And so yes, we have jump scares. Yes, we have horror music, and in that way, to me, that's the character of the Xenomorph and, or of these other bugs. Um, like these characters that are very much emotional characters in our story demand some type of score.

Adam Rogers: So the monsters have their themes, too.

Jeff Russo: Of course, they have their themes. They're fucking scary as hell!

Maggie Phillips: Yeah. And I would argue, don't you think you thought about the audience a little bit more in this show than we have in the past? Or at least, giving the audience a ride?

Jeff Russo: So yes. That, you know, it is a part of the entertainment factor.

Maggie Phillips: Yeah.

Jeff Russo: Right. I don't need to help scare them,

Maggie Phillips: No.

Jeff Russo: But I really do want to give them what they are expecting.

Maggie Phillips: Yeah.

Jeff Russo: Certainly I took a little lead from the first movie and the second movie in terms of the tonality of what Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner did in those scores, right? You know, there's a retro nostalgia there that I also wanted to grab onto. You know, so there's some of that sound that I wanted to put in there, which is one of the reasons why I went to Abbey Road to, to record the orchestra, um, because that–the sound of that room…it's like when you hear an orchestra in that room, you know–

Maggie Phillips: It’s something familiar. Yeah.

Jeff Russo: You know you’ve heard it before. So I wanted that sound for the big soaring strings–

Maggie Phillips: I never thought about that, but that makes sense. It makes you–

Jeff Russo: It just feels familiar.

Maggie Phillips: It feels familiar.

Jeff Russo: Yeah.

Maggie Phillips: One of my favorite score moments of yours probably wasn't recorded in Abbey Road and that's that solo guitar you did. And that, is that in Four?

Jeff Russo: Uh, that is at the end of Four. Yeah,

Maggie Phillips: Yeah, the end of four. I love that one so much.

Jeff Russo: That, that literally, I, I–

Maggie Phillips: Did you do it here?

Jeff Russo: –Right here. It might've been–

Adam Rogers: I’m sorry, what's the moment?

Maggie Phillips: Jeff does a guitar solo, and Jeff's guitar playing is phenomenal. It is! You can just–like self-taught guitarist who lead, you know that nineties band Tonic–

Adam Rogers: –Tonic. Yeah. No, I, that's–

Maggie Phillips: And so he pulls out his electric guitar and does this like, Hendrix sort of style…like it doesn't sound like Hendrix, but you know what I– it just has as big of a presence as a Hendrix solo. And it's so emotional, i's so beautiful, and it's, for me, it's my favorite part of the whole score. I appreciate it.

Jeff Russo: Wow I appreciate, I appreciate that. That was a lot of fun to do.

Adam Rogers: It, it's especially an interesting choice because the only experiences that most people watching will have had of an Alien story is a movie is two, sort of two intense hours of more and more alien stuff and then the end. But because, 'cause you're both having to work with eight installments. You need catharsis eight times before to get out of one and go back to the world

Jeff Russo: You know, that's an, that's actually an interesting point and I would say score doesn't need that, right? I don't need a catharsis for score that way that. That thankfully is all on you, Maggie. You know.

Maggie Phillips: Yeah. I mean, and luckily I didn't write these songs to do it and these songs are super cathartic.

Jeff Russo: –Or maybe you wish you did write those.

Maggie Phillips: I wish I do. God.

Adam Rogers: –they're very

Maggie Phillips: be retired if I had written some of these.

Jeff Russo: I have a question then, like, did you and Noah have a conversation about the idea of ending each episode with a song?

Maggie Phillips: Yes. We knew there was gonna be big endings. Right.

Jeff Russo: They get me going.

Maggie Phillips: They get, yeah. No, and I think, I think Noah would confirm this, but I think it just started working. So it was like, we ended 101 with Black Sabbath and then we did Tool, and then it was like let's just keep going in the same vein.

Adam Rogers: How do you find them? How did you find these?

