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- [00:03]
A
It doesn't matter.
- [00:05]
B
You can't stop it.
- [00:08]
A
Stop what?
- [00:09]
C
What did you do? I want their monsters.
- [00:14]
A
Here they come. Welcome to Alien Earth, the official podcast. I'm your host, Adam Rogers. Like an out of control research vessel, each week crashing into the latest episode of this show and seeing what's lying under its burbling surface. This week, episode five in space no. 1. As always, we've got fast moving spoilers inbound, folks, so shields up. Today on the podcast, I have the return of series creator Noah Hawley to talk about our brief interlude in space. Then I'll talk to the show's editor, Regis Kimble about editing in the world of sci fi and horror and chat with the actor Babu Sissing about his decidedly non mechanical performance as the partly mechanical Moro. To round it all out, since we got a lot of new faces this episode at the end, I have the accidental captain of the Maginot, Richa Moorjani. Let's start with this episode's obvious departure from the series so far as it interrupts our regularly scheduled Alien Earth programming for some Alien space programming for series creator Noah Hawley that was entirely on purpose. Mostly.
- [01:17]
B
You get to see the Alien movie of my dreams that I've been wanting to make. And originally in the conception of the season, that episode was not part of what the season was going to be. But then I just found it irresistible and I also felt like if we were offering people a series called Alien, we needed an Alien movie. In the middle of it, we needed a spaceship journey.
- [01:40]
A
Oh, that's interesting. The episode sort of wasn't originally part of how you imagined the series because the this kind of a spaceship story is, like you said, they're an integral part of how the universe has been shaped.
- [01:52]
B
The series, as I've said, went through an evolution. I mean, it took us many, many years to get to it. And the idea of doing a mid season episode, which was the story of what happened on the ship, came to me, you know, as we were gearing up to go into production and, you know, I shifted my directing from doing the first two hours to doing the first hour and the fifth hour because of course I wasn't gonna let anyone else make the Alien movie of my dreams. Sitting down to write that episode was a really exciting opportunity for me. If you're going to play in these waters, you have to have a very clear vision for what you want to pull off and why you're doing it at all when it's been done before. So, well, we have an advantage that the movies don't necessarily have, which is the. This story exists in the context of a larger story. You know, in television terms, this is the Morrow episode where you learn his backstory and you see what brought him to the moment where we met him in which the ship landed. It just also happens to be a mystery about who's sabotaging a spaceship full of alien creatures and the chaos of how they escape and everything goes to hell.
- [03:06]
A
So what were the things that you that were like, must have for your alien movie?
- [03:12]
B
Well, I like that it was a mystery, you know, that it was driven by this mystery of who had sabotaged the ship. I thought added some human stakes to it, some chaos, right. That the creatures could take advantage of. You know, one of the things that the season has introduced in what we call the image is a hyper intelligent creature that strategizes. And so what I liked playing with was how the image could take advantage of, say, seeing the ticks escape and then drawing attention to itself to allow them to do their thing. And so we don't know anything about these creatures that have just been invented for the series. We don't know that the, you know, what we first see is what looks like an octopus with an eyeball on it is going to pop your eye out and replace it. We don't know how the ticks reproduce. We don't know any of these elements about these creatures, which makes it very exciting for me as a storyteller. And the only rule is it has to be disturbing.
- [04:18]
A
So how situated does that story have to be in an alien canon in terms of when it takes place and what happens in the other movies? Is there canonicity? Is there canonical stuff that matters? Or do you just have to take the outlines and vibe and then you get to do what you want to do?
- [04:37]
B
My philosophy is you can make me care about that stuff. It's not my instinct to care about it necessarily. The big things that general audiences invest in are sacrosanct to some degree. And then the deeper you have to dive to find, you know, in this novelization, they introduce the idea of how you make a queen, et cetera. You know, that stuff is speculative. That's some. Another author's version of an alien story. But, you know, for me, the real canon is the first film and, you know, to a major degree the second film also. And, you know, if you think about the fact that 40 years have passed between those first two films and Prometheus, right. It means that for those of us who saw those movies, when they came out. We lived for 40 years with that being what the story of a xenomorph was. Forty years later it was introduced this idea of the black goo and the engineers. And I think that that is another great version of the alien story. But in my mind it exists, even though it was Ridley, as a kind of alternate fiction about these creatures who had been described to all of us for 40 as the perfect evolutionary predator, right? Who had existed for millions of years in this form. And so that's the reality of which I came to the series. And the degree to which I'm introducing these new creatures allows me to create new canon.
