House of R - ‘Alien: Earth’ Episodes 1-2 Deep Dive, Plus Noah Hawley and Alex Lawther!

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

Mal is joined by Rob Mahoney to dive deep into the first two episodes of ‘Alien: Earth’! They talk about everything from the Xenomorph to the tech overlords to some unexpected ‘Peter Pan’ references. Later, you can listen to an interview with Noah Hawley and Alex Lawther that Mal and Jo did at Comic-Con! (00:00) Intro(14:23) Opening snapshot(30:42) The Maginot(01:02:02) Tech overlords(01:33:29) The Lost Boys(01:47:35) Hermit and Wendy(02:13:09) Odds and ends(02:17:33) Noah Hawley and Alex Lawther Hosts: Mallory Rubin, Rob Mahoney, and Joanna RobinsonGuests: Noah Hawley and Alex LawtherProducers: Carlos Chiriboga and John RichterSocial: Jomi AdeniranAdditional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopowell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Forty grams of protein. Made to keep up with whatever comes next. New sweetgreen wraps hit different. Order now at order. Sweetgreen.com. Greetings. And welcome to House of R. A Ringerverse podcast on the Ringer Podcast Network. I'm Mallory Rubin. Joining me today. Here to tell me that it's not about the money. People so I think it's about the money with trillionaires. It's Rob Mahoney.

Mal, it's not not about the money. You know, it can be both. I'm here to have. I'm here on the mountain top to have a scintillating conversation with someone smarter than me. But it can also be about the money too. So really why not both? Will that person be a 12 year old? Who's to say? Will you be eating a red apple? Are you like Boy Cavalier, a member of Team Red Apple?

I guess it depends on how we want to classify like your cosmic crisps. Is that a red apple? It's not a red. I'm anti-red delicious. If that is strictly the binary, come on. Of course. When I say Team Red Apple, I mean Pink Lady. Honey Crisp.

If Honey Crisp is inclusive, then, yeah, I'm on your team. I got you. I got you. Okay. We're here today to talk about the first two episodes, the double premiere of Alien Earth, which has arrived on our television screens on FX. Rob, you're joining me to chat about this show today.

We are uniting, reuniting and uniting in the, in the apps. of our beloved co-host, Joanna Robinson, who is out for a few weeks here, recovering. We miss Joe terribly. We love Joe. We were thinking of Joe every second of the day, including when we talk about the Apple Wars and about alien Earth

and about basically everything else in life. You want to say what one of your favorite things is about podcasting with Joe? Just a little tree for her here at the top. Anything and everything. Honestly, there really is no better comfort than just feeling like you're in the hands of someone. someone like Joe on a pod where she is steering the ship.

She knows exactly where to go. She knows exactly what buttons to push. I just get to sit here and react. I get to, I have that great pleasure. Yeah. And so, yeah, I'm missing Joe something mightily, but I hope she is having her best and fast as possible recovery

with as little xenomorph involvement as possible. That's right. One can hope. One can dream. You're just hanging out in the cryo bed. As I often do. Joe is taking care, whether it's the Maginot, the nostromo, any other vessel.

she is our fearless steward now and always what's my favorite thing about potting with you're not i'm not going to say favorite we're to say one of my favorites because maybe we'll do this at the top of every episode and just uh i love this idea let's share in our fondness and our affection let's see one of my favorite things about potting with jo who is one of the best people in the world is that i love to visit all of these fictional worlds right i love to to visit these these universes and spend time in them and when i get to do that with Joe. There's this magic trick where it simultaneously feels like I've been there every day of my life with her. And also it's the first time I've ever been there at all and I get to see it with new eyes.

She's just the best. It's the best feeling. This is a beautiful person thing. Honestly, listening to the two of you trade things of interest to you both, especially when the other person is uninitiated, there are a few greater joys in the world, even when one of those joys is land man. Well, I mean, What do you mean even? Especially. Let me correct the record. Especially. Come on.

I am on the eve. Speaking of sharing joy with each other. I am on the eve of beginning my Buffy journey at last, obviously a passion of yours as well. I can't wait to dive in finally. We will be resuming, Joe and I will be resuming our stranger things, revisited pods, hot Nolan summer, et cetera. Later on, all of that is still coming, the best of the century series, et cetera. Joe will actually be making an appearance on this episode.

though, we're doing a little time travel because when Joe and I were at Comic-Con, where I got COVID, and I have been riddled with COVID, and I still have COVID. And if I sound even more sniffly and raspy and short of breath than usual on a podcast, it is both due to my enthusiasm for facehuggers and acidic blood and Timothy Olifant's new haircut, which we will be devoting an entire segment to later today, I assume. In great detail, yes. And also because I am still recovering from COVID. So thank you to everybody for your patience as I work through my brain fog.

And thank you to Rob for just kind of for days being like, I'm like, I'll let you know if I'm feeling up to the pod. We'll see. And now here we are. I'm glad you are alive. And just to clarify, this is again, chest congestion, not chest bursting happening of any kind. As of the moment of recording, we're banking. this a couple days before the premiere. So hopefully by the time this actually drops, I'll be fine.

I'll be in the bloom of youth and health. No baby xenomorphs have exploded from my chest cavity or any bodily cavity. That's a win. The weekend still awaits. It's true. We'll see. We'll see what happens. But I'm going to do my best.

And when Joe and I were at Comic-Con where we had a wonderful time, obviously, we've already had people who have listened to our Comic-Con break down, already know that Joe got to moderate the Hall-AjPen. on Alien Earth. We got to watch the premiere in a room with 6,000 people, like the speakers and the sound system. It was vibrating. Your whole body was an incredible experience. And then we got to have a brief chat with showrunner, Noah Hawley, and Hermit, aka Nemek, Alex Lothar. So at the end of this episode, we will have a brief little chat with Noah Hawley and Alex Lothar from back in the Comic-Con days. And so Joe is with you. with us here today, not only in spirit, but actually on the pod.

Quite literally. Look at that. Great stuff. And yet, my dearest apologies that instead of having Alien Earth moderator Joanna Robinson, you got me. But we're going to, we're going to trudge through. We're going to get through it. It's always a delight when you swing by the House of Our Man.

I told you this pre-pop, but I wore my Loki shirt today in honor of some of my fondest memories of podcasting you with you, which was like when you joined me both in season one and in season two to talk about Loki. And, you know, I said like similarly to those days, I told you, we'll keep it quick. We'll keep it quick. And that's what I told you about this pod. You know, we do actually, when we have two episodes to break down instead of one, genuinely, we can't really go like a beat by beat, scene by scene the way we sometimes do when we're just breaking more often do when we're breaking down one episode.

So we're going to say deep-ish dive, medium-ish dive today. But does that mean 75 minutes or does that mean three and a half hours? Rob, I have no idea. I'm not even sure by House of Our Standards, which one is under-promised? saying over delivering. Like, do the people want the four-hour pod or do they want the 90-minute pod or are there factions? You know, do we need to battle for supremacy within the bad baby universe? Also, what does time mean when you're talking about alien? And you're moving through decades of our actual lives of a shared cinematic and now television experience hundreds of

years inside of the canon. A 65-year mission for the folks on the Maginot here in this episode. I should probably issue a spoiler warning here in a moment. before we start saying even more things about these episodes, time. You know, it's like maybe we'll just take a cryo nap right in the middle of the pod, and then the runtime doesn't mean anything at all. I learned,

you know, you're not supposed to have a big meal. Okay. Before going into cryo, that was something that was established canonically in this premiere. My takeaway from that is that cryo sleep is not for me. What was your takeaway from that as a culinary enthusiast? Yeah,

what happens if you do? Is that just like you would need a bathroom break? I mean, yeah, do you like shit yourself in the cryo bed? That would be horrible. So are you just fasting going in? I have many, many practical questions about the cryobed,

none of which will be answered satisfactorily for me to get inside it. Yeah. I also am just like, while I like that there's been this consistent, everyone's in just like a tank top and their undies vibe throughout our alien experience, doesn't seem like the most practical suit for cryo. I feel like we need some sort of like moisturizing body glove. You want a full body mask, Yeah, it just seems important, but what do I know? I'm not a scientist, I'm not an astronaut, nor have I ever made a movie or a television show.

Well, let me ask you this, though, Mal. Like, are you a cryosleeper in real life in the sense that are you cranking that thermostat way, way, way down? Are you living at 60 degrees to go to sleep? Not 60, but like 69. I like a cool room when I sleep. I can't stand a hot room. room when I sleep. Can't stand it. I like the air to be cool and then I'll cuddle up under the blankets. Absolutely. Cozy times. Let's go. Wrap my arms around, not my husband, but my cat. Sure. And just enjoy a restful slumber for the evening. Listen, I almost just, because I said the word cat, I almost said another thing about the episode. I'm going to issue the spoiler warning. Let's do it. Let's get out of the way. Lest I stray again. Spoiler warning for the first two episodes of Alien Earth.

We're talking today about both episode one, Neverland, and episode two, Mr. October. But if anything has ever happened in any alien film, it could come up today. Now, nothing from the future of this series will come up today because neither Rob nor I have watched ahead beyond episode two. We've only seen the two episodes of this series that you all have seen. Obviously, like everyone else, we've seen trailers. You know, we've seen like the cast list, et cetera. But nothing's coming from the future of the show because we don't know anything about the future of this show. Any prior alien canon, though, could potentially come up today.

Does that feel like the correct spoiler warning for this episode, Rob? Feels totally fair. Yeah, I think that'll mostly encompass the movies, though I guess I don't know if you have any stray like alien isolation or alien novelization takes to get off. But I think that could be fair game as well. Great. I welcome it from you. I have nothing to contribute on that front. I will say that I had a blast rewatching all of the films in recent weeks, though I have some regret about doing it in release order instead of canon chronology order,

which I think maybe would have been the wiser decision given where this is sandwiched in the chronology, which we'll get to in a second. I'll note very quickly on the programming reminder front that you will also be joining me next week to break down the third episode of Alien Earth. So that's a thrill. Can't wait to watch about that episode. We haven't talked about these two yet, but I already can't wait to talk about episode three with you. That's going to be great. And then later that week, I'll be potting about the peacemaker season two premiere, which I cannot wait to do. I just rewatch peacemaker season. I want to show that I loved the first time around and frankly loved even more revisiting. It's long since time that eagerly make a grand return to our lives. I've missed him dearly. So I can't wait for the peacemaker premiere. That's going to be fun to pot about. Rob, anything that you wanted to do. tease. It's the NBA offseason. It is.

A little bit of a prestige lull. But is there anything anywhere that you would like to tease at this moment? Nothing in particular. You want to share a fun fact about your life then? Just to say something. How about this? A slight red.

Tell us something about like a good meal you had recently. Many, many great meals and many, many more to come. I mean, I've been in kind of a taco funk lately, but we're going to that's to unpack at a different time. I did just make a button mash appearance drafting the greatest video games of all time. How do you think you did? Unquestionably won.

There's really not a doubt in my mind about it. As you know, I just won every draft I've ever participated in, including on this podcast. Thank you to everyone who voted for me for our Mission Impossible draft. I as a, you know, to put it mildly draft savage and draft maniac, have to say that this is one of my favorite things about you. You know, a lot of people out there. say Rob Rob Mahoney. What a thoughtful guy, sure. Yeah.

What a kind, generous, charismatic person. Yeah, absolutely. What a sweet man. No. Wow. No. That's out. You're a monster.

And that is revealed in full whenever you have the opportunity to draft. I can't wait to listen to the button mash pod. I cannot comment yet on whether I believe that you have won, but I believe that you believe that you won. I think you know in your heart of hearts what you're about to listen to. But I'll say this. I am a man in my television, in my storytelling, and in my real life. I need the stakes, Mel. You know, I need something on the line. I need to feel

it. And, you know, when we're just pod and when we're just throwing around ideas, we're just pals having a good time. It's meaningless to you. It has meaning. It doesn't sound like it. There's a different edge that comes out. Okay. So every single hour that we have shared other than the drafts over the, let's see, when did, when were we overlapping at SSI over the 14 years that we have known each other in some capacity has been, has meant nothing to you except for the handful of times that we've drafted together. Painful to hear, but I don't really have a counterargument. Yeah. A twist of my words, perhaps, but I would think if anyone would see the reflection in this, it would be you. You would understand me, Mel. I understand. I would like to understand, however,

more about your relationship to Alien and also your thoughts on the Stumble Premiere. So let's get to, before we get to our deepish slash medium dive, let's get to our opening snapshot. We told ourselves we weren't food anymore, Rob, so it's time to pod. Rob Mahoney. Tell me, tell the bad babies what your relationship is to alien. Profound? Lifespanning?

I would say aliens is among my favorite movies of all. time. Alien is an unimpeachable masterpiece. The rest is a real mixed bag. Oh, yeah. But I'm going to show up every time to be pregnant with an egg. You don't ride for Prometheus? I ride for the ambition of Prometheus. There's a lot. There's a lot that's trying to happen. Does it all actually happen? People can reasonable people can disagree. But yeah, I, I find that in terms of franchise entertainments go is as consistently thoughtful and evocative. And

certainly like visually interesting is basically anything else out there. And the highs are pretty freaking high, I have to say. So the idea of an alien series, sign me up just from jump. Yes. What is your, before we get to like the, the maybe promise of a series and what we can do in the TV sandbox that perhaps we've not been able to do in, you know, the two hour confines of a movie and even many movies before, what is your, I have another big picture kind of table setting. Question for you here. Like, what is your relationship to, Noah Hawley's work as a creator. Now, anybody who has listened to your Fargo coverage probably has a feel for this already,

but give the bad babies who maybe don't know a little bit of a taste on that front as well. I am definitely an admirer. I would say especially of Noah Hawley as curator of vibes. I think he is one of the best stylists working on TV. That is something that's very near and dear to my heart. Also something sorely, sorely lacking on television, generally speaking. It is a workman's medium in a lot of senses, unless you're severance and you can just take like four years to produce a season, but otherwise, sometimes you're just churning shit out.