Maggie Phillips: It's collaboration, me and Noah and the editor, and it was pretty, I have to say, I, I don't like, not easy, but like, just like it was so much fun that there wasn't a lot of stress. We got into a groove early on and they just sort of landed. And it's just like, for me, my favorites like were the ones that were, would satisfy high school, college age, Maggie, which were Jane's Addiction, which we put in, uh, Legion too. I love that song so much. And I'm a big Metallica fan too so getting Metallica in there, I mean, it's just like so satisfying.

Jeff Russo: We've, we, what we've done is we create this, this like handoff, it's almost like a handoff because when you watch each one of these episodes, score usually hands off right into a song. And it's like holy shit. When, when that first song comes in after that first episode–

Maggie Phillips: It's so satisfying

Jeff Russo: It's so satisfying.

Maggie Phillips: Why I feel like we thought more about the audience for this and like all the emotions they're gonna be feeling and all the emotions that the characters are feeling. But I feel like they're gonna, I hope that they're gonna be very satisfied by it.

Adam Rogers: You two are obviously very collaborative too. And you talked about how score hands off to song at the end of episodes, are there any place where those things actually overlapped?

Jeff Russo: I created all of the music around the, you know, how we're doing this, the, title music. And then there was this idea to utilize this lyric.

Maggie Phillips: ‘Cause we use Strange Brew by Cream. We use a portion of that song.

Jeff Russo: Noah said, how can we take that and have that be the sort of crescendo part of, of the piece.

Maggie Phillips: –And that was the first thing Noah spoke about song–that was–

Jeff Russo: –to you.

Maggie Phillips: –for me, that was the first song that he brought up.

Adam Rogers: Say what the lyric is? with the

Maggie Phillips: It's literally just “strange brew.” That's all you hear. Yeah. It's nine seconds of the song.

Jeff Russo: So the idea was how do I take those, you know, those two notes, 'cause it's two notes, um, and, the lyric. How do I insert that into what this idea I had for the main title was. And I just started messing around with how to, how to make that work and Noah ends up coming into the studio and singing the two um words.

Adam Rogers: Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm gonna stick to that. Noah Hawley is singing in the opening–in the main theme for this show?

Maggie Phillips: Noah Hawley sings in every series of TV sh–

Jeff Russo: Pretty much.

Maggie Phillips: Yeah. Pretty much.

Jeff Russo: Pretty much.

Maggie Phillips: Not everyone knows that.

Jeff Russo: Not everyone knows that. But it’s like a band00

Maggie Phillips: Noah and Jeff have a band and I manage it sometimes. From the behind the scenes. 'Cause sometimes they'll call me up the next day and be like, we recorded the song last night, and I'm like, dudes.

Jeff Russo: You gotta tell me.

Maggie Phillips: You gotta tell me! Like I, I have to make sure you can use that song. It sounds great. It doesn't sound like Noah in the mix.

Jeff Russo: No

Maggie Phillips: Like you wouldn't–

Jeff Russo: We went out of our way to make, to make it not sound like Noah.

Maggie Phillips: I hope that's okay that we're sharing…that it's Noah. I, I think that's a fun Easter egg. I don't think he’d be upset.

Jeff Russo: Yeah. Okay.

Adam Rogers: Jeff and Maggie have been on Noah’s team for a long time. Which turns out to mean a ton of Easter Eggs across a bunch of different shows. But that means that things are a little different for people who are trying to get on the team for the first time, like actors auditioning for parts. Alex Lawther, who plays Wendy's brother Hermit, actually had a few jumpscares during Alien: Earth’s hyperspeed casting process.

Alex Lawther: I think another actor, Sam Blanken, was already cast and I think they were worried that me and Sam look too similar physically, we're both sort of these skinny British guys. And they were like, oh gosh. And so they asked me to come back but like slick my hair back or try to sort of make myself look a bit different and do another reading. And that all happened very quickly actually. I think we all got offered the parts over a very short space of time and then suddenly found ourselves in Thailand.

