House of R - ‘Alien: Earth’ Episode 6 Deep Dive

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

Jo and Rob dive deep into the sixth episode of ‘Alien: Earth’! They discuss some sad character deaths, the implications of resetting Nibs, what is actually canon in the ‘Alien’ universe, and more! (00:00) Intro (05:49) Opening Snapshot (17:45) Mailbag (33:39) The Peter Pan Question (39:00) Hermit and Kirsch Watching Wendy With the Alien (43:40) Resetting Nibs (53:25) Hermit and Wendy (01:01:52) Arbitration (01:13:56) Morrow and Kirsch in the Elevator (01:24:54) Slightly Gets an Upgrade in His Zoom Background (01:30:04) Hermit Drawing a Map and on Patrol (01:34:31) Fully Grown Alien (01:36:46) Kirsch Tells Isaac/Tootles to Take Care of the Critters (01:51:21) Wendy Confronts Dame about Nibs (02:00:55) Arthur and Slightly at the Lab Hosts: Joanna Robinson and Rob Mahoney Producers: Carlos Chiriboga and John Richter Social: Jomi Adeniran Additional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopowell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to by Paramount Plus. Beth and Rip are back in a new series, Dutton Ranch. Kelly Riley and Colehouser returned, and this time they're taking on Texas. As Beth and Rip build a future together, peace will have to wait as they face corruption, danger, and a ruthless rival ranch, willing to protect its secrets at all costs. Legacy is a beautiful thing, but only if it survives. Dutton Ranch starring Colehouser, Kelly Riley,

Annette Benning and Ed Harris, now streaming on Paramount Plus. For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Tramphia offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tramphia is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self-inject trumphia, proper training is required. Tramphia is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis.

Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them, and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Tramphia today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit Trimfairadio.com. Welcome back to House of R. I'm Joanna Robinson and no. This is not an episode of the Prestige TV podcast. This is an episode of House of R.

But joining me today, as he has with every alien episode that we've covered on this feed. It is Rob Mahoney. Hey, Rob, how are you doing? Joe, I'm doing fine. But I'm looking at my monitor. Yeah. Have you gotten a signal for the tracker or the AV feed on Mal today? Oh, listen.

Last I saw there was an eyeball with a bunch of tentacles headed her way, and I'm sure she's fine. No, Mallory, Mallory has a bit of a migraine today, so we are doing our best of soldier on without her. We will miss her dearly. She wanted to give her fond regards to Tootles via me.

But the good news is, Rob and I know how to talk about television together. So that is what we're here. We've done it a couple times. We've done it a few times. So that's what we're here to do today. We're here to talk about episode six of Alien Earth. Really excited to talk to you about this, Rob. I have a lot of thoughts and opinions and takes.

the hottest of takes ready and available for you here today. Programming reminders, before we get into that, just to let folks know that over on the aforementioned prestige TV feed, Rob and I have started covering week-to-week the HBO Sunday series Task with Bill Simmons. So it's a great show. Really, really good show. Completely. And, of course, by that, I mean our podcast.

And then the TV show is also pretty good. A question for you, Joe. If in the finale of task, Mark Ruffalo goes to Wawa and Mayor from Mayor of East Town shows up, is it the level of cinematic universe that would then qualify it to be on House of Art? I think so. Does it need a genre component? It depends who scores the like,

dun, dun, da, da, like sound of them meeting, you know what I mean? That would be tremendous. I would love that. We deserve that. All right, so we're doing that. Also, Rob and I are, we've got a couple more weeks to go on the hooked miniseries that we're doing in the prestige feed. This week for genre fans, Rob got to watch Lost for the first time, the first two episodes of Lost. I had the privilege.

The honor. Truly. We'll be talking about what it takes to get hooked on the TV show Lost over on the prestige feed. Let me just say, Joe, you know, Mal has shared in this experience with me lately. High marks all around for watching one of Joanna Robinson's favorite shows and then getting to talk to Joe about said show. Great experience. Would recommend it for anyone out there.

I had a great week last week because I got to show you lost and I got to show Mallory, Buffy Vampire Slayer, and what could be better? So yeah, if you haven't checked that out already last week, Mal and I covered Buffy Vampire Slayer Season 1 somehow in a single podcast episode. So that is ready and waiting for you. I'm sorry to keep interrupting you. Can I pick one knit regarding the Buffy Pot? I would be surprised if you didn't, Rob.

I just think the bronze took some strays. Okay. Who are you to tear down a successful small business? You know what? Who cares if they cater to everybody? Clearly they have their demographic. And yes, it includes teenagers. And yes, it includes full-ass adults who are all hanging in the same spaces in slightly creepy ways.

But they're bringing that money in. Yeah. Okay. So Rob is on record as being in favor of this institution that is just infested with vampires and has it, speaking of infestations, has this an occasional extermination party. Look, that is a citywide problem. Talk to the mayor. Talk to the principal of the school.

I will. Look, there are authority figures that are not as head of bronze PR. This is not my problem, you know? It is too bad. We never met, like, wouldn't it have been great if one of the seasons big bads was, like, the manager of the bronze or the owner of the bronze. The guy booking talent for the performances. All right.

So that is happening. Then also later this week, speaking of prestige in general, Mallory and I are wrapping up hot Nolan summer with my favorite Christopher Nolan film, The Prestige. We'll be talking about that incredible, incredible cinematic classic. Mallory will be back to chat about that.

And then over on the Ring Reverse, the Midnight Boys, Pugh, are talking about Alien Earth and also Peacemaker. So that is what is happening here and elsewhere. You can follow us on the social media platform of your choice.

There's a lot of options who are we to tell you which one to choose. You make your own decisions and we will be there for you. Wow. You can subscribe to the pot. You can watch us on YouTube.

You can watch us in the Spotify app. I got to say, the Spotify app comment section popping off? Quite a pleasant and somewhat busy place to be.

Well, now you've cursed it. I have. Don't go there if you suck. But for the most part, just really lovely people having nice things to say over on Spotify comments. And that is, and Hobbits and Dragons at gmail.com, of course. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns. We do have a couple emails to address.

We haven't been up on top of the emails for this show, but we've got a couple to check in with today. And then, last but not least, spoiler warning, alien earth up through episode six. That's what we're talking about today. Yep. Plus all the other alien stuff. plus all the other alien stuff. At least, you know, we'll get into what that means exactly, I think, a little bit. But the mainline alien entities may be touched upon, maybe brushed upon.

The mainline alien entities may be touched on or brushed upon. That is your parental guidance warning for this episode. Truly. Let's go now to our opening snapshot. All right, this episode, The Fly, not to be confused with the Breaking Bad episode, not to be confused with the Kronenberg film, not to be confused with the Nick Drake song. But surely in reference to the things that dissolved Tootles.

Rob Mahoney, what did you think of episode six? I liked it. I liked this episode for the reason, many of the reasons I enjoyed this show overall. Creepy crawlies, potential for body horror, a lot of humans being very dumb in alien spaces, which is the hallmark of this franchise. I will say the one caveat to that,

I find that this season and this show in general has thrived, the more moro is involved and has more to do. And this might have been the least he's had to do basically all seasons so far. Right. He did get a banger scene and an elevator. We love an elevator scene,

a very madman moment, if you will. Who was telling who that's what the money is for? I think it's Kirsch. I think that's how Kirsch feels. I think maybe that's how they both feel. I did not dislike this episode necessarily. I just have so many questions about so many choices that so many people and synths and hybrids and cyborgs made inside of this episode. My main critique is it's picking up on something that you and Mal talked about in the couple episodes before I joined.

And the way in which the show is skipping some of the important human connections and the way in which that then impairs for me the way certain things land. So we should say, again, spoilers to our episode 6 of Alien Earth. Not only do we lose our guy Tootles, aka Isaac. Kit Young, you deserve better. I'm sorry, Shadow and Bo got canceled and I'm sorry. You were the first last way to go. Well, he was named Tootles.

What are you going to do? Bye-bye. But our guy David Rizzol, who plays Arthur, who we loved on Fargo, got hit in the face with a face hugger. And even though all of us agreed last week that Arthur seemed like a likely candidate to get his face hugged. Maybe first in line and I guess second in line. I feel like that would have hit harder for me if they hadn't weirdly in this episode yada yada yadaed over the dissolution of his marriage. question mark? Seriously. Really bizarre choices. I have to imagine there was a scene or two that was cut.

There had to be. But the Dame Sylvia, Arthur Sylvia, scientific disagreement that leads to him getting fired and exiled from the island, and they're not even being a single conversation between the two of them about that is absolutely right about this. Absolutely confounding to me. And the fact that we don't, we have, you know, Arthur is visibly distressed as he's packing when Hermit comes to talk to him. He's looking lovingly at their vacation photos, which I hope

those actors had a fun time posing for and all this sort of stuff like that. But like, so he's distressed and sort of talking about her a little bit. But Dame Sylvia herself is not really sort of engaging in that as

we see her continue do what she does to Nibs and then get confronted by Wendy's Marcy and like, wouldn't all of that, the face hugging and Sylvia and Nibs and Sylvia and, I mean, Dame, I guess, Dame and Nives, Dame and Wendy slash Marcy hit harder if we really felt their connection in the first place beyond their dinner plans last, like last time. And did they ever make the dumplings? I mean, do we know? This is the question.

Is she making dumplings for one now? Like, I have a lot of questions about that. That's a lot of labor for one, you know? We love these. Yeah, I mean, I got to say, Dame Sylvia, with love and respect, I really think she's buying the pre-made rappers. I don't think she's making that dough from scratch. She's buying frozen dumplings.

At this point, let's just start skipping sticks. Let's optimize. Got it. We love those actors. David Rizzol is incredible. S.E. Davis, you know, if you love the Babadook, if you love Game of Thrones, whatever it is. Like, incredible performers.

They could have torn up a scene between a married, couple who disagree or one who has compromised their morals or whatever the case may be. And we just don't get it. And so then without that, then him getting hit in the face of the facehugger, I was just like, I want to feel this more, but I don't feel like I've gotten inside of his heart and his mind enough to be devastated by his death, you know? You're completely right. I think omitting that scene, and I'm with you, that I feel like they must have shot something and must have cut it for time because this is already quite a long episode. Yeah.

Not having it is inexcusable ending their relationship to the extent we were supposed to be invested in it at all on her upending his job. I think somewhat accidentally. I don't think she anticipated he would get fired, but Moore said, he won't do it, but I will. But she doesn't like protest very much. Not at all. Who is more fussed, Dame Sylvia, over the dissolution of her marriage, getting her husband fired, and crossing every ever. ethical line that she probably thought she had in this profession, or Kersh sitting on the drop ship at the end watching bit by bit, the crew and the hybrids get picked off by these aliens.

I have a lot of Kersh questions. But that feels like the Kersh questions I have feel more like the plot wants me to have those questions. Right. What is this guy actually after? What is he invested in? I mean, who knows? And I like not knowing.

I've been sort of digging into, I hadn't been listening to the official Alien on Earth podcast, but I went back and listened to a bunch of, you know, they're doing incredible work over there of cramming like five interviews per 30 minute episodes couldn't be us here on House of Our really incredible stuff. But like, so there's just like great little interviews with like our, you know, I listened to Samuel Blinken, talk about, um, boy Cavalier. I listened to Baba Sise, talk about Morrow. And, um, a lot of both are wonder, winderkinned, like, tech trillionaire and our cyborg and a number of other characters are talking about cutting off your. humanity. So even if you're a human character or even if you're a human character with a, with a

cyborg arm, packing your humanity away and putting it in a box. And what does it mean to be human? And I think that's a question that the alien franchise always wants to ask. And it's certainly a question that when you're putting little kid brains in synthetic bodies, you want to ask, like, what makes a human? If you're going to do that, which is super interesting, Noah Hawley, you have to have human characters whose rank humanity is really working. And you and Mal talked about sort of the Hermit Wendy or Hermit Marcy scenes and how you kind of wanted more of that connection, feeling Hermit's humanity inside of all of that. And I feel the same as imperative for something like Arthur and Sylvia, where I just like, you're so few human characters. I really need to have their humanity oozing out of every pore at all times.

For sure. And I mean, that's what makes more so compelling is he is, like, you know, at his core human, even though he has robotic parts. It's also I thought what made, if we're talking about kind of the two deaths of a kind that we get in this episode, we'll see what happens with Isaac. I don't know if you can just, like, boot him up in a new body. Is that like, who knows what the potential for all that is? His death, in a lot of ways, felt even more human than Arthur's death did.

because it was born of the ambition, like the wanting of the credit, the wanting of the responsibility. To be the most special boy. Exactly. I am being the one asked to the point that I'm going to tell Kirsch that Curley is not here. Curly is going to ask me if she can come. I'm going to tell her not to come. All that could have been avoided. And the combination of ambition and negligence being what is ultimately his undoing, very alien ideas, but also very human ideas within this universe for a character that is only kind of, or maybe as this episode kind of suggests, kind of evolve. beyond being human in some ways. Yeah, I think that's a great point. And then just to do a complete 180 from the humanity question,

I just want to say, you know, from the start, you identified our pal the I-Jackie as like a standout, just standout creation. Having spent a good amount of time on the Reddit boards and then just sort of like in and around the fandom online in the last couple weeks, a couple weeks. This is true

throughout the viewership. Oh, yeah. How could it not be? This tentacled eyeball has sort of stolen the entire show from everything else is going on.

