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- [00:00]
Professor Jeff Dudas
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- [00:29]
Professor Stephen Dyson
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- [01:04]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Part of legendary nights.
- [01:05]
Professor Stephen Dyson
From backyard jams to sold out arenas, there's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and Old Number 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee Whiskey 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery Lynchburg, Tennessee.
- [01:20]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:24]
Professor Stephen Dyson
It's the Pop Culture Professors and today we conclude our analysis of the FX series Alien Earth. First we have our discussion of episode seven, called Emergence, and then we have our discussion of episode eight, the season finale called the Real Munsters. If Boy Cavalier was talking to me, I would be deeply tempted to just do a on the ground. I'm Professor Stephen Dyson. And I'm Professor Jeff Dudas and we are two poli sci professors who have just watched episode seven of Alien Earth. The episode is called Emergence. I think a really enjoyable episode, I thought a real return to the core thematics of the show. An episode that was 15 minutes shorter than the episode a week before and yet, but felt much more, I don't know, deliberative, contemplative with its themes. You know, it was shorter but it felt less rushed than the episode before. I'm really delighted to have this episode in the bag and really excited to talk about it.
- [02:17]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, I thought this was a real big comeback this week. We talked a lot last week about how disappointed we were in episode six and how we had developed these kinds of growing concerns that the show was going to lose its distinctive kind of thematic focus and its really strong and yet subtle capacity to develop themes over the course of the storytelling, and I mean, I agree completely, this was a much better episode. It was by far the shortest of the season's episodes, but it didn't feel rushed. It felt like a lot of storylines came to a very nice and appropriate conclusion. But at the same time, there's a bunch of really interesting themes that get carried forward and sometimes introduced in ways and in characters that I hadn't really anticipated seeing them. So I'm very happy with this episode and pretty excited to see how it finishes off next week.
- [03:11]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, really strong penultimate episode. I think we have sort of isolated maybe three main themes that were going on in this episode, all of which have been sort of alluded to, you know, in the series so far, but are maybe more fully developed. There was a strong theme of kind of family and growing up. The two connected things there. I was really interested in the introduction of a new liminal or boundary crossing category of creature, which is the ghost. So I think we want to talk about that. And then there was a revelation about the kind of hierarchies of intelligence that's going on with the civilizations. With the eyeball monster rather spectacularly demonstrating that it understands PI and has multiple ways of expressing the particular equation that's at the core of that.
- [03:55]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Right. And also multiple ways of engaging with human beings that it finds to be beneath it. Yeah. And I have to be honest, other intelligences that it finds to be beneath it.
- [04:06]
Professor Stephen Dyson
If Boy Cavalier was talking to me, I would be deeply tempted to just do a. On the ground. I mean, he does have that kind of effect on me anyway.
- [04:14]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Well, it's a very disrespect. It's his basic mode of interacting in the world. Right. He's arrogant, he is dismissive and disrespectful of his interlocutors. And so he does the exact same thing with the sheep slash Eyeball monster, I guess. And the Sheep eyeball monster responds in ways that feel very satisfying.
- [04:36]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, 100%. Absolutely. So we'll get into that in terms of the kind of first theme here, sort of family and growing up. Nibs and Wendy, in particular on Nibs and Marcy, she's. This is very interesting, the kids. The decision of the show to use the children's real names versus their sort of Peter Pan names is really interesting and I think deliberate. And for almost this whole episode, Wendy is back to being Marcy, which is surely critical. She's like, shaking off the kind of Boy Cavalier imposed, you know, fantastical construct on her. But Nibs and Marcy I think, undergo different types of awakenings of growing up in this episode. Nibs, it turns out, cannot be sort of easily reprogrammed. And it was actually a catastrophic error or decision to try and erase part of her memories.
- [05:28]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Right. She's gone psychotic.
- [05:29]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah.
- [05:30]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Which.
- [05:30]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And didn't. Didn't. Damn. What's her name Say that. That. Actually, the danger here is you're gonna.
- [05:34]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [05:35]
Professor Stephen Dyson
You're gonna kind of chip away at the functioning psychology.
- [05:38]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah. Yeah. Yes, I think so.
- [05:40]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. And so.
