Neverland - Episode 1 | Alien: Earth - The Official Podcast

Wendy (Played by Sydney Chandler): So what am I? If I’m not human, what am I?

Kirsh (Played by Timothy Olyphant): Whatever you want to be.

Adam Rogers: Welcome to Alien: Earth - The Official Podcast. My name's Adam Rogers. I'm usually a reporter. I cover science and technology mostly, and I'm also a big nerd, so I'm delighted to get the chance to extend an inner jaw… mouth… thing and bite down into Alien, one of the great horror, science fiction and action universes, and a perfect organism for thinking about the future of technology, humanity, and monstrosity.

So this show is our chance to talk about what happens on that show, of course, and also go backstage or let's say below decks and into the steam filled, water dripping from chains, cargo holds. I'll be talking to folks around the world from Hyderabad, to London, to the Gold Coast of Australia, to The Gambia, to Pasadena - and from across the production to writers and directors about how they shaped the story, to actors about the characters and their, well, the action, and the people who did the actual world building and alien making. And listen, the whole point of genres like science fiction is to have good fun while wrestling with complex hard to kill acid blooded ideas. So at the end of every episode, we'll dive into one of those too.

Fair warning, there's gonna be spoilers, so watch the episode first or don't come crying to me!

This week, episode one, it's called Neverland and we’ll be hearing from writer and creator Noah Hawley. Then I’ll sit down with writer Migizi Pensoneau to talk about a new addition to the Alien universe, the hybrids, mind of a child transcoded into a synthetic adult body. And I’ll talk to actor Sydney Chandler, who plays one of those hybrids. Lastly, we'll do a big question, how should we think about the idea of humanity in a roboticized artificially intelligent future?

First let’s do some basics, the secret origins of Alien: Earth with creator, writer and executive producer, Noah Hawley.

Noah Hawley: I remember there was a plan, for a friend of mine's birthday party, to go see Alien with a bunch of what would have been 11 or 12 year olds at the time. And I had a similar set of parents who pretty much allowed everything else, but drew a line in the sand at going to see Alien. And so I went to see The In Laws instead, but I did see it eventually, and I did see James Cameron's sequel in the theater, which was a very seminal moment for me. It remains one of the best action movies of all time.

Adam Rogers: And completely different than what had come before it, too. So you, I mean, I just remember not being prepared for what that was like to see in a theater, how amazing that was.

Noah Hawley: I think what made Alien so powerful a film was just the sheer unpredictability of the biological horror therein. And the fact that it started as, what felt like a documentary about space truckers-

Adam Rogers: Right.

Noah Hawley: -that went on for like 30 or 40 minutes. And I think that slow build really, resulted in the terror that people felt because they weren't prepared for it. The movie had lulled them.

Adam Rogers: I actually do think about this with some maybe weird frequency about what it must be like to create a new kind of monster that just lives in people's gestalt, in the way that like Romero created modern zombies.

Noah Hawley: And to move what had formerly been a B movie genre in which the practical effects were always a little bit silly and you had to suspend disbelief where as I said the biological horror of it, the reality of this completely repulsive life cycle of this creature that every time you thought well, that's got to be it… it got worse.

Adam Rogers: Right!

Noah Hawley: And you weren't prepared for that either, so I think that's one of the things that remains so critical to the success of the first film that, every time you make another Alien, gets harder to recreate for an audience.

Adam Rogers: That comes to the challenge that falls on you here. How did you come to the project?

Noah Hawley: I came to the project through FX. I made Fargo for them, and then I made a show called Legion for them, which came out of a conversation in which FX asked me if I would ever be interested in doing anything in the X-Men world. And my problem is, if you ask me a question like that, I'm going to have an idea. And so they asked me a few years later, if they could get Alien, would I be interested? And of course I was, and had an idea. But it went through a very long process because in the beginning it was really seen as only a film franchise and the film executives at 20th Century Fox weren't interested in sharing with the television department.

Adam Rogers: Even though it's the same company!

Noah Hawley: I think there was a perception that you devalued the brand by making too much of it. And so it wasn't until Disney came in that we got another swing at it.