I think my favorite is the eyeball in sheep form. I think the eyeball in sheep form, there's something so malevolent about that sheep face that I just have to stand up and applaud. I do want to give

Mallory her do and say, Noah Holly confirmed in the official podcast that the eyeball was working in with the blood slug or saw an opportunity to help the blood slug on the Maginot. Once again, we see the eyeball help the flies get their meal.

And it's I think less about it's just all about learning. What can I learn from this? How can I bend any of this to my opportunity. It's not an altruistic, like, let's band together. It's more of a like, you know, that Oscar Isaac has apocalypse

like learning moment for the eyeball. So what do you think it is about, I know you sung her praises, but what do you think it is about the eyeball that has like really captured and enraptured people? I think some of it is the pure unsettling, skin-crawling

nature of that creation of something that is literally worming its way into your body. Again, as alien as it gets, and specifically eyes, which people always have a hard time with, anything that is involving eye violence is particularly violating. So you have that on this very physical level. It also represents, especially with the context that's being used in this show, a kind of stillness that is very different from the xenomorph, for example. What makes the xenomorph terrifying is that they could be anywhere, but they're moving, right? They're in the vents. They're in the rafters. They're

under the ground. They're going to pop up at any moment. The eyeball jockey mostly has been behind plexiglass and kind of, you know, quarantined away from the humans. And it's just watching you with all of its eyes at all of its angles, with its sheep Mona Lisa smile thing happening. Very, very disconcerting for a creature that we know to be terrifying. And I think, again, the sequencing of all this is so important. Like, you see the creature. You kind of get what it might be. You see it in the cat. You see attack nibs. And now it's like any time there is any potential daylight, it's fucking terrifying. To the point. To the point. that on the alien show, we are pulling focus from the xenomorph to be sometimes even more scared of the eyeball jockey.

Exactly. We've got scents and we've got xenomorphs. We've got all a hallmark of an alien story. And I'm like, give me where that eyeball, please. Seriously. But its plan, as you alluded to, whether it was helping the blood slugs or not, whether it has the beef with the xenomorph, which it certainly seems to based on the flashback. Its plan, to the extent it has one, is not so different from Moro's plan, which is destabilize all of this shit. Get out. Chaos. Yeah. It worked on the Maginot. Okay.

Before we get into our deep dive, and we'll do our best to dive as deep as we can without Mallory here, we have some mailbag business that we want to get to really quickly. Alyssa wrote in to mention the audio that we hear at the top of every episode. I can't remember if you and Mel talked about this. The audio cue that we hear at the top of every episode when we get the sort of like previously on-ish moment, is Jeff Russo, who's the composer of the series,

covering the Cream Song Strange Brew. And it's a banger. Like, I get when there's a couple things that I'm absolutely loving about Alien, the way the intro gets me so ready and amped to watch an episode of Alien Earth is 10 out of 10 no notes. And also the what is now signature sort of like image fade, cross-fading thing that they do, whether it's, you know, that hilarious freeze frame that's been memified and going around of Ice Age over. It gets me every single time. It's really good.

But, you know, when we see slightly sort of thinking about his plan and we get, you know, sort of superimposed over his face, the eggs opening, like, that's just incredibly good stuff. It's not. And it's so artistically done that it doesn't. annoy me. I'm not like, I wasn't wondering what he was thinking about. I knew what he was thinking about. It's not telling me something, but it's evoking something. And it's just done like really, in a very like signature to this series way that just like you could now re-edit something in the style of alien Earth and I would recognize it if that makes sense. So completely. I think a lot of it is it doesn't feel handholdy at all in that way. It feels everything feels like you're being

kept at a slight remove in a way that is also very true to alien. It's always a franchise that's like a little warm-blooded in terms of humans making human decisions, but also a little bit cold, a little antiseptic. Like there is a quality of that to a lot of the alien stuff. And so the idea of we're going to use these overlays and these dissolves and these flashbacks and even these reflections sometimes. Like I thought, you know, some of Arthur's best moments in this episode and David Ristall's best acting in this episode was in the reflection as he's trying to convince slightly

to open the door. I have a family too. I mean, horrifying. And like the moment of recognition in that performance and that character and that actor, when he goes from, please open the door, I'm locked from inside, to realizing what slightly is telling him and the way that is then reflected in a literal reflection, I think all that stuff works so well. The visual language of the show, the blend of like opening a montage

previously on plus flash forward, plus like, is this something we saw before? Is this something that's about to happen? Right. The ambiguity of that is what makes all of those visual cues so fun. I think it's really good. Something that I saw on Reddit that I just thought that I would flag for people is like, as we mentioned, as they excavate some of the critters from what is referred to as the broken zoo, the crash spaceship in the early episodes, we were like they couldn't have

possibly gotten all the blood ticks, right? No chance. And I saw a post on Reddit that said, if the blood slugs make it to the ocean, millions will die. Right? Like containment folk especially essential for those critters who can proliferate like quite quickly and at, you know, at volume. So season two, the hunt for the blood ticks?

Who knows? I mean, that's the whole season. That becomes like a Starship Troopers level event in terms of like quantity infestation. What is Jake Busey doing? Do you think he's ready to come back? I really hope so. I do wonder with the blood slugs and their little, you know, mino versions that they're pooping out into the water. How amphibious are these guys?

Like, can they live in the water indefinitely? Do they at some point need to crawl their way out to find out? Could a blood slug latch onto a blue whale and just go to town? Is that a thing that it has the capacity to do? Okay. Well, I know what I'll be dreaming of tonight. Thank you ever so much. Another thing I learned while perusing Reddit, and this is just linked to some.

Noah Holly's interview that Tang, the character that we were sort of curious about, on the Maginot, who was standing over his shipmates cryo chamber in decidedly, like, call HR immediately fashion, was not a

synth. This is an amazing reveal. I just did not fully realize in watching it. We all thought he was a sin. I just, maybe, and look, what does that say about us, Joe? That we are assuming that the creep must be the robot, and not just a normal creepy-ass human.

So something that Noah Holly has said in a couple different interviews is that, you know, at this time, the way he envisions it is that at this time, it's like if you were a creep, you could either go to jail or go hunt spacebugs. This is a sort of like... This is like the wall. Sure. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Take the black. And by take the glass, I mean stand over a young woman's cryo chamber. So that makes sense to me in terms of why Tang was like screaming when he died. I was, like, confused by that. If he's just, like, a creepy dude, then I guess that's why. I wouldn't a, I mean, synths can experience fear. Yeah, but it was just, like, such a human scream, you know? And I was like, why did they describe us of the milk moment?

You know, like, it just all seemed very, very strange to me. Look, everyone out there, filmmakers, never deprive us of the milk moment. It does a body good. We need it. Okay, so listen, this to me, what Noah Holly says is, like, what some of the, one of the, One of the joys of alien since the Ian Home reveal is this idea of you don't know who is a synth and who is not. So this is like, someone you were talking about when we were talking about Adam as potentially, I was like, Secret Synth and you and Malli were like, go to hell and die. That's a bad idea.

It was more, I really hope not. But Noah Holly's like talking about how Tang is kind of the reverse of that, like the opposite of a secret synth. Secret creepy human, Tang. So that is, what does that happen there? Honestly, I love the way that plays in both respects. The characters within the world are all operating under the assumption that he's human, both because of the timeline and because why would they ever think otherwise. But for the audience, we are interpreting everything he does so differently to the point of being

catastrophically wrong on multiple podcasts. And then another thing that we want to clear up, thanks to, you know, imparted a great email we got from a listener who wishes to remain anonymous, is that is this idea of canon? Because this is something that sort of like, you know, all three of us, a certain degree have been tying ourselves up and not's about to try to make like all of the timeline work. And so the question of like, is alien Earth in the canon or how much is Noah Holly paying attention to all the things that came before, et cetera, et cetera. So these are a couple things that I learned some fascinating things about alien and canon and how it works from

our listeners. So thank you so much. So a couple of quotes from Noah Holly on this. In the South by Southwest panel, he said, Ridley Scott made Prometheus and engaged with another. idea in terms of the origin of these creatures. It just wasn't part of my DNA of how these movies worked. So I chose not to engage with that part of the story and to just sort of speak to the alien that I had encoded. Very human language for no one. Yeah, very human, of course.

If I can just say on this front, and in some ways I understand that what I'm about to say is a little antithetical to the project of House of Ar. Sure. I kind of also operate this way with aliens specifically. Like it never once occurred to me in watching alien or aliens. Where did these motherfuckers come from? Right. I'm just so terrified of them in the present.

Like my fear and my adrenaline in the case of aliens kind of overwhelms the cognitive process of wondering the backstory of how all this came to be. To the point that I like Prometheus, I like Covenant, but the kind of like more anchored in the present iterations of the series I think are just more successful overall. But also like that's kind of where I am in terms of my interest. in the longer term canon and lore is wanting to be in that fear and not in the explanation. I agree with you and I would say it can be like a disease inside of the IP properties that

we cover this desire to give us the origin story of everything. I don't want to know how Han Solo got his blaster. Like I don't care about that sort of stuff. I don't want to see Boba Fett crawl out of the Sarlat. I don't want to see it. Sometimes it works and sometimes it's great. You know what I mean? But that's more story dependent.

than it is, like, my desire to know the lore. We are a lore, you know, of course. Of course. And so I really understand Mallory's impulse to always try to, like, figure out the timelines and make all the – connect all the dots. That's part of our job here. And it's certainly, like, in texts like Game of Thrones and stuff like that, like, with one singular author behind it, George R. Martin, that's the thing.

That is often rewarded. And then with an IP like this, where you've got not only different hands playing in the world, but Disney purchasing Fox at a certain point. So what does that do to who has a say in what the IP means and what is canon and what is not? So let's get a little bit more into that. Holly talked about, and I like this for him because we love Fargo. And we love that Fargo is like, it's Fargo-ish. And so if Noel Holly's like, I'm making alien-ish, like, I don't have a problem with that.

And so I think that, like, he told the radio times, it's got to be its own thing. There's touchstones, there's references. It's the same on Fargo of saying, all right, I'd take a little Lobowski, take a little of this tone of voice or this element, etc., etc. So he was talking about how an alien's your favorite alien movie, I think, right? He was like, nude is kind of an adultish personality in a child body. And Bill Paxton's character is a child brain, an adult body. And he was sort of playing with those ideas in order to get. the hybrids that we get in this show.

So that's the kind of way he is deciding to engage with the canon. Rather than, like, I need all of my timelines to match up, all of my company mergers to match up, all of my who knew what, when to match up. Does that make sense? I mean, who can keep track

of all the M&As at this point? It is a complicated corporate legacy. On the official plot, he said, Prometheus and Covenant aren't really his things, didn't even bother to recognize Romulus. And he took the chance to make the alien movie of his dreams in episode five. So that's sort of the stance here.

In terms of the listener email that we got, those are all Noah Hawley quotes. In terms of the listener email we got, we learned a lot about sort of, and it's funny because I've been thinking, as we all have been about Peter Pan and how sort of like there have been so many iterations of Peter Pan, there's Hook, there's, you know,

Pan, there's like all these different ideas, like just spinning out of, you know, there's Peter, there's all of them out there. There's Peter Pan syndrome, but it's a fertile concept that so many people have had fun playing with. And so if we think of the alien franchise as a similar thing, we gotten able from a listener who has some inside information about sort of like what is considered canon, what is an inside of the universe. They pointed us to a blog that sort of is by rogue reviewer, and it's called Defining Canon in an Alien world. And this person who was hired by Fox to do work inside of the alien IP world was talking about what is considered canon, what is it? So, like, if there's a predator in it, it's not considered canon. Anything that is alien v. Predator or Predator at all or anything like that, not canon. Well, it's considered Alien versus Predator canon, which is its own canonical.

Its own world. So it has no bearing on this. And then there's like so many novelizations, so many comic books. And you and I, You and I encounter this in the Buffy world. Mallory and I certainly encounter this in the Star Wars world where things are divided into, like, legends and canon and sort of stuff like that. But there's this concept that he wrote about in his blog that is so interesting. And then I swear we will talk about this episode and more detail. But he called it Barroom Canon, which I really love. Quote, as a franchise consultant to 20th Century Fox and Alien, Predator and Planet of the Apes, I had often, I often had to take a long, hard look at a number of long-beloved franchise stories and try to figure out how exactly. they could still fit into canon. If I couldn't, I'd recommend they'd be tossed. I propose a third

option, what I've come to call bar room canon. These are stories overheard in a bar or write in a comic or played in a video game or even posted on Facebook that may or may not have some truth to them. This allows canon to have some flex in regards to, including stories that otherwise could no longer count in a franchise's development. This is fantastic. Have your have your cake and eat it too. You know? And a wonderful and elegant solution to specifically what you mentioned, Joe, which is managing a franchise with so many distinct creators and distinct voices and distinct tones and distinct genres. And it's like, you're just not going to keep every date straight, every character straight, every company merger

straight. You need to give some room to fudge around those things. And I think this is a really smart way to do it to just say, yes, there are these big tent pole things. We all agree. Happened roughly at these times. But give yourself a little maneuverability to the point that you're not just creating corners that you then have to write your way out of. And, you know, Star Wars has just continually found itself back into this corner. So this is tough.

