Episode 7: Emergence

Summary

---

Alien: Earth – The Official Podcast

Episode 7: "Emergence" (September 17, 2025)

Host: Adam Rogers | Guests: Dana Gonzalez, Noah Hawley, Jeff Russo, Maggie Phillips, Alex Lothar

---

Overview:

The penultimate episode of Alien: Earth ("Emergence") delves into the pivotal split between human and machine, examining identity, agency, and the morality of scientific progress. Host Adam Rogers sits down with director Dana Gonzalez, composer Jeff Russo, music supervisor Maggie Phillips, series creator Noah Hawley, and actor Alex Lothar (Hermit) to unpack the episode’s emotional and thematic climaxes—including betrayal, maturation, violence, and the lurking costs of "mad science." The discussion also spotlights how music serves as the show’s unsung "world builder," heightening its emotional impact and horror.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Children, Hybrids, and Moral Awakening

• The Children’s Arc: Dana Gonzalez reflects on the trajectory of the hybrid kids—from naïve child-like interactions to hard-won loss of innocence.
  • “When they first initially come out, they're kind of interacting like children... By the time they get to seven, they realize that Boy K is not the guy they thought he was. They want to leave the island... And the horror that they experience as children finding out about this cruel world we live in.” (01:08–01:53)
• Individual Perspectives: Each child has a different reaction to their hybrid state:
  • Curly, once wheelchair-bound, relishes her new abilities.
  • Nibs grows reluctant and confused, questioning her existence.
• Reaction to Betrayal: The discovery of the children's graveyard and Boy K’s true intentions catalyze their maturity and distrust.
• Parental Archetypes:
  • Kirsch (Timothy Olyphant): The disciplinarian, "babysitter" parent unwillingly thrust into authority.
  • Arthur & Dame Sylvia: Stand-in parental figures with diverging attitudes toward the children’s humanity versus their scientific roles.
    • “Dame, you know, she’s going along with it, and she thinks about them as children more than hybrids... She’s definitely guilty of the death of these children, but she doesn’t think about them the same as Boy K does.” (04:32)

2. Defining & Crossing Lines: Humanity, Violence, and Agency

• First Steps into Violence:
  • Joe and Nibs both cross moral thresholds in this episode.
    • “Joe has been the hostage ... until he finally pulls the trigger. Chooses a side... Nibs finally becomes a hybrid. Like she's no longer that little kid anymore.” (04:51–05:09)
  • Is this maturity? Malfunction? Or the “robot” taking over? Ambiguity remains.
• Chekhov’s Alien & Agency:
  • Adam Rogers jokes, “If there’s a xenomorph imprisoned above your mantelpiece in episode two, then it gets out and murders everyone in act three. Usually it’s a bad guy who does the releasing, but here it’s Wendy doing it.” (05:32)
  • Dana Gonzalez calls Wendy’s decision a thematic fulcrum: Will she choose her human or machine self? (05:52–06:44)

3. The Sonic World of Alien: Earth

• Intentional Sound-Building:
  • Jeff Russo uses a bespoke Austrian metal string instrument to create eerie, discordant motifs, emphasizing the unknown.
    • “It can make this very dense, very discordant sound... I bring discord out when you don’t know what’s about to happen.” (07:14)
  • Early involvement with scripts lets music and sound become integral "world-building" tools, not afterthoughts.
• Collaboration & Process:
  • Russo: Looks for character and relationship themes, thinks about tone before nitty-gritty scoring (09:23).
  • Phillips: Finds appropriate songs once visuals are available—cites personal nostalgic favorites (Jane’s Addiction, Metallica).
• Signature Moments:
  • The transition from score to song at the end of each episode was intentional:
    • “When you watch each one of these episodes, score usually hands off right into a song, and it’s like, holy shit, when that first song comes in after that first episode, it’s so satisfying.” —Jeff Russo (17:08)
• Easter Eggs:
  • Noah Hawley sings a brief lyric in the main theme’s “Strange Brew” motif—an in-joke for long-time fans (18:45–18:54).

4. Hermit’s Arc: The Human Cost

• Casting Insights:
  • Alex Lothar recounts a fast casting process with concerns about his physical similarity to another actor. (19:46)
• Developing Hermit:
  • Hermit is a working-class, inherently decent "proletariat" figure trapped in a corporatized machine.
  • His identity as a caregiver (future doctor) is challenged by the inability to care for a hybrid sister—now more machine than human.
  • “Maybe he’s there to sort of look after the soul of her, if there is one... He takes that responsibility on because he’s just so used to caregiving.” (21:59–22:53)
• Sisterly Dynamics – Marcy/Wendy:
  • Lothar intentionally varies use of “Marcy” (for his remembered human sister) vs. “Wendy” (the hybrid being).
    • “It’s almost like this Marcy person goes in and out of focus when he’s looking at her.” (23:07–23:41)
• Role Reversals & Moral Lines:
  • Hermit, once the protector, becomes the one needing rescue—upending genre expectations.
  • His decision to shoot Nibs to protect human friends is a profound, ethically fraught turning point:
    • “...As soon as violence breaks out, Hermit’s choice to prioritize human life says, ‘I don’t actually think you’re human. Even if I think you’re my sister, I don’t think you’re human.’” (27:01–27:08)
  • Lothar expands: children contain violence within them, and Nibs’ outburst is both mechanical and childlike in nature.