Sometimes you're hiring work-a-day directors to come in and just like get this episode off the ground. You never feel that way with a Noah Holly show. Everything feels so considered and so precise. And tonally speaking is, look, can it go off the rails? Yeah, I was there for the Legion ride. I love parts of that show. I am utterly confounded by other parts of that show.

And I am there for the holistic experience of all of that. Like, I love feeling baffled by the things that he throws out there. And so walking into this show, which has a lot visually in common with like the kind of aesthetic of Legion in certain ways, characters just like walking in and saying incredibly ominous things and just letting it hang in the air as they do in both Fargo and Legion also happening in this series. It's just a perfect marriage as far as like subject matter and like adapter go, I would say. Yeah. I've yet to see anybody through two episodes of Alien Earth who has nip orings, spend time in a hot tub. but you're right there's a lot of connective tissue and similarities otherwise I was thinking in the visual

palette like the great little scene with the lost boys sitting around talking about okay like all the ways that they could still die and you're just a couch behind them it's like that just could be the Legion set it could be it could also be the TVA and Loki or Mad Men but yeah it's like wow this just looks like Legion I have I have a similar

answer to what you just shared for both of these prompts. I really enjoy the alien movies. It's always fun to revisit them. It's fun when there's a new film to have an excuse to go back and revisit them. It feels similarly like the first two films, Alien and Aliens, obviously just like historic all-time pantheon films. I really like Prometheus. I, and now when I return to it, I appreciate it even more. I appreciate its ambition, even more with a little bit of space and distance. Would you say, is that your favorite outside of alien aliens? Yeah, I think so. I really like Romulus quite a bit, but it's, I think the fact that Prometheus tried to take such a big swing in terms of expanding the canon and the mythology and the lore felt like such a breath of fresh air.

Because one of the things about the alien movies is like, on the one hand, when you get those touchstone, and those familiar beats when you see an egg and someone leans down in front of it. I actually loved how in this double premiere, we got a moment, like, directly intended to subvert that where Hermit leads over and you're like, oh, my God, here we go. And then he's like, someone should call us in and stands up because why would you lean over that egg? That's clearly an insane thing to do. That was great. I really respect that Prometheus took a big swing.

Listen, I am around if anybody ever wants to do a multi-hour podcast on Resurrection and specifically a very detailed breakdown on the depth of the betrayal of sending, in essence, your grandchild through a tiny little hole in the airlock. It's messed up. It's fucked up. I don't care what species they are. It's messed up. It's fucked up.

So, you know, one of the things about the film franchise, of course, of this. And I'll say before we transition into like movie versus. TV. Similar, like, feelings about Noah Hawley, I really think he is like, I, I like Legion quite a bit. I've, I had a bit of a lull and a break in my Fargo journey post-season three, but then returned in the most recent season and, like, had a blast again. I think he is quite sincerely gifted at, it's not even adapting, it is expanding. It is expanding in a world that previously existed. And I am so excited. I was excited just conceptually, like the hype was really high for this show. But after two episodes, I'm even more excited than I already was to see

what he continues to do in this world. And like, beyond even the specificity of Noah Hawley's vision for how to make an alien Earth show, the prospect of doing an alien thing on TV is like thrilling to me. Now, I love movies. I'm always like, as we've talked about many times on many pods, if you give me the choice, you can have a two-hour movie or an eight-season television show. I'm like almost always going to pick the eight-episode TV show with the prospect of future seasons because I love the idea of getting to not only like flesh out the lore, but just inherently, of course, more time to explore character and character dynamics and put characters on an arc

and lean into the theme in addition to riding along with the propulsive engine of whatever the plot might be in a given installment. And I think, like, what I was starting to say before is, like, you know, those familiar touch points in each alien movie, you've got your airlock. You've got your face hugger, right? Like, it always feels like a jolt of electricity when you know you're going to see a version of the thing you love. But there is, I think the, like, a knock that you could have on the franchise is, like, when each film feels compelled. to check those, like, I did the airlock thing, right? You know, then how much room is there to play to explore something new? Now you get different aspects of, like, heightening certain slices of the genre world.

Certain films are more horror forward, certain or more action forward, certain or more, like, almost fantasy and sci-fi forward. All of them are sci-fi, of course. But there's variance, but inside of a template. And so the idea of a television series bursting through that, and particularly given where we are in the timeline. Alien Earth is set in the year 2,120. Yeah. Which is.

I mean, we got to keep our BVYs and our A.U. Wies. Is that the universe we're operating? And I don't know if it has a technical designation. That's a great one. Let's go with that. We're going to make up a lot of new terms today, I think. So this is two years, two years before the events of the first film. alien. And this is, I believe, if my math is correct, 27 years after Prometheus. That's where we're set.

So that's a lot of evolution to happen in those 27 years, I will say. We're hundreds of years prior to alien resurrection still. But again, less said about that, perhaps, the better. So this is just like, what excites you most about this moment in the timeline to get to explore? And then what excites you most about getting to explore the alien universe on television over multiple episodes and hopefully multiple seasons instead of an hour and 54 minute movie. Yeah. I think timeline wise, it's always been a little ambiguous to me. And maybe this has been answered somewhere in the like extra textual canon as far as what

the Nostromo's actual mission was. Like was it always part of the plant for them to veer off and be called to this derelict ship and be infected with the aliens and bring them home? Like, was that an accident or was that on purpose? And I feel like based on the timeline, in the direction things have been moving so far in these first two episodes, we're going to close the loop on some of that ambiguity pretty quickly.

So that's pretty exciting. I just think to your point about all the checkpoints that you have for these sorts of stories, the formula of alien is so rock solid. I will watch it in any form, in any fashion. I'm so jazz to see it explored with this kind of scope and setting

and specifically bring these motherfuckers to Earth. I think there just is something about the fear that has been lurking in the minds of audiences and characters for so long finally culminating, seeing an alien tearing up a dinner party, it hits different. Just when you think you've seen everything that these guys can do, it just hits totally differently. Let me tell you this. One of the questions that I asked Noah Holly, which folks will hear at the end of the pod in the interview was like, great sci-fi always

has to feel simultaneously eternal and essential and urgent now. And what was what it was like on his mind most about the 2025 aspects of exploring the story now. Everyone can hear what he has to say, but obviously we're going to talk a lot as we break down these two episodes about tech billionaires and trillionaires as our overlords, artificial intelligence, capitalism and corporate greed run amok, etc, etc, etc. How could any of that apply to our daily life? Does any of that sound familiar to you right now? I don't know. Seems far-fetched. Of all of the like, boy, this feels really like something I would see on Twitter today, a bunch of rich douchebags missing the fact that a spaceship has crashed

into their building because they're having a Louis the 14th theme dinner party in their penthouse. It's a little, it's a little on the nose, but it's an on the nose that I appreciate. It's just, I laughed. I did. I juggled. Great stuff. What were your overall thoughts, Rob, on the two-part premiere? We're going to go through the plot lines and the character sets and some kind of like groupings in a minute here.

But give us a little bit of a moose-boosh. Give us a table-setting taste here. You can spend the entire time talking about Timothy Oliphant's Kirsch, if you'd like. You can go in any direction. How did you find these two episodes? They made me feel really alive. I'm going to be totally honest. Because you were watching everybody else.

I was watching a lot of grisly death. Destroyed by the dripping drool of a hungry xenomorph. Confronted with my own mortality, perhaps. And this is, I think, what Noah Hawley does so well is you see something you think you understand, you think you know, and he expands it in just the way you're talking about Mao where it's like, oh, I didn't know you could do this with that. And the closest thing non-Hawley I could compare it to was first checking on Brian Fuller's Hannibal show.

And it's like, oh. Interesting. again, you think you understand this IP and it just gets spun in a totally new direction and it also feels it's so clear and you could see this I think with Romulus too with Fetti Alvarez where it's like these are two people who've been thinking about alien

for 40 years. You know, it's just like it's been stewing, it's been iterating, it's been rolling over on itself and because of that it's like the themes, the visuals, the vibe, all that stuff is locked in exactly where it needs to be but then you get all this new stuff around the edges that makes it feel so fresh.

And I am energized by watching these two episodes in a way that have not been energized by a lot of television this year. Yeah, I really agree. I thought these were great. I can't wait to watch the rest of the season. Whenever I get to see a premiere out in the wild with other human beings, and particularly for me, a person who spends, I would say, 97% of my life at home in pajamas, I'm like, all right, I got to make sure I can separate the experience of the kind of jubilation of sharing that with the quality of it. And it was electric in the room.

Like electric in the room. I mean, the response and reception to the premiere, and they only showed the first episode, was sincere. So that was cool. And I was like, damn, that was good. People seem hyped. This is awesome.

We're going to maybe have a banger on our hands. Got home, rewatched it, watched the second episode, and I was like, you know what? We got a banger on our hands. We really do. That great. Banger confirmed. And to your point about how tangible, how palpable Noah Hawley's enthusiasm for this franchise is like you can feel we're going to talk about, you know, some of the new creatures. And obviously, like, we open with this rundown of the corporate control and state of the

world, the three different types of tech in the race to see what we'll win. Like, we're expanding from literally the first word. We are expanding what we were about to see. We're very familiar with since. Here are our cyborgs. Here are our hybrids, et cetera. And it's just like, okay, clearly there is the thoughtful, creative writing, directing, show running mind of like, well, the challenge is to make something that simultaneously feels familiar and fresh, right? When the title of the series loads and it's that you just get the, little like feeling in your heart as an alien fan when you see the letters and they start to start to take shape and form and you're like we're fucking back like it hasn't even started and we're fucking back

here we are the artistry and then also just the like it's not just I need to do something different because what's the justification for an eight episode television series or what's the justification beyond hey we always want more IP of doing it at all it's like you could just feel I I know all Holly have spent my life actually wondering about this stuff. Yes. I have always wanted to know about the Yutani side of Waylon Yutani. And so I will put a character in the show through which I can explore that, right? I want to know who did Waylon Yutani have to beat or best or try to thwart?

Who maybe in some way inhibited that corporation's assent, like all of these different. How did we get to the place where we know? we will be. And also, what did we not fully understand about where we were that entire time? Right? Because to your point, which I really like at cosine, part of what's always fun about revisiting the movies is there's so much that's cemented, but like you do have, you've always had room to play and wonder. And so like the opportunity to fill in the space in those two years, I'm sure, I've no doubt that there will be some alien purists who are like, frankly, sir, how dare you? That's going to happen, right? But there's

so much opportunity to build with intention and build from the perspective of somebody who loves and understands and appreciates the thing in the first place. And that's just such a solid foundation. So I am hyped. And I think it's probably time for our deepish slash medium dive. This episode is brought to by Paramount Plus. Beth and Ripper back in a new series, Dutton Ranch. Kelly Riley and Cole has a return. 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,

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and some very tasty limited time flavors. New Whole Foods, Market a peach, apricot, rose, Italian soda. Perfect for a picnic or brunch, as is their trending mango, Yuzu chantilly cake. But if you're on the go, new 365 strawberry pretzels make a great sweet snack. That sounds delicious. Get savings with yellow sale signs storewide and everyday low prices on 365 brand items. Enjoy the fresh flavors of spring. Save at Whole Foods Market. Let's start aboard the Maginot. Again, very familiar way to orient us. But I wanted to talk, and this is both familiar because we get a lot of cutting in prior

alien films. And also, you can kind of feel in a way that I respect Holly flex in a little bit right from the go here. What did you think of just the filmmaking style, not just aboard the ship in the opening, but we can kind of use that as an excuse to talk about this more broadly. The kind of frenetic cuts and intercutting and editing of various sequences, little like flash forwards and glimpses, drips and drops of bloody horror so that the doom is apparent before we actually see it unfurl.

And then plenty of other sequences where we are contextualizing something from the past. So we will flash ahead at the beginning, for example, to a bloody-eyed corpse on the floor that we will later have a long conversation about, like, examining and the suffocation and the blue lips and the toxin and what really happened here. But we glimps that very early. Okay, well, things are bad. Things are going to go horribly wrong here, right? When our guy, boy, Cavalier, your favorite tech overlord. I have, I'm on record about this, yes. I got to say he's great.

It's a great character. It's an incredible performance and character. The toe dexterity on this man alone. You know, it's quite impressive. I have absolutely zero notes on taking the Utani phone call from bed and putting his iPad between his feet. That is the most for a character who has named his Island Neverland and his first batch of hybrids, the Lost Boys, and is obsessed with Peter Pan because he is Peter Pan and doesn't want to grow up. That was a real I'm a kid moment and it really worked.

And in that chilling sequence where he's reading a passage from Peter Pan, that was another great example to me of like we're seeing various different glimpses and images from Wendy's life as Marcy and then suddenly as the tone of the passage changes, the tone of the imagery changes. A sheep with prods on its head and the thrumming of the score. So just all of these little touches, like you're, I mean, to borrow Joanna's moniker for you,

freeze frame Mahoney. I mean, this is just a treasure trove for you. What did you think? There's so much happening. I think especially even from the future casting perspective that you mentioned, like creating that sense of doom that we all know was there. Like we know what we're here for.

And we're not going to pull the structure of aliens, again where you're going to hold back the Zeno more for that long. Right. So show it to us up front. But at the same time, we don't dwell telling the entire story of the Maginot, which, look, I'm not here to tell anyone how to do their job. Whoever named the Maginot, there's like some nominative determinism happening here. I quite agree. You know, you kind of walked into it in a certain respect.

