The Real Monsters - Episode 8 | Alien: Earth - The Official Podcast

Curly (Played by Erana James): What do we do now?

Wendy (Played by Sydney Chandler): Now we rule.

Adam Rogers: Welcome to Alien Earth - The Official Podcast. I'm your host Adam Rogers. And while I'll never be a trillionaire, I like to think that my scientific curiosity is potent enough to unpack the undiscovered depths in any given episode of quality television. This week, the season finale, Episode Eight, The Real Monsters.

Of course, there are spoilers ahead. Make sure to watch the finale before you listen. Today on the podcast writer and co-executive producer Migizi Pensoneau is back. Stunt coordinator Rob Inch will talk us through the action in the final episode, and Sydney Chandler is also back to close out the evolution of her character Wendy. To wrap it all up, I'll ask series creator and writer Noah Hawley the big question posed by this episode and really the whole series: What Makes a Monster?

Adam Rogers: First, maybe you have one or two season finales, or series finales living rent free in your brain. I do. And my big takeaway from them is that it ain’t easy to stick that dismount so now writer and co-executive producer Migizi Pensoneau is back to give us all a gymnastics lesson.

Migizi Pensoneau: In a finale like this, everything has to pay off. It all has to be really, really carefully considered and thought out because you don't want to shortchange the audience on any one story that they might be invested in and you wanted to leave him with a feeling of like, man, that was a wild ride. I am curious about next season, this was great and this should hold me over for a couple years, you know?

Adam Rogers: And if you did it right, then the storylines intersect. Some payoff for one makes some other story make sense too.

Migizi Pensoneau: Yeah, a hundred percent. The lessons that the characters learn should absolutely affect and influence their relationships to everybody else around them. I mean, the main thrust of this is about identity and what makes you, you, what makes you who you are. You know, in the end it's your action, but it's also the way that you see yourself and can you live up to the potential of the way that you see yourself? Wendy goes through a million different variations on what side she's taking. Is she gonna be more on the side of the creatures or the side of the Hybrids or more on the side of humanity as represented by her brother? Is she gonna fall into the sort of tyrannical version of herself as, like sort of mentored by Boy Kavalier? I think one of my favorite aspects of Episode Eight is that there's a little hint that she has some Boy K in there and that she ends with, now we rule and you're like, what does that mean? What does that even mean? You know, the thing that Boy K says from Episode One is like, I just wanna have an interesting conversation with somebody and you finally get him to a position where somebody is right there, ready to have a conversation and, uh, and he has nothing to say.

Adam Rogers: What's the significance of this episode opening in the cemetery with Dame Sylvia? Taking care of the graves of the children. It's just a really striking moment.

Migizi Pensoneau: It's a pretty brilliant move on Noah's part to remind you of the sort of–the humanity of the Hybrids before we go into this place where at the end we're gonna see them sort of lording over their world, their domain, including that cemetery. Oddly enough, Nibs is the only one that can really acknowledge in a real way, like, oh, I don't think this is me. Whatever that means for her, her version of what's inside of her does not line up with this body that's lying in the ground. And that's a pretty interesting and profound moment, I think before they get hurried off to the next scene. It's a really nice moment.

Adam Rogers: Is Dame Sylvia still a mother at that point for them, or have they lost? Do they not think that about her? Does she still feel that way about them?

Migizi Pensoneau: I mean, she's the only mother that they have anymore at this point anyway right now. And so it–she's the one that's their only guiding light in this new world and this new reality that they've had. I mean, they're pretty messed up parental figures. It's Kirsch and Dame and Atom Eins comes into discipline once and you have, Boy K. None of these people are people that you would want as your guide for morality. Um, the one exception of course being Arthur and now he's doubly creatured.

Adam Rogers: Well, it is, it's remarkable because the only one of them who ever says that he loves them is the one who gets face hugged and chest bursted for his trouble.

Migizi Pensoneau: Yeah, for all of it. The one who actually cares. It was sort of the most tragic thing that we can put into Arthur's last moments is to give Slightly and Smee this moment of, there's an adult here who actually is what he's supposed to be. Sort of a surrogate parent and somebody who is very open about the fact that he loves these kids.