5. Mad Science, Hubris, and Consequence

• Hybrid Immortality & Death:
  • The deaths of hybrid children (such as Isaac) highlight the fallacy of immortality and the price of unchecked scientific ambition.
    • “There’s a sense of fatality, of, what did you think was going to happen when you put children into these adult responsibilities? ... It is his very childness that led to his death, because kids, rush.” —Noah Hawley (29:47)
• Failure of Safety & Ethics:
  • Hawley notes the biosafety protocols are inevitably flawed, especially in face of hostile, unknown threats (30:39–31:01).
  • Corporate hubris replaces regulation or prudence, with Boy K (Boyd Cavalier) as the most reckless example.
    • “Because there aren’t regulations or governments to keep him from breaking these protocols, they are just norms, in a way, scientific norms. And he wants faster, go faster...” (32:53)
  • The show bakes in a critique of “move fast and break things”—technology brings risks, sometimes catastrophic.
• Morality Among Scientists:
  • Arthur is framed as the show’s “moral center,” while Dame Sylvia is much more morally compromised.
    • “Arthur ... saw the good intentions of giving sick children a chance to live on... I think Dame Sylvia is a much more morally compromised person who does a lot of things in the name of science that are questionable.” (34:15–35:24)
• Cautionary Science Fiction:
  • “It all goes back to that line in Jurassic Park where Jeff Goldblum says, you know, your scientists spent so much time figuring out, could they do this? They didn’t think about should they do this?” —Noah Hawley (37:09)
  • The narrative remains simultaneously pro-science and cautionary, leaning on the lineage of Shelley’s Frankenstein and other science fiction parables.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "They could split an atom, but they can barely cross the street."
  —Dana Gonzalez, on genius lacking street smarts (02:30)
• “Science.”
  —Kirsch’s deadpan answer after Isaac's death (03:14)
• “The monsters have their themes too. Of course they have their themes. They're fucking scary as hell.”
  —Jeff Russo, on composing for xenomorphs (13:31)
• "Immortality is a false promise."
  —Paraphrased recurring theme as hybrids face death (throughout; articulated in Hawley's segment at 29:47)
• "Hubris is really stupidity in a different guise."
  —Noah Hawley (31:15)
• "This is a yes place, not a no place."
  —Adam Rogers quoting the show, critiquing corporate risk culture (33:23)
• "Fiction exists to show reality what's possible. Without the book Frankenstein, we don't have an idea of the mad scientist."
  —Noah Hawley on the influence of science fiction (35:40)
• "Could they do this? They didn’t think about should they do this?"
  —Quoting Jurassic Park to summarize the season's central dilemma (37:09)

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• Child Characters and Loss of Innocence: 01:08–02:59
• Kirsch as Parental Figure & “Science” Quote: 02:59–03:35
• Joe & Nibs Turn Violent: 04:51–06:44
• Constructing the Soundscape: 07:14–11:49
• Tone, Songs, and Episode Climaxes: 15:22–17:39
• Behind the Music Main Theme (Noah Hawley’s Easter Egg): 18:45–19:24
• Alex Lothar (Hermit) on Character, Relationships: 19:46–24:46
• Hermit, Marcy/Wendy Dynamics: 21:59–23:41
• Ethical Choices and Violence: 24:46–28:17
• Noah Hawley on Mad Science and Hubris: 29:47–37:09

---

Tone & Final Thoughts

The conversation flows between dry humor (Kirsch’s quips, Adam Rogers’s asides), analytical introspection (Lothar, Hawley), and passionate engagement with the show’s musical layer. The team’s deep collaboration, trust, and willingness to "go there" with themes of identity, family, and the dangers of unbridled ambition imbue the podcast with urgency and complexity. Episode 7 sets the stage for a finale where choices—human, machine, or monstrous—can no longer be avoided.

---

For listeners new or returning, Episode 7 offers a thrilling, layered synthesis of Alien: Earth’s philosophical quandaries, character arcs, and atmospheric world-building—an aural journey as intense and immersive as the show itself.

Transcript

[Maggie Phillips]

Mr. Strawberry says off.

[Jeff Russo]

We're never going back off the boat now.

[Maggie Phillips]

I see you.

[Adam Rogers]

Welcome to Alien Earth, the official podcast. I'm your host, Adam Rogers, and I fully agree that if we really wanted to understand the show, we probably should have just put Newt in charge this week. Episode seven, the Emergence. Of course, there are spoilers ahead, as usual. Make sure you watch the episode before listening, because today on the podcast, we have director Dana Gonzalez. We also have composer Jeff Russo and music supervisor Maggie Phillips to talk about the sonic world of Alien Earth and why the show's closing credits always go so hard. We have Alex Lothar, Joe Hermit to talk about going from a dude in distress to making a great escape. And series creator Noah Hawley is back to talk about mad science and its costs. So first up, somebody who was in on the filming of the show from the start to its finish and helped build all the evolutions and changes that we've seen. Director Dana Gonzalez is back to unpack the penultimate episode for us.

[Dana Gonzalez]

We established the kids, and when you're starting out directing them from the beginning to the end, there's an arc there. When they first initially come out, they're kind of interacting like children. They're making children decisions. And then episode seven comes along, and they've been challenged. And the biggest thing is the kids have to learn about the world and how people are seeing that, you know. No, they can't trust everybody, and the world is not perfect. And by the time they get to seven, they realize that Boy K is not the guy they thought he was. And, you know, they want to leave the island. And you want the audience to know everything I just said. You want them to feel that, and then you also want them to feel their loss and their challenge and. And the horror that they experience as children finding out about this cruel world we live in.

[Adam Rogers]

That's the significance of them finding the cemetery where their human bodies have been buried.