So just this blog post was made in 2021, so pre-Romulus, so Romulus is not even mentioned here, but the things that are considered canon according to Fox, Prometheus, Alien Covenant, Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, Alien Resurrection. That's canon. And then everything else, maybe including Romulus, I'm not sure, but definitely including Alien Earth. Alien Earth is considered Barum Canon.

And Noah Holley has made no, you know, made no bones about this. Like, this is just what he's decided to do. So that is what we are here to talk about today, something we overheard in a barroom somewhere about a boy genius and an island of monsters. Well, I should say, too, there's a couple additions to the canon beyond those films as well. Like, sorry, alien isolation is included. And they had like the series of other short films and stuff they released around Prometheus and Covenant very specifically. Like some of the supplemental material is still considered Tier 1 canon.

But not all of it, which is fascinating because like some of the Prometheus short films were and some weren't. Oh yeah, those are shit. We don't like those. We're throwing those out or at least demoting them within the bar room. And then it was like David's drawings, maybe. Like it's fascinating. It's many, many tiers. And then I love how we got to the bottom.

And it was like, these will never be canon but are considered similar-ish. So like Blade Runner was in, you know, there were like these other movies that are considered like imaginatively similar but have nothing to do with the canon but are somehow on this chart anyway. So fascinating read. Once again, the blog is called Rogue Reviewer and the blog post is called Defining Canon in an Alien world. I would highly recommend it. Really good for you. If you're at all interested in how all this stuff squares up, very, very interesting to check. Really good read.

All right. Well, I mean, doing Mallory Rubin proud several minutes, many, many minutes into this podcast, shall we go to the now and to the deep time? Let's cook, Joe. Want to support your gut health? Take Activia's gut health challenge by enjoying two Activio yogurt today for two weeks and see if you feel a difference. With billions of probiotics and 20 years of scientific expertise, Activia is one of the easiest and tastiest ways to start your gut health ritual.

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Sweetgreen.com. All right. So this episode opens with a lengthy Peter and Wendy quote. Yes. About growing up. And we have multiple Peter. This is the highest rate of Peter Pan quote. in an episode so far.

So I just wanted to quickly ask you sort of like on the Peter Pan front, how is all of that working for you, Rob, and how is it working maybe specifically inside of this episode? This one was a lot, even for me. A little overloaded. I thought we leaned on it too much. And I think especially it was not just the quantity, but the way that those excerpts were deployed,

the first of which, as you alluded to, this idea of like all kids needing to grow up over time And we're kind of juxtaposing that with Wendy, who's stretching her legs and learning how to be a different kind of and in some ways more adult person. Also juxtaposed with little toddler Zeno, you know, crawling out of its little corner of its cage. That one I actually really, really liked. Yeah. And I think with Wendy's part of that specifically, you know, learning to express herself in new ways, pushing on all these rules and boundaries around her as we see her do over the course of this episode, kind of carving out a sense of identity beyond what the surrogate, parents in her life have told her she's allowed to be.

It's kind of her journey through the course of this episode. That one I like, the more we keep going back to the well, it's like, okay, we're getting the bit about Peter Pan culling off the lost boys, but the metaphor is getting really strained because of who those people are supposed to represent. The one that's like more of an interstitial about a strange boy and like the piercing of the veil into Neverland. It's like, we're just stretching the metaphor a little too far for my taste personally, the more we're going back to it within one episode.

Yeah. Throughout this series, it's not been one to one. And I think it's especially confusing in that Tootel's moment about the sort of culling of the lost boys because it's not Peter who's doing the culling here. It's the flies. And also the eye and also maybe Kirsch, if you want to like make that point. But it's not Peter himself. So by Peter, I'm a boy cavalier. So I also agree.

I think a couple of these passages struck me as Noah Hawley went through with his highlight and was like, what is the creepiest sounding passage? I think especially the one. Credit words to do. There's some creepy-ass passages in Peter Pan. I am learning. As someone who has not read that particular text. I have also been going through the text with my highlighter, like finding, you know, the creepiest ones.

I read one of those passages last week about Peter killing the lost boys. So like, lived up. Very relatable. But yeah, in some. in some moments it felt a little like doing it to do its sake, you know, sort of thing. But I do think the idea of Neverland as it relates to the most obvious, like, tech trillionaires in search of immortality, the immaturity, the impetuous immaturity, the flighty immaturity of the tech trillionaire class inside of this. this world or our world, et cetera, I do think is interesting. And this idea of like, I think it's actually most interesting inside of this episode,

inside of this moment between Joe, Hermit and Wendy Marcy, like that idea of like, you're my younger sister and her being like, you can't keep me in that box actually because I'm something else entirely now. You have to let me grow up, even though you're. were still thinking me as your little sister. I'm a completely different critter. And my life cycle is different than what you would expect. It lasts much longer, apparently.

Potentially thousands of years of interstellar travel ahead for her. Okay, exciting. Can't wait for that. Okay, alien Earth could run for eons on X. Yeah. Well, it depends. I think as far as the Neverland comp of this goes, and kind of transporting that idea to this compound island,

I think is a really good creation within the world of the show because you're both creating one, the potential for these aliens to get out in the world on Earth. But for now, they are contained in a lab that is contained on an island and you effectively turn Neverland

into a prison for somebody. And right now it's a prison for like the eyeball jockey, but pretty soon it's going to be a prison for all the humans who are trying to survive with all these critters while they don't know the boat code.

You know, it's like the access to getting off the island I think is going to get restricted very quickly. And that's an exciting twist on the Neverland idea is being trapped there. Yeah, which is, you know, and who leaves when and what things that feel like an exciting adventure then become a life-threatening peril. And this idea, you know, I was sort of poking around the way in which J.R. Tolkien had some strong opinions about Peter Pan, a play that he saw when he was a young man. And not all of them are positive. but this idea of Neverland as like a fairy realm sort of that you go to

and this idea that like fairy stories should be scary and fairy stories should be dark. And that's what makes them so exciting. So yeah, here we are. Okay. Speaking of, you know, toddlers, xenomorphs and brothers who are uncertain about their sister growing up, we've got Hermit and Kirsch watching Wendy as she watches the alien. sort of like layers upon layers upon layers. And we've got a lot of this happens throughout the episode.

We've got, you know, the surveillance cam moments that we've been getting throughout the series of like, okay, this interaction is happening and who is watching this interaction happen? Who's in a zoo at any given time inside of this story? So Herman is talking to Kersh and he's saying like, you know, should we be worried about her, you know, and Kersh's like her physical, you know, and he's like, you're worried about what her intellect, her emotions, he scoffs, like, scoffingly. And then Herman is like, no, I just want to know how to take care of her when we get to leave. And it's like, LOL guy, this is Hotel California. You could check out any time you like, but you could never leave. That's like an onion asking,

how do I take care of a star? You think he's going to let you take her with you to do what? And he's like, just like live, be a family? I don't know. What did you think of his interaction? An onion asking how do I take care of a star Is elite god tear stuff And I appreciate it specific Like Hermit is for all of his strengths And clearly like you know He's a medical professional

Who's successful to some degree He seems to be able to keep his wits about him In emergency situations Like he has good qualities I can sketch out a map Severance style And try to extricate somebody All you know

Has many things going for him Also kind of a dummy And I think in this case Like her shredding his naivity about this whole situation. Like, in what universe would this make sense for anybody here, especially the trillionaire who calls all the shots? Why would he ever let you leave here with Wendy?

And even if he did, why would Wendy, a creature of now basically limitless potential, ever be satisfied going home and watching old baseball highlights with you? And Ice Age, don't forget. Okay. There's other things on the roster. No, I mean, I think it's really interesting that this would be an idea it's one thing for him to be naive in the first place.

Like, I'm coming back to this island with you and then we'll go, right? Of course. But I feel like he's had a couple versions of this conversation. Certainly, Adam, the Adam conversation that he had certainly should have disabused him of this idea that he just gets to waltz out with Wendy any time that he wants. So I was sort of confused why we were coming back to this conversation. But Kirsch gets a lot of quips in this episode, a very quippy episode for Kirsch. Yes. kind of railing given style to a certain degree.

I was delighted. I was also left wondering, where do synthetics get their personalities? You know, we're meant to confront in this episode. Nibbs is getting her mind wipe. We're changing like very core formative memories for her. What does that do to her as a person? Who is it that went in the code and is like, okay, Kersh, all right, right. Maybe like 80% bitchy.

You know, just like, let's just ramp it up a little bit. Who made that decision and how do I feel? shake their hand. I like to think that like someone at Prodigy is like just occasionally bumping it up and bumping it up like the quip the quip factor just every so often. Yeah, especially like the implication is that Boy Cavalier made Kirsch, right? Maybe, but he is an older model so he could be coming from a different company. I don't know. In his pursuit of that intelligent conversation like does he bump the bitchiness up and all that sort of stuff because he just like really wants someone to like push back on him and and meet him where he is.

You know, I hadn't really, I honestly was just operating under the assumption that some other company, Well, and Utani or whoever, was churning out all of the normal sense and that this was an acquisition. But honestly, the idea that Boy would have at some point made him, I think gives a whole different kind of a hue to their relationship, right? Then it would be Boy is sort of disappointed in the fact that Kirsch couldn't live up to what he wanted him to be. Kersh is resentful in some ways

maybe of people like Tudel slash Isaac who he's just kind of watching melt and seems generally indifferent by despite all of the maybe affection we had attributed to him in previous episodes in that relationship. So I think that's a great, that would be a great kind of angle to take within

that relationship, but I honestly have no idea where Kirsch came from. I mean it certainly seems like that might be what Morrow was hinting at in the elevator, we'll get to that exchange, but this idea of like you were made obsolete by your own company. You're the iPhone 6. Why are you talking shit to me?

All right. Let's talk about resetting nibs. Okay. Okay. Here's my most profound question, and I don't think we got a straight answer from Noah Holly on this, but like, in terms of the idiocy and the incompetency of the scientists, this is, quite admittedly, a hallmark of the alien franchise. Yes.

We have talked about this. In the DNA. And you and Mal made the great point of like, does it make it feel a little bit better that some of the dumb-dums making choices inside of this are literal children. Yeah. But for a character like Dame Sylvia, to make so many moves without considering the repercussions is frustrating to me. Is frustrating to me in a way that is a little different from, and don't get me wrong, it's frustrating. The scientists and Prometheus just like sort of like, what are you, aliens? Python thing.

I'll stick my face closer. Sometimes you just have to get a very, very, very close look at an alien species. But like when it's your project that you've been designing from the start, and in the case of Nibs, let's just isolate Nibs, you pick a girl with, quote, trauma in her past. We knew that when we chose her. What makes her a good candidate for this program in that case? or if it's like let's pick a kind of funky wired one just to see how that plays out, I'm going to need you to monitor her a lot more closely. And then also this active wiping her, which again, we already discussed the Arthur and Sylvia disagreement,

the fact that Dame Sylvia wipes her and then just sends her back into a room where anyone can visit her. And then Wendy waltzes in and is like, hey, why are all you remember? memory's missing, which pisses Wendy off and freaks Nibbs out. And I'm like, why was there no plan for this? You're going to wipe her memory and then just reintroduce her without maybe talking to the other children and saying like, hey, we had to do this thing with Nibs. Please don't bring it up. It will trigger her. You know, it was for this reason or another. They just like... Even that would be a bad plan. These are children who it's going to come up. What you needed to do was cut, like, cut the cord. Nibs is gone. Like, we just got to pull the plug on this human life.

Granted, I'm not saying I would do this. I'm saying within the world of damage control in the show. You and are her getting a divorce for sure, Rob. But here's the thing. If you're going to keep Nibs alive and wipe her memory, she needs to go into a separate part of the island in which you have a full Truman show style production, assuring her that nothing has happened since she went offline.

You cannot put her around other human beings who are not on the payroll. You cannot put her around kids who are going to say whatever. Absolutely blundering stuff from them. And even just the what happens literally next. Yes. Not five steps down the line. Literally, when she wakes up, what happens? Because, like, when she flipped out in counseling, at least, Dame Sylvie was like, lock her in her room and keep all the kids away from her.

Yep. And in this, they just put her in an unlocked room. Also, I just have so many notes about all the rooms that the kids have access to in general. They go wherever they want. There's, like, wandering in and out of rooms. I'm so confused by this. Why would you do this? Okay.

Anyway. Well, can we, I don't want to flash forward too much. Can we talk about some of this stuff with Nibbs, juxtaposed with her kind of future scenes with Dame Sylvia in this episode. I would love to. Let's do it. I will say on a conceptual level, the idea of eternal sunshining some of your own memories away is a huge, unwieldy, like mentally and emotionally challenging one to deal with that I love when sci-fi dives into that stuff. the idea to take a step further where you could live in a world

where other people are making that decision for you is especially terrifying. And the idea that you are going to remove, you're going to attempt to save someone from their trauma and not think that you are then creating a trauma of absence and the dissociation and the distrust that would come from that. That is alien level naivety in terms of Dame Sylvia and the entire operation.