And my favorite thing that happened on set was when they take each other's hands, which was not necessarily scripted. And it was one of those moments that was like, oh, this is such a little kid thing to do as you have this sort of like father figure, you're like, oh, thank God I'm safe kind of moment. And they're holding hands, but of course they end up being the ones who hold him up as he’s dying from this Chestburtser. It was, uh, yeah, it was god awful. It was wonderful.

Adam Rogers: I can only think of two other moments of physical contact between Hybrids and their parent figures. One of them is violent, is Nibs and Dame, and then there's hugs between Hermit and, and Wendy and Marcy.

Migizi Pensoneau: Yeah. I mean–

Adam Rogers: but it's really the only one of the only gentle–

Migizi Pensoneau: Oh, yeah.

Adam Rogers: –of parental physical, you know, expression.

Migizi Pensoneau: Yeah, for sure. There's always this weird distance between the Hybrids and the humans. One of the times we first see them all together in a room outside of when, you know, that wonderful sequence where they're all, become Hybrids is them in the big hallway where they are, you know, one of 'em standing on another while they're doing pushups or doing like, you know, and they're like, you know, they're all, I mean, it's a very, they're very physical and very much siblings together. But when it comes to anybody else having contact with them, there's always something standoffish or aloof about it. They're just separate in a weird way, for sure. And I think it's one of the reasons why I liked that handholding moment so much is it's so tender and it's so just real, like, parent to child and Jonathan and Adarsh and David played it beautifully through the whole thing. They brought it every single time.

Adam Rogers: All the Hybrids start out confined in a cell in the beginning. By the end, it's all the adults, the remaining adults. That parallelism intentional? That that dynamic, is there's a little of the Peter Pan thing in there too, right? Of the children are now like the, running as rampant as they do in the story with the adults outta the picture.

Migizi Pensoneau: Oh yeah, they're in full rumpus mode running around the island, collecting people. That's insane. The wonderful realization that Wendy has is not just a sort of like profound inner awakening of her own power, but it's like, oh, her actual physical control over this island and it's telling. The way that gets used is to do what they did to them, to throw them back in a cell. I think it's really telling that it does go back and forth. That they haven't learned necessarily from the mistakes of their elders. It's just a perpetuation of the same thing. So I think it's an interesting place to leave everybody so I think that there's more than a little pride, uh, Boy Kavalier's laugh at the end. There's a, a in a Season Two, there's a lot to be explored in that laugh.

Adam Rogers: But among them, they resolved their differences. Like they had a lot of internesting jealousies and petty human concerns with each other that now they kind of don't anymore. You know, now they're all on the same evil robot team.

Migizi Pensoneau: Yeah, I mean there's still a lot of hesitance in the looks between Slightly and Smee. They've done a lot of bad things together and I don't think Smee has ever really fully on board there. And is still a little afraid of what his friend has become. And although they are lined up in their goal in the immediate, they are very different characters. And I think, heading into a Season Two, whatever they might be thinking “now we rule” means, I doubt that any one of 'em is on the same page together.

Adam Rogers: So also in this episode, there’s an allusion to the lung–Hermit’s lung that got taken out of him earlier in the show. And it becomes the incubator, the womb, for the Chestburster that Wendy ends up connecting with. The Xenomorph that she can actually talk to. And Boy K says to Hermit, “you'll never guess what we did with the old one.” He’s joking about the old lung. So how did you all come up with that? Because it’s twisted but it’s also really cool.

Migizi Pensoneau: I will never forget. This is one of those moments, it was late night Bangkok time, I think. One of those sort of middle of the night writing sessions and we're talking about where that Xeno in particular is gonna come from. And we're talking about Episode, you know, Three or Four here, and we’re like, well now we're in this experimental stage where the face huggers are sort of controlled by Prodigy. Are they just gonna throw somebody into that egg crate? I don't think that sounds devious enough. Like how would they do–what's the darkest sort of version of this? It seriously came from a smile that I've now seen on Noah’s face several times where he gets this sort of like, I don't even know what to call it. It's not evil, but it is pleased at some dark stuff. And, uh, and him saying, and he's like, you know, we have that lung. And I was like, oh. And I, you know, I came back and I was like, that's horrid! And he laughs and I laughed and we, you know, went off. And we knew that the manipulation of Wendy trying so desperately to connect to her brother, to have this metaphysical sort of twisted and warped piece of her brother that imprints onto her and begins to have a relationship with her, that was always in the back of Noah's mind. And that sort of, perversion of, connection was always right there. We always knew that was always gonna be a part of, you know, in weird ways, DNA wise or within the parameters of the show and when the parameters are Alien, that's partially, that's her brother. It's an interesting thing to think about for sure and explore.