Adam Rogers: You said that you had an idea immediately, like as soon as the FX folks said, hey what do you think, you were like, oh-

Noah Hawley: I mean not, not on the phone call, but quickly enough that we sat down in, what would have been, I want to say, 2018 and had a conversation about it. And obviously it's evolved a bit since then, but, um, all I ever tried to do in this line of work I found myself in of reinterpreting famous films as television shows, is to figure out what the original movie made me feel, and why. And then to try to recreate that feeling in the audience telling a completely different story.

Adam Rogers: And it's a structural challenge too, isn't it? As a storyteller, because you just laid out three acts and, that's true in both those first two movies, that's very different than what you're working with, with eight hours of television.

Noah Hawley: Yeah, I mean, an alien movie is a two hour survival story, right, its heart. And it has a certain amount of setup, and then a lot of runaway, and then a certain amount of fighting back, and then the movie is over. That is not what a television show is. A television show is 10, 20, 50 hours of a continuous story about a group of characters who can't all die. In fact, most of them can't die. If you really want to tell stories about these people that an audience invests in, and so then the function of the monster becomes different in a television show than it is in a film.

Adam Rogers: You're starting development before COVID and really before the oligopolies of the super wealthy technologists became as present in our lives. A lot of what happened in real life caught up with what you were laying out as a narrative, as a world building structure 2018-2020.

Noah Hawley: Yeah, I'm, for better or worse, a Zeitgeist storyteller. You give me a, an air date and I'll calibrate our future, um, to that air date. All you got to do is think one or two steps ahead, right? I lived in San Francisco during the first dot com boom and I saw the power of tech, the amount of money that went in there and the sort of way it revolutionized American capitalism and, Elon believes in the cyborg future right, and then there's other, billionaires who believe in the transhuman future and, this is the battle, like, who's right, how are we gonna get past this, or are we all just gonna get the measles and perish.

And I thought, well, if we're coming to this world at this moment and we know that there's this synth technology, can we be looking at a moment in which the aliens enter our show where humanity is engaged in a different kind of struggle right, about which technologies are going to create immortality for us? How are we going to transcend this earthly realm that we're on. You know, Tim Olyphant at the end of the first hour says, You used to be food and then you convinced yourself that you weren't food anymore. But you're still food when the monster comes along, however smart you are, or whatever elevated ideas about the future of space travel you have, you're still basically just food.

Adam Rogers: You do also get to see a very specific Earth, the seeing the kind of ballardian skyscraper, seeing the canals and what looks like a post climate change world those are - you've got some ideas that you're working through, I think, about what the planet looks like as well.

Noah Hawley: Yeah, it's the hot, wet future that we all appear to be, inevitably, moving toward. And, what impact does that have? We know when the temperature goes up. All those tropical diseases move north. All those tropical insects move north. Everything's moving north, right? And so the planet, 50 years from now, you know, you're gonna have to worry about getting some tropical mosquito borne disease in Wyoming, right? That's a part of it, without making a statement about it. It's just saying, okay, I think if we accept that reality then this is what the future would look like.

Adam Rogers: I was surprised that this show's not only in conversation with Alien and Aliens, but with another text too, with Peter Pan. So where did that idea come from? Why is that important?

Noah Hawley: Peter Pan, if you read that book, it's a dark book. Peter, if he had his way, all the adults would die. I mean, he, there's a moment in the book where he hides in a tree and he's breathing quickly in and out because he believes that every breath he takes kills an adult, right? And you're like, that is dark. A man child at this most mercurial, right? And so, for me, that metaphor for Boy Kavalier as his own Peter Pan, he loves that idea that he has this Neverland. And, you know, what's interesting, obviously, in the Disney version of it, and the treatment in film, is that we romanticize this child who doesn't grow up, when the reality is that children have the least amount of control of their environment and their world. And that it's the act of growing up that gives us some measure of control and to put these children into adult bodies and then refuse to allow them to grow up, it's really about keeping them powerless.