- [06:03]
A
So there's a storytelling challenge there, which is how you tell a new and exciting spaceship story. But there's also, I have to assume, a directing challenge because a lot of really well known directors have taken on Alien films. And directing this episode especially, I just wonder, is that something you were thinking about? Hitting some of the same visual cues or doing some of the same things that they did, but also trying to make it your own?
- [06:25]
B
As a filmmaker who didn't go to film school my motivation is only ever to try to create a feeling in the audience. Film as a medium has the power to control time in a way that other mediums don't. I have a photo of my camera operator with the camera mounted to the xenomorphs, the animatronic head alien cam as we're moving down the hallway. You know, it's a. It's a shot that lasts half a second in the show but it gives you a visceral feeling of charging. And so I always think a lot about what things should feel fast and what things should be slow. You're, again, you're. You're creating a feeling in the audience when you do that. If you're in the middle of an action sequence, someone is fighting the xenomorph, for example. That should feel like. It feels. Which is. It's all happening too fast. But the moment you turn to run away now, things slow down because that's how it feels to be running away from a monster is like you can't seem to move fast enough.
- [07:28]
A
Right.
- [07:29]
B
So those elements are always instinctual for me as I think about how to shoot these sequences.
- [07:35]
A
So you were saying earlier that this is the Moro episode and it totally is because we get a lot of insight into that character. And I'm going to talk to Abu S s later this episode about that. But he's interacting here with a cast of characters that we know Little to nothing about in this episode.
- [07:50]
B
Yeah. And one of the challenges for a storyteller, you know, is I have to introduce, you know, a half dozen characters, basically, who exist only in this hour, although you see them a little bit in the first hour. And you have to invest in them to understand their relationships with each other, to have feelings about them enough to care who lives and who dies. And, you know, it's the other reason that I wanted to shoot it myself. And I feel like I need to build each of those worlds.
- [08:17]
A
In this case, we know who the survivor of the ensemble is going to be at the very beginning. The only thing we know about these characters from the very start is that they're all going to die except Moro.
- [08:26]
B
Well, we know that, and yet we forget as we're watching. I mean, it's a really fascinating thing about audiences and something that I learned early on. Even though it's in our brain, we're so focused on the narrative of the story that we forget because you're invested in them, you're rooting for their survival. You know, I think that there's an energy to that, which is, of course, only Morrow is going to survive, but I think there are moments along the way where you want the others to survive, and that's just as important.
- [08:58]
A
What's interesting that you say that you can give people clues along the way, but they won't remember any of it. They just remember how they feel about what was going on or how they felt about a character.
- [09:06]
B
Well, I mean, film and television is an act of hypnosis. You're sitting in a room, whether it's a theater or your living room, and you're a human being existing in that space. Maybe you're watching with your wife, maybe you're watching with your kids, whatever it is. But if the story is good enough, you exist nowhere but in that story. And that's why, you know, when you go to commercial, it can be so jarring for people. And why horror is so hard to do on television because you're breaking the hypnosis and you're breaking the tension and the dread. You know, that's the challenge of making horror for television, is those commercial breaks really kill you.
- [09:44]
A
It can't be an accident that this is the fifth episode. It's the beginning of the second half of the eight. Up until this point, it seemed like a driving coincidence that a Weyland Yutani spaceship hit a Prodigy city, sparking all this. It turns out now that it's not a coincidence. How does that Change what we're supposed to think about. Like Boy K. Well, I don't think.
- [10:06]
B
That four episodes into the show, people are thinking that Boy Cavalier is a humanitarian or necessarily a good person whose existence is going to make the world a better place. But I do think that he is an exciting character in that he says and does whatever he wants. He doesn't even wear shoes. And to the degree that that's wish fulfillment for a lot of people. You know, we do find ourselves attracted to what we call the truth tellers, Right, or the larger than life figures. But I think what this reveal does is to show that, oh, he is actually planning some things that. That you can only call evil. That he's so literally cavalier about the lives of the people on the planet Earth that he's going to crash a spaceship filled with aliens into, he hopes, his own city, which means that his citizens will die. At worst, just randomly crash it somewhere on the Earth to free these creatures. He doesn't have any belief other than that he'll be able to contain this thing once it gets out. But it reveals for Morrow that there is someone to blame for his life's work potentially going up in smoke. And so that turns him into a man with an agenda.