Adam Rogers: I want to talk about Arthur at the end again 'cause he has this tragic thing and sort of literally and metaphorically heartbreaking. But then you get the after credits–

Migizi Pensoneau: Yeah.

Adam Rogers: –of the, the team up no one asked for. So presumably if there's a season two there is, we get, we get Eye Midge zombie David? Is that the, the return he gets to do that? Is that the uh, maybe.

Migizi Pensoneau: Yeah, it’s gonna be in a human body now. Can it talk? And if it does, what does it even have to say? Is there anything, look, what does it want? I have, I have just as many questions as anybody else watching right now. But here's what I do know is that David is a phenomenal human being and actor. And the more we get to see him, even if it's just, lumbering around going “brains,” I'm, I’m a happy guy.

Adam Rogers: It’s a tantalizing prospect. In a nominal Season Two of Alien: Earth, we might get some zombie fights to go along with the existing slate. The human Eye Midge fights, the Hybrid robot fights, the Hybrid Xenomorph fights, anyway. Getting all of that gladiatorial combat to work takes a lot of behind the scenes effort. So what’s it take? Here’s stunt coordinator Rob Inch to talk about everything from stunt doubles to our beloved Xenomorph.

Rob Inch: Listen, every single episode we did when the Xenomorph came onto the set for the first time and a member of cast, a new member of cast and they'd never seen it, let me tell you, they were all freaked out. Anybody that saw it, I still got freaked out every time I saw it.

Adam Rogers: I love that.

Rob Inch: Noah had cast, um, Cam who was, who plays the Xenomorph, probably a couple of months before I came on board. You know, he is a stunt man in his own right. And he's a talented stuntman as well. Like we used him, funnily enough, playing one of the Yutani soldiers, there's a little nugget of information–

Adam Rogers: Oh, wow.

Rob Inch: –for you. Yeah. It's very difficult doing stunts in general when we're doing dangerous things. But then when you add the complexity of his costume, there's a lot to figure out, you know. Vision for one thing, making sure he is not overheating 'cause it's super, super hot suit. And then our goal was always to make it feel real. Still try to keep us in line with how it moved before and what we wanted it to look like.

Adam Rogers: That's really cool to try to figure out. Gimme a specific there like, what's a piece of direction that you give somebody in the suit to say, okay, you did it this one way, do it this other way to make it more Xenomorphic.

Rob Inch: It's very subtle nuances. And everybody saw different things in it all the time. So I would be looking at it from a physical, more kind of stunty, athletic way, they were looking at it a more of a sort of balletic kind of feel to it. So I actually think there became a good balance to it. Like, if you see him jumping or moving fast, that was us moving him on a wire. You know, we were always trying to figure out how we move it faster, how we can slam it around a corner so that it, you, you, you see a little bit, but you don't see a lot. But ultimately a lot of that came from like having Cam, having the head, having the suit, and sort of just playing around and figuring what, what it could do.

Adam Rogers: On the other side of the Xenomorph are the rest of the characters. How much of what they’ve doing, how much of the action are the actors themselves, how much is stunt doubles? What's your approach there?

Rob Inch: When you look at all the episodes, actually, there would always be 50% of them doing it and 50% stunt person doing it. That's the truth. You know, there's no point in us doing this kinda crazy stairwell sequence where we first discover the alien and it's chasing Alex and that, and we can't really put Alex in that situation. We really used him, you know.

Adam Rogers: Wow.

Rob Inch: Same with Sydney. Those moments, they were really embedded in them.

Adam Rogers: They've gotta be doing that, but also expressing like, whatever, terror being chased by an alien, or panic at having to rescue somebody or something like, like, they've gotta do that while they're acting.