- [05:42]
Professor Jeff Dudas
But this makes perfect sense, right? This is how a human consciousness, you imagine, could possibly respond when vast portions of it are manipulated or in this case, erased. And the realization of that which Nibs realizes last week makes her very clearly unstable. Right. Which is she is kind of throughout this episode. And her character arc is really, I think, very interesting. So Nibs is undergoing this transformation. Of course, the more unstable Nibs becomes, the more attached to her and the more protective Wendy Marcy becomes of her. And the more that Marcy. Wendy is identifying with her. And this is the other thing you say that's kind of crucial over the course of this episode. We saw it start to emerge last week when Wendy learns that Nibs memory has been erased. And so the first time we kind of see Wendy this week, she's discovering that Tootles Isaac is essentially been murdered. Right. By the alien.
- [06:46]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And he's called Isaac. He's not referred to, I don't think, as Tootles at all. In his moment of. In the. In the aftermath of his death, which assures deliberately reminding you actually this was a human child.
- [06:57]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Only when Kirsch is explaining what has happened to him to Boy Cavalier, who doesn't either refuses to accept Isaac's new name or just doesn't know or doesn't care.
- [07:11]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Well, isn't it that Kirsch says that's Isaac and Boy Cavalier is like what gives physical look Tootles.
- [07:17]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yes. And in that moment, right. There is no empathy that is shown by any of these characters for Isaac. And Wendy sees this. She understands this. And again, it's this dawning realization. They do not see us as subjects or as people or as things that have agency and that have by rights some kind of sense of autonomy. They see us as objects, as things to be manipulated, to be erased, to be placed in situations not of their doing. It is again what we talked about last week, this gnawing sense that she is existing and that all the lost children are existing within a context of unfreedom and effectively oppression. The one character that she holds out hope for is her brother Joe, because she believes that Joe sees her as his sister. And what's devastating, I think, for her this week, is that she realizes that he does not see her in that way. He believes that his sister Marcy is dead. And he doesn't really know quite what to make of Wendy. It's clear. And. But what does become clear is that he does not see her as his sister. He sees her as some kind of strange hybrid that maybe thinks like his sister, but is not. Which points us back to what is the connection between body and mind, between corporeal physical sense and emotional cognitive ability? How do those things work together? And what happens to familial relationships in this context? Can people actually live forever? Or is there something essential about the interaction between the body and the mind, the body and the soul, so to speak, that makes one fully human? And I think the show is proposing that that is essential, or at least it is in Joe's mind. And it's when Wendy realizes that. That she. If there were any stars left in her eyes, so to speak, about Jo seeing her as his sister, I think they fall at that moment, and then it comes to fruition. Right. In the final scene of the episode.
- [09:31]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. So, Jo. So that's really interesting. Cause you picked that up from the. I'd sort of missed that. That at the graveyard scene. You know, you'd seen this as actually seminal for Joy in realizing that the corporeal version of his sister is gone, and he's presented with this new facsimile of some sort. Yeah, Literally hybrid creation. And she's also become very strange to him in regard to her relationship with the xenomorph, in that she's not only able now to, like, make random soothing noises at it, but she's able to give it kind of tactical instructions, you know, hide and follow and sort of protect us.
- [10:04]
Professor Jeff Dudas
They share a language. Right. They can communicate with each other.
- [10:07]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right. Exactly. Exactly. So that, I agree, was an absolutely fascinating set of developments. You see, I think in the episode, you see the. You see Marcy really struggling with the last vestiges of her loyalty to the Boy Cavalier project. Because as she sees Isaac's dead body, she says something like, this can't be happening, or, you can't do this. We're premium, she says. And this, of course, aligns with what Boy Cavalier said, which is, there's that 6 billion, which I presume is the value of an individual, the cost of an individual hybrid. And Massey says, this can't be happening. We're premium. But of course it can be happening. And it shows that she has now come to realize the incommensurability between the value or the nature of her life and the cost that it's put on in terms of. In terms of its material kind of manifestation, and that these things are operating on different value levels and that she needs to transcend that and actually find a whole new identity, which she is finding maybe, as you say, less with her brother and more with this kind of connection with the xenomorphs and new community or felt community with the other hybrids.