Adam Rogers: Hermit strikes me from the outside as kind of an unusual character for the show because he's actually kind of a decent human, like he's completely human and he's mostly decent. He sort of represents the proletariat in this corporatized world. I wonder if you think that's right and how you thought about developing Hermit's inner life, you know what kind of person he thinks he is and where he fits into the scheme of who these people are?

Alex Lawther: Yes. It's strange when we first meet Hermit, he has encountered such loss. He's encountered the loss of his sister, but also both of his parents. And yet Noah spoke about him as someone that carried on and a sort of inherent optimism, I suppose, for living.

When we meet him in the story, I think he's just about to hopefully go off to medical school and finally sort of move on with his life. But it's, it's true that when we find him, we find someone quite trapped inside the machine, which he's working for. And I think he resents that machine, but there's not a lot of space for him to rage against it.

Adam Rogers: It's interesting too that he's a medic, he's gonna be a doctor. He's explicitly in a caregiving role. He's one of the few characters who, like his whole job is to make sure people are okay.

Alex Lawther: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's his sort of life ambition is to give care. And so then I think that he finds himself in a very complicated situation when he ends up in Neverland amongst these other adult people who are seemingly giving care, but actually they're offering something quite different than care.

Adam Rogers: We're talking about Episode Seven, so it's been six weeks. For us watching it, but in, story, it's really just a few days and it's just a like a couple of days for Hermit – from when Hermit has learned that his sister is not dead or some version of his sister–

Alex Lawther: Yeah.

Adam Rogers: –is still alive. So I wonder how you think that he adjusts to, you know, this like monster fighting superhero is also the, what, the 12-year-old that he remembers?

Alex Lawther: Yes. It's a really hard thing for him to compartmentalize, isn't it? And where is his place in that facility because he can't really offer her physical help as a medic, she bleeds this sort of white machine fluid, and she has scientists that look after her and so what use is a sibling? Like what use is a family member in that world? And I think he does struggle with that. And I wondered if it was something, I don't know but maybe he's there to still look after the soul of her if there is one. You know, if there is something, um, it's the Marcy that's inside Wendy. She can go back to lab and be repaired and she'll live forever and she won't get cancer. But how can he look after the human sort of, you know, like Mary Oliver, silk of the person inside of her. He takes that responsibility on because he is just so used to caregiving and is trying to find a space in which to give care with little Marcy, who's no longer little Marcy at all.

Adam Rogers: You did a specific acting set of choices in when you called her Wendy and when you called her Marcy in different scenes. We've talked about that with some of the writers. Tell me if that's right, first of all, and if it is what you were thinking, and why the choice was important.

Alex Lawther: Yeah. I suppose whenever he's speaking to the idea of his sister, as he remembers her, it's Marcy. Which is interesting because it so much serves him as much as it does because he’s been missing this child so much. So there's so much wish fulfillment as well in that. And then this Wendy is a new person, and he has less relationship to that Wendy being. And I think it's almost like this Marcy person goes in and out of focus when he's looking at her and sometimes when Marcy's out focus, they become Wendy, if that makes sense.

Adam Rogers: By the time we get to Episode Seven, there's a bit of a shift in Hermit's character, he's still in a caregiving role, but now it's the great escape, right? Like it is sort of a big swing 'cause he's kind of a rule follower until that point. And now it's like, no, we gotta break off of secret island lab.

Alex Lawther: I think he quite quickly realizes that she's not safe here, so therefore we've gotta get out. In his mind, it's for her. But there's so much that he's doing out of his want to fill a position of care and his need to be a brother, I guess.

Adam Rogers: She goes immediately from being the kid who is cared for to being in a caregiver role herself. Hermit becomes kind of a dude in distress for her to rescue.

Alex Lawther: Yeah.

Adam Rogers: In the, in the very quickly–

Alex Lawther: Which I love.

Adam Rogers: And it's an inversion of the expected relationship that they would have as brother and sister perhaps.