Rob Inch: That's the tricky bit ultimately. They go, I don't fight as good as the stunt double, but act like you do and we're gonna believe it because they're all great actors. So if they buy into that moment themselves, it, it becomes more real. For sure it does. You can see it in them.

We had prepped with them for. The best part of two months. I have my own kind of workshop stage set out in Bangkok. How I go about it is I kind of strip the script back. I'll build, like cardboard box versions of the sets that we're gonna work on. And then we would go in there and we'd rehearse it in there. We would really strip it back and get them involved early.

A lot of those sequences, like the stairwell and things like that had a huge amount of rigging going on in there. So we would be going in there and pre-rigging and then we would then aim to have the actors the week or two weeks before, depending on the, their schedules, and try and get them on there so they already know the environment.

Adam Rogers: Rigging, you're talking about like a harness, like the wire that's keeping them

Rob Inch: Yeah. The wire that's keeping them safe or whatever, you know. Or like the stairwell, which was set in this kind of, broken down block of flats as it were. It's a massive set. It's quite scary. When you're sort of stand in that void, get them used to that sort of moment. So when they first walk onto that set, they’re not like oh, this is spooky.

But it, again, it goes back to, like I said, it helps them like if we're standing over a great big void and they're, in this big scene where they just slipped on the edge or whatever, and there's a real edge there and there's a real element of, yes, they're on a wire, but there's an element of danger, I think that gives them the realism in that acting moment.

Adam Rogers: There are a couple of sequences early in the show that I just really love. There’s the stairwell sequence, the fancy-dress Louie the XIV party that goes awry in Episode Two, and then there’s the kind of fight in the freezer, shipping container in Episode Three. Can you just talk about making each of those happen?

Rob Inch: All of those things were done practically. The Lordship’s set, there was a glass balcony. We jumped it off, we put him out and smashed on the table as a big fight sequence. It was all there. And then we go out into the freezer container. And for that flipping moment we really flipped a container. We padded a container in there. We put some stunt performers in there and we ratcheted it over. And then we then put the actors in there, and we were doing a different version with them, but with a 360 camera move. So they really kinda, they really felt it all. And then I guess towards the end where we changed the environment and we're out outside in the jungle, seeing the alien in that sort of, natural habitat felt like bizarre to me 'cause it was right, we've never seen it like that.

Adam Rogers: There's a fight in the last episode between Kirsch and Morrow, those characters have animosity for the whole, as soon as they meet each other, you know. Like if it was a Western, you'd know that they were destined for a shootout by the end of the movie. Both superpowered in their own, in different ways. One of them is a synth, one of them is a cyborg and has the robot arm. So I want to know what was the planning like? How are you integrating the abilities of these two characters with the abilities of the human actors? How'd you get it to be the fight that everybody wants to see finally happens?

Rob Inch: Just for clarity, that wasn't originally in the script and I–

Adam Rogers: Really?

Rob Inch: –I get this message from Corey, our first AD and it was like, uh, hey, Noah's got something coming down the pipe for you, and I'm, wh–Then all of a sudden he was like, how about this one-on-one fight. I'm always keen on a one-on-one fight, especially on a sort of like closing out a big series like that. One thing I love in fights is using the environment. So we were using that it was set in the lab, so we were using the tray, we used the floors, we used the table, the mirrors, the glass. And again the idea of have we ever seen this kind of synth cyborg moment? It was finding what was gonna be their super strengths. When he gets slammed on the table it bows with him, it breaks his back. In any other fight that would be, the fight would be over, but he still managed just to cr–crawl over, pull his leg out, and it still, you know, it never felt like it was ever gonna end until somebody put the bullet in, you know?

Adam Rogers: And you said this fight wasn't even in the script originally so what was that like for Timothy and Babou, the actors to do it?

Rob Inch: I think when they got told they were doing a fight, they were like, yeah, let's get it on. You know, we were at the end of our long stint in Thailand and we were trying to find rehearsal time for the actors. But they were fully dialed in. You really feel the cyborg synth performance in it. And that's from the actors for sure. 100%.

Adam Rogers: So that fight, as Rob says, had the actors fully dialed in. And it does seem like a sort of culmination for those characters. But this episode, that’s–that’s sort of going around. By the end, The Lost Boys have finally embraced who they are, mechanical bodies and all. So let’s go back to Sydney Chandler, Wendy, to take us through that arc from human to Hybrid to alien whisperer.