I think that core idea is really, really juicy. stuff that I'm glad that the show is mining. Absolutely. And I think, you know, in the case of Morrow, listening to some Babu Sisei interviews, Noah Hali interviews, talking about like the trauma that Morrow experienced in losing his daughter. Yeah. And so the desire to put that pain, you know,

to his eternal sunshine that pain somehow. So he has sort of put it in a box inside of his own mind, but also this idea of, can I get a synthetic body? You know, Kersh makes a joke. about this as an elevator. Like, you know, he's like, I got to get me one of those and he's like a new kid or a body that isn't a piece of trash.

That's not what he says. Fucking cut in deep, Hirsch. Come on, man. Bitchiness at 80%, as you said, maybe even 110% in that moment. But so that idea, right, to not only like put a stopper on death, but get to this sort of like

control what has, you know, erase what has traumatized you, what has dismayed you. Like that is, a great product to sell to Tom Wilkinson in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Sure.

Great idea. But yeah, there needs to be consent around it. And I brought up Westworld before, but this idea in Westworld of, you know, having control over this human consciousness that you've created, there is this thing that they did in Westworld where it was like, it was just freeze all motor functions is just something they would say was just this is like just drives home this horrific moment of you can just freeze a person freeze all motor functions

you're frozen having having not delved into that world joe is that the kind of situation where their cognitive mind is still active but they just cannot move at all right they're just prisoners within their own bodies a racist interaction bring yourself back online reset like all of these things that, you know, tell me this story again, but without any emotion attached to it. Like, these are these are these horrific puppet mastery things that we saw a lot on a show like Westworld, Westworld Jurassic Park. All of these crightny ideas are definitely like in the, in the, hopefully not blood-tick-infested water here.

But like, this nibs move is just like, it goes beyond sticking your face inside of a, of a slimy egg, which is a bad idea, no matter what. It's just like, and I want, so I don't know how to understand the Dame Sylvia character, because I'm just like, are you smart? You don't seem smart at all to me, so I don't understand at all, you know? Well, let's kind of draw a dividing line between her and Arthur. Because Arthur, I would say he doesn't necessarily intend to get fired. He is not, I don't want to give him too much credit in his principled stand.

He does say, I'm not going to do that. Right. Against every principle of the program. Yes. With the expectation that I will be heard, we're not going to do this, I'm going to get to maintain my position. And then once the rug is pulled and it's like, okay, you're insubordinate, you are now fired, leave the grounds immediately, or you will be shot.

All of that seems to come as a bit of a surprise to him, that that's the way that would unfold. Dame Sylvia, to me, is expressing an equally naive to some other character's idea that, like, okay, I am still going to be as a person of empathy, as a person who cares about the well-being of these hybrids, I am still the one moving the dials, adjusting everything. And maybe my agency within this completely fucked equation is worth something in protecting these kids.

I don't think that's a smart assumption to make, but it's one that lots of people do as they are co-opted within difficult and challenging systems. It's also one that I think even that character may not fully believe, but it's kind of, you could, I think it's especially clear

when she does get down to nuts and bolts, if apologies to Nibs, and starts moving the dial around and kind of is like talking to nibs but also to herself and I think kind of convincing herself isn't this nice for you isn't this good to be able to do this absolutely we're just going to we're just going to wipe the trauma away and that that seems like she is trying to talk herself into this being a viable option 100% and like you're right that in in in terms of the compromises we make the moral compromises we make and maybe the exposure of someone like

this is a you know a you know superficial little gender reversal where you you would expect inside of the married scientist couple that the female character would be the more, you know, empathic one, the one in defense of the kids, all the sorts of like that. And is Arthur really, who's taking that principal stand and Sylvia, who is being a bit more career-minded inside of this. Or, you know, so caught up in the experiment and the rush of that. And so her, I think what could be interesting, you know,

to see how this all plays out, is her very, like, hippy-dippy, soft scarf, like therapist vibe mode. And I say that someone who loves the hippie-dippy aesthetic, but like... And a soft scarf. Not a hard scarf, certainly,

but, like, that maybe that, like, the rank hypocrisy of that is intentional inside of this. So I'll be curious to see, you know? But it sure sounds like we would have loved to have a conversation between Arthur and Dame Sylvia at some point before his unfortunate, a demise.

It would have been nice. Okay. Really nice. Let's go back to Herman and Wendy. They have this conversation walking down the hall. I just need to note. It just has to be said that Sydney Chandler's arms look amazing. She has not been skipping Arm Day.

No. The definition. I cannot wait for her to start punching people. It's going to be very fun. But this is our clearest sense that Wendy has, you know, she's been cooing and clicking at this alien for a lot of scenes now. I gotta say Sydney Chandler's doing a great job. The close-ups on the purse lips, all really good.

It's true. Really getting a lot of good teeth and tongue flicking action happening. Yeah. There's a lot happening. Although, in fairness, it did seem like she may have offended the Zito at one point, you know, when it was still a toddler. Like she said the wrong thing. Like the pronunciation for I love you and fuck you were like a little similar tonally.

And she just like erred a little in the wrong direction. But she wasn't flustered when she. She was just sort of like, oh, how cute. It's slaving itself against his plexy with its acid blood body. Yes. Adorable. Unbothered. But she has this.

She has created this bond. And this is perhaps, is this a mistake, I would think, that Boy Cavalier is made where he's like, great. They can talk to each other. Let's let them talk to each other. Yeah. So now she has bonded with the aliens and she feels more akin to them. I am a subject you were studying me. the way that you are subject, you know, you are studying them.

They didn't ask to come here. She is a child. You know, I'm sure there were some conversations that her dad played by Noah Hawley had with her about what they were going to do. There is a, but can you actually give consent if you're a child? It's unclear. So it's like, and Joe, again, a bit naively being like, what do you mean you associate with them?

They're predators, their animals, their beings. And we are human. And she's like, am I, though? I don't know. Have you seen my arms? These arms aren't human. What do you think? Well, I would say Joe does make inadvertently a decent point about what is what actually separates human beings from the xenomorphs as we know them. Everything that Wendy slash Marcy is saying is well-founded, like they have a lot in common with things like answer bees, that kind of hive mindset. They are operating for something bigger than themselves. But what they don't do, and the thing that Wendy is practicing in this moment is the level of deep empathy and projection of like trying to put herself into this alien's shoes or carapace or whatever

and say like it didn't, you know, as you said, it didn't ask to come here. It didn't ask to be brought. It didn't ask to come to this place. Yeah. And a xenomorph is not asking itself that before it rips you apart, at least based on our canonical knowledge of what these creatures are. And maybe that will change now that we have a translator now that we're duolingoing, Xenovian, Xenoese. Nope, xenovian is it. You got it in one. Zinovian. All right, Zinovian. Now that we're just going to Google translate Zinovian right here,

maybe that will change. But in the moment, it does seem like one of the things that is separating, even someone who is above human or past human like Wendy from the xenomorphs, is the exact thing that she is explaining to him and he is kind of not quite hearing. I think it's interesting to think about this idea of community inside of these alien species, to think, you know, this is something that Mal was bringing up last week, this idea of like the aliens that are working in common cause with each other, even if that common cause is just like, let's fuck up these people who put us in boxes. And let's see how the

doors work and let's see what advantage we can take of the chaos, all that sort of stuff. So there's that. But in terms of alien community, now, if people have read all of the novelizations that may or may not be canon, you might know much more than I do about the alien community. But the idea that there's like a mother, you know, like an alien queen. There's definitely a queen. And like there is culture of some kind inside of the alien world, you know? I mean, they're making art in there. Haven't you seen the, haven't you seen the highs, you know?

If that's not artistry, I don't know what is. I did think it was interesting earlier during the scene where Kersh and Hermit are observing Wendy talking with the xenomorph. Kersh refers to the xenomorph she killed as an adorn. male, which I don't know that I've heard often, if at all, a lot of gendered or like biological sex conversation about the xenomorphs beyond just like queen and normal run-of-the-mill kind of, yeah, drones. I think because there's a queen and because maybe of Jurassic Park, I kind of assumed they were all female.

The future is female and that's what I thought. It is. Yeah, I thought that was interesting too. It does seem if this is, if we're playing by Jurassic Park rules, and we should say Hermit did refer to her as a her earlier in the season. So like we're on different pages here as far as how all this stuff is playing out. Wendy's argument is basically this one xenomorph, hashtag not all xenomorphs, is good, maybe not bad.

He's like my blue. You know, maybe we're in Jurassic World. We have moved past just the park. I'm like pretty upset that you're making me think about Jurassic World, but it's a pretty good comp. Okay. Blame the show. Something that she says is this is a yes place, not a no place. Here we say yes, obviously repeating something that Boy Cavalier has said, right?

And I, in the Samuel Blinken interview on the official podcast, he talked about, you know, something that Noah Hawley gave him as a reference was this Twilight Zone episode, It's a Good Life, which I've actually seen. I've not seen all the Twilight Zone episodes, but I have seen this one, where there's a six-year-old boy who has, like, telekinetic powers. and can, has all these adults cowering around him. And if they have an unhappy thought or something that bothers him, he can just instantly banish them to this like purgatorial cornfield. And so that that idea of like adults fearful of a child, the temperamental nature of a child and the enormous power that that child wields. And so thinking about that here in this moment, like this is a yes place, not a no place,

If you say no, you might get, you know, Arthur-esque shipped off the island, except, you know, without the face hugger included. And that, you know, you think about that inside of something like the arbitration, which we'll talk about next, where it's just sort of like, he's just like, let me see, let me push the boundaries. Let me see how many times I could touch my feet inside of this. You know, one is too many. In that context, one is definitely too many. Yeah. I thought that was a really interesting comp. I think it's a great shot.

Before we go to arbitration, we should just wrap up this Hermit and Seen, Herman and Wendy's seen and say, he's like, I want to rescue her. And she's like, what if I don't want to go? Yeah, cue the Alt-J. Just dial that music cue up. Tesalate, arbitration.

Okay. I was into it. One last thing on that note. Yeah. I mean, for one, as far as the, like, the Cornfield Twilight Zone influence here. Like everything you're describing also sounds very X-Men to me. It sounds like people being terrified of Gene Gray.

It sounds like, you know, we're dialing up the puberty in that sense and like a different kind of chemical reaction happening within those kids' bodies. But the idea of incredible power that you have no means to control, the way you do control it, and this is where there's been so much in the show that feels so predatory towards children, that feels like what someone would say if they were an abusive, parent, if they were an abusive uncle, if they were a kidnapper, this is a yes place and not a no place, maybe the most overt version of that yet. And it's like, as soon as the words came out of her mouth as something that she has internalized and accepted, that makes it that much more insidious,

right? Like, this is something that she genuinely believes of this place that the key to tapping into her potential is saying yes to anything boy cavalier wants. It is interesting, though, inside of this episode, she goes from like, this is yes place, not a no place to one conversation with Nibs. And then she seems out by the time she's been radicalized. Listen, Nib's an influencer. Okay, so arbitration. Yeah. The shot we get is boy with his bare feet and his fucking pants tassels just slapping their way into the room.

Just incredible stuff. Something that Samuel Blankin said was that a reason why he said he was the one who pushed for a boy to be barefoot and every scene. And also was an improv of his to hold the iPad with his feet. Like, that was, like, his idea. The foot acting from Blank in this season, tremendous. There's some moments in this exchange where he's doing some gesturing. But my favorite has to be previously the very dramatic toe point we get from him as he's having a conversation with Wendy. Is he a trained dancer?

I need to look it up. I know he was in the Harry Potter. He was in Chris Child. But, like, I don't know if he's- He hits his marks, that's for sure. It's just, like, dexterous. Okay. So he said, like, Neverland is where he lives.

That whole thing is his home. He owns everything. So why would he not be barefoot in his own home? But to extend that to this arbitration moment, this just feels like slapping your dick on the table, essentially. Oh, yeah. It's power. That's what it is.

I'm going to pull a no-holy and hit you with a Peter and Wendy quote, right? Adventures of course, as we shall see, were of daily occurrence. But about this time, Peter invented with Wendy's help a new game that fascinated him enormously until he suddenly had no more interest in it, which, as you have been told, was what always happened with his games. So this idea that, like, boy Cavalier's like, what's the next game? What can we play? What's most excited?

What's shiniest? And this is what arbitration feels. This is a game for him to win. And sadly, for the Utani fans out there, for admirers of a bold red lip, he absolutely Of an asymmetrical haircut. A questionable wig. He wipes the floor with her in this arbitration. It's not even competitive.

It was tough to watch. I had a problem with it. I was really interested to hear, you know, we got this Twilight Zone comp, but sort of similar to the way that Tony Gilroy would talk about and or, they have been pretty careful in this alien various press cycles to not say, oh, yeah, we're sending up this tech billionaire. Like, that's what we're doing here, right? They're sort of like, it's a thing that happens.

However, when Boy Cavalier says, in the future where I live, we move fast and we make trillions, how are we... Especially in arbitration. How are we not thinking about Mark Zuckerberg's move fast and break things? If you just transpose this dialogue from some of the arbitration scenes in the social network, would they just play one-to-one? They honestly might. Do you think Jesse Eisenberg would be bold enough to put his bare feet on a table in a scene, though? Could he go toe to toe with Samo Blinken in the foot acting Olympics? Well, there's levels to this stuff.