Alex Lawther: Yeah totally as a sort of a 10-year-old sister and her older military trained medic brother, she comes in and she quite quickly saves the day on multiple occasions. It's interesting, isn't it? 'Cause I think that says something about how we want to give care, care and we want to take care of others. And that is such a sort of instant position of responsibility that even a 10-year-old is quite happy to fulfill.

Adam Rogers: Well, there's a little bit of that, like if you're a 10-year-old now, you get superpowers. That's a fantasy thing for a 10-year-old. And it's an interesting juxtaposition with Hermit who's like trying to get out of the military. Like he wants to not be a like–

Alex Lawther: He doesn't wanna be there.

Adam Rogers: –combat superhero. He doesn't want to be a colonial marine.

Alex Lawther: No.

Adam Rogers: Like he wants none of this.

Alex Lawther: Yeah. And he's constantly having to reevaluate his place. And I think that actually got crystallized as we were shooting. There were earlier versions of the draft was literally just sitting in his room, not knowing what to do.

Adam Rogers: Hmm.

Alex Lawther: Because what is there for him to do in that space? And I think Noah really sharpened that and made it quite active for him trying to figure out, what am I doing here? Like, what am I, how can I be useful?

Adam Rogers: And Hermit ends up finding his use in coordinating the great escape from the Neverland. He slowly puts in effort to convince Wendy or Marcy that the place is not safe, she finally sees that. And but, but because she's sort of an older sibling to the Lost Boys. She says if she’s gonna escape, they have to come with her too. So we finally get to this moment on the boat with Hermit, Wendy or Marcy, Nibs, and then Hermit’s other family too. And that jeopardizes the Hermit, Wendy brother, sister relationship.

Alex Lawther: Yes, because he's just trying to get her out with as few casualties as possible. He prioritizes the human life over, as he does with poor Nibs.

Adam Rogers: So, it's two things, right? The first thing is that Hermit sees her deploy the Xenomorph. There's that. And then when his friends come and say, no, you're under arrest, he lightning guns Nibs.

Alex Lawther: Yeah.

Adam Rogers: He protects his friends.

Alex Lawther: Yeah, because I think Nibs just ripped out someone's throat with her bare hands.

Adam Rogers: It's pretty violent. Yeah.

Alex Lawther: It’s super violent. But also I mean, children do have immense violence within them as well, and they have to learn what to do with that anger. They crush bugs and they hurt little animals and they take it out on their little siblings. All of that stuff happens. I mean, they don't rip out the throats of military officers, but I think it's a question, isn't it? Nibs is really curious because actually what happens is it all becomes too much for her. And she starts to disassociate and she starts to lash out and is that the machine doing that, or is that the child?

And I suppose the part of Hermit, that is about do no harm kicks in. And I think he makes a calculated and maybe human choice as to prioritize human pain over, over Nibs.

Adam Rogers: He's implicitly also saying, I don't actually think you're human. Even if I think you're my sister, I don't think you're human. 'Cause he's saying No, I'm gonna shoot the robot.

Alex Lawther: Exactly. That is his sort of internal battle throughout the whole season, I think is please, please, please be my sister, which means please, please, please do as few robotic superhuman things as possible. The moments in which Marcy, Wendy puts herself…his arms or is they can be tender with each other and as they were when they were brother and sister in their human form. What a crazy conversation this is. Um, Hermit feels the most comfortable with that. Knows how to be in that situation, knows how to be a big brother, but also recognizes the humanness in his sister. It's really awkward for him and uncomfortable…all the evidence she gives for not being his sister. Because that does therefore mean that she's not human and something else entirely.

Adam Rogers: So in that, in the dynamic of, who is the worse monster here? You know, aliens running around the jungle, weird robots whose eyes now glow red because they're evil robots, and horrible broligarchs. You've gotta kind of pick where you want to situate yourself. If you're Hermit, if you're the last real human, basically.

Alex Lawther: Yeah. In those first episodes, Hermit starts feeling that he's inside this sort of nightmare and there's almost a sense of when am I gonna wake up from? And then there's this baseball that reminds him of his dad and then his, someone turns up, he says, is his sister? Like, he might start thinking, am I just severely concussed? Because it's so beyond. And then he has to deal with the fact that this is a nightmare that he's not waking up from.