Sydney Chandler: The whole arc starts with a kid who's dying and is given this opportunity of a lifetime to survive and live forever and to be special. And so she starts with an incredible amount of hope and innocence. And she gets to live and these people want to offer her an incredible opportunity and she's insanely excited to do so. And as we move forward, the cracks begin to show, and trust becomes a very prominent thing. That trust is broken. And with that, the aliens become a massive character for her because I think on a subconscious and a bit on a conscious level, she relates to them. They are creatures that were just trying to survive. And were taken to a completely new, alien space and experimented on. And that's her. She's become an experiment and does not believe she should be, just as she doesn't believe the aliens should be. And they see something in her, and she sees something in them.

So when we get to the end, I think one of the more beautiful things is, in a show, you typically see a character, you know, the protagonist rise up to the top and grasp onto her humanity and here we go. And, that's not really the case. She starts as a nice warm fire and then she kind of ends on ice. She's not trying to please anyone. She's not lying to anyone. And she has an insane amount of power in her stillness and in her acceptance of this body. Acceptance that she, as Marcy, Marcy's dead. Marcy is bones in the ground. Who are we now?

Adam Rogers: Right. And so she's, she's literally alienated, like she–

Sydney Chandler: Yeah, she's, yeah, and she's one of a kind. Even against the Lost Boys, she is the first, she has different mechanics to be able to hear and communicate on a different level. So that's, that's fascinating to me, to be able to play of like, what does it feel like when the being you relate to the most is literally an alien?

Adam Rogers: At the beginning of the episode, she describes seeing the graveyard to the other Lost Boys, seeing where their human bodies are

Sydney Chandler: Yeah.

Adam Rogers: And they talk about becoming ghosts and way back at the beginning of all this, you were talking about the mind-body duality that Wendy was grappling with right after her transition into the new body. The idea of that ghost, of the soul being separate from the flesh is this classic problem in the theory of mind, right? It's like, where does it manifest? Or are we just meat machines?

Sydney Chandler: Yeah. I think for Wendy, it's like when she woke up the body and the mind are these two magnets that you can press together, but you can't get them to fully touch and there's that void in between and she's trying to figure out how to fill that void, that space. And what I think she comes to realize is that space, that dissonance, is Marcy. And when she sees the graveyard, I think that is a moment where it clicks for her, Marcy's dead. And that's when the magnets, if you will, come together. It all becomes one and it is a new thing and it is an old thing and it's just her. She accepts it. It's like accepting your truth, accepting your identity, and she's not going to let anyone else tell her what or who she is. That was a massive shift for her.

Adam Rogers: You're describing a maturation process, right? But this is like a new thing maturing. This is the machine, this is the Hybrid maturing into something.

Sydney Chandler: Yeah. It's something Noah and I talked about because this character goes from human, to more machine-like towards the end. And how long can that last? Your body's in the ground and you're looking at it. That's complicated. If we get to move forward, it will be exploring where that humanity is and how that humanity starts to leak out again.

Adam Rogers: As an acting matter, your physicality changes in the episode.

Sydney Chandler: Mm hmm.

Adam Rogers: And I think it's true of all the actors playing the Lost Boys. The moment of decision of like, no, now we're going to go round up the adults, everybody gets like a warrior posture.

Sydney Chandler: Yeah.

Adam Rogers: Was there a change in what the physicality was supposed to look like for somebody watching.

Sydney Chandler: Well, that's that's really interesting actually because that was never a conversation between any of us. Noah really gave us the freedom, he said, focus on the character and what a child would react to trauma, but watching it, I also noticed that and I think it was this…it almost looks like everyone settled into the power of their body.

It was like they realized the power of their vessel. And for Wendy especially, there was this power of stillness. And she can hold eye contact. She could hold eye contact forever. She could stand perfectly still forever. And stand her ground in that way. And so there was a really cool power in that. And I saw everyone with the childlike mannerisms of, you know, the hunched shoulders or, being closed off that kind of dissipated once they realized, you know, you think of ghosts and you never think the ghost is scared, the person's scared. And so when you realize, okay, I'm the ghost, I get to go haunt, your fear goes away. Yes. It's kind of a beautiful and terrifying shift of perspective 'cause these kids are quite powerful now.