There's putting your feet on Maine or at a major commercial product. There's also, I would say, many ways to put your feet on the table in a way that conveys power and indifference and kind of like the casual nature of how you are taking this arbitration. And then there is the very specific stance that Boy Cavalier takes upon sitting, which I would describe as stirrups, like just full on. He's going to the OVGYN. You know? It was a very particular choice.

Horrifying is what I would call it. Noah Holly. The bottoms of the feet too. Yeah. And not even very pristinely clean, I should say. They looked a bit grubby, which is... That's what I'm saying. Noah Holly has called Boy Cavalier a quote,

wish fulfillment character that he says and does whatever he wants, doesn't even wear shoes. And that Noah Holly is like, there's an allure to that in terms of like, when you like to go into a room, slap your feet on, bare feet on the table, just say and do whatever you want.

It's not a wish that I've ever had, but, um, no, you know, if that's, if that's something you've dreamed of, it's interesting to see.

Um, in terms of move fast break things, the infamous Mark Zuckerberg Facebook motto, which they pivoted away from, uh, in 2014, um, the things in this case,

among many other things, we've got move, fast break aliens, move fast, break whatever, move fast, break rules. When in this, inside of this episode where we watch Tootles dissolve into milky goo, did not skip on the milk in this case. Oh, no. The thing we're breaking in this case is literal children. And there's this interesting room.

And again, to your point, you make a good point. We don't know that Tootles is dead, dead, right? It would feel a little narratively cheaty to undo it, but people narratively cheat all the time on TV shows, but... I also think to whatever degree you could put him in another body or whatever, the people who could do that, one of them, maybe the one, is now dead. So maybe the potential would have existed, but they don't have the ability to do it. You're talking about Arthur?

It's just getting a nice little face hug right now. Do you consider them dead as soon as the facehugger attaches to their body? What about that little period after where they're, like, go and have a hearty spaghetti meal at the dinner table? Is that life, you know? Is that truly living? That's why I ask you, Joe. Okay.

The idea that we watch Tootles die, I'm not totally skipping ahead. We'll spend plenty of time on that. And white goo come out, and it's this remove from the fact that this is just a literal child that has been killed by the negligence. Yes, a terminally ill child, but a child who has been killed by the negligence of and disinterest of this tech company. You know? And I feel like this is something that happens where we figure out ways in which to put layers between the horrific act and the results and putting the child brain and adult body and watching that dissolve like it's just synth and it's not an actual person that we've lost is a really interesting sort of way to grapple with that, I thought. It's kind of a narrative magic trick because if this were a literally. child being dissolved by an alien bug, it would feel, as you're saying, as horrific as it probably

should. But you and I can marvel at this episode a little bit, talk about the ins and outs, and we're not operating under the shadow of a kid was just murdered because of corporate negligence because of the way that the show creates that veil and then these characters within the world are creating that veil. And I think you see that a lot in the arbitration from Utani and Boy Cavalier both, hiding behind the trappings of, thoughts and prayers of like what what they should say in this moment and using all of those those particular veils and those particular pleasantries to do what they actually want to do which is not give a shit about any of these people any of these kids push further faster harder

whatever will make the most money and the most acclaim and give them the most personal satisfaction to them it doesn't matter that it's a kid to us it should and I think it does but it mutes the kind of like blunt force impact of a child getting murdered when you do see them in an adult body. And then something that Wendy might say inside of this episode is what's the difference between that kid and a xenomorph kid? You know, so anyway, not deep thoughts, but shallow thoughts from me, Joanna Robinson. Okay, so like...

Well, from Wendy, who is 12. Yutani saying, I'll compare our earnings to yours any day is her own sort of like attempt to slap a barefoot on the table. or he'll send you to bed without supper little boy and then like, oh, for his pain and suffering. Like she got a few little tiny shots in. It's true. But mostly got completely bulldozed

and you hate to see it for women in STEM. You really do. Well, she's a nepo baby in STEM. That's true. You know, she did not come by it honestly. It's true. Okay, so you've already talked with these stirrup stance that he takes to the table.

How did you feel about the crawling on top of the table moment? Oh, very good. I really liked. I mean, I love basically everything that Samuel Blankin is doing with this character. And in particular, crawling on the table as he is talking about the invasive alien species that have been brought here, great bit of flourish. And one of those bits of flourish that I would guess is also probably not necessarily in the script, but is him interpreting that character,

understanding the power dynamic of this long table with the arbiter in between, and sort of encroaching into territory that, you know, If he were being as professional and corporate as everyone would like, then he certainly wouldn't be doing. I'll be interested to see sort of what the legacy of Alien Earth winds up being. But if I had to look into the Hollywood tea leaves, I would say we might remember this as much as anything else as when we first really understood what Samuel Blankin could do and where we first understood what Babu Sise could do. And as, you know, if you're a filmmaker or someone who makes television watching this, you're going to want. And this happens a lot in Noah Holly seasons, that those actors then get snapped up and put into something else. And so this scenes, like, feels like one of those moments where it's just like, I can see this.

You know, I actually think Sidney Chandler is doing a great job with the role she's being asked to play. But it's a different prospect because she's being asked to play a bit of like emotional remove inside of this, which is different from what Samuel Blankin and Babu Sise are doing here. completely. You know, the Holly stuff does lend itself to that, not just as you're saying, Joe, because we've seen it happen before, but when you think about the meat of what those parts offer, a lot of big monologues, a lot of huge dramatic turns, a lot of opportunities and I think encouragement for artistic flourish, where it's not just like, we got to shoot this today to get this scene of exposition, like jut it in here to make all this stuff, make sense. It's like the monologue is the point. Like, this is what we are here for. This is where we are clearing out for. is to give these actors room to really do their thing. And the result, when you get the right actor, is exactly this sort of performance. One of my famous, like, one of my favorite eras in prestige television was when Damon Lindelof and Noah Holly were almost playing, like,

battleship with their cast members. Like, Noah Hawley puts Gene Smart in Fargo, and then Damon Lindelof puts Gene Smart in Watchman, or Damon Lindelof puts Carrie Coon in the left-o and the Noah Holly puts Carrie Coon in Fargo. You know, it's just like this sort of back and forth trade of these incredible actors. It was really fun to watch. Okay.

One last thing before we leave arbitration, you know, Marl says we'll destabilize the facility in Exville and the chaos. I learned what Xville. I mean, Xville is just short for X-Fill trait, but I didn't know and I had to look it up. So good turns. You got to watch some more like Lioness. I guess so. We got to get you up on it. Mel felt sure that we would see all five of the companies here,

but we only get the two that we met. Were you disappointed that we didn't see the other folks? Is that something you're interested in seeing in future seasons? Do you care at all? How do you feel about it? I actually like it as an opportunity to leave that for future seasons, right? Like leave some stuff that we don't quite know. And frankly, for a show like this,

some opportunity for maybe like fun stunt casting or whatever you want to do in terms of the interpretation of those other CEOs. I like leaving that out there. And plus the idea that this really is a concentrated beef, right? This is one ship crashing into one city that is owned by one company and being assholes about it. And do we need to involve everyone else beyond like a designated appointee to oversee the process? Would those other CEOs really be bothered?

I have notes for the arbitrator, by the way. He's not very good. He's not very good at his job. Okay. Let's go now. Not since the diner scene in heat Have we had? No, we're inside of an elevator.

Morrow Kircher here. It did make me think of heat and it did make me think of Raylan and Boyd and Justified. We've got Kirsch and Maro. This is sort of a repeat because it feels like

they were sizing each other up on the other side of the arbitration table, right? Yes. We had their interaction in episode three. Yep. Which was already full

of like little Zing between them. Episode three, I don't talk to Aaron Boys, is how Morrow greeted Kersh. Curse says, which country are you king of again? You know, and if you're not careful, you're going to belong to them is what Kersh says tomorrow about the eggs that are sort of like opening right next tomorrow. So that's how they met. This is round two, and I have to imagine this is just sort of like leading up to another.

We need one more. But the game before the game, the pregame that happened. happens in the elevator here. This is like the way in before the heavyweight fight where the two boxers get really close and almost kiss. That's kind of what we get here. And it really is, look, Morrow versus Kersh, like whoever wins we win. I just want to see them on screen together as much as possible. Is your sense, so like this animosity between cyborg and synth.

Yeah. You know, for Morrow, and we talked to Babu Sisi about this, but for Morrow, there is this deep sense of loyalty to Utoni, right? Like, for sure. Not just like, I lost my daughter, so I have to make my mission worth it. But like I am grateful to have been plucked off the street and given this replacement arm and all this sort of stuff like that. Kirsch, who lies to Boy Cavalier by the end of this episode and says everything's fine back home. Don't worry about it. Well, from a certain point of view.

Doesn't seem to have any corporate loyalty. So where do you think his? side of this of this face off comes from? I don't know. Yeah. I think there is something happening in general between clearly synthetics and humans. We know that from alien. And the cyborgs being the men in the middle of this, if you think about it from

Kirch's perspective, he was created into servitude effectively, right? Like he is under the employ of a corporation. He didn't ask to be born. He didn't have to be created. He was given no agency in any of this stuff. It's like, you work for prodigy now. By contrast, if you're a cyborg, you are at least making elective choices. And so I would think if you're synthetic and looking at both sides of the aisle, feeling a sense of resentment towards the humans who are fallible and emotional and you just kind of sneer and look down on.

And also the cyborgs who are those same humans, but think they're like you. Like think that they have bought or acquired some capacity for mechanical life in the vein that you have it. But also, they're still dumb little humans. And so how would you not look down on someone like Morrow if you're in Kirsh's position? And vice versa, if you're Morrow, why would you not look at this as a freaking toaster? I think it's interesting. Great ad work from you in advance for our upcoming hooked episodes about Battlestar. Okay, so we get this shot.

So something that Bobbussi says on the official podcast I thought was so interesting is that what he watched in order to prepare for this role was just a few little films you might have. have heard of. There will be blood, no country for old men, and the Dark Night. And he was studying Daniel Day Lewis, Javier Bardem, and Heath Ledger in playing... Jesus Christ. Just a couple of, you know, actors you might have heard of. All of whom featured quite prominently at our recent best movie performances at the 21st Century List at the ringer.com, which maybe explains why Bob Ussese is coming in here, throwing heat every single time he's on the map. So he was like, okay, so the challenge that they had, Heath Ledger's like, he fledger's, like, he flogers, play the joke? Like, how do I play a Daniel

Plain Vu? How do I play this character who is so repugnant in so many ways? And keep you just eating it up, eating up every single minute of screen time. What are the physical choices that were, like, he talks about it in an almost just like analytical, you know, studying the way that Heath Ledger, in a room full of still people, Heath Ledger is constantly moving. Like, all of these things, he was just like, really just, what is the sports crushing tape?

in order to make sure that he could. Or crunching tape, both are viable. I just think it's really interesting. And so, like, the choice that he made, especially inside of, like, chaotic situations, is that Morrow would always be, like, slow and methodical. We meet him first at the very beginning. And people are dying via xenomorph outside of,

he's going slow and he's humming a tune. and that's just sort of like, that's a very sort of Javier Bardem sort of way through the conversation. But I just thought that was really interesting. He's just absolutely smashed it. And I wouldn't say that he is imitating any one of them. No.

But he has captured the thing that they have captured, which is us pulling for a guy who is like grooming a child and threatening his mother. And his mother and all his other things, you know? On paper, there is no reason we should, want that character to succeed or win in doing, I mean, even if he does succeed, it is in bringing an alien, a xenomorph, to the general population of the earth, basically, or at least the continental part of the earth where actual people would live who do now work for prodigy.

And yet, sometimes I kind of want him to win. Sometimes I just kind of want him to succeed because of that beautiful, complicated, magnetic, sweaty performance that Babu Sisi is brought out here. The sweat is doing a lot of work for me. We get this over the shoulder shot back, you know, we're on the back of them. We open on the back of them. They're wearing almost matching jackets. They've got shoulder straps on both different shades, but, you know, very like we're not so different, you and I sort of silhouette to their costume.

And which I thought that was really interesting. Curse says tomorrow, the self-hating machine, the almost human. Right? Bitchiness all the way up, right? And then Marlis says to curse, yesterday's model, the incredibly irrelevant robot. What's it like working for a company

that made you obsolete? They're cute, your kids. I got to get me one of those, right? A child or a body that isn't so sad? Tough. Deeply, deeply tough, given Maro's backstory. This was like the polar opposite for me, Joe,

of the film that I personally revile Hobbs and Shaw. Normally I have some time for the Fest and Furious franchise But something about the forced attempted banter in that movie Between the Rock and Jason Statham was like I just had a bodily allergic reaction to I was like oh Jesus You weren't doing the HACA when you were watching it no

It was so uncomfortable and so bad I was basically dry heaving while watching it And this is the opposite This is like I would watch a whole show That is just these two guys on a collision course To borrow the heat kind of formulation here but we're kind of getting that while also getting eight other shows

packed within this season of Alien Earth to the extent that this season has like an architectural flaw there's like a lot happening that you need to track thematically emotionally, literally and sometimes there's going to be dropped beats in that as a result of how much they're trying to put in

but this is the sort of payoff is like this is the F plot of this episode and it is must watch television absolutely I did pull out a a jamberry Peter and Wendy quote about Hook, even though Bobby Cise said in our interview last week that this is not something that he was thinking about it all

when he made his character. Great, he was thinking about Javier Bar Dem and that's fine. Yes. But in this scene between Smee and Hook inside of Peter and Wendy, Smee's like, you like your hook hand better than your hand hand, don't you? Right? You think it's better for combing your hair? You think it does, I wish I wouldn't comb my hair with a hook, but what do I know?