Adam Rogers: It is all very dreamlike actually.

Alex Lawther: Yeah, it's super dreamlike and so, just sort of go, okay, well what, what else you got!

Adam Rogers: I guess we're doing this.

Alex Lawther: Yeah. And I thought it was really interesting that there is the possibility of language for the aliens and that means something, doesn't it? Because it therefore means the aliens are less alien than we've given them credit for. Maybe actually they're not purely the killing machines that we fear that they are, I do think what the show does is complicate the question of both what it is to be human, but also what it is to be an alien too.

Adam Rogers: Like Alex says, this show complicates a lot of the larger questions about humanity. The lines between human and machine, human and alien all get blurred. But the thing that’s the least human about the Hybrids is that they’re supposed to be effectively immortal. And then in this episode, Isaac dies. Even Hybrids are, ultimately, food for something. So that’s the big question here. If that immortality is a false promise, how can any of the pursuit here of scientific advancement possibly be worth it in any sense? So here’s series creator Noah Hawley.

Noah Hawley: I think there's a sense of fatality of what did you think was going to happen when you put children into these adult responsibilities? The tragedy of this death that happens is that it is his very childness that led to his death because kids rush and he had some impulse control issues and, you know, he didn't know his own strength and pulled that door off and then rather than, pause, slow down, think it through, he did the first thing that came to mind, which is, well, I can just open the door and slide in the tray and, and I'll be out in a second. And, you know, he created this opportunity. So, I think that all those things that occurred, for Kirsh who has seen the footage and knows that the Eye Midge orchestrated that moment, there's a lot of great science that happened. There just happens to have been a consequence to it that was less than preferable.

Adam Rogers: The biosafety precautions in this lab give me pause. Can I just say.

Noah Hawley: You know, it's, uh, there's no such thing as a perfect vacuum. when hostile alien forces are involved. I think that science fiction has taught us that. So, this facility was not designed to contain these creatures, really. And so they're just winging it.

Adam Rogers: Now that it is clear there's some definite mad scientist traits among a lot of these characters, is there like a sense, a storytelling sense that the mad scientists get kind of punished for hubris here for doing this vivisection? Does that have to happen to the scientist perpetrators?

Noah Hawley: Well, there's a moment in the, in the fifth hour when Dr. Raheem says, you know, this is proof of how stupid smart people can be. They're smart enough to build machines that go into space and to split the atom, but they're too stupid to know you don't bring parasites home with you.

Hubris is really stupidity in a different guise. To think that they can contain or control what's going to happen. But in the same way that, you know, Dame Sylvia and this whole experiment of putting child's minds into adult bodies, you can call it whatever you like. It's still an experiment. It's still, we're gonna do something no one has ever done before. And then, no matter how prepared we think we are, we just have to see what happens. And we didn't prepare for a spaceship to crash and Nibs to feel like, she was almost invaded by a creature that forces her to think about, well, what is inside of me in a way that reminds her that she's mechanical and that idea she can't really handle mentally, psychologically. You know, there are all these variables.

But even without a spaceship, this was never going to go well. And that doesn't mean that you wouldn't end up in 10 or 15 years with a great product of immortality in which they'd worked out all the bugs. But those bugs for now are, are literal. And the consequences are the lives of these children.

Adam Rogers: Yeah, I guess I wonder what the journal writeups of like, well first we started by putting baby rat brains into adult rat synthetic bodies, and we figured out what happened there. Then we did it with monkeys and there was a lot of institutional review board questions about that. You know, I don't think they followed those protocols.

Noah Hawley: Boy Kavalier doesn't really have the patience for all of that, and because there aren't regulations or governments to keep him from breaking these protocols, they are just norms in a way, scientific norms and he wants faster, go faster, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've, I've already, just assume I'm ahead of you at all times, is what he says. People who, who are ahead of you at all times are the least prepared for failure or setback because it's gonna come. You can't outsmart everything.