- [11:21]
A
Oh, right. Morrow has one mission, and that's the guy who screwed it up.
- [11:24]
B
Well, and we tease it in the first hour when Morrow asks the bound soldiers, where is the one called Cavalier? He's seen his face. He's heard him say, you know, that he's crashing the ship. And so he wants to find him because that's whose fault it is.
- [11:41]
A
Noah faced a lot of challenges making a sort of condensed alien movie to drop into the middle of a TV series. And, you know, I've been a writer and an editor in print for most of my life, and that world is a lot like television. And one very important way, it doesn't really come together until the edit. So let's talk to the editor, Regis Kimball, about assembling a TV show's Lego bricks into a spaceship.
- [12:03]
D
Episode five is a standalone. You know, it's a horror movie. And that's what made the 79 movie so great, is that you have this long anticipation, these breathing moments, these empty frames. And we've tried to instill that feel throughout the series. You know, the chestburster happens maybe in 45. Is it 45 minutes into Alien 1?
- [12:28]
A
Yeah, it's a long time.
- [12:29]
D
It's a huge time for a creature movie to see the creature. And so here, you know, it's A measured metering out. It's not this fantasy of people floating through the room, but it's just this horrible, horrible monster movie of the big thing is coming. And these people are living in a world that's. It's not going to be comfortable for them in the long run.
- [12:53]
A
So this episode, like you said, is kind of self contained, but it has this large cast and they're mostly new to a viewer, so we have to get to know them really quickly. How does that change your approach?
- [13:05]
D
Working with Noah for so long? We kind of have a shorthand and an understanding with how we want things to sort of feel. For the most part, we try to tell the story in the least amount of cuts because his sensibilities are such that he doesn't want to force feed the audience. He likes giving people shots with more than one character in them. So you can see their body language and you can see how they're playing off each other. And it's a nice way to allow the audience to take from the frame what they want instead of always being in big close ups and force feeding them. I mean, here we are in the Maginot and you're dealing with these characters that you just are starting to learn about. Just like in the 79 movie, when they're in the mess hall and they're doing things, people are on top of each other. It's very dirty. I mean, Malachite, this poor kid who thought he was going to be going on a geologic survey ends up with these creatures all around him. You know, a love story in the middle of it with Zaveri and Bronski. So this ensemble sort of drives the cutting pattern because you're dealing with broken people, people with an agenda. Then it sort of goes into a bit of this whodunit. Where is this coming from? And then once it's finally revealed, it's kind of just an all out sprint to the end.
- [14:22]
A
Is there an expectation that you're going to be solving problems that emerge or, you know, ideas that emerge during shooting?
- [14:28]
D
Well, yeah, things change all the time. I mean, what's on the page kind of helps. But there's always challenges in production. There's always challenges with every actor that comes onto a set. And so you're trying to embrace those characteristics that the actor brings with them and then also embed that into the story that's trying to be told. That's the other thing is in working with Noah, he's got this writer brain. And so you end up with these sort of modular emotional events. That something from two thirds of the way down the script, an emotional beat that might actually line up better with scene three of a different character. So when you start butting these two scenes up with one another, a whole third kind of emotion is generated from it because they're informing each other in a totally different way than what was ever written or really conceived. And Noah, he's really adept in the cutting room and has a great sense of when things are working or when things aren't working, which is really, really a luxury and a great way to work with somebody.
- [15:33]
A
You've actually worked on quite a lot of science fiction or vfx were going to be a part of it where you weren't going to be able to see everything that's going to happen. Does that make it harder to edit an episode of television if you don't have all the pieces in front of you?
- [15:46]
D
It does make it difficult. But first of all, they had a xenomorph on set, so that solves a lot of timing questions. But with ticks and image and orchid and I know I'm missing one.
- [16:01]
A
The fly is the last one. Right. I took that. They. They don't name it for a long time.