Seems like a recipe for a scalp injury. I, the captain answered, if I was a mother, I would pray to have my children born with this instead of that, and he cast a look of pride upon his iron hand and one of scorn upon the other, and then again he frowned. So, like, this idea that, like,

but with Morrow, I can't pin it down. Like, and I like that. I can't pin it down if he takes pride in the cyborg nature, but he doesn't because he's like the worst part of a man, but then he wants a full synth body. So, like, what is, you know, and how much how much is that emotional reality

changed for him with the loss of his daughter and the 65 years he spent in space and all that sort of stuff like that I just think it's really just I'm and it doesn't feel like

a character inconsistency to me it just feels like an incredibly nuanced, complicated person who has a complicated relationship with their own body which is just fascinating so.

It feels like a dude who put robot parts in himself and has to reckon with that on a daily basis while all of his family is dead. You know, I think that in itself, very relatable circumstances. That in itself is a kind of magic trick as well in terms of the writing. I think this is a problem that lots of shows, especially these sorts of universe expanding ones, fall into.

We talked about the lore problems with that of like just going down the wrong alley of trying to explain too much. There's also the character part of that, which is you explain too much of a character's backstory. You give us too much flashback, and it takes out all the mystery of who they are. And kind of what makes them intriguing on the story. screen. We've seen extended flashbacks with Morrow. We've seen him explain what happened to his family where he now finds himself in the world. He hasn't been like the villain who's been off screen the whole time. He's having phone calls explaining this shit. And yet we're still there with him

because of that internal divide. Because he is a man who is rebelling against his robotic parts and an active pain when he plugs himself into a hard drive. Like that's a very captivating character to watch. Some people say conflict inside of human heart is the only thing worth writing about. that's a house of our truism. I want to say that, oh, something I was so excited to talk to you about because you just watched Lost for the first time is when Noah Holly was talking about episode five, he's like, oh, this is, in TV speak, this is the Morrow episode. This is the flashback Morrow episode. And I was like, oh, that's a LOSTism. Good job.

Okay, great. I know that reference. I get it. Okay. So we've already talked about Sylvia, wiping nibs, and Nibs talking to Wendy and how all of that was. deeply dumb. Okay. Yep. Slightly gets an upgrade in his Zoom

background. He is no longer in negaspace. He is now in an actual, they actually put trees around this actor when he was doing this. Do you think, you know, we were giving them grief for the Zoom background before. What if he was just on a blur setting

and we didn't realize it? Yeah. Do you like the blur setting, Rob? You've used the blur setting before. I've seen you do it. I've used a blur setting previously. I myself have used a like

CGI foresty background on many of Zoom. That's true. That used to be your go-to. It just depends on... Before LA, Rob. It's a different. It's a different world. Before we are a full-time video company, Rob. Look, there's just some concessions that we all have to make within our various machines. Arthur has to come to peace with his. I have to come

to peace with the fact that I can't just throw up a Zoom background. You know, I need to be a physical person in the physical world. Now you have a full full-blown set deck behind you. Okay. Look at that. It's slightly, it's slightly you know, talking tomorrow, but it's Smee and slightly. And these two, I've been really missing these two together. I have two.

You know, Smee has been, these two are the two most convincing were kids inside of adult bodies' performances. I would say especially Jonathan Ajayas Smee is the one that, like, that character hasn't been given a ton to do within the plot. Deeply sidelined, yeah. Deeply sidelined, but every time he pops up, he's doing some physical thing. His facial expressions.

The way he crosses his arms, like in humph, the way he sort of like half falls over when he's with Curly on the dock and gives her a little scare. All of that stuff is really, really working for me. It's incredible. So the two of them together, back together since, like, episode three, making me really excited. When Smee hugs slightly from the side and says this is a grown-up hug and he's like sort of suppressing his smile, like trying to be grown-up, but also,

smiling the same time. Like, he's so cute. I'm so worried about these two. Having just watched Tootle slash Isaac, who I would say is the kid we, like maybe we're the least. I mean, I don't know. Well, I'll say this for Tootles.

But if anything happens to these two, if the fly gets to these two, I'm going to have a really hard time with it. I love these kids together. And I love their constant conversations about what it means to be an adult and what it means to be a kid. It's really, really good. And especially since we've seen slightly, Arush,

like in deep emotional agitation inside of this episode all season, to have this lightness that Smey sort of brings to him and to the scene is really great. So, yeah. It's not an easy performance style. And I can understand why some people watching it will see these adults acting as children. And it just might not work for everybody. But this version of it does work for me really well. And I think it's the combination of that, you know, to take the grown-up hug moment again,

there's like a timidness to hit the way he kind of approaches him. And there's also like a brashness to being a kid and somehow walking the line of both of those things at once. Really, really delicate. But I think very, very successful within the exact thing they are trying to hit. Slightly might be learning how to hug people. sideways like a grown-up, but in terms of like luring someone into a lab to their death, I have some notes. What would you do, Joe?

I would be better at lying. It's okay. Children have learned yet to lie very well. That's great. Rob, if I had to lure you into a lab, I would not say, I have something I want to show you. I'd be like, oh, my God. Someone's in peril. I would pick someone you care about

and I would say you have to help me help them, right? And look, there's one very easy plug here. Your dog is in peril. Well, I was saying, not saying for me, but for Hermit, like, slightly walks in the room. Wendy's in trouble. Where's Wendy? You need to come with me.

She's in trouble and needs you. Boom, we're off to the races. We got to go. Yeah. Also, I would go save my dog, of course. Come on. I know. Or like, you know, any number of our beloved colleagues at the ringer

and I'd be like, you got to help me. A bookcase has fallen on someone. Some set deck has fallen on someone. If you were like, Rob, Mal is suffering from a migraine and she needs to be saved, I would be like, absolutely, let me record a two and a half hour house of art first. And then I will bring her over, you know, some Advil and some soup or something. Very nice of you.

Okay. We get, as I mentioned earlier, that superimposition of the opening egg on Sightly's face as he talks about wanting to show her but something. And I have to say, we have notes for Joe. we have notes for our guy Hermit in terms of his being quick on the uptake or not in this moment he's like

no I don't think so I really don't no this sounds quite sound right I don't think so no no thank you even it'll be fun does it do it for him I don't think so instead Hermit goes on patrol with his old pals they're beefing up island security

which is something that Morrow referenced earlier right like they're expecting and infiltration and invasion and so the troops are walking around and they have to draft Joe back into service, which gives him a convenient excuse to grill his soldier pals about the security on the island.

I do appreciate that his friend was like, whatever you think you're going to do, stop it right now. This is a bad idea. She's like, you're not being subtle at all. No. Barely a step above slightly, just now in your room, in terms of your subtle machinations here.

Look, all of, all that is true and they're right to call him out. This isn't those characters' fault, but this scene is not good. No. Like the bluntness of the exposition dump of exactly what you just laid out of the like, oh, that's why we are on this patrol because we're worried about people coming to the island. Like, it's just as wooden as wooden gets and they might as well be talking directly to the camera. Did it soften the wood for you to have such an overt Jurassic Park?

reference when he says, go down this path and you'll see a sign for the boat docks. And it's raining in the jungle. Was Dennis Nedry here in your heart and your mind and you're like, I can get over the stilted this here? I think the potential is there. I'm still going to need some jeeps. I'm going to need a can of barbassol somewhere. You know, it can be anywhere.

It can be in one of the dorm rooms. That's fine. But it needs to at some point roll down a rainy hill where someone has to then go find it. The Dilophisaurus, by the way, is my number one, like scary. Dinosaur. Oh, terrified. Would be right at home in the critters zoo here. It's not, we get the close captioning here is screeching and clicking in the distance right after, you know, this conversation.

So, but the Delophisaurus is like a chitter, a chitter hop creature, which I, and a per, there's a per, and then the hissing and the rattling. It's the whole thing. Underutilized, I would say, in the Jurassic Park universe. This really has become a backdoor Jurassic Park podcast somehow. It's come up, almost every episode, but clearly there's just something in the DNA of these two universes and projects that speak to each other. I think if you're talking about billionaires and critters and IP and, like, you know, smuggling things off islands, like, how can we not?

That's fair. Death Watch for Hermit's Pals. Oh, they're so dead. But are they, do they make it to the finale? Are they dead next week? What kills them? Is it Morrow? Is it the xenomorph?

Like, what's, what's going to happen? do you think? There's so many candidates now. I think one of the exciting things about this episode, and we'll get into a little later, is there's now a threat here that is a threat to everybody in the way that a xenomorph would be,

but a face hugger, like a synthetic doesn't really give a shit about a face hugger. The hybrids aren't really threatened by the facehugger. Fly. Yeah, the fly, that acid splooge

is going to work on anybody. So I think everyone should be very afraid, even though in theory the idea of being a soldier on this island is that you know where the monsters are, guess what, they're very close to you. That's not where you want them to be. I'd say I would just simply leave. I would just simply not be there, Rob, I have to say. This is, you know, as we get this conversation about like, oh, we've got such a good thing going here. We're paid. We're alive. What are you using your money

for if you live on this island? What are, what is it do? What are your benefits? Do you get stock options and prodigy? Like, what are we? I haven't seen a dentist here, you know? Like, Yeah, you got to Boykevler really needs to take a tip from like Google or whatever and have like, you know, all the amenities on the property. Where's the volleyball court?

Where's, you know, where's Friday, barbecue Fridays? You know what I mean? Like what's happening here? Very easily solvable, but in some ways he is, you know, reading the tech founder playbook. And I think this is a yes place.

It's very tech founder bullshit for sure. In this way, he's got a lot of room to catch up. It is inaccurate, though, depiction of where we're going because Google and all the other companies have started stripping those amenities away. So, you know. Well, you get the reputation for having them and then you just remove them and turns out the reputation still kind of sticks. Once upon a time, we used to do Taco Tuesdays, but we don't anymore. Before we get to Tootles, we should just really quickly say that Wendy is talking to her alien pal who was fully grown now.

I think it's the same. I would say like preteen, maybe. Okay. It's this, well, it's a guy in a suit now and no longer CGI right, is what we would say. That that is true. It's a day. And I'm not confused by that because the xenomorph life cycle seems to be pretty fast. Accelerated. No matter how you slice it. But this is the same day, right, that we're watching? This is the same day.

That Nibs got a race that we go, you know, Adam fires Arthur, gets on the jet, goes to arbitration. Yeah. There are away at arbitration. Nibs gets erased. All of this happens. Kirsch is watching on his iPad dispassionately. as his protege, Tootles, aka Isaac, and then Arthur get got by various aliens.

It's just 24 hours in the life of Monster Island. Not even 24 hours, because Arthur was supposed to be off the island by nighttime or else he would be shot. And so even if we say everything that happens at the beginning of the episode happens at like 6 o'clock in the morning, we're not even to nightfall yet. Dave Sylvia is not even making dumplings for one yet, right?

No. All right. Wendy. Given that life cycle. How many days or hours is it until now awkward pre-teen Zeno tells Wendy you're not my real mom and slams its door shut? I don't think this is happening. I think Wendy is mother. Wendy is mother.

She is queen. It's very Wendy darling coded, right? She comes and she reads to the boys and now they're like Peter Who. So. But the rebellion has to be coming at some point. Maybe it's not, you're not my real mom. Maybe it's I learned it by watching you. This is some real, there's something coming.

Teen Groot, wish fulfillment that you're going for here. Maybe so. You want to get that teen Zeno like a video game so that he can, she. You got to satisfy it some way. You know, what else are you going to do? We do see the Zenomorph sort of Spider-Man down from the ceiling at one point. Disconcerting. Yeah.

Did not like it. Did not like it. Pretty tough. All right. The Ballad of Tootles, aka Isaac. So given how much Kersh does not give a shit that Tootles dies inside of this episode. Yeah. What do you make of the earlier part when he's like step by step, follow the protocols to the letter?

Like, you know, the scientific method is not a suggestion, like all this or stuff like that. Like, do you feel like he actually cares? if he actually cared, would he risk sending this child into a lab with all these monsters? Or did he lure tutels in there with just this idea of, I can't wait to see which one of these things

eats you? I was left to at least entertain the latter by the ambiguity of Kirsch's intentions and we're just reading so much into that character right now. The way he is already proactively watching the lab on tape, and again, it's not alerted anybody. It's like he knows, he knows both of these things. He knows who Tudor slash Isaac is and kind of what he's after and what what strings to pull to get him to be motivated.

In this case, it's like a little more responsibility. I trust you to do this stuff. Go down, you know, next down the list in terms of the experiments. He also knows what slightly and more are up to. And so the idea that, yeah. He has all the motivation to tell lots of people about lots of things and doesn't do any of it to the point that it kind of of does feel like he's setting up Tootles a little bit. Is it like a...