Adam Rogers: Naming them after the Lost Boys, Wendy and the Lost Boys that's who Peter Pan is trying to draw into his orbit.

Noah Hawley: Yeah, you have to be who I tell you to be and I have the naming power over you. Even though you were a person before with parents who named you an long history, now I own you and I control you.

Adam Rogers: Yeah, that's interesting, that naming-

Noah Hawley: But isn't it fun? Isn't it fun? We're all kids. Isn't that fun?

Adam Rogers: You're a novelist also, and you kind of work in genre in the novels too, thriller mode and a mystery solving mode, you've done that with your television work too. And I wonder what compels you, if anything, about that. What do you like about it?

Noah Hawley: Well, I think genre is what makes morality exciting for an audience. The issues are the same, but the stakes go up. So, what kind of people should we be? How are we raising our children to be adults? All these things that I find myself returning to as a storyteller, when you put them in the context of a crime story or science fiction story, they just get more exciting for an audience. And I've always felt like if you entertain an audience, they give you permission to do more. More with theme, more with character. The way that, that Alien introduced the android and the idea that we couldn't even trust the people around us to be people. They didn't belabor it, but it was the shock of the film, which was a film that was already laden with so much shock.

Adam Rogers: And there's the monstrosity of the monster versus the monstrosity of the company.

Noah Hawley: Yeah, and you know there's a quote in the second film where Sigourney Weaver says, I don't know which species is worse, at least they don't fuck each other over for a percentage. The moral horror of Alien is what made it compelling to me. You know, it's not just what these monsters do to us, it's what we do to each other. Are we worse is such a fascinating question.

Adam Rogers: If you know you're working in an Alien expanded universe, what becomes core that you know you have to preserve to be true to that and what becomes expendable or what becomes expandable to you?

Noah Hawley: Well, there's a few things. One of the things that I think is really remarkable about those first two films is how much they are about class. You have space truckers in the first film. You have the soldiers in the second film. There really is a sense, a 1970s and early 80s sense, that individuals are working against a system. But then of course, you know, we never see who's at the top and who's making those decisions. And, you know, my feeling was if we're gonna go to earth I think we have to meet those people and understand what it is that creates that kind of dystopian world in which people on a spaceship can be going to a planet looking for something they don't know what it is, and then when they discover it, it's there to kill them, and then when they go back to their company and say, hey, this thing's trying to kill us, the company says, well, that's okay, as long as it survives.

Adam Rogers: And the corporate sort of oligopolies that become important too. The Alien movies talk about Weyland Yutani, now there are more companies and they're in charge.

Noah Hawley: This is this is a moment in Earth history where there are these competing technologies, and Weyland Yutani has invested in the idea that we're gonna become more than human by beginning to swap out our biological parts for mechanical parts, and thus become stronger, better, faster versions of ourselves, right? And then, of course, the Prodigy Corporation is like, well, that's a very inelegant surgical solution to what could be a very clean and transhuman project.

Adam Rogers: I want to know this specifically in relation to Boy Kavalier, who's the tech oligarch, the lead of Prodigy, one of the companies that you've put in charge of the planet. Is he actually a super genius or is he just a broligarch?

Noah Hawley: The answer doesn't have to be either or, it can be both on some level, right? And, I think the Dunning Kruger effect applies to smart people also, right? It's not just that stupid people don't know they're stupid, it's smart people don't know they're stupid. I mean, what happens at a certain level of wealth is you start to believe that the genius that made you rich, it applies to everything. And simultaneously you stop surrounding yourself with people who might say, yeah, but right now you're only surrounded by people who say, oh my God, you are a genius. So I think it's the hubris is always the downfall, right? I wrote in one of my books, like, at a certain point of wealth, you just think everything's free, and no one else goes through the world thinking everything's free, except the people who can buy the world. You know, and the other danger of it, of course, is that they're fascinating, often transgressive, sometimes charming, funny, either deliberately or inadvertently, they're entertaining, and outrageous, and outraging, and we can't stop talking about them. And that only makes it worse.