- [11:14]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, I think so. I mean, she has come to realize that they are disposable and that they are seen as disposable no matter what, no matter how they are outwardly treated or described or talked to, that they are not seen. With the exception of, I think, one character who has his final greatest moment in the show, Arthur, they are not seen as different, but similar enough to human beings to warrant the kind of moral treatment and agency and exchange and understanding of agency that human beings would be inclined to show one another. And so it's at that moment. That's correct. Wendy has come to a point where she seems like she's about to transcend whatever human bonds are left and find a different kind of family.
- [12:12]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah.
- [12:12]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And she hasn't already.
- [12:13]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right. Exactly. And again, on this theme of family, I mean, you mentioned Arthur, who, in his sort of final moments, has. I think you'd called it when we'd spoken before we started recording his greatest moments. You know, he wakes up from the kind of coma that the facehugger has induced in him. And just like Kane in the original movie, he doesn't really know what's happened or that there's anything wrong. He just has a fault, kind of foggy memory. But he does know, largely from the reaction of the children, that something catastrophic has happened. They're sort of behind it. And he acts as a. As a dad, you know, he doesn't get angry, doesn't start throwing his fists around or what. Whatever he says, look, guys, I know something bad's happened. Let's go home and let's just work through the problem.
- [12:56]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yep. It'll be okay. We'll work it out. And, you know, now. Now that we know that there's a problem, we will figure out how to deal with it. And it's a. It's a. As you say, it's kind of his shining moment in the show. Because you would have every expectation that the dawning Realization that they have done something catastrophic to him personally would induce a kind of a rage or a kind of defensiveness that would lead him to lash out or to strike out at them. And he has exactly the opposite reaction. He, in that moment models the kind of caring and loving parent that the rest of them have claimed to be to the Lost Boys but have shown no evidence of.
- [13:36]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, yeah. And I was gonna say yes. In a stranger or in someone who's not those kids, parents, or in an adult to adult interaction. That realization, you're right, would provoke rage and all the rest of it. But I think it is not only the proper but the natural fatherly reaction to operate in the register not of kind of rage and being wronged, but sort of tragedy and in protectiveness rather than lashing out.
- [14:00]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Well, he treats them in that moment. He's the one human being who treats them as being different but the same.
- [14:04]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yes, right.
- [14:05]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Everyone else has treated them, has seen them as different and therefore has treated them in. In a kind of inferior sense. Right. Denying their agency or their capacity to have autonomous engagement with the world. Arthur's the only one who, as you say, transcends that. That potential boundary.
- [14:24]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right. And that's why he couldn't. He couldn't continue existing in the Prodigy Corporation because that's totally antithetical to their ideology. And that scene, which is. Which is very poignant because, you know, it sort of continues with him holding their hands to try and walk home and then progresses rather quickly through the classic kind of emergence of the chestburster. And that scene is then juxtaposed immediately with. Is it Curly? Is that her name? With Curly going to the dame and saying. And calling her mother, you know, and that's poignant not only cause it gives you the. Again, the parental archetype. But of course that's been. The schism between Arthur and his wife has been his adherence to a reasonable, a humanistic conception of parenthood. And her, for whatever motivation, but her eventual kind of abandonment of it.
- [15:10]
Professor Jeff Dudas
She was the one last week who was willing, without giving it much thought at all, to go in and erase Nibs consciousness.
- [15:17]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right.
- [15:17]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Her memories.