[Dana Gonzalez]

Yeah. Wendy was brought in there going, we're gonna save your life, and it's all gonna be good. Curly. She was in a wheelchair, so she basically now she can walk and run, and she's all in. She's like, I'll do anything because I love this life. So she's got a different perspective on it than even Wendy or the other kids do. And then you have nibs. You know, she's questioning, like, what is this? I don't think Boy K thought they were going to be going through these personal, independent dilemmas. It's an interesting dynamic.

[Adam Rogers]

It's interesting because he's supposed to be so smart. How did he not see that coming?

[Dana Gonzalez]

I think there's a lot of geniuses don't have street smarts. They could split an atom, but they can barely cross the street. I don't want to give it away, but he's been controlling his destiny since he was a young boy. And, like, he's very stunted, you know, Kirsch and Adam, they're the adults. They're the ones who have been like, no, no, no, you don't want to do that. And he's like, well, why not? And he does listen to them. He gets mad at Kirsch. Adam tries to nurture him along, but he's not making great decisions all the time. And he's definitely not thinking it through.

[Adam Rogers]

There are big, droll Kirsch moments in this episode, and you have Timothy Olyphant playing Kirsch just dropping the kill shots on these lines. One of them is when Isaac is killed by the fly. Somebody says, what happened to Isaac? And Kirsch says, science.

[Dana Gonzalez]

Yeah.

[Adam Rogers]

Then he's also got. After he captures Moro, who's come to the island to try to get all the aliens for weather Yutani. And he captures the chest person that's released and Kirsch just drops. You two are grounded to slightly. It's me, right? They're great moments because you have Tim Oliphant, but I wonder. Also, they seem significant because they're funny, first of all. But it's also Kirsch being elevated, and I wonder what you think of those moments.

[Dana Gonzalez]

So I think that those scenes, like, are really there to remind the audience who we're dealing with. They're kids. It's like earlier when Arthur says, let's go back to the island and we'll talk it all through. And they're holding hands together.

[Adam Rogers]

So it's just interesting, too, the parenting relationships that the different characters have of the Lost Boys. Dame Sylvia and Arthur, kind of in loco parentis. Boy K doesn't think they should be. You mentioned Arthur has that moment where they're holding hands and Arthur says, look, those who love you will always understand. It's very, like, poignant moment right before bad things happen. But Kirsch is the only parent who actually punishes them for misbehavior.

[Dana Gonzalez]

Yeah, he's the babysitter. He's a reluctant. He doesn't want to be the parent, but he's. Yeah, he's the disciplinarian parent. That's who he is.

[Adam Rogers]

Just wait till your artificially intelligent dad gets home.

[Dana Gonzalez]

Yeah. That dynamic is interesting, and I think it's important to hold onto that.

[Adam Rogers]

Do Dame, Sylvia and Arthur see themselves as parents of the children who were. Of the human children or of these new things, of the hybrids?

[Dana Gonzalez]

Yeah, I think Arthur, I don't think he likes the science. It's a little bit more kind of like, what are we doing? And then Dame, you know, she's going along with it, and she thinks about them as children more than she thinks about them as hybrids. She's definitely guilty of the death of these children, but she doesn't think about them the same as Boy K does.

[Adam Rogers]

Both Joe and Nibs become violent in episode seven, where they haven't been before. They finally have a turn. Joe has been the hostage and in distress for much of the series until he finally pulls the trigger. Chooses a side, essentially. And Nibs finally becomes a hybrid. Like she's no longer that little kid anymore. Right. In the same scene.

[Dana Gonzalez]

Right. He definitely chooses a side. I'm gonna save these human lives. He's not even thinking in eight. There'll be a little bit more discussion about that and why he has to make that choice. And then Nibs, it's like, she's had enough. Is that the maturity of her? Is that the robot taking completely over? Is it malfunctioning? What's going on with that? I think that's gonna be more explored.

[Adam Rogers]

The aliens always get out in this universe. They try to put them in a box, and then they always get out and wreak havoc. I keep thinking about a joke like Chekhov's Alien. You know, if there's a xenomorph imprisoned above your mantelpiece in episode two, then it gets out and murders everyone in act three. Usually it's a bad guy who does the releasing, but here it's Wendy doing it.

[Dana Gonzalez]

That really is a big center point for this whole series in a way. Like, which side is she going to go, machine or human? Penultimate episodes in our world have sometimes more action than the finale because the finale is like the things coming together at a certain place to propel the next season. So the penultimate episodes, definitely a lot of things colliding. I think the main heavy lifting of seven was to show the big challenge between Wendy and Hermit. And again, going back to that, which side will Wendy go, human or machine? This is definitely the fracturing. And for the audience, I think for them to ask themselves that same question. Question. And that sets up episode eight kind of perfectly. Has this event that happened at the end of seven really forced her over to the machine side.

[Adam Rogers]

Every character has building blocks that assemble into the humans or machines or aliens that we now see. But all of that happens in response, to some extent, to the world of the show. Now, I've banged on about world building a lot here on Pod, but there's a last critical tool in the world building toolbox. We haven't talked about music. Like I said at the top, Alien Earth's tunes do not have to go that hard, but they do. Why? Well, here are composer Jeff Russo and music supervisor Maggie Phillips to tell us.

[Jeff Russo]

At the beginning of all projects that I do typically with Noah, I try to find some new instrument or some new way to make a sound that will be unique for that particular show. And this show, I found a company in Austria that makes these bespoke, weird stringed instruments. So it's this big metal piece that you can do a lot of things with, including use a bow on. And there are moments I can make it sound like groaning. Right. It sounds like metal on metal bending. It's a very musical instrument, and it can play melodically, but it also can make this very dense, very discordant sound. I bring discord out when you don't know what's about to happen. So that sort of can create this tension between the visual and the listener.