But seeing the incredibly grisly carnage that the alien. Lillian is leaving behind to see the flashes of all that, of all these scenes, of all the crew members who were kind of just meeting and getting to know for the first time and seeing how a lot of them ultimately meet their end. I love that deployment of telling the Maginot's story as opposed to, oh, we're going to spend the whole first episode with them or the whole first two episodes with them. Like we are, we are getting this thing moving. We are putting all the wheels in motion. And I think the filmmaking is a huge reason that works. It's also a huge reason why they're able to do all this perspective play. There's so many like someone looking at a screen.

but we see the reflection of their face and their expression back kind of superimposed over the top of it or someone looking through the eyes of a synthetic through something else and seeing their reactions. Like how much information they're able to convey in a really short amount of time and a really like short amount of like visual spectrum, honestly incredibly impressive. On the looking through the eyes of a hybrid front, I thought that was such a, we'll obviously talk later when we get to Wendy and the Lost Boys and Kersh and everyone. at Neverland and Prodigy Corp Island, about the exploration of the question of humanity, which very clearly will be one of the central areas of examination of the entire series,

not just these two episodes. But in terms of what the filmmaking can achieve, we are so absorbed because we are rooted in various perspectives in like Wendy saying, I am human. and then you see boy Cavalier just looking through her eyes because while he is totally swept up with how she thinks about her own humanity and we'll get to obviously everything about his quest and his pursuit at the end of the day he also is like here is something that I can access literally through machinery and all of that can be conveyed to us in one frame this is just yeah very impressive very impressive in that circumstance within that framework what is your own as a synthetic as a hyper like what belongs to you if your own if your own visual scope isn't necessarily your own and I think conveying that

through the filmmaking is really smart I think conveying the sort of refracted horror is something that's always been so key to alien but really horror movies everywhere of it's like we know what the xenomorph looks like we're going to see the whipping tail crawling into a you know a duct behind somebody but sometimes you just want to see the facial expression of the person freaking out who just saw it for the first time oh my god um there were a lot of really good really cool xenomorph shots across these two episodes. Absolutely. And a lot of the comedic gold of the Comic Con Hall H panel was various members of the cast talking about all of the K.Y. Jelly that was drooping on them throughout the process of filming the series.

But that shot, just the like, we know you want to see it. So we're going to luxuriate for a second on the slow profile of the armored. head for the first time. Great shit. In terms of people's facial expressions, yeah, I loved. A couple of my favorites that popped to mind. I love the first time that the drool drips on Hermit's shoulder and he looks up into the like, cavernous depths and it's like, well, we know, but he doesn't know yet. And that's true for just one more beat. And like in that beat, you and the character are in a different place and like you know where they're about to be. and that's just so fun.

And then you contrast that to something like that moment with Morrow, the elevator in the episode two. By the way, what was that gun that he used to like basically make a webbing duffle around the xenomorph? It looked like he had like Shilob's spider weeping from Lord of the Rings. It's like, what is this? This is incredible. He tries to stop these soldiers. He tries to warn them. Okay, let me stop you.

She doesn't try that hot. It's just like, you're making him a mistake. Yeah. You're making a mistake. This is a character who at that point we have seen. And we have a lot to learn about what happened aboard the Maginot, but we have seen him. He's in, he's communicating with mother. Always a thrill in an alien story.

Usually everything's, everything's fine. Whatever you have to hit that keypad. Everything's fine. And one of the members of his crew is begging him, let me in. And he gets up and he activates its cyborg arm. And he just melts the hinge at the door to ensure that she is brutally annihilated by the xenomorph. Like we've seen, we've seen him pledge by this point that he will find every prodigy, a soldier who is making their way through and ensure that the specimens, that the cargo is restored and protected. He has put, he has our guy, Guy talk from White Lotus is back.

Tough. Tough turn for Guy talk in this episode. And his fellow soldier Hoyt, both of whom fall. victim to the blood slug, one of the most horrific things that I've ever seen this like leech blood bag. And we've seen Morrow do all this horrible stuff. We're not inclined to feel sympathetic. No. But when the xenomorphs head rises behind him and we're panned in close and his face is beating with sweat and the terror is unmistakable chills. He keeps it pretty cool under the circumstances. And I got to say a lot of the people in this story are keeping it much cooler

than I would. The guy talks partnered the first guy who gets the bloodslug bloodline bagged. He's got that thing crawling around in his uniform for quite a while. And he's just not feeling anything. He's not responding. Here's my take on this. You ready? I'm about this. This is what I couldn't help but thinking because it goes down the back of his neck. I'm like, this is what and this is later. But just like, you know, we see they're watching ice age still, right? Questions about that. Maybe the most dystopic part of this entire story. People still watching, I think that that's like Ice Age 4. What are we doing?

I mean, listen, there are only so many, there are only so many Reggie Jackson highlights that we can pull up. We need to entertain ourselves somehow. It's true. What this tells me, though, is that people are still watching Spider-Man. You feel it's hanging on the back of your neck, and instead of appropriately freaking out, you're like, let me see what happens.

Let me roll the dice. Let me see what happens. Just how radioactive is this radioactive insect? Yeah. That's not what happened to our guy Hoyt. That's not what happened to our guy Hoyt. Did not go well. You know, on the visual front, another thing I loved was just like when we're aboard

the Maginot, this just looks like the 1970s. It does. Because that is when the film Alien came out. That movie came out in 1979. And so we are clearly going for like, in terms of their their uniforms, just all of it. It looks like that, even though that makes absolutely no sense for where we would be in the future timeline of this world. But I loved it.

I just loved a little touches like that. And then, of course, you have like the setting of a big stretch for all of us here covering shows filmed in Thailand. Prodigy, you have this pairing of these like incredibly futuristic cityscapes with this like unbelievably lush. natural beauty. It's like a just beautiful looking show. One can only hope that this far in the future there is that much natural beauty left.

You think no more greenery anywhere. I'm concerned. I'll say that. But I'm with you on the overall aesthetic and it's like, again, what do you have to nail for an alien store? You have to nail that very specific look. You have to make every button look so pushable that I just want to jump

into the cockpit or into the communications room or whatever. What is the room that Morrow's in where he sealed himself in? That's not like a cockpit per se. No, that's like the communication center for, yeah, firing off all the crew was dead.

Honestly, maybe my biggest laugh was him sealing the door shut and then going back to entertain. Yeah, they're all dead. Extremely tough stuff. That was good. Nails the look and feel stuff like so quickly and so easily

that's like within 30 seconds to a minute, you know that, okay, we're locked in. Also, one other small thing about that is that I feel like Alien does, but a lot of other sci-fi doesn't. This idea that space travel is slow and boring. It's like if you show a spaceship moving through space, it shouldn't be. I mean, if there's a dog fight, yeah, maybe it's a little dazzling.

If it's just a long hauler with a little zoo in the back, that's not an interesting ship to watch like hurdle through space. Right. 65 years is the length of this mission. Tough. And that's a long time to be basically going, we hear they lost a lot, they lost a lot of people to collect these specimens, right? And then it's a lot of like awkward shared meals when you wake up from cryo and you're like, was, was Tang watching me sleep again? I don't feel good about Tang. I don't. I have some concerns and questions about our guy Tang.

You know, you mentioned like that one of the things you're interested in about where we are in the timeline is like marching toward learning more about the Nostromo. And one of the things that I thought was really key to establish right away is like, okay, we have now many movies and now a show across many years of the timeline in Prometheus and Covenant, like we're with Wayland. we have a sense of like the earlier exploration and and clarity or efforts to find clarity about what is out there, you know, how to pursue a little thing like immortality before we get to our like bio weapons obsession, et cetera. At the end of the day, whatever the corporate overlords were seeking, the people on the Nostromo didn't know what was waiting for them, right? fuck you ash but yeah give her taken ash perhaps can't give me real ash vibes i got to say more ash than bishop it seems

oh i just love bishop oh what a what a darling i just love bishop this crew knows exactly what they're doing they from and this was the mission we we have this fascinating conversation where um roger from bad sisters is teaching one of the youngsters his social studies. And we'll get to some of that when we talk about the tech overlord, corporate control of the world and the conglomerates that have states their claim to various regions, planets, et cetera. But they start to argue, you know, there's a lot going wrong with the ship. What if we just like got rid of the specimens, to which Mara replies, the specimens are the mission, period. We see the blood slough, the rat lowered into

the blood slug case. We've got all of the different specimens clearly labeled. They were sent to retrieve these things. That's what this was all about from the word go. And they have collected a vast array of them and are now seeking the things are about to go awry to bring them back to Whalen Utani. So they're all in on it. They know what this is about. Do they know the risk? Do they know the danger? Maybe not. Unlikely based on how this went. Once the bodies are piling up, there is a sense.

But I don't think most of the people involved to know the scale of what they have walked into. So let's talk about that a little bit more. What they're actually carrying and then this kind of air of mystery. On the creature front, we've got a mix. we have the classics. We've got our xenomorph. Of course. This is, this was another Comic-Con Hall-H highlight was the cast all talking, because

it's a practical effect. Obviously, there's, of course, the VFX as well, but there's a gentleman in a xenomorph suit. You can really tell, like, that this is like a person running around, a person jumping after Alex Lothar, etc. And they were like telling all these stories about this is this, like, really sweet guy who's a vegan. And then he just has to be like, I am the chief predator and the most perfect organism in the world. I mean, what do the aliens eat? Do we know for a fact that they eat meat?

People. I mean, are they eating the people? Or are they just kind of tearing up the people? You're ingesting some of it. Yeah. If you're also making you ingest them. That's true. That's true.

When your, when your xenomorph throat prong burst through somebody's face, you're taking some of that in. For sure. But you could pick it out, you know? I'm saying like, you floss a little bit. Are they, you know what? Those are beautiful teeth. Shiny? So shiny that you can see them in a dark air duct. You know, the reflection is just piercing. You think the xenomorphs use in Visaline or like, what's their secret? How are they? They're getting that nice alignment. Only the, you know, the creators in Prometheus know for sure. You know, we're really going to have to go back to the tape on them. We got a lot of face huggers, of course.

I think the with love and respect to hermit a character I'm instantly very invested in and the other members of his unit got some notes on the search part of the search and rescue you know they identify correctly that something has burst out of the chest of one of these individuals and through the glass of the cryopod

and has left a bloody trail and so we should follow it but like one bed over didn't check the other bets. Facehugger right there. It's like, guys, let's take a look at that. We have a lot of new creatures, though. It's not just a xenomorph facehugger bonanza here.

I want to know two things. How do you feel about all of these new creatures? How do you feel about actually three things? One, how do you feel period about the idea of new creatures? Two, how do you feel about the specific new creatures, which will run through what we've seen in a second here? And three, are any of them as scary to you yet as the house? hybrid from Romulus.

The hybrid is very scary. Honestly, OG xenomorph is terrifying. So the bar is already quite high. I'm loving the diversity. I'm loving the idea of a huge and seemingly infinite universe in which there's all kinds of life that could kill you. And it doesn't always look like the alien that we know and love. The possibilities of that are really exciting.

And it's not just like, oh, we made an alien but a dog. It's, oh, let's do this weird eyeball parasite and just like chase the tail on what that thing would look like and feel like. Let me stop you there and say something. I really liked this show. I like the new creatures. I agree with you. I think it makes just sensed.

It's fun. It's cool, but it makes sense that we would be discovering more creatures and not just bringing back the eggs and the facehuggers and the xenomorphs. Maybe not enough friendly ones. Like who is the Max Rebo of the aliens universe? That's kind of what I want to know. This is a great question. I don't think it's the blood slug, the eyeball monster, or the, is. Is it flora or is it fauna bobble that unleashed a lethal tentacle toward doodles in the hall?

Listen, need to get this on the record, need to say it now. These episodes, which I'd love, committed a cardinal sin. A cat was harmed. Cat was harmed by the eyeball monster. A cat was brutally viciously harmed. Quite. We were made to look at it for too long. and I am outraged and more importantly than that, Jonesy is outraged.

It's an orange tabby, Rob. It's an orange fucking tabby. And you know why. And it's not okay. It's not okay and it shouldn't have happened. I am glad for lower reasons we don't have to entertain is this Jonesy's dad. You know, we don't have to go down that. particular road. Well, let's start here. Mali Rubin, you, animal lover, would you take on the 65-year

mission to go round up some animals across the galaxy? I would not go to space. Let me say that. Out on space. No, I love space. When I was a, this won't surprise you to hear it all. I was a bit, I had a telescope when I was a kid. Nice. And I was just like, look at space or try to. I didn't really know ever learn how to use the telescope. They show us it a poet or maybe a podcaster. Love space. How space, space is good. That is my first, but not my last Thor, the Dark World reference of the pod. Stay tuned.

I will leave. Buckle up, buddy. Buckle up. I love space. If we were actually in a different phase of our shared existence and maybe we will be by the time we're still kicking, who knows? Where it really was just kind of routine to go to space, that would be different. But right now, like when people are like, like Bezos, like I'm going to space. I'm like, what?

I don't I just seems It's very scary and reckless I don't understand While I would also I would not want to ever be away From my beloved pet Halo I would certainly never take him to space

Like I was always so dismayed To see Jonesy not only because it's very stressful Even though you know it's going to be okay To see Jonesy in peril The jostling of the carrier Always makes me like Wanna cry It's just so upsetting

But what is a cat doing on these vessels? How is that what the cat wants? It can't possibly be what the cat wants, Rob. Let me ask you this. What is the cat doing any of the rest of the time? I would think a cat could accomplish most of its life goals on a spaceship. Listen, see, this is a difference between cat people and dog people. You're a dog person.

This is a divide that we have. And you're like, I can't be a cat person. I'm a cat person. You know what I have to say about dogs? Fucking love them. They're great. I have a lot of room in my heart. Yeah.

Why don't you? Here's my thought. What if the eyeball monster is the cat of its own world? You know, who are we to say that our cats are a superior animal than them? If you spend any time with a cat on Earth, you would understand that they're superior to anything and anyone. Okay? First of all. Yeah.

Is the eyeball monster the cat of its world? I mean, it does seem to be very agile. Yes. Very creative. Quick on his feet. Yeah, mobile. A creature who is at least initially maybe misunderstood by some around it. I think so.

I don't know. How would that eyeball monster respond if offered a little like a paste tube? Are you familiar with paste tubes? Do you know what these are? Cats love them? I have no idea what you're talking about. Churu tube? No.

All right. I'll send you some videos. Please. They all will love some. True story. Yellow had his annual echo cardio ecocardiogram recently. It went great.