Adam Rogers: At almost the last moment of the show, we get more resolution of the Peter Pan theme that's present throughout the episodes. Curly asks to be called Jane, which Wendy has explained is the name of Wendy's daughter that Peter Pan kidnaps in the story. And so there's all this resonance with these themes of motherhood and family that are famously really strong in the Alien movies too. How does that all come together at the end of Episode Eight?

Sydney Chandler: Well it makes me think back to the original films, were so beautiful because Sigourney is able to create the strongest character in film, in my opinion. Um, and gives strength to the feeling of motherhood and what that means. And it's the nurture and care for others. It's that community, that selflessness to take care of others, to check in with others, to be able to read, and be able to put yourself in danger for them.

Wendy is able to feel for all of these other kids and to see their situations and she doesn't block that out. And so, I think that is the strength, and that is the nurturing, is to be able to share a sense of self-empowerment. And that feels safe. And they're doing it together. So, Wendy's not alone anymore. Yeah. She's connected into that group again and that feels really good.

Adam Rogers: And we have to talk about this, this moment. Wendy finally gives Boy K that one interesting conversation he's been wanting this whole time. Wendy has the killer line, “Now we rule” and then we get this sort of mad scientist cackle from Boy K. And we kind of go off on this note that feels like actually maybe this power and autonomy might not be so great or self-empowering, I guess for the Hybrids after all. What do you make of that moment?

Sydney Chandler: With Wendy, I think one of her strongest suits is her black and white thinking, and her ability to follow her gut. And I also think that when we get to the end, that could be potentially a massive weakness or danger. Take for example her brother. He's fallen into the gray area because he shot one of her own, but she loves him. And so when Boy K laughs, it almost feels to me like he's intrigued by how dangerous this scenario can now be. And you give power to an immortal child with an alien, I mean, who knows what can happen.

Adam Rogers: Boy Kay may be reveling in the chaos of this moment, enjoying watching the world burn, but does that make him a monster? Does what the Lost Boys have done make them monsters? Does being a huge insectoid space alien that can bite a person’s head off make someone a monster? Actually, that probably does make you a monster, but to finish out the season of Alien: Earth, Noah Hawley is back to try to answer that question. What makes a monster, really? Among other big questions, of course.

Noah Hawley: For me, it goes back to that Sigourney's line in the second film where she says, “I don't know which species is worse, at least they don't fuck each other over for a percentage.” I think that, in order to really create the deepest horror possible in this show, you have to combine several types of horror. There's the literal don't be eaten horror. There's the sort of primordial fear of parasites. There's the body horror, right? And then I think there's the moral horror, there's the things that we do to each other.

I mean, the idea that Morrow would present Slightly with this choice, right? You must expose a human being to a face hugger, and then when the face hugger falls off, you must walk them out of the facility and bring them to me. But you choose who the person is. It's something that would be awful were it asked of an adult, but to ask it of a child is really an abomination, right?

So that level of horror that settles into the audience on a human level. It's not just, oh, that's gross or wait, you mean it goes in your eye? It's visceral and repulsive on a human level. And I think it's the combination of those forms of horror that build to that eighth hour and the Lord of the Flies, the children's revolution, the surge of feeling that comes when the prisoner escapes, when the tables are turned. And, and if the driving question of the season was, is Wendy gonna choose human or other? I think we've had a few episodes in which the audience is going, I think other's probably the right way to go. You know, as she says to Dame Sylvia, what if, if you’re what's wrong? You know, what if humans are, what's wrong with this scenario? But then what's the alternative? That's what the show has to figure out.

Adam Rogers: But Wendy has an option here that nobody in an Alien movie has had, nobody in this situation has had, which is she can communicate with them.

Noah Hawley: Right.

Adam Rogers: She's like, become a key that any of these people are gonna want. She can actually deploy Xenomorphs at her enemies.

Noah Hawley: Well, and as her brother says, you know, we're food to them. And she says, no, you’re food. She's not food. I mean, they're food to the flies, but they're not food to these creatures. And they have a certain amount of security on that level is that they're not part of the food chain anymore.