Adam Rogers: So you do introduce the Maginot, you've got a spaceship here. And so, you know, the Sulaco, the Nostromo, and now there's a Maginot. And in the first episode there's some great elision of like, yeah, yeah, there's an alien spaceship. But you know what happens on one of those? And gets expanded on more, but I'm just wondering what you get from having the ship as a factor.

Noah Hawley: Well, I don't think it's Alien without a ship. And, that visual world, that is the Alien brand. And the biggest challenge that I had was, okay, not only does most of the show take place not on a ship, but it's not even the Weyland Yutani Corporation. So, that aesthetic, which is so iconic, is it just everywhere, or, is Prodigy a different aesthetic? And since I was looking at those movies from 1979 and 86 I had to make the choice. Is the technology this retrofuturism or am I gonna embrace the sort of Prometheus holographic world? And I thought, well, If I do that, I'm not making Alien. People are tuning in to see Alien, and, and if isn't dripping metal chains in a, in a sweaty cargo room, then-

Adam Rogers: What are we even doing here, man?

Noah Hawley: Exactly! We went back to the original blueprints-

Adam Rogers: Wow.

Noah Hawley: -to the degree that Ridley Scott was a little surprised at how much we embraced the aesthetic of the Nostromo in the Maginot. But the aesthetic of that world, the white on whiteness of it you know, in contrast with the sort of industrial sense of it. I mean that, that is Alien to me. And when we built that bridge, when we built that comms room and you walk into them, it's a really fascinating thing that happens because, for me as a child and now an adult filmmaker, I mean, time collapses. You're basically walking into the movie Alien in a way that was so profound that the entire crew gets giddy. Not only are you making it, but you're inside of it.

Adam Rogers: It's not just world building for me as a viewer, it's world building for people making it too?

Noah Hawley: There's an exercise that I've certainly been engaged in, since Fargo, in which I am in dialogue with the movies that I love. But it's not in in just an, an imitative or a carbon copy, it's trying to tell an original story within an existing franchise. You get the best of both worlds, if you do it right. You get something people love and then they get a whole new version of it. And my hope is that that feels like a gift.

Adam Rogers: You've also added a promise unfulfilled by the pluralizing of the title in the second movie, because there are other kinds of aliens in this Alien universe.

Noah Hawley: That goes straight to this idea of my job is to recreate in you the feelings you felt watching the movie Alien, right? And I can't do it with the Xenomorph. I can't make you have that voyage of discovery where you're like, wait, so it's an egg, and then it's a face hugger, and then it's a chest burster, and then it's a Xenomorph? You know that, you know all those steps now, but you don't know with these other creatures how they reproduce, what they eat, all the disgusting things that, you know, will make you feel, I hope, those moments of panic and revulsion that you felt watching the original movie.

Adam Rogers: So those are Noah’s straight-ahead storytelling reasons for adding new monsters to the Alien canon. But the show also adds another new lifeform — the Hybrids, human minds uploaded into synthetic bodies. And I want to turn to co-executive producer and writer Migizi Pensoneau to talk about those; he comes to Alien with a lot of reverence.

Migizi Pensoneau: When the call first came, I said no, because I was too reverent and the show felt too big to sort of be a part of, but when I opened my computer after I'd said no, uh, boldly, um, I opened my computer and the making of alien was the last thing I had been watching the day before. And I was like, man, I love this series. And there's no way I can't be a part of it. So then I started begging after I said no.

Adam Rogers: Right, you first resisted the warrior's call to battle, but then were forced to pick up the-

Migizi Pensoneau: Yeah, classic heroes journey stuff.

Adam Rogers: So within the structure of Alien: Earth, there's this introduction to the idea of a hybrid, of these kids' brains in synthetic bodies. Can you talk about what those are inside the universe?

Migizi Pensoneau: It's human consciousness transplanted into a synthetic body. With the idea that this is a way to extend human life, that an organic body is fragile and temporary, whereas a synthetic body could, in theory, last forever, that's what a hybrid is.