And one of the vet techs was like, is it okay if we like offer him a little bit of a little bit of true? No free ads, but also if you guys want to sponsor the pod, hit us up. And we said, of course he loves him. Came out after. She was like, he was really macking on that tube. That's a direct quote. She's going to town.

He was mac in on that tube. And he was. Unfortunately, the eyeball monster was macing on the wonderful cat in this to double appear and it made me upset. Let me issue this as a cat comp. This is one of the descriptions it has. Yeah. As he's getting all the info on this particular alien. Yeah.

More study needed to gauge inherent intelligence, though T. Ocellus has shown remarkable problem solving skills at a near human measure. Would you say that that describes Halo as well? Superior to human problem solving skills. He can do anything. Well, more study is needed. but I'm just saying they could be in the same class. Okay. Which of these creatures was most corgi-like in your estimation as a corgi enthusiast? Probably the blood slug, unfortunately.

Yeah, I was I was leaning blood bag, but you want to capture the slug part of it as well. So I'm kind of torn between the two. And it's like very leech-like. Yes. A terrifying construction. Leach-Mich. I would love to hear some suggestions for this one. I feel like there's something there.

between blood slug and blood, blood bag, and a third as yet discovered alternative that could really work. For the eyeball monster, I took to calling him the eyeball jockey, because he's basically riding you around. You know, he's just like completely wired into your brain, controlling your cap parts or your human parts. It's not good. Arrible. Also, why did we need to see two, I don't know why I'm talking about something this much that was this upsetting to me, why did we need in fairly short succession, two different beings, this poor sweet cat and then rich, uh, bewigued party guy. Oh, yes. Severed at the middle, just dragon.

Bottomless. Why? I can't lie. I did, I did love that little, that little beat of him dragging around half his torso after getting ripped apart by the Zeno Morp. The party guy. Yeah, that was great. Yeah.

Did we need it with the cat? Horrible. The double reveal of cat's silhouette, lapping, up blood into half-zombified face into then half-zomified body, quite upsetting. Let's move on. I can't. I can't handle it. Let's move on from the cat part, but I do want to salute the time-honored tradition in catching

the eyeball jockey. Yeah. Yes. Our hybrids participate in the time-honored tradition of just like catching the bug under the bull. You know, it's really... And then Sme is just like, I got it. Yeah.

I'm holding this metal team. all you got to do is you put a piece of paper under that thing you run it out into the yard you throw it out it's like a spider you're just like you got to save it you know you got to do what you can and i i applaud them for for participating in that part of humanity even that far into the future on the eyeball monster's problem solving prowess front it did seem like you know because when they call in kersh and it's me like he's put the microscope on top of the metal bin but like he then he lifts lifts his hands i ball monster clearly could force this way out and doesn't try to. Very much like abiding my time, dismaying. Perhaps just domesticated, you know? I don't think so. It's just ready to curl up with them on the couch. That great couch back in Neverland.

Beautiful. Who wouldn't want that? What alien wouldn't want to curl up on that couch? The appeal of a good piece of homeware, the appeal of a lovely, a lovely couch, not a mystery. But here's what is a mystery, Rob. Did something more than what meets the eye happen aboard the Maginot? We have obviously, like, and apparently, as we already talked about, we've got the burst chest cavity, the burst cryopod, the trail of blood.

Yes. We've got the facehuggers. At least to some portion of the crew. We have the medical slab discovery, the foreign bodies, and his GI trusses. Like, some of this is, okay, the facehuggers latched on the xenomorphs burst forth that we would expect. All that. Absolutely. But here are a few other things we know.

We find corpses that have been littered with bullets in the chest, in the head. We find corpses who have died from suffocation. Hermit points out the blue lips says, and because they're like, oh, you know, air and the, oh, depressure. gas cap, no, toxins. Okay? We have all of the like weird shit about our guy, Tang, watching people sleep and they're like, get away from this one woman and then he goes and sits down very close to the other woman. And then we flash to confirmation that he is, in fact, watching them sleep. Also in one of the other like rapid fire intercut sequences, there's a very upsetting shot of Tang just screaming. Something's going on with Tang, clearly. We have that sequence

where Marrow is like, do I need to restrict you guys to quarters? We hear a rundown from the captain of all of the shit that's wrong with the ship. The comms are down. The log files are corrupted. They're burning too much fuel. A lot is a miss other than the obvious. And so my question to you is twofold. One, how much time do you think we're going to spend back in space aboard the Maginot,

learning the answers to the questions? And then what do you think happened? Was some other sabotage or mutiny a foot that is independent to the bursting forth from the chest cavity of a little baby xenomorph? Or do you think that everything that happened with gunfire, with toxins, etc., was in response to trying to contain a specimen that got loose? Yeah. I have zero doubt that there's something else in play. There's just too many of these circumstantial facts. And yes, I think there is probably a very alien-esque, like, maybe Tang knows that one of those women has ingested one of the alien eggs already and is like keeping closed tabs and see what happens.

Like maybe it's something like that. I also think one of the members of this crew, if not multiple, are probably participating in some kind of corporate espionage, right? Like, if the structure of the show is about all of these different corporations and the way they're trying to steal information and proprietary stuff from each other, someone here works for, like, Lynch or whatever one of those other. companies. It's like there's just got to be someone on board who is pressing buttons they shouldn't, who is sabotaging things that they shouldn't. Because by the end of it, not only is all the crew dead, the ship is hurtling toward Earth and cannot be steered in any way whatsoever. So clearly some stuff has been blown up and destroyed. Yeah. I agree with you. I think it is as close to a lock as anything that something else is afoot here. I think the fact that we get that conversation about, oh yeah, four corporations control the world. Oh, Prodigy has entered the chat. And we know it's Whalen Yutani, Prodigy, obviously our primary focus so far, but we have Lynch dynamic and threshold also in the mix. I guess you could potentially just say that to establish the state of play. And it's possible that it is all going to be like oriented between Prodigy and Whel and Utani.

But that doesn't seem possible because Prodigy's existence doesn't span back to the launch of the Maginot. So one of those other companies, if there is a spy aboard, has to be associated with another firm. We learn that our guy, boy cavalier, it's like 10 years, you know? He's kidding. This boy genius start. Isn't a new? New in town in the town that he now is his because he has control of a large slice of the world.

So yeah, I think that is a lock. And like it was we'll talk more about the, or we could just transition to this now because we're going to talk about our tech overlords and what we see here. We have this series opening note before we get to the actual conversation between Utani and boy, which basically hits that note that you're citing. It's like, that's mine. No, it's mine. Hey, let's get the lawyers involved. Always goes great.

Really priming us for the fact that, like, you know how this works. You know what it means to try to encroach on what's mine. It feels like we're priming for, for, and that sounds great, honestly. Corporate espionage inside of our alien horror, why the fuck not? Please. Let me share with you the opening text at the beginning of the episode. Here it is. In the future, the race for immortality will come in three guys is cybernetically enhanced humans, cyborgs,

artificial intelligent beings, since, and synthetic beings downloaded with humans. Human consciousness hybrids. Which technology prevails will determine what corporation rules the universe. We learn that at this point in history, Whalen Utani controls North and South America, Mars and Saturn, dynamic controls the moon. And Prodigy was started again 10 years ago and is, to quote Petrovich, a synths, AI. Here's my question.

Before we get into Boy and the Prodigy crew a little bit more. How does this, like, how deeply, to what extent is this compel you as a premise, given that one thing we know. And again, we said we'd be talking about all the other movies. So this is, I don't, this is fair game. It's about as fair game as anything like other than there are xenomorphs in these films. Yes. Waylon Utani is not like losing in this show. No.

So what, if any, bearing does that have on how you're processing what you're watching here, just knowing the chokehold that Whalen Yutani has on the canon in the future? Not forever, but for a while. I think it can be really narratively interesting to spend time or anchor your perspective to the losers of something that you know is going to happen, a change you know is going to come, especially when you position it in this way where these companies all have kind of competitive products, at least slightly adjacent kind of robotic endeavors, and how they are positioned in the marketplace is relative to each other.

So it's like in order for one of them to win, they're going to have to either subsume or kind of outflank the others. And so for Whalenutani to win, does that mean they are kind of overwhelming this like hybrid idea and kind of humanizing the synthetics that they create? Or is it that they're moving in the opposite direction of complete synthetic compliance? and removing the humanity that's at the core of this story with the hybrids in all kinds of ways. Yeah, I'm with you.

I think, like, how did Whalen Yutani get to be where we find it later? But also, like, all of the things that happen in the spaces that we haven't visited or occupied, also just, like, even the way the characters throughout the film franchises, like, talk about Earth, you know, so much of so many movies, including ones earlier in the timeline, to be clear, but, like, is just this idea of, like, exploration and colonization and colonization, this like sense that we not only can move beyond Earth, but need to.

Obviously, here in this show, like, Hermit got accepted to med school on Mars. You know, we've expanded beyond Earth already, but this like idea, this beat that that recurs that like Earth, oh my God, not Earth, we can't go to Earth. And then finally you build toward a moment where you succeed the majesty of Earth. I am just, I've always been fascinated to learn more about like, what was actually happening on earth throughout these different moments and how did the people who gained power get it and what happened to everybody else? So I'm really looking forward to exploring that and I think that Boy Cavalier, Prodigy and all of the other, establishing the

various prodigy characters to me was one of the most successful aspects of the two-part premiere. Boy Cavalier Instant icon. Just like this is going to be a blast. You can just tell. Hell, this is amazing. Dame Sylvia, Arthur, Kirsch, Wendy, the Lost Boys. This is one of the more thematically rich aspects of the world right away. And there's a lot here to talk through and explore just at the jump in terms of where we find these characters of what we think it might mean. But before we leave Whalen Utani, what did you think about this Utani boy cavalier phone call? And also just the fact that we're going to get to spend more time with the Utani.

side of Whalen Yutani, which is not a thing that we have done before. I mean, I love seeing the two of them interact, even over footheld iPad. And just like the, you know, the subtle conveyance of like, oh, this ship has something that's valuable to me and therefore kind of valuable to you to see. Like it has to be. It simply must be even if you don't, you want it just because they want. You don't know what it is. You know it matters.

Yeah, exactly. And the way that all that is sort of setting up all of these other battlegrounds and tension points as far as the jurisdictions of these ships within these cities within that are crashed into. buildings and who owns what and how. And then within that, staging the idea that there's this search and rescue team of like store brand colonial Marines basically who are going in, who are like a privatized army that is inherently hostile to the ship that they are going to ostensibly save because they're

coming from a rival corporation. And so the fact that you're creating all of these layers of, you know, like effectively bureaucracy that are preventing these companies from helping each other, that are preventing people from helping each other that are really screwing up any possibility of containing the alien in any meaningful way. Sounds entirely plausible to me and unfortunately plausible to me. I really agree. The glee with which boy says to you, Tani, like, I don't have to remind you that any incursion on a proxie territory will be construed as a hostile act. He's like, let's go, you know, let's go. Like, give me a reason. And that's terrifying. All of this,

of course. And I think particularly, you know, we haven't spent much time with U-Tani yet, but we're in like a corporate boardroom on the other end of that phone call. We're literally in Neverland with Boy Cavalier where Adam, his right-hand, besuited, heavy. This is like, seems to this two chief responsibilities seem to be handing him iPads for calls and handing him him a ball, like a stress ball toss around? Good work if you can get it. It is. I sign me up immediately.

I wonder if Prodigy Corp is taking applications right now. Oh my. Just tell me the vesting schedule and I am there. Can you start working on your, um, are you ready for a magic trick? Apparently that's the only move that got. Yeah. It's a pretty good opening move. It is good, but if you work in Neverland, you're like, oh my God, this shit again.

I know. Are you kidding me? I got that vibe from Arthur. little bit, you know, it's, I mean, speaking of the most recent season of Fargo, thrilling, some notable Fargo alums. I'm thrilled to see it. And I'll say this as far as like the, the Boy, Utoni contrast to. I think it is telling on that call that between the two of them and neither of them seem terribly interested in other people, but Boy seems slightly more so, even just even just the level of like, oh, it wasn't just financial damages. Right. He's like,

And all the lost lives. Of course, all the lost lives. But did you buy that? It almost felt like he was just like, I need to make you feel like an asshole for a second. They're definitely with some of that. But I think there's something to even the lip service. And I say that in part because this is clearly a story more broadly about capitalism in basically every installment alien is. Yeah.

And Boycavalier is somebody who clearly is a capitalist has more money than he could possibly count. Youngest trillionaire ever. congratulations Forbes Forbes cover Boy Cavalier Frame and put it on the wall But his introset is not He doesn't have vote him for it on the wall Because he has all of the synth faces

Behind him Why are we doing this? Survive You know I just think if I were in the business Of building any kind of synthetic bodies I would not just have closets full of bodies A la ex machina I would not have faces up on the wall Well

I mean again people are interested So you say. I would say. Other people may feel differently. But I think he is at least somewhat interested in what he says, which is the like progression of a certain kind of intelligence and of catapulting humanity in a certain kind of way. If that makes money great, and I'm sure he wants all of that stuff that comes with it as well, Utani doesn't seem terribly interested in anything other than like how can we make the most money

possible regardless of who we need to exploit to do it. Yeah, I definitely. And I think, like, my assumption is that we will learn more about how Utani is thinking about this work. Because, again, this vessel went into space. If we're doing the math, like, they're returning to Earth. They burst right through the landing dock, but, like, they're on their way back. This is a 65-year mission. That means they set out before she was alive, right?

So like this is presumably an inherited vessel that's set out before her time, I would assume. I guess we'll find out. Maybe that's not the case. But everything that's happening with Boy from what we know so far is like of his doing and his making, which very much of his doing and making. And this, I would say this is where all the Holly projects have deep like cult-like vibes. And Neverlands certainly has that in a way that Legion and Fargo both do at times. It's just like these little worlds within worlds that are so like auturistic in their design. Yes, absolutely.