- [15:18]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And I think we should talk about Nibs because that, you know, she also grows up. So it fits in this category of kind of family odd or from childhood to adulthood. But it gets us also into our second category, which is the introduction of a new liminal figure or figure with leaky boundaries or boundary crossing figure, which is the figure of the ghost. And this comes from something Nibs says. Nibs is in the midst of her psychosis. She's in a sort of discontinuous or disordered cognitive and emotional state, which is being caused by treating a human mind as if it's a computer program and sort of just hacking away a part of it and then assuming, well, that things must be okay. She says to Massey, like, things are not okay. We're all going to die here. And then the bugs will crawl in and we'll all be ghosts. And I think that's just such a excellent summation of the problematic of the show. You know, if you remember, in the first episode, I'd really wondered, because it was so much about post humanism and AI, I'd wondered, where do the aliens come in here and how is the show gonna tie all this thing together? And I think it's done it beautifully, and it's summed up in that line, we're all gonna die here. Right? This is kind of horror. You know, the bugs will crawl in, you know, boundary crossing, the kind of bodily gooey type of horror and sort of penetrative introduction of alien, foreign biological organisms into the sort of sacrosanct human body that's always been at the core of the Alien franchise. And then we'll all be ghosts. And the ghost is something that I think hasn't really been mentioned in the show, but is a totally natural myth, a totally natural figure to fit within that show. Because what is this show about? It's about transcending death or living forever in a way that ghosts do, but they don't live forever as the same form as they were when they. When they were. Right, Right. They're. They're. They're a presence and an absence simultaneously that they're alive and not. They're. They're. They're present in this world, but they're really existing in a. In another world. And rather crucially, they are, in science fiction terms, not real, but in sort of fantasy or in fantastical or fairy tale terms. They're an absolute staple of the genre. So that line really brings together a lot of the problematics of the show.
- [17:29]
Professor Jeff Dudas
That's really sharp. And I think the ghost figure is super interesting here in relation to Nibs. And I have two thoughts in addition to this. So the first is at the graveyard scene towards the end, and you had mentioned this or had remembered this off camera. It's. It's Nibs who sort of immediately identifies her former self. Right. Her former body.
- [17:50]
Professor Stephen Dyson
That's my name.
- [17:51]
Professor Jeff Dudas
That's my name. That's me. And Wendy, right. As Joe is kind of having a moment right, where he is mourning the loss of his sister, Wendy says, well, that's not us anymore. We're still here. And she of course, is referring to the transfer of consciousnesses from one body to another. And Nib says something to the effect of, I'm not sure I'm not already a ghost. And so you had noted that. Right. And then the other thing, that's the figure, the stuffed animal here, Mr. Strawberry, is actually very, very important. It's not just for comic effect. Human storytelling in the, you know, cross culturally, when it has dealt with images of ghosts, of haunting figures, there has always been. Human beings have always imagined there being a kind of corporeal, animalistic like figure that sits at the gateway between the dead and the undead. Frequently it's a dog. A dog becomes a sign, and often it's a light colored or a white dog. A white dog becomes a signal or a signifier that there is a boundary here between the dead and the undead. And in this show, it's Mr. Strawberry, right. That is the link, Right. It's Nibs's link between the two worlds back to her former self and then also with whatever she is now as a lost boy. And so when she says at the end, Mr. Strawberry says off. It's not just a comic line. It's a way of putting both halves of herself, the dead and the undead, so to speak, into communion with each other. It becomes, I think, a really impactful and important moment in her character because it's at that moment that she sort of embraces her, as you say, her liminal self.
- [19:40]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. And also, maybe ironically, you know, ghosts are usually sort of seen as they're figures you might see and hear, but they can't kind of touch you. But it's also at this moment that Nibs embraces her kind of hybrid enhancements in that she becomes ultra physical, I think in the.
- [19:57]
Professor Jeff Dudas
She rips out the guy's jaw is a jar. Yeah.
- [20:00]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Well, this is also an interesting moment that I haven't seen enough of. I haven't watched enough times to think through the symbology of it. But it's, you know, it must be deliberate on the basis that these are all multi million dollar. You know, it's the old thing about film and television. These are all multi, multi million dollar productions. Nothing is said or seen usually that is there by accident. You know, everything is there for a purpose. I suppose there was the famous kind of Starbucks cup in Game of Thrones. That was, that was just A screw up, you know, but there's a reason for everything. And Nibs says and does two, I'm sure significant things, but I haven't had chance to process them. Maybe people can tell us in the comments, she says to the soldier, I see you. And it's sort of a non sequitur. There's no reason for her to say that before she attacks him. And then she grabs his jaw and pulls it out and pulls out the kind of. Whatever the jaw is, is sort of attached to maybe the vocal cords or the, you know, but the whole thing. So why just, you know, see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil. That's in what's named earlier episodes. Yeah. And that's in. Is it slightly's bedroom has. Has the figures of the monkeys on. Maybe it's that I see you and then to take the jar. Clearly there's something symbolically going on. But even more crucially, she's enacting hybrid physicality, you know, just before her moment of her death. And you thought this was crucial?