- [16:06]
D
So, yeah, I mean, these are characters that are sort of. Again, they're. They're paced out how much you actually see of them until they start to make their full grand appearance. And their horror, you know, you fully start to understand exactly what that image is all about. The horrible thing that happens in two, you don't see how it gets in the cat, but in five, you start to see, well, holy shit, this thing is fully sentient. It's fully engaged.
- [16:32]
A
I was totally okay not seeing how it got into the cat, I gotta tell you.
- [16:35]
D
Yeah, well, it gets worse, let me tell you. It gets a lot worse.
- [16:39]
A
Great. All right, so this week we got a little alien movie, a Ship in a Bottle episode, if you will. But did you notice we also got some backstory on why a whale Yutani spaceship full of dangerous aliens crashed into a building in Prodigy territory. And we got the story on Moro, the obsessive cyborg. This is Babu Sise, who plays Moro.
- [17:03]
C
My first encounter with the Xenomorph was watching it pop out of John Hurt's chest as a young person living in Africa at the time. And I remember watching this on tv and I couldn't get my head around it. It just scared me so much. And this audition came in, they'd sent the first three episodes. So when I was reading it, I just had that sense of tension of these people don't know what's coming for them, you know.
- [17:27]
A
So I take it you were excited then to have these scripts in front of you.
- [17:30]
C
I was already a big fan of the franchise, so one of the first thoughts I had was that it's too good for me. I just immediately discounted myself, like, it's too good. It's like a dream. Forget it. For three days, when I was waiting to hear the final confirmation, I didn't leave my flat. I would just walk to the kitchen, walk to the lounge and I don't really waiting for the call indeed. And I'm quite calm about these things, but I don't know, this one just got under my skin. So when I got the call, I finally went out for a coffee.
- [17:57]
A
Noah has written ensemble shows before. There's intertwined characters, multiple plot lines. But Morrow as a character is a load bearing character, moving action forward in the way a scene has to feel. When Moro shows up in a scene, you're supposed to feel a certain way, it's like, oh shit, Morrow's here.
- [18:15]
C
Here we go.
- [18:16]
A
You know something, right? I wonder what that's like for you as an actor in those scenes, in those moments in a show where there are so many stories but you're at the middle of so many of them.
- [18:26]
C
Yeah, I love the way you put it is that he is load bearing. He takes a lot of the weight of certain elements of the story. And yes, very early on I felt that pressure that I'm gonna be under in some of those scenes. So, yeah, I've always felt there was some of that. But I love Morrow. He's a complicated character and I love complicated characters. Some of the research that I did is I went and watched There Will Be Blood, checked out Danny J. Lewis's performance. I went and watched Javier Bardem again for like the 10th time in no country for Old Men. And of course those are phenomenal performances, but I was looking for clues as to how is the actor solving this problem. And I also watched, God rest him, Heath Ledger. I watched the Dark Knight again and watched the Joker. And what's incredible is the way he moves in there. Like everyone else is quite upright and stiff and ready to go, but he just kind of rolls around in these scenes. And I watched all of that and I thought, okay, I have to make a decision on how Morrow moves. And the clue was in that scene when he's talking to Mother, when he's trying to get into the impact room, he isn't rushing, he's keeping his head. He's got one sweat, he's humming. He's maintaining his pace because he knows if he rushes, he's gonna ruin everything. And so once I had that set in, I thought, okay, great. Now, of course, not to spoil anything, but when Moro needs to move quickly, he really does.
- [19:51]
A
And so how's he able to remain so cool in the face of the horror and bloodshed?
- [19:57]
C
If you imagine at some point he was part of the Special Forces, this is how he's risen right up to the top. So he's put himself in extreme cold, extreme heat, extreme situations, and being able to take extreme situations without reacting. In a way, it's the simplicity of it. This is the situation I'm in. What does fear do to me? If I keep a clear head, I can do something useful. So I just went down that path of. He's just got incredible strength of character. It's not that he's unfeeling, especially with the introduction of a daughter. I even feel that part of his lack of fear is to do with the fact that he's lost his daughter.
- [20:29]
A
Sure.
- [20:30]
C
So it puts him in this place where. What's worse than that?
- [20:34]
A
Oh, he's already been through kind of the emotional trauma, so what difference does the rest of it make?
- [20:38]
C
I mean, I don't know that he's dealt with it, but he's in the process of going through that trauma. Not that it's made him numb, but it's made him maybe a little bit more foolhardy, a bit more extreme.