So let's let's talk a little bit more about what you're what you're raising here. This like question of his, his, what is his why other than the money and like what is his relationship to his work and what is unfolding? Because I thought it was very intentional and striking like the number of, the number. of different times throughout these two episodes where he has a really authentic, almost giddy response to what is unfolding scientifically, to what he and his company and his band of geniuses have achieved. Like when he is, again, very Peter Pan, very, I'm going to be a kid forever, like swinging around in his desk chair watching. And he's like, yeah, all of the backwards, watching all the data pour in once the lost boys reach

the crash site and then Adam comes in and he's like, it's like Christmas. Like that excitement feels real, right? And he's in other ways quite bored and like looking to chase some sort of high, which he is just outright says to Dame Sylvia. He's like, I want to just climb the mountain top and have an interesting conversation for once. When he, one of though I thought really striking moments was when they're all watching Wendy hack the HR bot to quote Ice Age to her brother. As one does.

As one does. Pack the HR bot to quote Ice Age and then crush your brother's dream. And then you're like, you gotta stay. Yeah. I know you just mentioned that you've already been wounded twice, but you need to stay and you will be immediately imperiled. And then I'm going to feel quite bad about it. To have a heart. I know.

Going right from have a heart to like shut down. But boys watching this and everyone else seems like, okay, there's a kind of like rational response to this, which is very quickly, Wendy is doing things that we didn't know Wendy could do. Now, that should be scary, right? Wendy is beyond their understanding from the jump. Boy's reaction to this is a breathless. Did we know? Did we give her that skill?

How is this possible? And I really loved the scene where Boy and Dame Sylvia had a conversation. Because, like, of course, I mean, of course there is this undeniable. like this is immortality, right? We had a very memorable journey with Guy Pearce in like a raisin costume. This is not, we've thought about pursuing immortality in different forms in the franchise before. But Boy's particular relationship to this and to his work is I am focused on maintaining the human mind. And when Dame Sylvia is like, you're talking about achievement.

Like what this is is about becoming. Well, what is becoming? We can think then of like the Dame Sylvia Kirsch, Wendy, scene and like, you know, evolution and the journey from childhood through adolescence to adulthood and how from Dame Sylvia's perspective, it's like this is still a journey, right? And Lady Crane, you know, you mentioned all the Fargo heads. I mean, Lady Crane for the throne's heads. This is just an absolute joy and a thrill, wonderful stuff.

Here's what Boy Cavalier says to her. The fear with our. artificial intelligence is that we will build a brilliant machine, that will build an even smarter machine, and so on, until so on us. What we're doing here, you and me, is exploding human potential. Then we'll see what they build before the machines ruin everything. So he seems to think he's telling himself and other people, not that he is compromising, radically altering, undermining forever what it means to be human, he believes he is preserving humanity

in a unique and true way. What did you make of that? I thought that was fascinating. I think there's so many of those sorts of wrinkles with the character that just click and work and they lock into place in a way that I don't think I fully grasped until we get to the point of

the hybrids wanting to go on their rescue mission. And, you know, like, Wendy comes in and it's like, you can participate in the exercise with alien stories of like, Why did this character do this dumb thing? And the less successful alien stories don't really have satisfactory answers to that. But I will say overall, the franchise has quite a dim view of the human intelligence and experience and just thinks that we're going to do dumb shit. I realize this character was hugely successful when his response of gleefully signing up and being like, yes, I would love the data that comes with an experience like that, basically irrelevant of what happens as a result of it.

that felt completely in character for me. That felt completely in line with the philosophy of everything you just laid out. Like creating the sort of triangulated positions of Kirsch and Sylvia and Boy, as far as like what humanity is and what the hybrids are and what they are to each other, I think it's like such an elegant way to set the stage for these first two episodes. So on that front, that was another thing I also really loved. Like very clearly, the prodigy inner circle is not aligned. Right? They're working currently as a team toward a common goal, but their perspectives are all distinct.

We have that established quite clearly for us right away, and presumably that will lead to disastrous outcomes as we go through the rest of the story. So, like, one example was when Boy asks, hey, is it like a mistake to let Wendy watch her brother? here are their answers. Kerr says, I think it's distracting. Dame Sylvia says it soothes her. And Adam says it's favoritism. Like they're just not seeing this the same way. Even Dame Sylvia and Arthur, a married couple who we get these little like nuggets of

conversation where, you know, we learn they can't have children. We hear them say these are, we hear Dave Sylvia say these are our children. Now the work, right? This is their creation. This is how they are fostering life together. Yeah. Everybody has very clearly a different view on this. We get to watch Kirsch and Dame Sylvia sit with Wendy and in front of her disagree with each other.

Yeah. When they're talking about, they're having this conversation about emotion and the role of emotion and humanity and what is different, how they're basically programming this into Wendy's experience now to like approximate the experience of adolescence and Kirch's, Kirscher says, she's not human anymore. Why are we pretending she is? But this guy is

a science officer, Sith, synth, for Boy Cavalier who is sitting there saying, look at her face, she thinks she's human. And he is like celebrating that. He's awed by it. He's jubilant in response.

And then Kirsch is like going to stare Wendy down on the transport and say like you used to be food. this is just kind of like riveting in terms of the complexities of these dynamics and where that might lead us and to anchor all this in an alien show which yeah has always been concerned with humanity and synthetic life and the way those things interact and certainly as far as the alien itself like the parasitic relationship with the essence of humanity is core to the text but what makes a human being and what makes a robot I don't think is something that

the story is meaningfully tangled with in quite this way like in such a deep philosophical way as if you are going to create something that is a bridge between them, why would you want it to behave and act more like a human, as Kersh says? When it's like the cutting edge of innovation, usually the reason why we make new things that look

like old things is so they're more palatable to us as humans. So they don't feel so alien. So they don't feel like a robot that will walk into your room and not eat or sleep and just stare with its eyes open the whole time. Like there's an uncanny, unsettling quality to things like that. And so the whole idea of like, we're going to simulate puberty so that you'll have more human moods,

even though you're not exactly human anymore. Like, it's, it is a worthy question to answer, to ask if you're creating something like that, to be honest with you. Yeah, I think this is just like, so interesting.

I want to, I definitely want to come back to that question of like how the show is exploring humanity from the Wendy and Lost Boy side of it in, in a few minutes. But let's stick with the, with the boy, Kersh, Dame Sylvia, a cluster for a second because I'm with you. This is just like so interesting to me the way

they're all thinking about it. Okay. So boy says, um, since he's just, much like Hala was macking on that tube, uh, macking on that apple, man. Oh my God. Goodness. Just finish your bite. I know. It can wait. You know, hold the room, you know, express authority in a different way. Just please finish your bag. I need to have my snack. And then we can resume the this conversation. Exactly. I'm with you. He's talking about like, you know, he just wants to talk to someone who's smarter than him, right? And also rude. Just kind of like compliments and then really insults Tim Sylvia in the process of saying this. And then here's what he says about Kirsch gives us this sense of clarity about how he views synthetic intelligence compared to the

idea of human intelligence. Kirsch's information smart. Data cross-references. Data cross-references. is with the musings of every great philosopher, but that's not wisdom. He genuinely, now like, I want to be careful not to make it sound like a boy cavalier who is stealing sick children is like he's raising some good points. Making a ton of great points here. But I think it is really interesting to position him as a character who is like, there's something holy and sacred that is worth trying to protect and preserve and nurture and extend about the human mind that cannot actually be replicated by artificial intelligence, that is like not the same as, hey, let's create the AI and have it replace everything that's human because it's superior.

Now, I think like in terms of what you were saying about where have or haven't we seen that, I think that the journey we go on with David and Covenant in Promethe's and Covenant is like very rich in that respect. Absolutely. And like I really welcome the franchise exploring that more fully. And I think this is an interesting group of characters through which to do it. This is a great moment before we get to How is Wendy thinking about her humanity to talk a little bit more about Kirsch. Timothy Oliphant, shared favorite of yours, of mine, of Joanna's, frankly, everybody at the ringer.

Of the world. Chris is, of everyone, all of us. Across cinematic universes, across timelines. The man is a treasure. One of the highlights of my life was watching him walk out on stage and point at Joe. Like, do this to Joe. She introduced him at the panel's unbelievable. We need the GIF, please.

Oh, my God. It was magical. Please run me through how you're feeling about the platinum hair and the platinum eyebrows. And perhaps more crucial even than that, Kirsch is a synthetic. And yet, he's walking with the Timio, hip wax. It has been preserved and maintained. There are a couple stretches like when Kersh and Wendy go to ask boy if they can go to the crash site and he walks up the steps. And then also when he's leading the lost boys to the transport, where it's just like, thank you.

This is where. Raylan is with us always. He is with us always. But I'm going to have to call bullshit on this and only this thing. I think this show in these first two episodes, this world that they've created, they've created incredibly true to the text of the alien universe, incredibly true to everything that we know to be what these ships and these people and these settings should look like. You cannot program that waggle.

That's the thing. It's like it doesn't make sense that he would have. The rent of Timothy Oliphant, Seth Bullock, Raylan Givens, hip swagger. And yet I'm grateful that he does. I wouldn't want it any other way. This may be a credit. You know, Kirsch is kind of tipping the true answer and the spirit and the balance of this philosophical conversation. Toyed Boy Cavalier.

This is the humanity piercing through a purely synthetic being because Tim himself cannot help but titillate. He cannot help but be him, even when he's trying to be a robot. He so clearly thinks that humans are basically worthless, right? He's like, she's not human anymore. Why are we pretending? Tells Wendy that humans used to be food makes this incredible speech about the animal kingdom. When the lost boys are working their way through the ship doing their recon and like all of them, but like particularly dear sweet nibs, quivering in fear.

And he's just like, animals feel fear. You're not animals. Toughen up. Like he's just, but my, I think actually my favorite Kersh Mummo. He calls. He radios to Wendy in slightly because he's like, we found this like pretty dangerous. He found the egg layer. He's like, we got it really. We got to get on this. I said to me, I need you to meet me. Wendy's like, great news. I found, I found, I found Joe. And Kirsch is like, I don't care. It's just like, that's what this whole thing was like nominally about. He's like, I just, I could not possibly care less about that right now. He's no bullshit. He's not a.

afraid to say what he thinks. And so that is like a real counter. Obviously, he's most directly positioned as a counter, even though they are a team here, to Dame Sylvia and her warmth and her generosity and centering and like continuing to try to nurture the humanity in the hybrids. But the fact that it's contrary to how Boy is thinking about this is ultimately probably more notable. So this is just all, I think, very interesting so far. They're all kind of right in their ways and they're all kind of wrong in their ways. Like ultimately what Kirsch is saying about humans use, like being food in some respects within the food chain. Unquestionably true. Like that's the role that we played on earth for a long period of time. And what he says about

the fact that the big change was not our evolution beyond that, but the fact that we have told ourselves we are no longer food and we behave in that way. That has been the crucial part of human evolution. Yeah. That kind of also factors into what we're seeing on the synthetic part of this as well. And to what Boy Cavalier is arguing about, you know, the great fear of AI that you alluded to of like a supercomputer creating an even smarter supercomputer. I got to say, this is not my great fear of AI. My great fear of AI is a very dumb program thinking it's a smart program and thinking it needs to eradicate the human race as a result of it. And so it's like it always comes down to like how you position yourself within this world and what role you think you operate within it. And usually when

things get messy with the synthetics is when they don't quite understand the equilibrium that they're participating in. And the same is obviously true for the humans and the xenomorphs. That's a fantastic point. And like I love, I love just thinking about whenever like a franchise spans such a wide swath of our actual human experience, like, I'm sure all of us spent a lot of time thinking and talking about the fact that we're just like, this is pretty grim thing to say, but like genuinely actually like living through the dystopian plots of all the sci-fi we were growing up. Like that's just what our, that's our period of history that we're living through. So that's weird, but true, right? The spiriting, to say the least, but here we are. Let's make the most of it.

Boy. And so like when the films started coming out, and you're in the 70s and you're in the 80s, like the idea of the synthetics and of mother and like all of this feels so futuristic. And now it's just like this is, this feels like, exactly what we're watching unfold in real time.

Yeah. There's something really kind of like unmooring and destabilizing about that, like mentally, but also just like in terms of kind of like thinking about where you are in the scope of consuming a thing. And I loved, I loved a lot of aspects of the Peter Pan of it all, but that was one of the things I really loved about it was like pairing this. other historic, fabled literary touchstone with something as central to sci-fi storytelling as the creation of proliferation and eventual domination of artificial intelligence and the race to dominate and how human beings who are seeking to best other human beings ultimately end up destroying themselves.

Like, Chris is like, we've seen many versions of the story. We're watching a version of it in this show. I'm really interested in, like, also the idea that, like, what we can get into this now is we get into the Lost Boys, like, what? Okay, like a story like San Juniper, are you a Black Mirror fan? Yes. So San Juniper is one of my favorite episodes of television ever. If you don't get into all of the specific elements and you just describe what San Junipero is about,

it is about uploading the human consciousness so that you can live on in a different way after like your body, your mortal life, maybe it was an injury, maybe it was age, whatever. You found another way, right? And I watched San Juan Naperra and I'm like, this is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Like the idea of not only choosing, like loving someone so much and wanting someone so much that you could choose to spend eternity with them, but also like the idea that technology could be a vessel to something hopeful instead of just something dystopian. First of all, I think inside a black mirror is like very welcome as kind of like a breath of

fresh air, right? But it's interesting to think about like kind of where how, what is it inside of a story where like a lot of the beats, the core beats of what is happening or similar that change it and shift it from when is this hopeful and you're like, wow, I found some like purpose and maybe peace in what is possible here. And when is it like, we're all fucking doomed. And that just seems like a lock at this point. And the reasons for that are, I think, pretty apparent.

But it is kind of amazing to me that, like, you can get different versions of it across the wider sci-fi AI canon. And that, like, obviously, like, even inside of alien Earth, I think there's a desire to show us both parts of that, at least with the jump where, like, a character like Wendy is like, I have been granted a second. chance. From Wendy's perspective, that is what happened. And before I was a kid and I was going to die and I was sick. And now I'm strong and I'm alive and I'm going to be around. And I can not only know that I'm going to move forward, but I can protect other people. I can go save somebody I love.