- [21:15]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, yeah. Because this is the moment where I think we get the payoff from with regard to the relationship between Wendy and Jo from earlier at the graveyard scene. So Wendy has. She realizes, I think, at the graveyard scene that. That Jo does not see her as his actual sister. That the payoff is in the final scene on the boat scene where Joe chooses to. I mean, he chooses essentially to ally with his humans who are hunting him. Right. And his sister, rather than allow Nibs to kill one of the humans. So he has made his choice in that moment between the synths and humans. That is what I think consecrates Wendy's dawning realization that not even my brother sees me as a being who is his sister, who is deserving of the same kind of love and care that the human sister, the human version of me, was deserving of. And so she says, you had noticed this off camera. She says multiple times, what did you do? What did you do? And I think it's an expression of rage, Right. You have made a choice to abandon me based on nothing more than a kind of fixation with the physicality of being human. And I think that's the turn, right? And we know, like, she can direct the alien, she can direct the xenomorph, she can talk to it. And I do wonder, I think one of the commenters from a previous episode or previous reaction of ours had suggested that they thought that maybe the show was setting up Wendy for a kind of heel turn where she becomes in the end, a sort of a villain. And I do wonder if that is, in fact, what's happening.
- [23:03]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. Jo's role in the show now is he's the person who should be more sympathetic to not only the hybrids in general, but that particular hybrid who is. Who keeps trying to police a boundary that is no longer policeable. Right. Who's staying with his kind of species allegiance. And what he's alarmed by is Wendy's transformation into a hybrid and her allegiance now with the xenomorph. And it is very interesting. I wonder if one interesting direction the show could take that would be interesting, sort of theoretically would be, is Wendy's turn the heel turn, the turn to the bad, or is she actually the sort of forerunner of a sort of more pan species kind of unity? I mean, this was the old. You know, I've been very interested in reading this show alongside Donna Haraway's notion of kind of cyborg politics, which is all about sort of leaky boundaries and post humanism and so forth. And Haraway is seen as a figure who finds her route to utopia by diving straight into dystopia. So Haraway's famous sort of, you know, political stance is she's a, you know, a feminist. And she sees the root to feminism as going through the cyborg is going through the kind of breakdown of the traditional barriers which had reinforced a sort of, you know, patriarchy and so forth. And then what will emerge at the other side will be different. But. But it doesn't. That doesn't necessarily mean bad. It can be a greater unity. And in her politics, that's a. That's a feminism. That's a breaking down of a gender hierarchy, but it could be the breaking down of other hierarchies as well.
- [24:38]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, I mean, that's. That's a great point. And maybe so it's not so much that Wendy's going to take a heel turn, but that she will become the sort of the hero. But in a way that's different than what we expect. Right. How surprised are we going to be at the end of next week's episode when, you know, as the famous Flight of the Conchords song goes, when all the humans are dead.
- [24:59]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yes.
- [25:00]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And that it's Wendy who's kind of leading the way to a new, more shining moment, potential moment of emancipation.
- [25:09]
Professor Stephen Dyson
There was a commentator who wrote on our last video who said he wonders whether Weyland Yutani is getting ready to nuke the island, which would be, I think, an excellent ending. It would give the show the kind of self disassembling quality, you know, getting rid of all this. So allowing the franchise's continuity to continue. It would also be a beautiful callback to the moment in James Cameron's Aliens where Ripley says, let's take off a nuclear site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. And I would love it if someone's, if someone in Weyland Yutani says just nuke it. It's the only way to be sure. And let's era this from, from kind of history. All right, Last thing we want to talk about maybe pretty quickly is the Eyeball monster here, which takes a, a stupendous step forward here, you know, the step of a sheep actually, you know, stepping on a, on a metal crate. Boy Cavalier has been just fascinated by this monster from the start. He's far more interested in the intelligence rather than the, the kind of physical qualities. Weyland Yutani obviously wanted the Xenomorph because they like its hostility and its bioweapons potential. Boy Cavalier is obviously someone who, even more than money, is interested forms of intelligence and novel forms of intelligence. That's why he's interested in himself not growing up, you know, the boy who never grew up, because he thinks children's minds are the ones that can carry things forwards. That explains the specific instantiation of the hybrids and the neuroplasticity that's necessary in children's children. Different forms of intelligence are fascinating to him. And he figures out, actually, maybe I should ask the eyeball monster if it knows PI. All advanced civilizations. It hasn't occurred to anyone else to ask this. And he gets his answer. The eyeball monster does know PI and it knows how to, you know, educate Boy Cavalier in his rudeness and the impertinence of the question.