- [20:51]
A
Can I ask, though? This is a bit more of a process question, but we see early on flashes of the kinds of things that Morrow does on the Maginot once the alien is loose and has broken containment and he goes into Mother and drops into the escape pod and all that stuff. But as I understand it, a lot of that was filmed early, and then you went back and expanded the tale of that for episode five, the separate flashback to what actually happened. So I wonder, did your opinion of what he does on the Maginot change over that time?
- [21:19]
C
Yes. When I was shooting the first episode, I didn't know at that point that he had a daughter and what her fate was. So by the time I went to do the longer version, I had that information. And knowing it, some questions came up in terms of, okay, so some of the actions he takes, sealing out our new captain of this room, protecting himself. But, you know, with Morrow, it always comes back to the mission. He cannot let his human Emotion, things like empathy, sympathy get into the way too much. I think he spends a lot of time suppressing what he. I'm not gonna say really feels, but those feelings, when they come up where it's like, okay, do I open this DOR and let Zaverin. No, because there's a risk the monster will come in. And not only that, this impact room takes one person. What's he gonna do at the end of the day? Who's he gonna trust to complete it, to get this thing on the ground and get these species into Yutani's hands? He's not gonna trust anybody else on that ship to complete that job. I love this line that he says in episode five. He says, I don't need 10 more people with emotions, with feelings about what's happening. Let's not wake up the rest of the crew. Because it's just gonna make it more complicated.
- [22:33]
A
So he knows that this is a trillion dollar mission. He's gotta do it for Yutani because he owes her and he owes the company for who he feels like he is. He has to show utility when he gets back to Earth and sees what Earth is like and sees that there are hybrids who he meets early on first couple episodes. But that doesn't change, does it, what he's thinking? Like, his motivations continue to be that. Like all mission, all Yutani, no compromise. Even though he knows that things are different now.
- [23:00]
C
She's the one that built this thing, and she made him an integral part of that. From someone abandoned on the streets to being somebody who can have an impact on the direction that the world is going in. He wants to be on mission. Like, imagine he left his daughter there when she was about 11. If he comes back in 65 years, she's old enough to be his mother, right? It's a sacrifice he's made. Who would he make that for? Yutani. And his own sense of need to have a purpose. So even after he sees everything that's happening, the place still remains the same. We need to get these creatures that I've given 65 years of my life to, a daughter as well. I need to get the mission complete.
- [23:44]
A
I guess you wonder what kind of moral determinations he'll make about himself once he's completed this mission. But then he can also compare, at that point what he knows about the Yutanis with Boy Cavalier. And by episode five, he's got another enemy besides the aliens.
- [23:59]
C
Yeah, 100%. And that particular character represents, in some ways, a graver danger. The xenomorph is purely instinctive. But you have Boy Cavalier, who is uncontainable. He just wants to achieve his goal. He's playing universal chess. Whereas Morrow's like, listen, we're not nothing and you've messed with the wrong person because I'm not gonna take it, you know?
- [24:25]
A
Right.
- [24:25]
C
What I love about the Moro character is no one sees him coming. Really. He's under the radar. What was it? The greatest trick the devil ever played was pretend it doesn't exist. So he has this wonderful thing. When we're discussing his costume very early on, or discussing how he represents himself, I always said he wants to be the kind of person that in a crowd you wouldn't notice him. He's just there. But he sees everything. You see nothing, you know? And Cavalier, for him, represents an existential threat to everybody because he's reckless. Also, if he gets all of these dangerous species, who knows what the future of Earth is?
- [24:58]
A
There's a song that he hums when he's singing about his daughter. What's the significance of that? Because he hums it when he closes. A very out of mother too. Right?
- [25:06]
C
Yes. I mean, we talked earlier about how he tries to manage his emotions. So I have a few phobias. I ain't gonna talk about them in case anybody finds out and uses it against me. Right. You never know.
- [25:19]
A
Smart. Yes, good.