And then, I mean, I guess this is something we will hopefully get to ask somewhat about, but like, is it a... This is my question is like, when we watch Ash do things, we understand that this is, this is corporate mandate. When we watch David do things, it's a little... How would you interpret that? Different. Right?

It's different. But it's sort of like just passionate scientific explorers. meets fanaticism and cultism, I don't quite, which I love. I don't quite, I can't quite get my arms around. Agreed. David, though, I'd love to try, but like, it's confusing. And with Kirsch...

I think he would love to get his arms around himself, too. He certainly did try. And I think that with Kirsch is like, similarly, I'm interested to see more about, like, what is the agenda here? Is it corporate espionage? Is he working for the other side clandestinely? Or is it just curiosity?

What's going to happen? I'm curious to see. I don't know. I think there is a baseline curiosity in it. The other things could also be true. Maybe it is corporate espionage. Maybe he has been hired or co-opted or incentivized or reprogrammed by whoever would be necessary to do that. But some of what we saw earlier in the season when he first encounters all these aliens is he seems genuinely sort of

of intrigued by what they are and what their potential is and getting the info download and is kind of fascinated at every step of the process. I think part of him just kind of wants to see, like, yeah, what happens when this eyeball monster goes into an alien or goes into a human? Do you feel like if he saw the blood slug put all of the little minnows into the water bottle, he would just keep his mouth shut and wait for someone to drink that water and then see what happened? I think he would pass him the hot sauce. That's where we are with Kirsch. Okay. Tootles, I just want to say.

Toodles is our first to go here. Again, Kit Young, I, you know how you and Bill have been giving me a hard time on the task podcast that we've recorded so far about my IMDB spoilage? I will say... It's not a hard time. This is genuinely a talent of you. I will say Kit Young being the lowest Bill's lost boy made me worry that Tootles is a first to go. And then when he named himself Isaac, I was like, I don't think this is going to go well for you. Here's a passage from Peter and Wendy.

Poor kind, Tootles, there is danger in the air for you tonight. Take care, lested adventures now offered you, which, if accepted, will plunge you in deep as woe. Tootles, the fairy tink who is bent on mischief this night is looking for a tool. and she thinks you the most easily tricked of the boys. Beware, Tinkerbell. Does that mean your best friend, the eye jockey, is the Tinkerbell in this scenario? You know, we did float this idea.

I think she might be. Okay. She's the most whimsical of all the creatures. Also the most horrifying in some ways. Particularly in sheep form, look, every time that sheep goes up on its high legs, It makes me deeply upset. For me, it's the dead stare into camera.

I feel like there's so much going on behind that eye, that one eye, that is many eyes. Not to get ahead of ourselves, but the sheep snort into camera with God smack queuing up is easily my favorite of the ending cue so far. I have to say my favorite. What was your favorite moment of all this? For me, it was when Isaac looked down at his tray and saw. the like rocks and robot parts and way, uh-oh, I'm food. And I don't understand why there wasn't like better security on the, like, given that the sense they're not afraid of all the other aliens.

Yes. And here's one that is interested in them. Why isn't there, you know, why are the hinges on the meal tray door not more secure? Like, what's happening here? also, does Tootles not have a calm device behind his ear? They all have these little things behind their ear that I think are calm devices. Like, it's what, it's what Curse uses to, like, talk to them. So, like, does that not work the other way?

Can they not calm? And, like, well, I think the first part of that is, is obviously a little hubris of like, oh, this thing is broken, but like, I don't want to let Kirsch down. I'm going to find a way to do this. I'm going to wedge open the door and do all that. that eyeball jockey headbutts the window, all of a sudden falls, everything's going to shit. That is the moment you calm.

But he's taking the scene. He's looking up at the nest. He's trying to find the bugs. And before you know it, that acid barf is just all over his face. I assume melting those communicators. Oh, yes. Well, once the acid barf comes out to play, but I would say there's like a good like 30 seconds

where he was just sort of banging on that door trying to get out that I would be like, you have a cell phone embedded inside of you. I did like how at first, when the fly landed in his arm, he looked like a kid at like a, you and I were both actually separately recently in Hawaii. You know those like parrot photo ops where you can like go get your photo taken with a parrot. Have you ever seen a small child do one of those things? This giant parrot lands on their arm and they're like excited and scared at the same time.

And disconcerted and holding their arm as far as they came out of their face. We're friends, right, man? This is very normal. And then the acid vomit happens. The acid vomit, I mean, it's not fun to watch. The nest itself, honestly, of all the creatures in this season. It kind of looks like wisteria to me. I don't like it.

No, I do not. I do not want any part of it. We had spent the least time with the flies because they were kind of in containment in some, behind some windows that were like fogged up or kind of gunked up. a little bit. We hadn't really seen them up close that much this season. Did we know that they ate robot parts? I did not

until all of a sudden, as you said, the metal and the rocks were on the tray. The feeding process, very interesting. The sheep with the eyeball jockey just gets like, hey. And so I guess the eyeball jockey can subsist on whatever its host subsists on, I guess is the assumption.

It's at least keeping it alive well enough to do its little tricks. The flora fauna. a plant gets a tray of water. I mean, very important, obviously. And then which looks like just like slabs of meat. Yep. And a nice little knock from Isaac.

You know, a little moment of affection between them. Completely pals. Yeah, rocks and scrap metal did make me a little nervous. The wedged open door certainly made me nervous. The nest overall, a hideous concoction that I just hate. All right. Well, you don't love a gently climbing flower. I love to know that about you.

Okay, anything else you want to say about, and I will say this. Yeah. Beloved Kit Young, who again, so good on Shadow and Bone, justice for Shadow and Bow that they never got to do with Six of Crows season. Great death. Great twitching and glitching and gurgling and dying. Good job, I thought. I think in terms of the death, very, look, it's notable and kind of its own symbolic moment

and visual moment anytime anything with a synth body dies, right? It's just this explosion of the milk. It's like it's so inhuman and it's alternatively also so human. And the idea of taking a hybrid in this role where he is dying in a way that only a synthetic can, like having his face melted to expose the robot skeleton underneath, and also dying in a way that every human does, which is like deeply, deeply alone and where you can't be helped by anybody. Just if we want to stare into the void together, Joe. I'm sorry.

This is the truth. This is what we all face down, whether there's acid bugs involved or not. I'm a little worried that if I did tell you so it was trapped under a bookcase, you wouldn't go help them. Because you'd be like, of course, and we all buy alone. That is not what I would say. I would try to help anyone trapped under a bookcase. I want us to save off that sense of loneliness and isolation as much as possible. That's the darkest thing you've ever said to me.

I'm sorry. And we've studied a lot of dark texts. Interesting. Look, if you want to disagree, I'm open to your. interpretations of human death, but to me, that kind of seems like where we all end up. I don't know if they'll be able to revive Tootles, but I have to say, if it's child brain in a synth body, it's tough luck that the acid vomit went right into the face and et into the face, and then the flies as they were feasting, we're really feasting on face stuff.

That seems like you were compromising whatever it is that it represents the brain inside of that thing. Well, now that we've seen what four of the five aliens can do, we still haven't seen the flora fauna really go to town on somebody. I don't think it's great that it likes slabs of meat, though. I'll tell you that much right now. No, no, yeah, that affectionate knock feels real different when that tentacle can just kind of grab you or spray you or whatever it does. What's your like power ranking of which aliens you would like to help you meet your untimely demise?

You got your xenomorphs. I guess if you want to include the facehugger, too, that's kind of a separate category. but the face hugger, the xenomorph, the eyeball jockey, the blood slugs, and now the flies. Okay, great question. Well, we don't know what the florafana does, right? No. So we're going to put that in a different category for now. And then we have not seen the eyeball jockey kill anything, right?

Crimes of opportunity so far. Yeah. We've seen it like lunge at nibs, but not worm its way in. And then we've seen after the fact what it looks like. So I don't, I mean, yeah. One can infer the way it's using its little tentacles to pluck out that eyeball. Yeah, it's tough. Okay.

Lower Fonda, a different category. Eyeball jockey. None of this is good. Rob, blood slugs, no. Might be xenomorph, honestly. It seems faster. Acid burns you, but it'll be over fast. So that's what I would say.

I don't blame you. I think it might be the way to go. Just rip me apart and call it. a day, you know? Yeah. Go down in glory. That xenomorph made fast work of like an entire

banquet full of rich dummies in like mere minutes. So, no, like mere seconds, honestly. So yeah, stab me with your scorpion tail. Take me out. How about you?

That seems pretty painful. Look, we're going to have to figure out with the xenomorph why it killed the banquet so quickly but then was just like playing with the crew of the Maginot as if it just needed some sport. I don't really understand

what's going on internally with these guys. It's weird relationship with Joe. I have questions. Well, I mean, it's a little love-hate with them. They're still figuring a lot out. And especially now that there's a separate xenomorph

that's born of his lung, what's their relationship going to be? Great question. Well, you just evaded the question that I asked you. I would choose, under these circumstances, Blood Slug is a hard pass from me. Absolutely. Acid bug, hell no.

Eyeball jockey, absolutely not. I think... I would take facehugger if I get the promise from, Joe, I need you to promise me. If the facehugger gets me, you just got to let me go. You just got to throw me in the incinerator. Acid blood. That's fine too. We just got to make it.

We got to make it fast. No chest bursting. Absolutely no chest bursting. Or if it happens, I don't want to be awake. A facehugger, though, is like a suffocation death, right? But that's kind of quiet and peaceful, I guess, by contrast. Is that, did it look quiet and peaceful for Arthur as he was like, It did not.

Like stumbling around the lab. Like, look, it wasn't great, but contrast that with like the xenomorph clawing you apart. Okay. Here's my final answer. I want the xenomorph to kill me in a way that my body is still like somewhat functional. And then I want the eye jockey to take over my body and become a podcast or whatever it wants to do. But like this is the conservationist approach. I want to be of use.

All the matter recyclers. I want to be of use to her. I support her in all of her crimes and schemes. And if I can help her, I will. So, yeah. Support the eyeball jockey. Continue to be of use to Whelan Dutani or whatever company you work for,

The Ringer in this case. Like, we support you and your life of alien aided and indentured servitude. It's not about the corporations. It's about supporting women. I support. I thought it was a shareholder value. I support other women. And that's what I would like.

Okay. So, all right. Speaking of women, not supporting other women, Wendy confronts Dame Sylvia about Nibbs. We already talked about this a little bit. Anything you want to say about this particular interaction? I have a lot to say about this particular interaction. I think especially at this point, we talked about the growth, even within this episode, you see from Wendy and her shift in perspective as she has talked to Nibs, as she's understood what happened, as she's bonding even more with the xenomorph.

All that stuff is happening sort of in the background underlying all of these interactions. There's also like the idea that telling these kids they are special has met its useful end. You can tell kids they're special over and over and over. There's a diminishing return that's going to happen with that on the 50th time. And it's clear like that's not enough for Wendy anymore. There's also the side effect, which is you tell someone they're special over and over and over and they are going to operate as a special person. And they are going to think, well, if I'm special, why are your rules applying to me?

If I'm special, why are you not the problem? Why am I not the one who is inherently right? Because I am the more evolved life form. And we're starting to see that come through specifically with Wendy, but I imagine it'll come through with a lot of the hybrids as well. We get the I'm not stupid. No, of course not, darling, like moment, which I thought was really interesting.

The rejection, I told him this was a yes place. So she's like, within this day, is decided to reject this old Facebook maxim of Move Fast Break Things. This is a yes place, right? Rejecting the Wendy name, right? Like, this is just a real hard pivot for this character. It is. And it's interesting.

I almost wish we had seen a bit more maybe special connection between Nibs and Wendy. So we can understand why this, like, violation of Nibs. Because it's almost like Wendy felt removed and more special than the other kids, you know, and not like really as protective of them, but more just sort of like secure in her status as favorite and leader. And so this felt like a very like, you hurt one of mine moment, which, you know, tribalism can sort of like rear its head whenever it wants to. Also wondering if the alien is whispering sweet nothing's into her that helps radicalize her, right? Like she's murmuring to the alien, but what is the alien murmuring? back, you know? Wow.

I mean, that's an existential question. I think we're going to have to dig into with incredible. I'll be thinking about a lot as I die alone, apparently, wrong? Something so much. Well, what is it? What is a childish alien have to offer? Like, I think something to wonder about just their general hive mind mindset is like, yes, they have a sense of community.

Yes, they have this cooperative nature. Yes, they are obeying to a, like, a kind of structure and hierarchy within their little alien society. But like what, where does that programming come from? And is it a conscious kind of programming? Is that something an alien can articulate its place within its, like, societal role? Or is that something that's just kind of baked into its nature? I would love to hear, like, literally what the alien is saying.

I also don't want to know it too much, but I also do want to know it. And that's the show being successful. So what I'm hearing is you hope next week is a flashback origin story of alien language. And so that you would have- I want to go all the way back to the roots of Xenovian. All the phoenoms. Etymologically speaking, what kind of language is this? Whereas, given your desire to have like a solid teenage xenomorph.