Adam Rogers: Characters in the show have multiple opinions about what the hybrids actually are and whether they have the soul of the kid or not, whether they're human still or something different. Were there different conversations about how to play it or what people thought about what they were supposed to be?

Migizi Pensoneau: The idea of what a hybrid is on Alien: Earth varies from character to character, but person to person, actor to actor, director to director. My personal opinion on the humanity of a hybrid is that I just wrote them as humans, when we were making adjustments to the script. They're just people with their own wants and needs and goals and all that. And so the way that you approach it is that you're just writing these kids. You're writing these characters, not as the sort of synthetic bodies of the way that they're perceived, but you sort of melt that away and you get down to the fact that these are kids going through this new experience that nobody before them has ever been through. And the sort of terror and horror and wonder of that, of being exceptionally strong. That kind of thing is always where the focus was, it was always on the humanity of the hybrids. And, for me personally, I never thought of those characters as anything but human, anything but children.

Adam Rogers: So does that mean you wrote them differently than you would have written Kirsh?

Migizi Pensoneau: A hundred percent. The kids are, are a human consciousness and Kirsh developed entirely synthetically. The benefit of writing science fiction right now is that we have all this stuff to build on, so you get a chance when you're looking at somebody like Kirsh to be like, well, we have Asimov's three laws safe. And we're like, do we have that in our world? Or does he have different parameters about what are sort of sacrosanct limits that he has, but, I'm not giving you any answers to that. I certainly have some of my own, but, but, but the writing of the hybrids was very much, for lack of a less cheesy term, their inner child was always front and center, how, how they were written.

Adam Rogers: Inside the story Boy Kavalier's like sales pitch for this product is that they're better than a human body in some way, like he sees the machines as better in some important way.

Migizi Pensoneau: He, he sees them as the next step of evolution.

Adam Rogers: So you believe him. I have a perhaps cynical distrust of billionaire tech oligarchs. I don't know where I might've got that, but I don't know if I'm supposed to think like, oh yeah, like, no, he wants to sell a trillion dollar robot body.

Migizi Pensoneau: I'm not speaking on behalf of the show when I say this, but for myself, I will take a billionaire or trillionaire’s word at face value because to get, you know, mildly political, I think it's why the world has found itself in the position it's in right now because people are always continually stunned by how terrible billionaires and trillionaires could be, especially when they're in power. And I'm like, they told you the whole time what they're actually wanting. I believe that Boy Kavalier believes himself. He thinks he's telling the truth at all times.

Adam Rogers: But then he gets distracted by the existence of not just the kind of alien that a fan of the movies remember, but a bunch of them.

Migizi Pensoneau: Oh yeah.

Adam Rogers: There's a new shinier toy.

Migizi Pensoneau: Yeah.

Adam Rogers: For the same reasons? Does he think that that's, there's something transhuman in the alien?

Migizi Pensoneau: I wouldn't say transhuman, but there's a level of knowledge that's outside of himself. There's something that is alien and from a different world. That would intrigue anybody, especially a guy who, he's cracked human consciousness and he's like, all right, well, let's let's crack this. Let's see what this thing has to say, it's very much a distraction. I think he's still enamored of the hybrids and what he's done with that. I think it's still an incredible ego stroke for him, but I think that he’s, as you said, it's like, Ooh, shiny. There's a new thing and it's a thing to crack. It's another world to conquer.

Adam Rogers: While Boy Kavalier might be patting himself on the back, thinking he’s really cracked the code on hybrids, and then moving on to his new Alien toys, the hybrids themselves have to contend with the complexity of their own existence. And who better to give us some insight into the mind of a hybrid than Wendy herself, actress Sydney Chandler, who really couldn’t wait to play this role.

Sydney Chandler: I got sent the first three scripts, and I stayed up, I think, till about 3 a.m. reading and re-reading the scripts. And so that night, I booked a flight to Canada. Because I, I knew Noah was there filming Fargo. And the next morning, called my agent, who is now used to me being very impulsive. And I said, you know, whereabouts in Canada could I potentially find Noah? And do you think he would let me take him to dinner and talk about this show?