[Adam Rogers]

Okay, you've both been working with Noah for a long time. It's a decade and a half at least. So tell me what your collaboration looks like.

[Jeff Russo]

I've been working with Noah for. What year is it? 2025. So about 16 years. I've worked on pretty much every. Not pretty much. I've worked on every one of his creations.

[Maggie Phillips]

Yeah, I came on five years after Jeff, so I've been working for 11 years.

[Jeff Russo]

Oh, yeah, it was five years after. Because it was season two Fargo.

[Maggie Phillips]

Season two of Fargo. Yeah. But like what Jeff says, we have done everything, so there's no pause in the working relationship. It's just going from one to the other and sometimes overlapping.

[Jeff Russo]

I think part of the thing that is great about our working relationship with Noah is that we typically are starting when he's starting. Right. Like, he's starting to write scripts for all these shows, and he'll send us scripts and we'll start thinking about music right at the get go. Which is why I say things like, oh, yeah, I've been working on Alien for four years, which is not typical for a composer and certainly not typical for a music supervisor. So that gives us the opportunity to do our best possible work.

[Adam Rogers]

How do you know like, okay, this part needs music, and it should sound like this. Or we want it to do a certain thing like, how are you thinking about what the musical life of what you're seeing on those pages will be?

[Jeff Russo]

For me, my process is I read the script, and I'm thinking of overarching themes. I'm not thinking of like, oh, in scene 22, I need a piece of music here. I don't really break down scripts like that. There are script supervisors do that for editorial. But when I'm reading a script, I'm thinking like, oh, okay, there's a character. This character's definitely gonna need a theme. These two characters that have this interesting relationship that might need some sort of thematic material. And I think of it that way and start writing on a very broad sense. And it's really mostly about tone and what does the show feel like? And that's a conversation that I have with Noah early on.

[Maggie Phillips]

Yeah, it's a little different for me. We do have to do script breakdowns. I mean, on other shows, there's a lot more scripted music. I mean, there's not a ton of songs within the episodes, so.

[Adam Rogers]

Right, right, right.

[Maggie Phillips]

So those are like Somewhere under the Sea. And Accentuate the Positive are songs that Noah scripted and were very integral to his narrative process. And I think somewhat nostalgic for him. Like songs that are important to him. I think, personally, at least Accentuate the positive because we've used that in Fargo too. He loves that song. And so I would say I do, too. Oh, I do too. I do too. But I think it. My guess, and I have not ever talked to Noah about this. I think that song holds a special place. But for me on this one, I didn't really know until I got some visuals where we were gonna go with the songs, because it wasn't as. It's not as song driven. It was very Jeff Forward in the beginning.

[Adam Rogers]

Okay, well, I want to come back to the songs in a second. Because obviously the songs play a big part in the show. But let's stick with the score. Cause I want to understand what you're looking for when you read a script. What are the steps? How do you go from ideas while you're reading the script to an actual musical score?

[Jeff Russo]

To me, typically, I also use melodies to connect characters to the audience. So the siblings have a theme. I call it the siblings theme. And when it plays and you sort of feel the connection between the two. But now that you've seen episode seven as Wendy is, I want to say, separating from her, Brother. What I tried to do was take that theme and deconstruct it. So what started as this feeling of emotional connectivity between those two characters ends up feeling like emotional separation.

[Adam Rogers]

That's slick.

[Maggie Phillips]

And what's really slick about the way Jeff does it is he does it very subtly. I've always said this about you, but it's not like you're not being spoon fed.

[Jeff Russo]

You know, I think that's typical for everything that we do with Noah. It's like we typically. I feel like it's respect for the audience.

[Maggie Phillips]

It's respect for the audience to watch a show on their own.

[Jeff Russo]

We never put music in. And I'm talking about score, I'm not talking about songs. But we never utilize music or score unless we have emotionally earned it in a scene. We would much rather be quiet. Quiet than put music just to fill space. Right. You know, we really talk about how is this feeling? What is the feeling behind this entire sequence? If they're running, I don't need running music. How are they feeling when they're running? Why are they running? Are they running away from something that's going to kill them? Are they running towards something that they want to grab ahold of and kiss? You know what I mean? There's like all kinds of feelings that go into it. And I feel like we've always gone in the direction of we can only play the music that the characters are demanding. And if they're not demanding it, then don't do it.

[Adam Rogers]

But I'll push back a little bit. There's a jump scare noise. There is a cue for the jump scares.

[Jeff Russo]

So what I will say is this. It's alien. And so, yes, we have jump scares. Yes, we have horror music. And in that way, to me, that's the character of the xenomorph and or of these other bugs. Like these characters that are very much emotional characters in our story demand some type of score.

[Adam Rogers]

So the monsters have their themes too.

[Jeff Russo]

Of course they have their themes. They're fucking scary as hell.

[Adam Rogers]

Yeah.

[Maggie Phillips]

And I would argue, don't you think you thought about the audience a little bit more in this show than we have in the past? Or at least giving the audience a ride.

[Jeff Russo]

So, yes, it is a part of the entertainment factor. Right. I don't need to help scare them.

[Maggie Phillips]

No.