- [25:20]
C
But you do these things called box breathing, or you hum something to take your mind off whatever you're doing, however difficult it is. That humming is 100% a comfort blanket for him. It's his teddy bear. So when he's in the most high pressure situation with the xenomorph knocking at the door, having to do what he does to get everything right, to get into this impact room, he starts humming. It was actually Noah's idea, the song and that moment of humming, he came and I had to sort of make sense of what it was for me. And in my mind, it's something linked to this time in his life and what that song represented. It's a moment of absolute peace. And that song he relates to that, that's the way I take it anyway. But it's just such a beautiful song, and I love that he put the French version into it. The way it crescendo is at the end with the flash, with the daughter, which we hadn't discussed. The fact that Noah's edited that in, it's like, okay, good. Any kind of synergy with Noah's a good thing.
- [26:17]
A
So Morrow develops this relationship with slightly and I had thought that was irredeemable for a long time. That was just manipulative. But for what you're describing now, sort of paints that in a very different way. He had a daughter who he no longer has a relationship with, and now he's got a relationship with this kid. I've been unjustifiably mean to Morrow. You're telling me there's more to it than that?
- [26:35]
C
I think there's more to him. But what he does do to Slightly, it's all the things. You see what I'm saying? It is manipulative. There's no getting away from it.
- [26:44]
A
It's bad.
- [26:45]
C
It's bad. I mean, bad in the sense that I don't think it's lost on Morrow that he's looked for the weakest link. There's one question he asks when he's downloading into his head, Morrow is about utility. So he's using every opportunity to understand what's happening. And as he talks to them, he's already figured out their synthetic. As he's talking to them, he sees that Slightly is the one who says, well, it depends. It depends on a certain situation, whether or not you should punish someone. And he said, why is that? Well, you know, if they were your parents, for instance. Aha. Now, he's seen a weak spot there. So later on, when he's approaching the pair of them, Slightly is the person he focuses on. He doesn't know if it'll be useful later, but it might be. And so when the opportunity comes up, it's definitely manipulative. But you know how it goes. You get into the weeds, you start doing everything that you need to do, and suddenly you go, oh, hold on a second. This isn't as easy as I thought. There is an emotional connection and I'm not going to spoil anything. But as the series goes on, if you imagine that they're meshed in a certain way, he learns how to manipulate even better if he needs to. What buttons do you press? What is it that makes human beings react?
- [27:56]
A
But we talked about that loaded moment when Moro closes the door and seals Severi's fate. So now let's go to the other side of that door. We can talk to Saberri herself. This is actress Richa Moorjani.
- [28:11]
E
Something that was so exciting to me was I actually got to name my character.
- [28:15]
A
Really?
- [28:16]
E
Yes. Because after Noah cast me, he emailed me and he said, you know, you're Indian. Do you want your character to have an Indian name? And I appreciated it. So Much, because to me, to have a character that does have an ethnic name that resonates with me really does help me as the actor to feel an actual connection to the character, because there is something about names and about where we come from. And I sent him a list of first names and a list of last names that I felt like could work. And he went through both of the lists and he put together. He picked the name, the first name, Zoya, and the last name, Zaveri. And he's like, I. Like. I think this has a ring to it. And I said, so do I. And so we named our child Zoya Zaveri.
- [29:02]
A
Also, you're playing kind of a classic character. You were playing the commander of a spaceship where an alien gets loose. Big science fiction deal.
- [29:12]
E
Yeah, definitely. I mean, and I didn't take that lightly. And there was definitely a lot of similarities between my character and Ripley's character. And part of my research was just watching tons of interviews with Sigourney Weaver and hearing how she prepared for the role and her experience and talking about her character, and that really helped with my own preparation.
- [29:31]
A
What was one of the things you took away from that? I mean, what did you bring that was useful?
- [29:34]
E
One thing that I remember Sigourney saying in one of her interviews was how Ripley doesn't succumb to the sexism. She just keeps doing what she has to do to do her job and to save her crew. And that's kind of exactly what happens with my character. She's dealing with this crew that. She loves them because they're her people, and they've been in space together for 65 years. But now that the actual captain has suddenly died and she's put in this position that she wasn't expecting to be put into, she's dealing with this whole new level of sexism, but she doesn't let that stop her. One of my favorite scenes to shoot, which is probably not Zoya's favorite moment in her life, but it's in the really fun scene in the mess hall when everyone's there getting food, and she's there to tell everybody what the reality of the situation is. Look, we're all about to die, but they're not taking it seriously until Moro has to come and slam his big robotic arm on the table and just get everyone to listen.