Adam Rogers: You, you made that call first before flying to Canada. You didn't just fly randomly to Canada and then plan to explore the greater North American-

Sydney Chandler: Correct, correct.

Adam Rogers: Yeah, okay.

Sydney Chandler: Yes. But I did buy the flight and it could have very well not worked out in my favor. But Noah, thankfully, agreed to meet with me. We sat down and talked Alien, and talked the character and why I fell in love with her so deeply. I'm a huge sci fi nerd and so is he and so we had a great, great conversation. Then I came back to Austin and did my auditions. And in that, found out that me and Noah are neighbors in Austin. So I did not have to fly to Canada. But it was worth it.

Adam Rogers: You said you were a sci-fi fan. You knew the Alien universe. You were already into it.

Sydney Chandler: The first Alien film is one that I have watched and rewatched ever since I was a kid. And it's funny because I used to have, you know, night terrors as a kid and a lot of the time it would take the form of our beautiful Xeno. And so while filming, you know, you're filming 2, 3, 4, 5:00 in the morning and you're being chased by, you know, one alien or another. It becomes really scary. Like, I had moments where I jumped back into my little, you know, childhood self. And it's like, oh my gosh, we are in danger right now. So that was really fun. That was really fun.

Adam Rogers: You're also playing a person who, because you're playing a hybrid who's a kid, but in an adult body, there's a real-

Sydney Chandler: Yeah.

Adam Rogers: -disjunction between like inner self and external presentation. So how do you think about playing that as a, just as an acting challenge?

Sydney Chandler: It was really interesting because I, once I started digging into Wendy more, I kind of started to see the body and then the mind as two different characters. And they were kind of like two of the same magnets and they were pushing really close to each other and you could get them super, super close, but they weren't quite touching. There was that force just, just pushing them far apart. And for Wendy, especially in the beginning, it was like she survived in that space between the two magnets. I think that's where she wakes up and it's this void and this hollowness that doesn't quite make sense. And so it's these two forces trying to mesh, you know, and how does the personality and conscious or subconscious mannerisms enter into something that's synthetic. And how does the synthetic body take a hold of a mind, which one comes on top?

Adam Rogers: Was there intentionality about what you were going to do physically, or does the physical stuff just have to emerge from where you’re, from your mindset? Like, is there a specific twitch that you can adopt? You know, I'm not trying to be reductionist about it.

Sydney Chandler: No, not at all.

Adam Rogers: But I really do want to know since you're so thoughtful about it.

Sydney Chandler: Yeah. It was really interesting actually, cause, during pre production we worked with an awesome movement coach and we initially started kind of at the base level, what would the body move like without a personality put into it, you know, what is the most balanced way to stand? The most efficient eyeline. Just different movements and then we started to play with, okay now let your personality kind of leak into that. Even before character, just let Sydney's personality leak into that, her mannerisms or an emotion, what does that feel like? And the more we started to play with it, and with Noah's blessing too, the more we started to focus not so much on the mechanics of the body, but more so the aspect of what is it to be a child, and that became much more visceral, I think, for all of us.

Adam Rogers: So, when you're doing prep, what, what kind of preparation did you actually do to get into a child mindset?

Sydney Chandler: So we worked with a child psychologist and it was great because we would start with, you know, military training in the morning and stunts, and then jump into playing ukulele and painting rocks and smashing pots. And so it was just a really well rounded day. It was really enjoyable. And when we worked with the child psychologist, it was really, really beautiful because she asked us to be as honest and authentic as possible and to not hide any emotions.

And I remember one day, we were singing some song in, in our circle. And one of the actors, I won't say who, just stood up and walked away and sat down and left. You know, we asked, you know, what are you doing? She's like, I don't wanna do it anymore. It was the most childlike acting I'd, I'd ever seen, you know? It started to help us. It opened all of us up of like, oh, that is correct. You know, as adults we hide so much because society tells us to. But with kids, if you're not enjoying painting rocks or whatever it is, you might step away. Because that's how you're genuinely feeling. And so that was a really big lesson that we all took while studying kids, is to be as honest as possible.