[Jeff Russo]

But I really do want to give them what they are expecting. Yeah, certainly. I took a little lead from the first movie and the second movie in terms of the tonality of what Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner did in those scores. Right. You know, there's a retro nostalgia there that I also wanted to grab onto, you know, so there's some of that sound that I wanted to put in there, which is one of the reasons why I went to Abbey Road to record the orchestra. Because the sound of that room, it's like when you hear an orchestra in that room, it's something familiar.

[Adam Rogers]

Yeah.

[Jeff Russo]

You know, you've heard it before. So I wanted that sound for the big score.

[Maggie Phillips]

I never thought about that, but that makes sense.

[Jeff Russo]

It just feels familiar.

[Maggie Phillips]

It feels familiar.

[Alex Lothar]

Yeah.

[Maggie Phillips]

One of my favorite score moments of yours probably wasn't recorded in Abbey Road. And that's that solo guitar you did. And is that in four?

[Jeff Russo]

That is at the end of four.

[Maggie Phillips]

Yeah.

[Jeff Russo]

I love that one so much that literally I was.

[Maggie Phillips]

Did you do it here?

[Jeff Russo]

I see it right here.

[Adam Rogers]

Might have been seen. Sorry. What's the moment?

[Maggie Phillips]

Jeff does a guitar solo. Jeff's guitar playing is phenomenal. It is you can just like self taught guitarist who led, you know, that 90s band. Tonic.

[Adam Rogers]

Yeah, no, that's the.

[Maggie Phillips]

And so he pulls out his electric guitar and does this like Hendrix sort of style. Like it doesn't sound like Hendrix, but you know what I mean? Just has as big of a presence as a Hendrix solo. And it's so emotional. It's so beautiful. And it's. For me, it's my favorite part of the whole score. I love that moment.

[Adam Rogers]

I appreciate that.

[Jeff Russo]

That was a lot of fun to do.

[Adam Rogers]

It's especially an interesting choice because the only experiences that most people watching will have had of an alien story as a movie is two sort of two intense hours of more and more alien stuff and then the end, but. Cause you're both having to work with eight installments. You need catharsis eight times to get out of one and go back to the real world and then come back again next week.

[Jeff Russo]

That's actually an interesting point. And I would say score doesn't need that. Right. I don't need a catharsis for score that way. That thankfully is all on you, Maggie, you know?

[Maggie Phillips]

Yeah. I mean, and luckily I didn't write these songs to do it. And these songs are super cool.

[Jeff Russo]

Or maybe you wish you did.

[Maggie Phillips]

I wish I do. God, yeah. I'd be retired if I had written some of these songs.

[Jeff Russo]

I have a question then, like, did you and Noah have a conversation about the idea of ending each episode with a song?

[Maggie Phillips]

Yes. We knew there was gonna be big endings, right?

[Jeff Russo]

They get me going.

[Maggie Phillips]

No. And I think. I think Noah would confirm this, but I think it just started. So it was like, we ended 101 with Black Sabbath, and then we did Tool, and then it was like, let's just keep going in the same vein.

[Adam Rogers]

How do you find them? How did you find these?

[Maggie Phillips]

It is collaboration, me and Noah and the editor. And it was pretty. I have to say, I don't want, like, not easy, but, like, just, like, it was so much fun that there wasn't a lot of stress. We got into a groove early on, and it just sort of landed. And it's just like, for me, my favorite's, like, were the ones that would satisfy high school, college age Maggie, which were Jane's Addiction, which we put in Legion, too. I love that song so much. And I'm a big Metallica fan, too, so getting Metallica in there, I mean, it's just, like, so satisfying.

[Jeff Russo]

What we've done is we create this, like, handoff. It's almost like a handoff. Because when you watch each one of these episodes, score usually hands off right into a song, and it's like, holy shit, when that first song comes in after that first episode, it's so satisfying.

[Maggie Phillips]

Well, that's why I feel like we thought more about the audience for this and, like, all the emotions they're gonna be feeling and all the emotions that the characters are feeling. But I feel like they're gonna. I hope that they're gonna be very satisfied by.

[Adam Rogers]

You Two are obviously very collaborative with each other, too. And you talked about how score hands off to song at the end of episodes. Are there any places where those things actually overlap?

[Jeff Russo]

I created all of the music around how we're doing the title music. And then there was this idea to utilize this lyric.

[Maggie Phillips]

Because we use Strange Brew by Cream, we use a portion of that song.

[Jeff Russo]

Noah said, how can we take that and have that be the sort of crescendo part of the piece?

[Maggie Phillips]

The first thing Noah spoke to about song, that was the first. For me, that was the first song that he brought up.

[Adam Rogers]

Say what?

[Maggie Phillips]

The lyric is literally just strange brute. That's all you hear? Yeah, it's nine seconds of the song.

[Jeff Russo]

So the idea was, how do I take those two notes? Cause it's two notes and the lyric, how do I insert that into what this idea I had for the main title was? And I just started messing around with how to make that work. And Noah ends up coming into the studio and singing the two.

[Adam Rogers]

Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm gonna stick to that. Noah Hawley is singing in the opening in the main Theme for the show.

[Maggie Phillips]

Noah's in every series of tv.

[Jeff Russo]

Pretty much, yeah.

[Maggie Phillips]

Pretty much.

[Jeff Russo]

Pretty much.

[Maggie Phillips]

Not everyone knows that.

[Jeff Russo]

Not everyone knows that.

[Maggie Phillips]

But you know what, Jeff? Have a band, and I manage it sometimes from the behind the scenes, because sometimes they'll call me up the next day and be like, we recorded the song last night. And I'm like, dudes, like, you gotta tell me.

[Jeff Russo]

You gotta tell me.