Adam Rogers: That's, this is the, this is a yes place, not a no place–

Noah Hawley: Right. Which is such a crazy thing to say. I mean, sure philosophically, I also believe let's not be negative, let's try to be creative problem solvers. But, you have to say no when safety's involved. If you know better than me because you're actually experienced as to how to build a skyscraper, and I'm telling you this is a yes place, and you're saying, but that skyscraper's gonna fall over. I think it needs to be a no place.

Adam Rogers: It is literally in Mark Andreessen's techno optimist manifesto. There's no problem that technology might create, that technology can't also solve. They assume they can fix it if something goes wrong.

Noah Hawley: I mean, eventually. Can they fix it in time, I think is the question, right? Sure. One day technology could fix the problem that it creates, but if the result is that we're all dead, then it's a pyric victory.

Adam Rogers: And you think that really Dame Sylvia, maybe Arthur, feel the same way as Boy K about this? I mean, they're culpable in some of the hubristic science.

Noah Hawley: I think Arthur is the moral center of the show. And I think that you know, what he saw the good intentions of, giving sick children a chance to live on. And yes, the downside of course is that they don't live on, or that they don't end up being children or, you know, there's a lot of versions of it. But, the risks, when you measure them out, outweigh the downsides. I think Dame Sylvia is a much more morally compromised person who…who does a lot of things in the name of science that are questionable. I mean Arthur, when Atom Eins says, erase three days of her memories and change her personality to not be this person, he is fired because he won't do it and she will do it. And she justifies it and convinces herself that she's helping, that it's just a different kind of medicine. But the reality is she knows somewhere deep down, she knows that, that this is the wrong thing to do. But she is ambitious and she does, you know, want to be a great woman, remembered, she wants that Nobel Prize as much as Boy Kavalier does.

Adam Rogers: It's kind of a bummer of an irony that they don't, I guess, read much science fiction themselves at Prodigy that they're like, for some people the actual incept date of science fiction is, literally a story that says like, don't try to create life. That's a bad idea. You know, it's Mary Shelley saying that very early on.

Noah Hawley: Right. Well, there's a, there's an idea in baseball, which is like, you're gonna hit the ball where you're looking so don't look at the fielders. There's a reason that our first phones were flip phones, like the communicators on Star Trek. Fiction exists to show reality what's possible. Without the book Frankenstein we don't have an idea of the mad scientist. These things that are created in the imagination become reality.

Adam Rogers: Does the show then leave any room for the possibility that scientific achievement can also be a great human achievement? I mean, is it all warnings against what scientists are supposed to do versus what humans standing up against monsters?

Noah Hawley: No, I mean, I think we need in this moment to be as pro-science as possible. You know, what I find fascinating about this moment that we're in…the reason that the belief and faith in science is decreasing is because of these devices. These, uh, magical, you know, if you have a phone that you can look at that tells you every fact and fiction and people can do their own research and they don't need Universities and you know, you basically have this device, the very technology of which is invisible, that is fueling the research that people are doing that says, I don't have to listen to scientists. It's like this crazy Catch 22, right? You know, I think in the context of the show, it's always the cautionary tale. It all goes back to that line in Jurassic Park where Jeff Goldblum says, you know, your scientists spent so much time figuring out could they do this? They didn't think about should they do this.

Adam Rogers: Look, I'm not a scientist, but I'm pretty sure that's it for this week's episode of Alien: Earth - The Official Podcast. Next week, the season finale. We are done. Just a few tiny loose ends to tie like Wendy will probably be okay with Hermit shooting her friend with lightning, right? And Dame Sylvia will probably be okay with Arthur getting face hugged and chest bursted.

Morrow and Kirsh will probably hug it out. I bet Boy Kavalier will realize that other people are not just non-playable characters and everyone will go live by the seashore. Oh, sorry, I'm getting a message from my producer here. Oh, no, no, that's right, huh. Well, we'll sort that out next week when we talk about episode eight 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.