Adam Rogers: You spent a little bit of time with the actress who played the child version of you too right?

Sydney Chandler: Yeah, Florence.

Adam Rogers: So what were the circumstances of that? And what was that like as an exercise?

Sydney Chandler: Yeah, no it was awesome. Noah's really, really incredible with his casting. She reminded me of me when I was younger, to an extent.

Adam Rogers: That's impressive casting.

Sydney Chandler: Yeah, it was. We had some really, really awesome conversations about, you know, everything but the job, me and her. But just watching her own mannerisms a bit, you know, cause she is the first introduction to our character. The way she spoke, the way she held her head, uh, a bit to the side when she was thinking about something, I just pocketed a few of those. It was really, really wonderful working with her and working with all of the kids. Again, they remind you how incredibly open and honest and brave kids are. If they're in one conversation, that's their whole world. That's their one focus. They're so present. And then, you know, on a dime something happens behind them and that becomes their whole world. They forget everything else that happened, you know, a few minutes before. So they're insanely present. They're the best acting coaches, to be honest. So it was just, it was so lovely working with them.

Adam Rogers: You have this scene of your character's consciousness being transferred, basically, like I'm going from one body to the other.

Sydney Chandler: Mm hmm.

Adam Rogers: What do you think that Wendy is thinking as she undergoes that process and kind of wakes up in this new form?

Sydney Chandler: That's interesting because I spent a lot of time thinking about that question. And the things that popped out to me were, you know, maybe Marcy was similar to me and had really bad eyesight. When you wake up in this body, your eyes are 20-20. My curiosity, and I think for Wendy as well, would be, is my skin still warm, or is it cold? Can I feel the breeze on my face, or do I not feel that? Does my body get itchy? I don't know. And then as far as waking up, I mean, I think it would almost be like coming out of anesthesia maybe, you know, that, that space of you were in the deep, deep dark and now there's light, and you have no idea what to expect. So I, it would be kind of like being born, really, born again.

Adam Rogers: She also goes searching for her brother very quickly and that's a, a link to family and humanity on this arc that the show now sets her off on. But, also right in front of her Kirsh says, stop calling her human, is she starting to think about that? What connects her to humanity or what doesn't?

Sydney Chandler: I mean, theoretically, if I took your mind and placed it into a synthetic body, you wake up and I ask, you know, what is your name and you share your name. And I say, okay, well that's not actually you. How would you respond to that? Of course, it's me. What are you talking about? Of course it's me. I'm responding to you. And I think that's how Wendy takes it. And all of these adults think it's the thing to do, to call her inhuman or not her anymore and I don't think she takes that in. She doesn't allow herself to take that in, if you will. I think she's very good at compartmentalizing and her focus and her only focus is her brother. And I think that's one of her biggest strengths. As well as one of her weaknesses is being able to compartmentalize as well as she does.

Adam Rogers: Yeah, you have to get old before you start having the real existential-

Sydney Chandler: Exactly.

Adam Rogers: -crises of whether the meat is anything. Yes.

Sydney Chandler: Exactly. Yeah.

Adam Rogers: Um, but it might just be too that she's a kid. I mean that, like, that's the thing. We're supposed to keep remembering that it's a kid in there.

Sydney Chandler: Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Rogers: And so the responses are always going to be tilted toward that's a childlike response.

Sydney Chandler: Exactly. And again, they are so adaptable. She gets quite comfortable quite quickly because she has to. This is her situation now. And I realized she wouldn't be one to be overthinking. Um, she lets things occur as they come. And so I had to allow myself to lean into that freedom and release the pressure a bit. And what's fascinating to me is watching all of the Lost Boys. Everyone is so unique. Their idea of a child and the idea of the body and their characters, they're all insanely unique children. We are not all the same. And I think that came from Noah giving us the freedom to explore. And to not feel like we had to fit into a box. Which I'm really thankful for. I think it allows the story to be as human as possible.