[Maggie Phillips]

Like, I have to make sure you can use that song. It sounds great. It doesn't sound like know it in the. Like, you wouldn't.

[Jeff Russo]

We went out of our way to make it not sound.

[Maggie Phillips]

I hope that's okay that we're sharing that, Noah. I. I think that's a fun Easter egg. I don't think he would be upset.

[Alex Lothar]

Okay.

[Adam Rogers]

Jeff and Maggie have been on Noah's team for a long time, which turns out to mean a ton of Easter eggs across a bunch of different shows. But that means that things are a little different for people who are trying to get on the team for the first time, like actors auditioning for parts. Alex Lothor, who plays Wendy's brother, Hermit, actually had a few jump scares during Alien Earth's hyperspeed casting process.

[Alex Lothar]

I think another actor, Sam Blenkin, was already cast, and I think they were worried that me and Sam look too similar physically. We're both sort of these skinny British guys, and they were like, oh, gosh. And so they asked me to come back, like, slick my hair back or try and sort of make myself look a bit different and do another reading. And that would happen very quickly, actually. I think we all got offered the parts over a very short space of time, then suddenly found ourselves in Thailand.

[Adam Rogers]

Hermit strikes me from the outside as kind of an unusual character for the show because he's actually kind of a decent human. Like, he's completely human, and he's mostly decent. He sort of represents the proletariat in this corporatized world. I wonder if you think that's right and how you thought about developing Hermit's inner life, you know, what kind of person he thinks he is and where he fits into the scheme of who these people are.

[Alex Lothar]

Yes. It's strange. When we first meet Hermit, he has encountered such loss. He's encountered the loss of his sister, but also both of his parents. And yet Noah spoke about him as someone that carried on and a sort of inherent optimism, I suppose, for living. When we meet him in the story, I think he's just about to hopefully go off to medical school and finally sort of move on with his life. But it's true that when we find him, we find someone quite trapped inside the machine which he's working for. And I think he resents that machine, but there's not a lot of space for him to rage against it.

[Adam Rogers]

It's interesting too, that he's a medic, he's gonna be a doctor. He's explicitly in a caregiving role. He's one of the few characters who, like, his whole job is to make sure people are okay.

[Alex Lothar]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's his sort of life ambition, is to give care. And so then I think that he finds himself in a very complicated situation when he ends up in Neverland amongst these other adult people who are seemingly giving care, but actually they're offering something quite different than care.

[Adam Rogers]

We're talking about episode seven. So it's been six weeks for us watching the show, but in the story for Hermit, it's really just been a couple of days since he learned that not only is his sister not dead, or at least that there's some version of his sister still alive, but she's a monster fighting superhero. So how do you think he handles that? Does he compare her to the 12 year old that he remembers?

[Alex Lothar]

Yes, it's a really hard thing for him to compartmentalize, isn't it? And where is his place in that facility? Because he can't really offer her physical help as a medic. She bleeds this sort of white machine fluid and she has scientists that look after her. And so what use is a sibling? Like, what use is a family member in that world? And I think he does struggle with that. And I wondered if it was something, I don't know. But maybe he's there to sort of look after the soul of her, if there is one. You know, if there is something, um, it's the Marcy that's inside Wendy. She can go back to lab and be repaired and she'll live forever and she won't get cancer. But how can he look after the human sort of, you know, like Mary Oliver Silk of the person inside of her, he takes that responsibility on because he's just so used to caregiving and is trying to find a space in which to give care with little Marcy, who's no longer little Marcy at all.

[Adam Rogers]

You did a specific acting in when you called her Wendy and when you called her Marcy in different scenes. We've talked about that with some of the writers. Tell me if that's right, first of all, and if it is what you were thinking and why the choice was important.

[Alex Lothar]

Yeah, I suppose whenever he's speaking to the idea of his sister as he remembers her, it's Marcy, which is interesting cause it so much serves him as much as it does because he's been missing this child so much. So there's so much wish fulfillment as well in that. And then this Wendy is a new person and she has less relationship to that Wendy being. And I think it's almost like this Marcy person goes in and out of focus when he's looking at her. And sometimes when Marcy's out of focus, they become Wendy, if that makes sense.

[Adam Rogers]

But by the time we get to episode seven, there's a bit of a shift in Hermit's character. He's still in a caregiving role, but now it's the Great Escape. Right. Like it's sort of a big swing. Cause he's kind of a rule follower until that point. And now it's like no, we gotta break off a secret island lab.

[Alex Lothar]

I think he quite quickly realizes that she's not safe here. So therefore we've got to get out. In his mind it's for her. But there's so much that he's doing out of his want to fill a position of care and his needs to be a brother.

[Adam Rogers]

I guess she goes immediately from being the kid who is cared for to being in the caregiver role herself. Hermit becomes kind of a dude in distress for her to rescue very quickly. And it's an inversion of the expected relationship that they would have as brother and sister perhaps.

[Alex Lothar]

Yeah, totally. As sort of a 10 year old sister and her older military trained medic brother. She comes in and she quite quickly saves the day on multiple occasions. It's interesting, isn't it? Because I think that says something about how we want to take care of others. And that is such a sort of instant position of responsibility that even a 10 year old is quite happy to fulfill.

[Adam Rogers]

There's a little bit of that. Like if you're a 10 year old now you get superpowers. That's a fantasy thing for a 10 year old. And it's an interesting juxtaposition with Hermit who's like trying to get out of the military. Like he wants to not be a life of combat superhero. He doesn't want to be a colonial marine. Like he wants none of this.