And I think the moral quagmire and dissonance immediately established here where you're like, Boy Cavalier and Prodigy Corp have given these sick kids a way to live on. Objectively true. Yeah. And then you're like, you watch the conference. I mean, a million things we could pull out here in the episode, but like, you watch the conversation between Hermit and Wendy and he's like, I went to your funeral. Yep.

And she's like, well, the boy genius told dad we had to lie. It's like, you know, the other kids coming to Neverland and Wendy saying to them, you can never go home. Yeah. Like, all of that is horrific. So how is that, like, moral stew feeling to you from the lost boy perspective at the beginning of this series? And then, you know, what are your thoughts on Peter Pan?

I would say the whole moral stew. Yeah. It's feeling juicy. It's feeling oily. It's feeling hot to touch. You know, there's a lot happening there. Nourishing. Very nourishing in its own way.

And you're right. Like, the objective truth is. Prodigy is helping sick kids to live a different kind of life that they would not have the ability to live. Put another way, they are taking some of the most vulnerable people in the world. And praying upon them for their scientific experiments. Completely.

Using them as guinea pigs. And in order to do so, taking their first trial subject and telling her, don't you want to be a big sister? And Wendy's like so chuffed at the idea that she gets to have this like responsible role to these other kids. That she is using them to recruit or predate, depending on how you want to look at it,

these other kids into the program to something that, you know, just to extrapolate the parallels for their own situations, I have no idea who in their own families knows what as far as them being dead or alive or here or not. It's all very, very messy in a way that is fucked up. Fucked up and quite delightful for a show like this to have to wade through. And I think that's what it is, is I hate when stories wade into a big moral quagmire like that and don't know that they're doing it.

Yes, exactly. This is one of my. This is the proposition here. Yes. Yeah. The movie about time is like a movie about time travel exploitation of agency, ultimately. And it's just like, yeah, we don't want to deal with any of that. Isn't this cute?

Let's just keep on going with the story. This is what they're doing here. Like, this is a story about humanity. It's about making these sorts of tradeoffs and choices. It is built into the text and the subtext and the themes of the show. Yeah. Let's fucking go, Mal. Yeah.

I'm with you, man. It's like amazing to watch. watch the kids talk about with other characters, like, you know, the Neil Armstrong conversation between Boy and Marcy is. Marcy is about to become Wendy, you know, this idea of being the first, right, to make the leap, to make the jump. But then, like, specifically watching the kids talk with each other about what is happening was like really kind of amazing to get to witness.

I thought that the way that, specifically the way that Wendy, the way that they talked about their minds. And like, you're sort of like, what to your point about agency, like, what level and obviously like we do learn that Noah Hawley, who was playing Farsi and Joe's father in the show. Has to himself as alien daddy. Great stuff. Absolutely incredible stuff. I was actually like Googling. I was like, Noah Holly, Yankee Joe DiMaggio enthusiast. Like, is he like a baseball obsessive? Give him about a show. talk a little bit about the baseball of it all in a few minutes. But the dads, what we have been led to believe from what we hear in these two episodes is that the poor brother thinks that

his sister died, but that the dad said, take my kid. That's what at least we have been led to believe so far. Is that true in all of the other cases to your point? Like, did all of the parents agree, do some of them not know? We don't have enough information yet to say for sure. But what we do know is that Wendy went through her version of priming and then Wendy becomes the primer to like take a bunch of 11 and 12 year old kids and say this is the thing you should do because then you're going to be special. And again, to give them to like grant them the gift of a path forward, but also to sort of like manipulate their vulnerability. This is like literally how human trafficking works. That exact conduit is how it works. That exact conduit is how it works.

in a lot of cases. This was like really kind of intense and gnarly. And like I thought the conversation about their minds was so interesting. Like when Wendy says, I talk about how adult minds can't transfer. I thought this was a great scene for two reasons. One, it sets us up for some interesting and presumably important questions about, you know, my assumption is that for all a boy cavalier is saying about how he just wants to climb to the mountaintop and have an interesting conversation for once. And you're like, okay, so you're saying it's not about money. You're saying it's not about ego. It's actually about something worse. It's about boredom. That's even more more dangerous in the hands of the youngest trillionaire ever. Oh, God. But like, my assumption is that boy,

Cavalier is doing this because not just he wants to have an interesting conversation and who wants to preserve humanity. He wants to one day move his own mind into one of these bodies and be hybrid and exist on. And so they've got to build toward the point where an adult could make the journey. Wendy's saying grown up minds are too stiff so they can't make the trip yet, but our minds, kid minds, we fit just right. This is a great twist. It's such a great twist on what could have been as simple as like an adult making an adult choice.

And now instead it's a sick kid making a desperate choice. Yes. And then you watch them out in the field. And they're in these like strong synth bodies. But like they think there's a bear on the loose because they're kids. Yeah. So why would they think anything? else, right? And like, I thought all of that was really amazing. It makes you, I start to wonder, too, we'll talk about Wendy and, um, and her brother more in a few minutes. But like with that relationship and her desire to protect him and her insistence that she's not going to let anything happen to him, sort of like feels like we are building toward her pushing to have him make the trip and like, well, he has an adult mind, not a kid mind. So what does that mean, etc. But like, okay, you have a quote like that one from Wendy's about the kid minds. And, like, well, he has an adult mind. And

And then we have a passage from Peter Pan read aloud to us by Boy Cavalier that is also about the kid mind and the adult mind. And I'm just going to read this in full because there's like a reason we got this in the episodes and it feels like we should be keeping this in mind as we go across the entire series. Boy Cavalier is reading this one of cutting to like all these different images and visuals. This is what I was alluding to earlier where like shifts in tone kind of as we go. Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children's minds. That's a bar, first of all. My God, Joe asked, stay tuned in the interview. Joe asked Noah Holly about this, this passage choice.

It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight. When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and place. in the bottom of your mind, and on the top, beautifully aired or spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on. In the old days at home, the Neverland had always begun to look a little dark and threatening by bedtime. Then unexplored patches arose in it and spread. Black shadows moved about in them. The roar of the beasts of prey was quite different now, and above all, You lost the certainty that you would win. This, like, gave me a chill to get that passage from Peter Pan, which, like, the original, the original subtitle of Peter Pan is, or the boy who wouldn't grow up.

We've got our lost boys, literally named our lost boys. Prodigy H.Q is the island is named Neverland. Boy, Cavalier, is Peter Pan. The canonical name of the xenomorph is Rufio. The boxes are all checking, you know? Oh my God. You're the best, incredible stuff. Rob, all children except one grow up.

Like, that's the quote. This is what we're watching. Boy, Cavalier does not want to grow up, right? He wants to be able to preserve in the state of this childlike wonder. We have our lost boys. We've got Wendy. Who is Hook? Is Morrow going to be Hook?

This one thinks I'm wondering about. Like, we've got the literal, like, cyborg hand as a kind of hook-like thing. But also he is a security officer for Wayland Utani. So he is an opposing force to prodigy and to boy cavalier. I'm curious to see how deep the comps go across the character sets like Tinkerbell, etc. But this is just all very interesting. We've got the animated classic playing on the ceiling. You know, Wendy, slightly Smee, Tootles.

curly nives, all of the names, et cetera. It's not necessarily subtle in terms of what it's like hammering home to us about boy and his pursuits. But I don't think that's a bad thing. Like the fact that it's not just there for us, but it's actually something the character has done. He has chosen these names. He has put these images on his ceiling.

He has named his base of operations, this thing. He is signaling something, not only to us as an audience, but to his fellows about what he thinks is important. And that's been, that's been very compelling to watch so far. Quite. I mean, what's the point of being a trillionaire, if not to have the mind and the freedom of a child forever? Or like living basically without consequence to anything that you do. I guess you could say to have really nice furniture and a great wardrobe. He has a real rich kid bohemian vibe going with the fits that I'm loving. Can you even imagine how much he's spending on sweaters? Just just how much he's blown to fill that wardrobe. Truly upsetting stuff. But to him,

it's meaningless, much like every podcast that you've ever done that wasn't a draft. Not what I said. Misinterpretation of both my words and the facts. Well, well, the nature of humanity from the perspective of Wendy and the Lost Boys. Here's a little touch I loved. When Wendy makes the, Marcy's transfers into Wendy. We should say Sidney Chandler, the lead of the show. Very good.

Great performance so far. This is Kyle Chandler's. kid in case anyone does not know that what a family my god amazing stuff um i thought also just has like a distinctly alien series look right just like you there's certain performers who it's like okay they feel of this world or not obviously there's a certain kind of female protagonist in particular but like making the female protagonist a version of a synthetic or in this case a hybrid who's also like not not not ellen ripley and also like not not newt uh it's just like a quite a quite a blend to throw at us when are we doing our podcast on how newt went out

i got to say we're not ever doing a newt-centric podcast it cannot happen no one is clamoring for that totally fair um our first moment with wendy after the transfer and wendy is in this new hybrid body uh is perched i've really loved this little little touch perched on this little nook of a rock face so high up that we're about to get this like amazing launch and jump down to meet Dame Sylvia. And what is she doing? Wendy is looking out at the ocean. And I thought that the combination of like the most human thing, which is basically just looking out at the water, thinking about life from a place no human could possibly

reach was a great way to capture like, this is what it means to be a hybrid. And then, of course, we build very quickly to the like racia and then the incredible like these feel weird, like boob discovery sequence, wonderful stuff. And it doesn't take long for us to get to the moment where like she says to Arthur, as we're about to create the other lost boys, go around. Just the superiority, the way that later when she's talking about her brother, And she says it's a very heartfelt like a desire to protect, but the description of he's not like us, he's not premium. That's what she says. He's not premium.

Like this is a character who is holding onto her humanity, rooted in her humanity. Her primary driver so far is wanting to check on her brother, reunite with him and make sure he's okay. And also to like be big sister to these other kids. Yeah. But and is like still a kid herself and giggling at the. the word sperm, who among us? Yeah. Honestly.

But like, and it's hearing from curse, you know, okay, what can I be? Whatever you want to be. But when she goes in to Boy Cavalier's office and is like, I want to go find my brother. And he says, look at her face, her body language. If I didn't know better, she was human. And her response to that is I am human. And so she is simultaneously feeling with an undeniable truth, her superiority. but also is like, I'm a person and I want to find my brother and I want to make sure these other kids are okay.

And that's a, that's a great blend for meeting this character and beginning our journey with her. I think the intersection of those things, of that superiority and that sense of solidarity, great driver of story, great driver of conflict and plot, especially when you put it in this kid package with a kid brain, even if they have all these superhuman abilities. Like I mentioned earlier, you know, all the alien movies having characters who make just like crazy choices all the time. It's like baked into the DNA of the series. Yeah. Why not make half the cast kids?

Right. And just like people who are going to by nature do things that are brash and impulsive who are going to be a behave in dumb ways. It's like now there's like a canonical reason for characters like Wendy to do the things they do. Like of course she would chase after her brother who she didn't have a chance to continue a life with much less, you know, or say goodbye to even. Such a good point. Yeah. And I love to, I want to zoom out too a little bit mechanically speaking in terms of the way they are filming and showing those transition scenes. One, the big whirring tables with the glowing tubes.

Like, look, it's just great set design. It's amazing. And then the whole, the previous body holding flowers as they are kind of transferred consciousness one to one. This is just amazing stuff. You have like the beauty and piece of that. But then elsewhere when we get those rapid cuts, we see just like they're just, zip in a body bag over Marcy's dead face. Completely.

It's ceremony, but it's also then like a cold procedure at the end of the day and a programming choice. And it's, it is what we've talked about, which is there's this like very complicated moral dilemma unfolding right in front of us. And it's a moral dilemma that's basically being solved by like a tech bro venture capitalist. And he's like, yeah, okay, we'll put these trappings on it to make it seem okay. But ultimately, like, we got to do what we got to do.

Right. How is because of the child. like I need to like move forward into a dangerous circumstance without thinking about the peril that awaits. I need to find my brother because she did bring the paper cutter and the walrus. The taking the paper cutter and making it like it's like I've got a sword. That was actually awesome. Also all of their outfits are great. Like it's just everything about the look of the show is the design is like impeccable so far. The stuffed animal latched to the belt loop was Just an absolutely sensational touch.

And exposition dump to your whole flock of stuffies. Well, I mean, what is more like, I'm actually just, I just turned 12 than I'm telling my stuffed animals about this thing in my life. And in this case, it happens to be my brother who I'm keeping very close tabs on and stopping from going to Mars. Hermit. Prodigy medic hermit, Marcy slash Wendy's brother, named for Joe. DiMaggio put a pin in that. I want to get back to the baseball in a second here. Please. How is this relationship, the brother-sister duo here?

We go through the respective loss and yearning. He does not know that she's alive. She knows that he is and that he doesn't know she's okay. They are rooted initially in a different level of awareness. We watch this like reunion. in the, we've seen for both of them up to that point, reflection and memory thinking about ice age or otherwise, sharing a beer as maybe a five-year-old question mark with dad. Perhaps it was a soda.

It didn't look like it. It looked like a beer, but I don't know. It's a future beer, you know? Yeah. It's a, yes, it's a future beer. That's definitely fine for small child. They each have their memories. And so those memories, of course, then become part of the test and trial and path back to each other.

I will now ask you, I cannot believe or understand or accept what you have told me. And so the only way you can convince me is by calling upon the shared history that only the real you would know, the memory of what did you say when you came home filthy with your lip bloody. What did you say to me on Christmas morning when you woke me before the sun rose? and that embrace. Are you feeling the depth of the emotional spark here that you need to between these two? Because this emotional relationship is the heartbeat of the show so far. So are you all in on brother and sister Hermit here?