Adam Rogers: That’s an interesting take from Sydney, right? That you get a more human story from these fundamentally inhuman things. Or I’m wrong. Even before there was a Silicon Valley, really, transhumanists and techno-optimists were saying that we’re all just one download away from digital immortality. Now, brains aren’t digital — they’re meat! — and even if it were possible, even if you could somehow screenshot all the electrochemical networking that goes on in someone’s head and transfer it to a different head, some AI thinkers believe that any machine intelligence, by definition, will fundamentally differ from a human one. So let’s go back to Noah Hawley on that human future.

Noah Hawley: Science fiction has this eternal question that it asks, which is, does humanity deserve to survive? And so, if the question is, does humanity deserve to survive, then my question is, well, who's more human than a child? They're concentratedly human. And so this idea that came to me was, well, maybe they tried it, but adult minds are too fixed, right? And, they're like, well, let's try it on, kids, right? And they found that, lo and behold, child minds are flexible and they can make the trip, and so when I put those things together, then this exploration of what does it mean to be human and does humanity deserve to survive? Now it's an interesting conversation. For me, the kind of critical question of the, the series is, is Wendy going to choose human or other because she has a choice, right? And you feel the pull between Tim Olyphant's synthetic character and Dame Sylvia's human character. You know, you got a synthetic daddy and a human mommy and each one is saying, really, you should be like me is the right choice. And Wendy and the others are struggling with that. Should they become more human or should they become less human.

Adam Rogers: So that's a really interesting notion here that Wendy and the Lost Boys have choice. Because at, at the end of the second Alien movie, at the end of Aliens, Sigourney Weaver, Ripley, she has to become essentially more than human. She has to put on the loader suit. She becomes a cyborg in order to fight the monster, or else she'll die and Newt will die. She doesn't have a choice there. But in this story, the more than human, you know, technologically enhanced characters, the hybrids really do have choice around who they can be and what they can become.

Noah Hawley: It's a choice that every child faces is of what adult to become right? Am I going to still act like a human and respect the human boundaries of behavior, the social mores, or am I gonna say I'm not human, so none of that applies to me. I don't have to be good, the human version of good or bad you know, I'm allowed to create my own species.

Adam Rogers: The hybrid bodies can still emote. They still feel connections to family. Wendy feels a connection to her brother.

Noah Hawley: Yeah.

Adam Rogers: Synths and the hybrids can obviously pass a Turing test. You know, they can pass for people. So, what's the gating factor for what says that's human, that's not?

Noah Hawley: That's the challenge of it. We had a lot of conversations about sweat on set, right? In Thailand, it's 115 degrees. Can they sweat? My memory of the movie is that Ian Holm sweated, so I'm okay with that. Can they cry? Yeah, I think there's certain biological functions that like, the feeling that you're breathing. If you were put into a synthetic body that didn't breathe, you would panic. Or the sense of a heartbeat, like it's not actually doing anything, but you need it in order to feel human, I think.

The question with the, Tim Olyphant, the conversation he and I had a lot of the time was, well, you know, probably you've got this programming from your founder, you can't harm a human, et cetera. Whether we're doing those specific three rules or not, you got to figure there is some programming in there as to like, you know, don't kill the boss. And maybe his ego is fragile enough that it's like, don't yell at the boss. Don't challenge the boss. And so I would talk to Tim, like, when Boy Kavalier dresses you down, maybe you've been programmed with a smile response, right? So, where someone else would be angry, you're smiling in this weird hostile kind of way. All of those elements were really choices that have to be made and that's part of the fun of world building.

Adam Rogers: Well, pals, normally I’d say that’s all we’ve got, but episode 2 of FX’s Alien: Earth dropped today, too! So go watch that, if you haven’t, and then scuttle back to Alien: Earth - The Official Podcast — that’s us! I can promise hybrids deployed for some Die Hard-ing around Prodigy Tower, Wendy hunting for aliens or brothers, whichever, and lost boys versus space monsters.

Make sure to rate, review, and follow this podcast wherever your pods are cast, cast are podded. Anyway, you get it. I'm Adam Rogers. I'll meet you back here after you’ve watched episode 2 and next week after the show.