[Alex Lothar]

Yeah. And he's constantly having to re evaluate his place. And I think that actually got crystallized as we were shooting. There were earlier versions of the draft was literally just sitting in his room not knowing what to do, because what is there for him to do in that space? And I think Noah really sharpened that and made it quite active for him, trying to figure out, what am I doing here? Like, what am I? How can I be useful?

[Adam Rogers]

And Hermit ends up finding his use in coordinating the great escape from Neverland. He puts a lot of effort to slowly convince Wendy or Marcy that the place is not safe. She finally sees that and. But because she's sort of an older sibling to the Lost Boys, she says that if she's gonna escape, they have to come with her too. So we get this moment on the boat with Hermit, Wendy or Marcy Nibs, and then Hermit's other family too. And that jeopardizes the Hermit Wendy brother, sister relationship.

[Alex Lothar]

Yes. Because he's just trying to get her out with as few casualties as possible. He prioritizes the human life over, as he does with poor Nibs.

[Adam Rogers]

So it's two things, right? The first thing is that Hermit sees her deploy the xenomorph. There's that. And then when his friends come and say, no, you're under arrest, he lightning guns Nibs. He protects his friends.

[Jeff Russo]

Her friends, yeah.

[Alex Lothar]

Cause I think Nibs just ripped out someone's throat, right? Violence, yeah, it's super violent. But also, I mean, children do have immense violence within them as well. And they have to learn what to do with that anger. They crush bugs and they hurt little animals and they take it out on their little siblings. All of that stuff happens. I mean, they don't rip out the throats of military officers. But I think it's a question, isn't it? Nibs is really curious because actually what happens is it all becomes too much for her and she starts to disassociate and she starts to lash out. And is that the machine doing that or is that the child? And I suppose the part of Hermit that is about do no harm kicks in. And I think he makes a calculated and maybe human choice as to prioritise human pain over Nibs's.

[Adam Rogers]

He's implicitly also saying, I don't actually think you're human. Even if I think you're my sister, I don't think you're human. Because he's saying, no, I'm going to shoot the robot.

[Alex Lothar]

Exactly. That is his sort of internal battle throughout the whole season, I think is, please, please, please be my sister. Which means please, please, please do as few robotic, superhuman things as possible. The moments in which Marcy Wendy puts herself in his arms, or is they can Be tender with each other and as they were when they were brother and sister in their human form. What a crazy conversation this is. Hermit feels the most comfortable with that, knows how to be in that situation, knows how to be a big brother, but also recognizes the humanness in his sister. It's really awkward for him and uncomfortable. All the evidence she gives for not being his sister, because that does therefore mean that she's not human. And something else entirely.

[Adam Rogers]

So in the dynamic of who is the worst monster here, you know, aliens running around the jungle, weird robots whose eyes now glow red because they're evil robots and horrible brologarchs, you've got to kind of pick where you want to situate yourself if you're hermitage. If you're the last real human, basically, yeah.

[Alex Lothar]

In those first episodes, Hermit starts feeling that he's inside this sort of nightmare, and there's almost a sense of, when am I gonna wake up from it? And then there's this baseball that reminds him of his dad. And then someone turns up and says he's his sister. Like, he might start thinking, am I just severely concussed? Because it's so beyond. And then he has to deal with the fact that this is a nightmare that he's not waking up from.

[Adam Rogers]

It is all very dreamlike, actually.

[Alex Lothar]

Yeah, it's super dreamlike. And so you just sort of go, okay, well, what else you got?

[Adam Rogers]

I guess we're doing this.

[Alex Lothar]

Yeah. And I thought it was really interesting that there is the possibility of language for the aliens, and that means something, doesn't it? Because it therefore means the aliens are less alien than we've given them credit for. Maybe actually they're not purely the killing machines that we fear that they are. I do think what the show does is complicate the question of both what it is to be human, but also what it is to be an alien, too.

[Adam Rogers]

Like Alex says, this show complicates a lot of the larger questions about humanity. The lines between human and machine, human and alien, all get blurred. But the thing that's the least human about the hybrids is that they're supposed to be effectively immortal. And then in this episode, Isaac dies. Even hybrids are ultimately food for something. So that's the big question here. If that immortality is a false promise, how can any of the pursuit here of scientific advancement possibly be worth it in any sense? So here's series creator Noah Hawley.

[Noah Hawley]

I think there's a sense of fatality, of, what did you think was going to happen when you put children into these adult responsibilities? The tragedy of this death that happens is that it is his very childness that led to his death, because kids, Rush and he had some impulse control issues and, you know, he didn't know his own strength and pulled that door off and then ran. Rather than pause, slow down, think it through, he did the first thing that came to mind, which is, well, I can just open the door and slide in the tray and I'll be out in a second. And, you know, he created this opportunity. So I think that all those things that occurred for Kirsch, who has seen the footage and knows that the image orchestrated that moment, there's a lot of great science that happened. There just happens to have been a consequence to it that was less than preferable.

[Adam Rogers]

The biosafety precautions in this lab give me pause.

[Noah Hawley]

Can I just say, you know, there's no such thing as a perfect vacuum when hostile alien forces are involved. I think that science fiction has taught us that. So this facility was not designed to contain these creatures, really, and so they're just winging it.

[Adam Rogers]

Now that it is clear there are some definite mad scientist traits among a lot of these characters. Is there, like, a storytelling sense that the mad scientists get kind of punished for hubris here for doing this vivisection? Does that have to happen to the scientist perpetrators?