I would say I'm feeling it-ish. Okay. Tell me. It's there. These are characters we're still coming to learn and understand and care about. And to how far you can do those things two episodes in, I'm mostly doing them. But I just think there's a lot of road here in terms of really firming up this relationship and fleshing it out. I understand the broad parameters of what I'm supposed to feel. But I would say this is the one area where I'm like, I'm eager to see what they do with it to intensify those feelings and to ultimately challenge them in some way.

Yeah, I'm with you actually. Like I think both of the, I mean, I love Alex Lothar. We've obviously talked about him for 500 hours on the pod before because of Nemek's role and the manifesto's role. and Doran in our collective consciousness now. He, Alex Lothar was the star of maybe my least favorite episode of Black Mirror, which has nothing to do with his performance in that episode, which is sensational. I just actually find that too upsetting to like, quite quite, it's unbearable.

It's just, it's unbearable. It's like it fucked me up so much watching it. I can't handle it. Their performances here are both great. I am with you. I like, I'm really eager to see where this goes. and what level of messiness and complexity works its way in? Because, you know, like, I do think, perhaps unsurprisingly,

I'm an easy mark for something like, you know, the quoting, or face my fury, face your furry what? Like, that was very sweet and charming, I thought was very cute. You're a big continental drift head? Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that this like, I am eager to see how the characters and the show explore what it means for two people to have found their way back to each other because of various

lies and now find themselves in a position of a great divide. So when Hermit is like, I went to your funeral and Wendy says to him like, Daddy said, not only now does he have to think about the fact that he didn't know his sister lived on in this other way, but that his father didn't tell him this, his father who was now dead, and he's like, I have to go to medical school because I told my dad I would. Like, his whole life just blew up. And it's this amazing gift to rediscover this person who means so much to you, but also, now granted, he was like just like cascaded over the edge of a fractured ship by a xenomorph. So there are more pressing concerns, admittedly. But I am eager to see our guy, Hermit, like, grapple with what? what this all means in terms of his relationship,

not only with his sister, but with his father and himself. And then this is where I will be invoking Thor the Dark World again. Promise you I would and here we are. If you must. Thank you. It's your podcast, I guess. So Wendy's feeling, I mean, she misses her brother no matter what,

but she's feeling guilty, right? Like I stopped you from leaving and now look at the spot you're in. Kirsch is like, injury, illness, old age. They all do, meaning die, generation after generation, and all we can do is watch and take names. And Wendy says, no, he's not going to die. I'm going to save him. Now, this made me think of two things. Real Loki, Thor, Jane, say goodbye energy here to me where, like, no matter how much you love somebody, if you are immortal and they are not, you have got to face it.

that and what it means at some point. And I don't think just through two episodes and what we know about Wendy so far that a 12-year-old mind inside of a now powerful hybrid body is going to say, I'm cool with you just maybe dying in the next few days as we face these aliens. Like, I feel like she is going to go into full Anakin Padmay. I've now, I'm just realizing both of these comps involve Natalie Portman. Welcome to the pod. Like, I can't lose this person. And typically when characters refuse to accept the natural course of a human lifespan, we end up in bad places. And so, like, what will that mean? Will Hermit and Wendy want the same thing for him, for each other?

Will what they want be possible? Will Wendy find yourself needing to rebel against Prodigy because they won't help her do the thing that she wants for the person she loves? There's a lot here. but like, yeah, I think seeing how the characters directly respond to these dynamics will be pretty important maybe to how the show ultimately like succeeds, given that this is going to be, it seems, the central relationship around which the story. Orients. Definitely. I'm considering everything you just said in this larger conversation to be a pre-talk for the eventual talk you will have about Buffy because all this is like very Buffy angel coded to me in its own way. I love it.

I love it. I love it. I love it. So, you know, we're going to come back. But yeah, the whole like mortality versus the incredible scope and power that Wendy now wheels. I think it's something that the show is going to have to reckon with structurally too, right? Like this is a person who kind of could do whatever she wants, especially if she's not in the presence of a xenomorph or of other synthetic people. Like she's stronger than anybody.

She could bust out of any room. She's basically like if your preteen was a kaiju. Like how are you supposed to keep that person under wraps? We don't exactly know. And so how ultimately the season will put her in uncomfortable positions that she can't just solve by being physically stronger than everyone else around her. I'm eager to see. And also as far as like hermit's place in that dynamic, we just haven't, I think by design, seen much of his like interiority yet. Yeah.

It's been a lot of like Wendy observing him from a distance, her trying to piece together what his life is. And we've seen like a couple of scenes that are with him in the room. Yeah. But ultimately, like we don't know a lot about what his life has been like, who he. is as a person. We're just seeing him from the outside in. We know that he's not listening to podcasts during his commute. He's listening to baseball games. My guy just like traveling. Listen, Rick and Frank could take some notes about how to pass the time while moving down the river. That's all all says. Wendy explains that he was named for Joe DiMaggio. And so I would like to ask you

if you were going to name a child after a baseball player. It would it be? It would certainly not be a present baseball player. I had a humbling experience in the office recently with our friends, Van Lathen and Jack Sanders, in which I attempted to name five current baseball players. Come on. No, it was bad. It was bad.

You couldn't name five current baseball players. I don't believe that. There's a lot of like, I see a name and I absolutely know they're a baseball player. off the dome. Am I getting much further than like Shohay Otani Muki Betts? I'm honestly not. You're through two of the five. Just keep naming Dodgers. You can do it. It's the four and the five that are the problem, you know, or the like, oh, did that guy actually retire five years ago, who I know just through osmosis? Regardless, I got to pull deeper. I got to go straight to my childhood. And I have two names that I would propose for my potential offspring. I would love

kind of your, you're going, I assume you're going with a Texas player here. One of them, is. Pudge Mahoney. Mm-hmm. Yep. Honestly, has a nice ring to it for Pudge Rodriguez. Love it. Yeah. One of the true greats. I was also a big friend with Griffey. How do you feel like Crime Dog Mahoney?

How does that hit you? It's perfection. I mean, that might be the one. Crime dog, Mawdy. Who are you pulling? Pudge is also great. I mean, Pudge is elite. Man, those are both really good.

I think so probably my actual answer, is Brooks, because for Brooks Robinson, my dad's all-time favorite player and like a genuinely very important figure in our family. Nice. I, listen, it's been a rough year for the Orioles. Haven't given up. I don't believe the window is closed. I think it's just a minor setback. Got some pretty rude text messages from Chris Ryan the other day when the Orioles were playing the Phillies.

A lot of celebration on his part for Kyle Schrober's many home runs. and then a pretty like, I thought pretty unkind, like what happened to your boys. A lot of injuries. We'll be back next year. And because I still. This is a pretty safe space. I have no understanding or recognition of what is currently happening to the Orioles. So if you just want to pretend that they're winning their division.

They're not. They're one of the worst teams in the sport this year after being amazing the last two years in the regular season and then not winning a playoff game either year. That's not what we're here to talk about. That's not what we're here to talk about. I still believe. The point is I still believe in this young core. I still believe the window is open. I still believe they'll be back.

I still believe they will. This team, the Orioles are the most important team in my life. They have never won a World Series while I have been alive. Yeah. Okay. So I believe that this team, this core, will win a World Series. And so what I am going to say is that if that's true, I will probably, if I ever have a child, name that child after a number of the World Series.

series winning team. Could Adam and I get away with naming our kid Gunner for Gunner Henderson? Maybe. It's a little dicey. Okay, how about this? I also got to say the idea of naming your child after a currently 24 year old. I'm going to name my kid Gunner Henderson, Ruben Levine. See how it goes. Yeah, no, I'm not going to make no, no current. You can't actually name your kid after or anyone current. You can't make the Dineris mistake. Like, you just can't do it. You don't know how things are going to go. That said, one of the crown jewels of the team on the young superstar front, Jackson Holiday, as you know, I'm sure. I'm sure he was one of the five players you mean.

Yes. Jackson Holiday winning a World Series for the Orioles in the same year that Lamar Jackson wins a Super Bowl for the Ravens is still in play. Okay. And then I feel like I would just have to, I would have to go with Jackson. Right? I think you would have to make a bigger gesture and change your name to Jackson. Forget kids.

Like we need to really put our money where our mouth is. Jackson crime dog, Rubin, reporting for duty. I love it. We've solved it. Unforgettable name. Hermit finds this baseball. This is the actual. in the canon of the show here. This is the third home run. Game 6, 77 World Series,

Reggie Jackson. It's signed. Did you find this disrespectful? That it was just sitting there where you could touch it? Not that it was sitting there where you could touch it because I fully believe that a rich person living and having a wig party would do that, a powder of wig party. But for someone who cares about baseball with hands, that I'm sure are covered in blood and soot and K-Y jelly. To just go put your roots on that thing. I did think that was very puzzling. Also, if I'm like, if I'm Chris and Andy, I'm watching this and I'm like,

how could you not take the framed Philly's jacket on the wall as well? But on the disrespectful part, it seems clear. It's like a pressure activation, right? So you lift the ball. Yes. And that's what plays the highlight. To me, the inference from that is that people are constantly touching this pressure. This is a real point. Which is insane. Absolutely fucking crazy. But Hermit's not thinking about hygiene or clean hands or should he get a rapper or something before he touches the ball. No, he's like, what are the odds? Like this is of all the balls of all the highlights. This is the guy. Reggie Jackson, Mr. October. My dad used to tell me that. Here's what he says. He called it proof. He said sometimes the world gives you a moment to shine. And if you do, well, there's a name for that kind of hero.

He called him Mr. October. Now, I absolutely loved this. Two reasons. One, sometimes the world gives you a moment to shine. And if you do, there's a name for that kind of hero. Like, this is the prompt for our heroes, right? Like, this is their moment. Can they rise?

Can they become a figure in lore? Yeah. The idea of Hermit, I actually was like really touched by this. This is such a good little detail. He called him, he, my dad, in telling me this, he called him Mr. October. Yes. Well, it's like everybody called him Mr. October. And the idea of like the very personal nature of stories and myths as you pass them down and inherit them.

Like, I just loved that little detail. Like from Hermit's perspective, Mr. October, the legend of Reggie Jackson. It's like this is about how his dad explained greatness to him. even though he has the highlight and he's hearing it and he's watching it. And he knows that there are other people who are like, look at this thing we've just witnessed. I just thought that was like a great little touch. I really liked that.

I think that personalization is really wonderful. And to your point, just like this idea of in this point in human history, like it's such an abstraction, the idea of like who Reggie Jackson even was to a degree that might strain credulity a little bit. It would be like if you turned around and pulled something off your shelf that was from like 1890. If you hit 18 postseason home runs, I think you deserve to be remembered forever. Now, granted, right now in 2025, he's only tied for 10th now on the all-time list of posseys and home runs.

By the time of Alien Earth, like, I mean, who knows how far down the list he is. But still, it's a meaningful moment in the history of the sport. I can't even imagine what future steroids they create to fuel like minors working on Mars. And, you know, it's like once that future HGH drops, all the baseball records are going to be in real peril. All of which is to say, there's a lot of stuff happening kind of in the reference set of this show. Yeah. That I think you just have to kind of go along with.

It's like, would these characters know Reggie Jackson? Would they know Agatha Christie? Would they be watching Ice Age? I loved the Agatha Christie. It's great. Let forensics Agatha Christie this shit. Completely. Also a valid point.

Not her job. Not their purview. Do what you signed up to do. Good advice for everybody. But I like the idea of taking these things that are like a little bit more distant or removed and turning it into as you're aluny to like it's not that this is a thing that happened. It's like, oh, this is a story my dad told me. The fact that the baseball exists, the fact that Reggie Jackson existed is almost like irrelevant to the point, which is this creation of someone who steps up in these moments. The creation of someone who like, I mean, like Wendy is trying to do kind of like rising to meet the era and the moment and the time that you're in.

And also just the idea of like what is it to be human? Like, what is it to go to the ballpark and watch a thing or to have witnessed something amazing and heard about it and decided to share it with someone else? Like, you know, I, again, I don't actually know if Noah Hawley is like a huge Yankee fan, the fact that we get Reggie Jackson, Mr. October and Joe DiMaggio in these episodes makes me think maybe the answer to that is yes. But like, just this idea of like as the world is changing, as the nature of humanity is changing, as what people are capable of doing and where they go and where they even like. like, where do you go to med school? Where do you live? What does the world around you look like? Everything changes all the time. And the idea that something like watching a person swing a bat and hit a ball into the stands in a big moment that if you were a Yankee fan brought you a lot of joy. And if you were a Dodgers fan, made you super fucking sad is a really human thing to still

hold on to and care about community fandom, a shared experience. Like those are human things. And so for that to still be present, a book club where you would read an Agatha Christie story and talk about it. Like whether people are still doing that, maybe, maybe not, but like the fact that they know that's a thing that happened. And the thing that mattered is so it tells us a lot about the like strands of humanity that continue to exist and live on. So that was really, I thought, you're right. It's interesting to think about like what has made its way into this next. century and like what does it tell us. Yeah.

I like things inevitably will though. And I think you're right that when we when we try to identify what separates us from other other artificial forms of intelligence, other kinds of potential life, I feel like the easy grab is art. Right. It's like our relationship to a show like alien earth to a piece of music to a book. That is something that other forms of intelligence is someone like Kersh could never understand that he does not have the wisdom to understand that kind of human connection

with a piece of art. David would tell you you're wrong. Yeah, he certainly would. And my man plays a mean flute, you know, like he knows what he's doing, very dexterous fingers as well. Like he's, well, I mean, he's capable of many things. I would argue, though, that sports are even more human than art can be, in part because, you know, it takes a lot, it takes an incredible amount of humanity to create art and to interpret art and to participate it and interact with it. But if you imagine a synthetic person going to a baseball game, it's like they're reading the launch velocity off the bat.