It's not a desire. That is a fact. A teenomorph. Like, do you feel like the answer wouldn't just be like, look what I can do and it's Spider-Man's down from a ceiling? That was literally what it did. That was literally like the xenomorph went to school and got clowns. a little bit by someone on the football team for not being strong enough and it was doing pull-ups up there.

That's what happened. All right. So in this moment when Marcy rejects the name Wendy. Yeah. I want to talk about that a little bit too. Yeah. Well, okay. I think just within the context of within this scene, Wendy is saying, I don't want to be people anymore.

Yeah, that's what I was going to talk about. She is absorbing the kersh. Never mind what the alien has been murmuring at her. She is now repeating the things that. Kursh has been murmuring at her since the beginning, which is like, you're not human. Why would you try to be one? And also this idea of like, which we talked about with Morrow earlier, so like that, put the hard motions, emotions away. What Dame Sylvia was saying about Nibs, like, isn't it nice to be able to just erase these things?

And so if she's like, if being human, like, we can get rid of it, all the sadness, all the madness, see the world for what it really is, not how it feels like all of this sort of idea. Is this what we're going to watch from her for the rest of the season? The inhuman simp. I mean, I just got like a deep pit of despair in my stomach at the idea of literally every product that will be made from now until the end of time that is geared to doing some version of this thing, of removing your despair, of removing your trauma, of smoothing over the sharp edges that make you a human being and a person. And a lot of kind of the short-sightedness of all these. like sci-fi creators. It's like, we're seeing so many things out in the world today that are, that have that, have you ever seen a sci-fi movie before sort of subtext to all of these creations?

But maybe the most important one is that we are our traumas, that we are the darkness in us, that we need all of these things to feel literally anything. Like if your existence is purely happy and special and sometimes all the time, like, you are going to be a hollow person. Like you need the contrast of those things. You need to be able to feel the full range. of what it is to be human. And if you're just, you know,

every time you encounter an eyeball jockey, trying to like copy paste over that memory, I think you're going to be left not just wanting for it, but like deeply broken for that. And yet, that is what we want to do as people. I will mostly agree with you with the asterisk of, um, not wanting to sound too like,

maha and say like, we do believe in antidepressants and other things that people need to take. Yeah, I don't know, I know. No, no, no. But that more surgical removal of certain things, yeah, is perturbing. Again, there's... It's a good disclosure.

Again, there is that, like, makes me think of Westworld in this moment when they say cognition only, no emotional effect. Like, just turn off your emotions and just be... But then she's got this tether to her brother. Like, how strong is that tether? I think it'll be really really interesting watch. It hasn't really been tested yet, honestly.

That's kind of one of the other threads that we're waiting to sort of pay off is Wendy's allegiances to her brother and allegiance in a sense to Boy Cavalier. We've seen them kind of pushing and pulling back and forth in terms of how that's shaping who she is as a person, but she hasn't actually had to pick and choose between them yet. And I think her insisting in this moment

that her name is Marcy, which fair enough, but also at the same time, saying I kind of don't want to be a human being while assuming her human name. I don't really know what to do with all that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's interesting.

Okay, we already mentioned the Arthur packing up scene. Again, I really wish we could see the montage of them trying on various like vacation outfits. Yeah. As they pose for these photos. This Jurassic Park idea of someone turned the game. off in the rain, right?

Like, just to turn off tracking of one synth, we have now turned off tracking of all of the scents, which I would say it's probably going to be bad for the rest of the season. Yeah, what could go wrong? About for who, though? What could go wrong? Good for eyeball, jockey. Sure, depends on your perspective.

If you want to join me... Yeah, good for Morrow, potentially. Yeah, you know what? These are people we're rooting for. Okay. One last thing I want to say before we get to, like, slightly and Arthur and all of that, which we talked about a little bit already, but the mold guys, this is something that like, you know, we've seen these guys in the hallway

sort of constantly spraying down the walls. We got some email questions about it. What do we think these guys are? Noah Hawley said an interview to IGN. You've moved up from the grunt space, trucker engine room feel of it, now are with the trillionaire, but even so, they're still fighting the mold. They're still fighting off the water intrusion. the fungus and the mold scrubber characters that we brought in,

all of that stuff is in order to bring the identity of alien when there's something always dripping into the Neverland world. The oceans have risen. We're in a climate change crisis world, and things are damp, I guess. Perpetually. You can create your perfect ideal island of monsters and still have some rot in the walls. So there's that.

It's disappointing. I was really hoping that Boy Cavalier would be able to have his ideal island of monsters. Yeah, you know, I know you're classically a bootlicker and love that for people. Thank you, Joe. Anything you want to say about Slightly and Arthur and their ending that we haven't covered already?

I mean, this is another pretty intense scene. I think this scene reflected back to me. Yet again, another opportunity to look inward. This is a very introspective episode of this podcast about a very introspective episode of television. What is it about us that I... Let's take the first part of this where Arthur and Hermit are meeting

and having their conversation. He's kind of giving him the heads up about the boats. We see Arthur not notice the security footage of Tootles being melted down in the lab, but it cycles off. Then that is sort of underpinning that whole scene. That whole sequence is like, is he going to look back at the monitor? Is he going to look at something that tells him that Tootles is in danger, that he's dying, that he is acid baked, whatever it is.

And there's a part of you that wants that because, like, on some level, I care about Tootles. And I want to see, like, is he, can he survive in some way? There's also the part of me that just wants the human to go in the facehugger lap where everything is fucking up. And really the core of these stories, and I would say more broadly, like horror movies and any kind of storytelling along those lines. It's just like, I want that thing to happen. I want the human to go into the fucked up space and make the dumb decision. I want them to do the thing that no one should do, even though I know that Arthur is probably going to die as a result of that. And I don't know what that says about us that we want that or at least want to see that, but boy, do I.

Something interesting that I heard Noah Hawley say was this idea that, like, television is hypnosis and that, you know, so you're watching this in the meat space, like, home with your dog or alone the way you will die or whatever it is. You're watching this and then you're transported inside of this other world if they're doing their job correctly. If there are people like yammering, if you're not on your cell phone, you're just sort of like sucked into the thing. And that more than the, he didn't talk about this, but I would say the two genres that are the most hypnotic inside of something like that are horror and comedy because, especially

in communal movie, like movie theater spaces, right? The palpable fear that you share with other people and then the palpable joy that you share with other people. There is this like emotional soup that you're swimming in and this world that you've sort of sucked yourself into as you're, as you're experiencing the story. And he was talking about how hard it is to do horror on television because there's commercial bricks. And so it just like breaks the hypnotic bell if you're if you don't have the ad free FX on Hulu option or something like that. Okay. Yeah. So that trance space that we go into with horror particularly is the most sort of narcotic

hypnotic in those moments where someone walks down the staircase into the basement where they shouldn't go or whatever. You were just sort of like almost physically pulled into with your like, maybe your brain is like, don't, don't, don't. But kind of your entire body is like, do, do, do. Because like this is. My whole body is saying this is a yes space, you know? And so that classic horror movie tropes that this sequence is playing with,

when you get horror strings for slightly as he walks behind Arthur, an iconic horror movie move. So I think that's what it is. We want to feel that sort of visceral excitement and dread and, you know, like don't stop, but also do. because, you know, it alights something inside of us. It does. Yeah.

So I think that idea of hypnotism is really interesting. And, I mean, Arthur, I liked fine as a character. I really think we should have been given more of him to really feel this. David Ristel, though, has so much, like, you know, credit in my bank from Fargo, this last season of Fargo, that I was just like, oh man, I'm going to miss you. I think it's still a great performance on us. I don't think that character has a lot going on. And as we said, like it feels like some stuff has just been trimmed out or cut for time or whatever it is.

I still feel that whether it's drafted off of Fargo or even just distilled within this performance, like a great deal of connection to Arthur, even as he is doing foolish things, even as he's doing things I don't agree with. I think there is something to the idea, too, of what ultimately lulls him into the lab, here is the fact that he has a heart. Yeah, that he wants to save Tootles. Yeah. Well, he wants to save Tootles, but also he's trying to help Hermit save Wendy,

too, right? It's like him being willing to stay on the computer and show him this stuff and tell him this stuff and disable the trackers is what then alerts him and sends him on this like death spiral, you know, via face hugger, unfortunately. How'd you feel a slightly's impression of

Hal saying, I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I'm afraid I can't do that. Open the lab doors, pal. Just. All right. And then as we mentioned, you know, while Boy Cavalier is doing his best Peter Pan impression with his like, or Titanic maybe, you know,

if we're watching that along with Ice Age in the future. That one at least would make sense to survive the test of time. Oh, yeah. Titanic's Eternal. Ice Age, we have questions. I did like Noah Holly's answer. It was what I actually kind of suspected, which is that Noah Holly watching.

a lot of ice aid because his kids were that age. I believe it. If you were, I don't know if you've had experience like babysitting or anything like, like, is there a cartoon movie that you've had to watch a ton somewhat against your will? Or is that not, is that experience not come to you yet in your life? It has not come. As a non-parent and as a younger sibling with no other younger siblings. I've dodged that particular bullet, though.

It seems, I would say the only situation has been in small doses of like babysitting someone who's obsessed with the movie Cars? And I'm just like absolutely not. Where it's like you would put cars in because you're like, that thing is just going to stand the test of time. For me, I babysat a kid who like was obsessed with the Lion King, which is a great,

it's way better than Cars than Ice Age in terms of movies to be obsessed with. But I would like, occasionally I would show up and I'd be like, Aladdin. And he was like, yeah, I'm king. And I was like literally anything else. And he's like, yeah, king. And I was like, all right, here we go again, I guess. What was the movie or project at the end of the pit?

when Dr. King has picked up her sister and her sister wants to watch the same movie over and over and over. I can't remember what it was at this point. I can't remember either. Oh my God, we're... It's just a couple more months until we're back with Mel King and the rest of the crew of the pit. I'm very excited. What a delight that will be.

Yeah. Joe, I would like you to consider, I don't know, 50, 100, hundreds of years into the future when people are still churning out content. And the new version of Alien Earth comes out, not literally Alien Earth, but some IP, driven property. And instead of

Ice Age, or instead of Peter Pan as the stand-in that is the framing device, what if it's just Ice Age at that point? What if it's even more literalized

and canonical within the structure of the show? Actually, I'm going to be really honest with you. Yeah. I've never seen an Ice Age movie. You're good.

It's fine. Again, is that the worst thing that exists? It's not objectionable. We'll all die alone. Some of us with the warm memories of Ice Age to some of us without even that to keep us company as we go.

Anything else you want to say before we go? One final practical question, Joe, as we are watching Arthur try to drag Tootel's body out of the nest. Very unsuccessfully. How much is a hybrid body way? Is this feel like dragging a car? Does it feel like dragging a piece of heavy machinery? I mean, you might ask the question, like,

then slightly drags Arthur pretty quickly, but slightly has since strength. And Arthur has... unlike Wendy has been skipping Arm Day. I think it's... Can you skip what you've never done? I think it's human weight.

I think they probably weight it you'd want to make it human weight, right? I think it's a fair question. It's also something that as we consider the end of this season, I would expect that most of the hybrids, if not all of the hybrids,

are wiped out. I guess that depends on how they figure into the multi-arc kind of structure that they're apparently trying to attempt with Alien Earth. But beyond the scope of this show, I don't know how many of these kids actually.

survive. Maybe one would be my guess. And can that one successfully blend into normal human society and not like crush every metal grate that they step on? It's just Westworld all over again. I've seen this story before. I think that, well, the good news is that per our opening conversation, Noah Halley doesn't have to worry about canon. So like the world could be sense in his idea of alien. It doesn't much matter. So the real bar room. Canada is the shit that we argue about, one or two beers deep. That's the real bar room can. Or they can all go to space.

And then we don't, you know, in space, no one cares of your synth, I guess. I don't know. In space, no one cares about canon, I promise. Deeply. All right. So that does it for episode six of Alien Earth. We'll be back with Mallory for episode seven and eight, which, as I said, I've been told absolutely rule. I'm really excited for that.

this middle bit has been a bit wobbly for me, but I'm really excited to see these final two episodes. We'll be back with the prestige. An incredible Christopher Nolan film. Where are you in the... You love the prestige, right? Fucking love it. What's your favorite, Nolan?

Have you told me? I mean, it's up there. I think it depends on what day you ask me. The prestige is a candidate. I think The Dark Night is a candidate. It's probably one of those two. But the prestige, I would say, is probably his most human movie.

which, you know... The bars in hell, but here we are. Another filmmaker who can come off a little cold sometimes, but something like deeply warm-blooded about that movie in particular. And actually, that's a spoiler. I'll save it for the Prestige Pod. Okay. And then we'll be back on the Prestige TV podcast feed

with more hooked episodes, hooked loss coming this week, more task, et cetera, et cetera. Thank you to everyone who worked on the show today. Thank you to Carlos Chiroboga, to John Richter, to Arjuno Rangelengapal. Thank you to Matt. to Mallory for being herself. Thank you to Rob for just showing up and doing two hours of a podcast with me.

You're the best. Well, I like Kirst just work here. You know, I am but a synthetic employee. Once again, more evidence that you would just dispassionally watch a coworker die under a bookcase all alone on your iPad. I don't like this impression. I don't like it. We'll see you soon. Bye.

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