The Hybrids or the Synths. And yeah, she has some level of control over these creatures. I think, you know, the goal of the series is, is to explore that idea of do you ever really have control of the shark? You know, or are you just fooling yourself? the way that the scientists are fooling themselves, that they can control this situation. But, for the moment, she has an ally you know, that allows us to explore another aspect of, of Alien that, you know, hasn't really been explored in, in the films. We were introduced to, to this Alien idea as a single creature and then in the Cameron movie, we were introduced to the idea that maybe they're actually more of a hive, you know, or a colony, who has a queen. And, and that there is, they have some ability to communicate. You know, I decided to make it auditory because you know, it's really hard to communicate through smell on the television.

Adam Rogers: Very early on, Dame Sylvia poses the thought that if we don't improve human life alongside immortality, all we've done, she says, is create immortal consumers. At the end of Episode Eight, what do you think the show has to say about that idea, the idea of immortality in general?

Noah Hawley: What you have to think about is for all of human history, death is the worst thing that can happen to us. But when you're talking about experiments that might give us immortality, then what's the worst thing that could happen to us, right? And if the worst thing that could happen to us is each other, or the, the things that we've done, the tortured decisions. I mean Slightly, if Slightly, he's gonna live forever now with this knowledge that he killed the one person there who cared about them, that's worse than death, I think for him, because death would be, would be welcome.

Adam Rogers: By Episode Eight, it is very clear that the poor kids are not growing up, okay. They've all essentially made a decision to embrace the, whatever the powers are that these new bodies have. They all admit by the end that they're not kids anymore and that they're in charge, that they get to be ghosts, right? They're literally ghosts in machines.

Noah Hawley: Yeah. But the danger, of course, is that they end up like Boy Kavalier, who he tells us killed his own father and replaced him with a father he could control. That's an awful story to them. But there are similarities in terms of we are being mistreated by a figure of authority and we're rebelling against that figure and, and in some cases that's gonna end in death for people. They don't see it, they don't see the parallels, right. But I see it as the storyteller.

Adam Rogers: Do any of the adults or robots who were in loco parentis for these Hybrids, do they remain their parents by the end? Do they remain parents for them even after horrible things happen, even after, you know, Kirsch gets broken and Boy K gets put in the jail, are they still parents?

Noah Hawley: You tell me, are, are the things that your parents did to you still with you to this day? I don't think we escape our parents very easily and, you know, we're shaped by them for better and worse. So I think those figures of authority, it's very hard to shake that. You know, I think at this moment they they have the sort of upper hand. But you know, what I like about Sam’s performance as Boy Kavalier in that final scene is that, you know, when she says, “Now we rule” and he starts laughing because, you think he's lost, but really he's won. Because what he's really invented is a new species.

And he is a genius, you know. He's responsible for this moment. And those characters always interest me. The ones who you cannot count them out because he is gonna find a way to regain the upper hand if he can.

Adam Rogers: Plus we find out that if anybody's okay, at least the Eye Midge is okay.

Noah Hawley: Well, we have not seen the last of that. And, what excites me is, the fact that you have a show called Alien: Earth, and you still can't tell which species is going to dominate at the end of the first season. You go into it thinking of course, it's a show about Xenomorphs taking over the earth, but that's not necessarily the hierarchy that's going to emerge. And, I wouldn't count out, even though we haven't seen as much of these other creatures, I, I think they all, either in concert or or singularly have the potential to ruin our lives.

Adam Rogers: I would like to say about the fact that it ends on something of a cliffhanger, I guess all I can think to say is, no, bro, what are you doing to people?

Noah Hawley: Well, I'm trying to get a second season. I mean, if I wrapped it up too cleanly, you know, it's, it's pretty easy to say, well that was great miniseries. And, you know, at a certain point, Season One is the runway that you're using to launch the show. And, you know, I had to have faith that FX and Disney are, are invested in this franchise and, and that we will come back and finish the story for people over multiple seasons.

Adam Rogers: That's all for this season of Alien: Earth - The Official Podcast. Thanks for coming on the trip with us. I had a blast. I hope you did too. Be sure to rate, review and follow Alien: Earth - The Official Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Adam Rogers. Thank you for joining us.