They know exactly what's going to happen the second it's in the air. They are mystified to the extent that they can even feel mystified by the fact that humans would assign meaning to any of this shit. And so it's like there is an interpretation that's happening in sports that is similar to art, but then is laid over the messiness of the performance itself, which is inescapably human and all the projections that we are putting on to it. it and just the like percentage chances of the game itself that people like you and I will misread constantly in favor of just like oh he's in a rut oh this guy's on a hot streak oh this

is happening for this reason oh this is happening because he's coming off of injury it's like at least just streaky and like you know yeah the hand it really the pain lingered last year yes I will I will co-sign all of that with synthetic like certainty but all of which is to say I just think there's so much happening within sport that is so messy. It can only be human. It can only be deciphered by humans. And if you were looking at it through any other purview or any other perspective, you would never be able to understand it.

It's such an interesting point. I think that is what you're describing about sports feels true to me about sports and art and anything that you would put under the umbrella broadly of like experience and creation, whether it is you doing it and participating in it or consuming it and then thinking. about at the end of the day, how did it make you feel? Right? It's that old, that great, like, the Halt and Catch Fire moment. Like, it was never about where we were going.

It was always about how it felt. Like, yeah, you want your team to win the championship, but you watch them lose every single game along the way because you care, you love it. You know that there's a chance that it's the best feeling you'll ever have. And when you read a great book or you watch a great show or a movie or you look at a beautiful painting, like whatever that version of you of it is for you, I think they can give you the same thing. And obviously in real life right now,

there's a just, yeah, this question of like, well, if that is the most human thing, then what does it mean when the machines start to be a part of that? And it's like a deeply existential and destabilizing thing to be confronting, right? Like practically in terms of its impact on industries, but also like philosophically in terms of like, the unique experience of a person making their way through life, falling in love, caring about a thing, feeling disappointment and loss. And like, I think that the choice, you know, that opening the cyborg, and of course that cyborg is a human who has then an augmentation of some part, some part, the pure synthetic and then the hybrid, the choice to make the primary, I mean, we're going to be

with Kirsh or we're going to be with Morrow a lot. But the choice to make. the primary characters we're going to be spending time with, hybrids, who are human and machine and are going to be, which of them are, like, more desperate to hold on to whatever aspects of their humanity they feel are essential or distinct, and which of those characters are like, I'm actually ready to leave that behind. Who thinks that's a strength and who thinks that's an anchor is going to be so fascinating to watch. Can't we I can't wait for the next six episodes of this show.

I can't wait to talk about episode three with you. I'm thrilled. This is great. Any other odds and ends you want to hit? I'll note the hazmat suit guy spraying the walls and Prodigy, very worrying. I thought the fact that people just casually walked by that multiple times and was like, this is fine, seemed incredibly

odd to me. Sure looks like an old acid mark on that wall. I got to say. Some acid blood? You know, perhaps? I don't know. Yep. Seems entirely possible. so that's bad. Can't wait for episode five when we spend perspective shift to spend the whole episode with that guy and just like go home with him and see what his life is like.

That would actually be great. I would love that. I'm down. Count me in. I'm in. Some subtitle highlights for you. We got wet crunch. No notes.

We got soft squishing. It's also fantastic. And blood squelches. Squelch is always a favorite here on House of Arr whenever we get that in the subtitles. Anything else that you would like to ponder or highlight here before we. before we tossed to the interview. There was so much squelching, honestly. There was one thing that you highlighted,

now that I did want to touch on a little bit, which is the xenomorph's relationship with Hermit in particular. He's obsessed, or she's obsessed. I guess the hermit says she at one point. Rob, the ceaseless pursuit of Hermit by the xenomorph. On the trail. It's not just I need to get rid of all life. It is, I have sought you out.

time after time from cavern and fractured stairwell to elevator shaft to hallway to I love the I'm lying in wait in the statue and the modern art come on that was so good stuff

into the like hurling in the little egg layer we also had the Wendy we didn't talk about Wendy's like what do you hear that with the clicking and the buzzing throughout mysterious for sure but yeah this is this scene This, this, this xenomorph has it, has it bad for Hermit.

That's clear. I think you identified the reason why, though, which is every other character is calling her an extraterrestrial, a monster, a bear. And Hermit's the only one who calls her a she, who sees her for her. I'm just saying that there is a, there is a pursuit here happening. It's very familiar and I think very beautiful. Yeah. And right away, he's like reading the dating profile stats. He's like, eight feet tall.

Hard carapist. Nimble. Come on. I will say the elevator that Hermit goes into to escape the xenomorph, the fastest elevator I've ever seen. Those doors closing with xenomorph quickness. Impressive stuff from a design standpoint. But she will not be deterred.

I'm sure she will be on the scent yet again. Hermit's pheromones very strong. Apparently so. You know, I wonder what the rent is at that building, not only because of the fast elevators, but like, you know, rich party guy was like, if there's a proper boy cavalier, we'll call me personally.

We go to the same club. Great shit. That whole table of murder dinner party guests, this show has been even grislier than I imagined it would be in terms of like, and I think some of that is the difference in setting, right?

Like, as we have moved out of Nostromo-like settings or derelict ships or abandoned space colonies, we're kind of like in the bright of if not day, at least the bright of like a luxury apartment building and getting to see the shadow of a xenomorph on like a you know a penthouse wall or seeing the like the havoc it can wreak on a setting like this with these people there's

there's just something really distinct about it that I'm really enjoying yeah it's a great call that contrast of just like unmistakably even though it is in the future this is earth that's an apartment building this is a city and that is different than another planet or a ship in space where you're like where's the nearest airlock like we need another solution we're on earth. And Airlock's not going to help. You're going to need a bigger airlock. Exactly.

Rob, this was a joy, a treat, the thrill. No, thank you. I've had such a great time watching this show, talking about the show with you. I can't like to do it again. Same. I can't. We'll do it again in a week.

It's going to be great. I can't wait. In the meantime, between now and then, we will now hear the chat that Joanna and I had at Comic-Con with Noah Hawley and Alex Lothar. Okay. We are so excited to be here with you guys today.

Thank you for the time. Noah, we wanted to start with you and talk about what it is like to expand in this world that people have been visiting for literal decades. Which aspect of getting to make an alien television show instead of a movie where you have two hours and you know what beats of the template you have to hit? Were you most excited to be able to flesh out? Was it something on the theme front? character dynamics, maybe the lore or mythology, given where you are in the timeline?

Yeah, I mean, the surprising thing to realize after seven movies is how little mythology there is in the alien universe. And, you know, we really don't have a sense of how humanity is organized in the future and what a government would look like or post-government world. And so that gave me a lot of leeway to just sort of start to build around this idea. because so much of those first two movies are about class, right? Space truckers, soldiers, Paul Reiser, middle management, right? You really get the sense that it's about the individual versus the corporation. And there's almost something Samuel Beckett about that first movie where it's like they've got to go to a place they don't know where to do a thing. They don't know what for people they don't know who, right?

Like it's very existential. And so it was really fun to expand on that. and bring in this sort of Peter Pan organizing principle so that it's almost a parable. I love that. The only thing that's so interesting is that because the show is interested in this idea of what makes a human a human, but you have so few sort of average human characters in your core cast. Alex, of course, is a fine example.

David Ristell's character. How important do those characters become when you're asking this question? Well, I think the central drive of this, if you have this defining story is of these children who've been put into adult bodies, right? But they're synthetic bodies. And the question is, are they going to choose humanity or other, right? Are they, is Wendy going to, in a hundred years, is she still going to consider herself human or is she going to be other? And what that means is that the humans in the show have this push-pull effect. The good ones, her brother makes her feel like, no, human is good.

and then the bad ones like Sam's character. She's like, well, if that's what being human is, I don't want to be human. And so there's this tension at the heart of the show. So Alex, with all that responsibility for your character to represent all that is good in humanity. No, I just think it's really interesting when we meet your character in this first episode and he seems a bit like he does not fit in

with his military surroundings, but when the crash happens, he's the first one to say, call it in, let's go. So what does that tell? Is he cautious? Is he fearless? Like, what does that tell us about his character? I guess he's a medic. So Noah spoke a lot about position of a medic being the first person.

What's the person running towards the bullets? And also the first person who touches death. And therefore, that creates, I think, something around those people who are on the front line that their association with, I mean, they're there to provide care, but they are stitching up the wounded. and, yeah, the sort of the midwives of death in some way, without being too bleak. Yeah. Right, midwives of death.

The first of experience. Yeah, Doudoula. I love it. And I think with, yeah, there was something quite, you know, what is it like to carry that? I think, I mean, I've said this a few times, but as soon as I looked at Sydney's, face, looking at me as if I was her brother, there was total clarity as to have to look after this person because they're surrounded by nefarious others, including Sam Blank and playing boy but also like, this person doesn't need care in the way that I've been used to.

This person was my sister, my little sibling. But now they are more than that and they're growing up exponentially. And there's, I think, a frustration. underneath that as to where to put that care, especially if that's how you've defined yourself as a medic and a sibling and an older sibling. So actually, yeah, just looking at Sydney and seeing her looking at me as her bro, it was quite transparent. My job in that sense. I love that too. I'm interested to kind of piggyback off what Joe was asking about humanity. And a lot of what we're talking about already feels very archetypal to me, right? In great sci-fi, essential sci-fi,

I think almost always has to bridge the gap between feeling simultaneously eternal and urgent, very of the moment. And, you know, in what we've seen of the show so far, I think clearly that balance was struck. So this can be a question for either of you, for both of you. But in that respect, like, what feels most 2025 in a show that in our lives as consumers has spent decades? In the canon timelines, it's hundreds of years? Is it the tech bro billionaires? Is it the rapidly evolving AI? Trillionaires. Trillionaires. Excuse me.

Excuse me. I apologize formally to boy. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a combination. I think the question we're all wrestling with right now is how far is this going to go? How far is, you know, the billionaire class, the corporate class going to go? Is it, you know, and how far is the AI and the technology? going to go.

And it's always a question of how much is our life going to change, right? And I think the show, without intending necessarily to hit this moment that we're at, because when I wrote these scripts, there was no chat GPT, right? This has all happened since the story was laid out. And so it's just a matter of the zeitgeist moment of realizing, like, oh, it's here faster than I thought it was going to be. Yeah, yeah. I love that you asked about the now.

I'm going to ask about the recent past, asked about you mentioned the Peter Pan aspect. We loved that part. We're big bookners. We loved it. And I love the kind of chilling Jamberry quote that you pull out about rummaging and tidying her children's mind and starling while there asleep.

Isn't that beautiful? It was very dark. And so I was curious, what was that like for you to pour back through that text and sort of pull out some of those eerier sections of a story that we think of as, lighthearted. Well, there was a strange kismet to it because the Peter Pan story, which most of us really know from the Disney film, you know, I built that story aspect without rereading it. And then when we're

going into production, I reread it. I was like, oh, this book is super dark, you know, compared to the film. And so I, you know, as we're going into prep, I started pulling lines out of it. And then then I told Sam Blank, we're just going to have you sitting there reading. to these kids at night, but the things he's reading just get darker and darker over the course of the season, you know what I mean?

Because, you know, Peter is, you know, he's kind of a monstrous character when you really get down to it. And, you know, there's this idea that if the lost boys grow up, he gets rid of them, and you're like, well, what does that mean?

You know, and so this idea that, that, you know, he's, Sam has placed himself as the boy who never grew up. But when I look around the world, what I want to know is, where are the adults, right? Like, where are the people who are thinking more about tomorrow than they are about today? And so this show becomes a kind of metaphor for like, where are the grownups? Scary.

Great. Haunting scarier than the xenomorph, honestly. Genuinely. Genuinely, a different type of acidic blood. We have limited time. However, I think we would both regret it for the rest of our lives if we did not bring up Nemek, who is a little bit of a... For the rest of your lives. Yes, that's right.

He's a very important. We can chat about it also if you weren't. Andor is our shared favorite. We've had an unbelievable experience covering it together. And the thing about Nemek that we love so much, the performance, the manifesto is that it's a very finite, limited amount of screen time. But the impact of Nemek is not only contained. to Andor this moment of Star Wars fandom, his words, his impact on Cassian, Cassian's impact on others changes how we think about Star Wars Ritlar.

Wow, that's a heavy load, yeah. Well, and that's what we wanted to ask you and connect it back to Alien because I think there are genuinely very few franchises in the world that could afford you the opportunity to have that kind of impact on a fan, where what you do in one moment changes maybe how they think about their entire life of living in a fictional universe. You're getting to do it. You got to do a Star Wars. You're getting to do it now with Alien.

So what does that feel like? How do you tackle something like that? Is it like an adrenaline rush? Is it terrifying? Is it both? Well, two things come to mind. The first is with Nemek. I didn't have a clue what was in that manifesto when we were shooting.

I kept asking Tony and I was like, Tony, because it would change, right? Depending on who he positioned himself as a revolutionary. And Tony said, oh, don't worry about it. Like, I'll get you, you know, I'll do it later. Then finally, an ADR, he gave me. the text after we'd shot everything. Oh, this is a really good bit of writing. I wish I'd known.

But then actually, and we've been speaking about this over the course of a couple of days here at Comic Con, is that there is something about the ownership and the life that the thing that you make ends up having because of the fans that are watching it that is way outside of your control or your wildest dreams, really, being here yesterday and showing the thing to 6,500 people on the first episode of a TV show and people having an immediate response to it, but also having a history already with the show. And I think as an actor inside that you can't really fathom that whilst you're making it. But it is, yeah, undeniably quite moving, actually, to be part of something that has a life outside of you. Because

thank goodness you're not responsible for it in a way. You allow it to be with the people that watching it and I suppose that's how the thing the story carries on getting told and consumed. So, yeah, funny old thing, eh? Love it. Perfect way to end. Funny old thing, eh? Thank you so much

for your time. We really appreciate it. Thank you. Absolutely. All right, Rob. That is a wrap. Thank you for joining today. We are now there forever girl and forever guy. And what a treat. What a treat that is. Thank you not only to you for being here today, but to the rest of the team. Carlos Chiraboga for producing this episode.

John Richter for all of his work on this episode. Arjuna Ramga Powell for his production supervision and Jomi, Adoneron, for the work on the social. We will see you next week for our Alien Earth episode three deep dive. Until then, let forensics Agatha Christie this shit. Pay off your home. Travel for life. Drive a Ferrari.

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