- [30:29]
A
So Zaveri's response and Moro's response are both really telling, but they're both very different from each other. Can you say a little more about that?
- [30:37]
E
I do think that you know, Zoya, Zaveri and Moro have very different priorities, and his priority is to protect the cargo, because that's the mission. And that is what Mother says is the number one priority. Whereas Zaveri, her priority is her people. These people have been her crew for 65 years. And she very much has this inner conflict when Mother tells her to acknowledge that the cargo is the number one priority. And she just can't seem to accept that, because for her, the people are the most important thing. And I think that's, you know, a theme throughout this whole franchises. This idea of what kind of person are you when you're put into a situation like this? And you really only see that when these monsters come out.
- [31:20]
A
It's interesting, though, because as a viewer, the episode gets me to a place where I kind of understand and at least sympathize in some ways with Moro.
- [31:30]
E
Especially because I don't think he hates my character. I don't think he's doing it just to be cruel. I don't think he's doing it to be evil. But he's doing it in that moment because things to him, he is doing what he has to do. I mean, I think the way that he still brought humanity to his character, you almost feel sorry for him. And I was so blown away by his performance.
- [31:48]
A
There's the kind of surgery scene with the ticks and the people die in the lab, and there's gases and aliens on people's lungs and stuff. And after that, Moro does take command. Zaveri allows him defers or allows him to assume command. So I guess I'm asking why that is. The moment that she finally does give up, is that too strong?
- [32:06]
E
No, I don't think you're wrong at all. And when it comes to that scene and she's. And it's literally a life or death moment for multiple people, and she goes with her instinct, which is for the doctor to do the surgery and take that risk. And of course, it doesn't go well and they all die. And I think she kind of freezes in that moment and she realizes that, well, I failed. I was trying to save my crew, but I failed. And maybe it would be better for Morrow to take over now. And then she sees the alien behind her, and I think that snaps her back into reality. And that's really the turning point for her, where she goes from this really thinking, methodical person to just plain warrior, and she has to just act.
- [32:46]
A
It's not really fair, though, right? Like in that first movie, Ash, the synth, does the same scale of betrayal, but he gets his head knocked off. And in this one, it's sort of the inversion. The robot wins. It's, it's, it's a little frustrating.
- [33:01]
E
It is. And originally the scene when you see her die in the first episode, they had actually shot that with somebody else because I had not been cast yet, because I don't think this episode had been written yet. I don't think that they knew there was going to be this whole storyline. So they had actually already shot that scene with a different actress and it was in episode one. And then later, when Noah decided to write this episode and then he cast me, we had to reshoot that whole scene. I mean, there was no way that there was going to be a happy ending for my character, which we knew from the get go. But he tried to bring as much heart and humanity as possible so that the audience really does feel just a total sense of grief and despair when you see her die. Because in the first episode you don't really have that context. Then you see episode five, you see who she is, you see what she was trying to do, and then it's really, really depressing.
- [33:56]
A
Yeah, it's amazing. That means that Babu had to like betray two captains, basically.
- [34:00]
E
Yeah, he had to. He had to go through that traumatic.
- [34:02]
A
Experience twice since we're talking about it. That death scene, getting killed by the alien. Yeah. Was it, was it Cameron?
- [34:12]
E
It was Cam. And you know when he is in that costume and when the cameras are rolling and he's chasing me, he really did chase me, by the way. And he really did tackle me to the floor and all those things. Of course I was safe. I didn't get hurt. I did get a few bruises, but I was proud of those bruises. And then when the cameras were off, the team would come in and take his head off and it would just be his xenomorph body with his beautiful face poking out of it and his beautiful Australian accent. And also both him and I are vegan, so we would just talk about eating plant based food in between scenes. This scary xenomorph creature who's a vegan, I just thought that was hilarious. But no, I mean, he was incredible when he had the head on and when the cameras were rolling, he was absolutely terrifying and made it very easy for me not to have to act much.
- [34:58]
A
That's this week's episode of Alien Earth, the official podcast brought in for another safe and comfortable landing. Next week, Morrow's plans start coming together. Wendy's plans start falling apart. And I'm not gonna lie, there's some body horror on episode six of FX's Alien Earth Rate. Review and follow Alien Earth, the official podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Adam Rogers and I'll see you here next week.