[Noah Hawley]

Well, there's a moment in the fifth hour when Dr. Rahim says, you know, this is proof of how stupid smart people can be. They're smart enough to build machines that go into space and to split the atom, but they're too stupid to know you don't bring parasites home with you. Hubris is really stupidity in a different guise. To think that they can contain or control what's going to happen. But in the same way that Dame Sylvia and this whole experiment of putting child's minds into adult bodies, you can call it whatever you like. It's still an experiment. It's still, we're gonna do something no one has ever done before. And then no matter how prepared we think we are, we just have to see what happens. And we didn't prepare for a spaceship to crash and Nibs to feel like she was almost invaded by a creature that forces her to think about, well, what is inside of me in a way that reminds her that she's mechanical. And that idea she can't really handle mentally, psychologically. You know, there are all these variables, but even without a spaceship, this was never going to go well. And that doesn't mean that you wouldn't end up in 10 or 15 years with a great product of immortality in which they'd worked out all the bugs. But those bugs, for now, are literal. And the consequences are the lives of these children.

[Adam Rogers]

Yeah, I guess I wonder what the journal write ups of like. Well, first we started by putting baby rat brains into adult rat synthetic bodies, and we figured out what happened there. Then we did it with monkeys. And there was a lot of institutional review board questions about that. You know, I don't think they followed those protocols.

[Noah Hawley]

Boyd Cavalier doesn't really have the patience for all of that. And because there aren't regulations or governments to keep him from breaking these protocols, they are just norms, in a way, scientific norms. And he wants faster, go faster, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've already. Just assume I'm ahead of you at all times is what he says. People who are ahead of you at all times are the least prepared for failure or setback because it's going to come. You can't outsmart everything.

[Adam Rogers]

This is a yes place, not a no place.

[Noah Hawley]

Right. Which is such a crazy thing to say. I mean, sure, philosophically, I also believe let's not be negative. Let's try to be creative problem solvers. But you have to say no when safety is involved. If you know better than me, because you're actually experienced as to how to build a skyscraper, and I'm telling you this is a yes place, and you're saying, but that skyscraper is going to fall over. I think it needs to be a no place.

[Adam Rogers]

It is literally in Marc Andreessen's techno optimist manifesto. There's no problem that technology might create that technology can't also solve. They assume they can fix it if something goes wrong.

[Noah Hawley]

I mean, eventually. Can they fix it in time? I think is the question right? Sure, one day technology could fix the problem that it creates, but if the result is that we're all dead, then it's a pyrrhic victory.

[Adam Rogers]

You think that really, Dame Sylvia, maybe Arthur feel the same way as Boy K about this? I mean, there is culpable in some of this hubristic science.

[Noah Hawley]

I think Arthur is the moral center of the show. And I think that what he saw was the good intentions of giving sick children a chance to live on. And yes, the downside of that they don't live on or that they don't end up being children or, you know, there's a lot of versions of it, but the risks, when you measure them out outweigh the downsides. I think Dame Sylvia is a much more morally compromised person who does a Lot of things in the name of science that are questionable. I mean, Arthur, when Adamind says erase three days of her memories and change her personality to not be this person, he is fired because he won't do it. And she will do it. And she justifies and convinces herself that she's helping, that it's just a different kind of medicine. But the reality is she knows somewhere deep down she knows that this is the wrong thing to do. But she is ambitious and she does want to be a great woman remembered. She wants that Nobel Prize as much as Boy Cavalier does.

[Adam Rogers]

It's kind of a bummer of an irony that they don't, I guess, read much science fiction themselves at Prodigy. For some people, the actual incept date of science fiction is literally a story that says, like, don't try to create life. That's a bad idea. It's Mary Shelley saying that very early on, right.

[Noah Hawley]

Well, there's an idea in baseball which is like, you're going to hit the ball where you're looking, so don't look at the fielders. There's a reason that our first phones were flip phones, like the communicators on Star Trek. Fiction exists to show reality what's possible. Without the book Frankenstein, we don't have an idea of the mad scientist. These things that are created in the imagination become reality.

[Adam Rogers]

Does the show then leave any room for the possibility that scientific achievement can also be a great human achievement? Is it all warnings against what scientists are supposed to do versus what humans standing up against monsters?

[Noah Hawley]

No, I mean, I think we need in this moment to be as pro science as possible. You know what I find fascinating about this moment that we're in? The reason that the belief in faith in science is decreasing is because of these devices, these magical, you know, if you have a phone that you can look at that tells you every fact and fiction and people can do their own research and they don't need universities. And, you know, you basically have this device, the very technology of which is invisible, that is fueling the research that people are doing that says I don't have to listen to scientists. It's like this crazy catch 22, right? You know, I think in the context of the show, it's always the cautionary tale. It all goes back to that line in Jurassic park where Jeff Goldblum says, you know, your scientists spent so much time figuring out, could they do this? They didn't think about should they do this?

[Adam Rogers]

Look, I'm not a scientist, but I'm pretty sure that's it. For this week's episode of Alien Earth, the Official Podcast, Next week, the season finale. We are done. Just a few tiny loose ends to tie. Like, Lyndy will probably be okay with Hermit shooting her friend with lightning, right? And Dame Sylvia probably be okay with Arthur getting face hugged and chest bursted. Morrow and Kirsch will probably hug it out. I bet Boy Cavalier will realize that other people are not just non playable characters and everyone will go live by the seashore. Oh, sorry, I'm getting a message from my producer here. Oh, no, no. That's right. Huh. Well, we'll sort that out next week when we Talk about episode 8 of FX's Alien Earth. Be sure to rate, review and follow Alien Earth, the Official podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Adam Robin Rogers and I'll see you here next week.