- [26:51]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, I mean, it's a great moment in the show and it leaves us with a little bit of a cliffhanger for next week, which might be a useful way to kind of conclude. Boy Cavalier now is so enchanted with the eyeball monster that he wants to insert the eyeball monster into a different body, into a human, presumably into a human. And he says, I know just the perfect specimen.
- [27:16]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Who is the perfect specimen?
- [27:18]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Is it him? Is it Joe?
- [27:21]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right, yeah. Is it? Yes. He offers some candidates. He said maybe it should be one of these mold scrubbers, you know, Cause they would be kind of lower IQ and that would form the differentiation. But yeah, I mean, I still think the obvious ending of Boy Cavalier's story is to be infected with the Eyeball monster. And this sort of raises a tantalizing possibility of, you know, perhaps deliberately, what if he discovers the eyeball monster doesn't just know PI, but is substantially more advanced than that and maybe more advanced than him. And he then expresses the desire to become sort of another one of the show's chimeric creatures and hybrid creatures, and he sort of invites the eyeball to possess him. Yeah, you know, maybe he's. He's sort of facing. Facing a sticky end. And he determines the way out of this is actually to be infected with the eyeball. And because they're not going to kill me while I'm infected or. Yeah, you know, who knows? But I. I think there's a lot of delicious possibilities as to what could be going on in what is going to be going on in episode eight, which is gonna be the season finale.
- [28:20]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Which I'm now very excited about.
- [28:21]
Professor Stephen Dyson
I'm super excited about it. I think there's a real chance for this show to stick a landing and to actually be elevated into a pretty high tier of this type of television, this type of storytelling. And just the boundary crossing and the genre hopping is, I think, really original and really challenging, difficult to follow. You have to have. You have to accept that it's not kind of hard sci fi, but if. But if you do, there's rich rewards here.
- [28:45]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, I agree.
- [28:46]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Okay. And on that bombshell.
- [28:50]
Professor Jeff Dudas
To the extent that this has not been the sort of hard sci fi that maybe the foundational Alien texts seemed to lean into at times, has been a point of contention amongst certain audiences.
- [29:01]
Professor Stephen Dyson
We see it in our comments section.
- [29:03]
Professor Jeff Dudas
We see it. We've seen it in a lot of our comments section.
- [29:05]
Professor Stephen Dyson
I'm Professor Stephen Dyson.
- [29:06]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And I'm Professor Jeff Dudis.
- [29:08]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And we are two political science professors who have just watched episode eight of Alien Earth, the season finale. So we're political science professors. We've been doing this whole series on Alien Earth, and we've been talking about its political and ideological aspects. And these have often been things, you know, that are a little elliptical or, you know, very political things. But we've had to have a very broad conception of politics here. We have a very directly political episode, maybe the most political episode ever, which lends a really sort of political gloss to the. To the season as a whole. Because the whole thing, it turns out, has been building towards one of the very last lines in the last episode, if not the last line, which is where Marci says, we rule now we rule. Now we rule. And ruling is an explicitly political Project. Yeah.
- [29:55]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And this is the most on the nose, conventionally political episode I think, that we have seen. I think the whole series has been deeply political, but as you say, in the broader sense, the sense of politics is about all of the things that communities do in order to get along with each other, in order to live with one another. And implicit in those machinations for how people get along with one another are dynamics of power and authority. And we've seen that really throughout the series. Here, though, we get a very conventional kind of political topic, one that is sort of unmistakably.
- [30:29]
Professor Stephen Dyson
It's a revolution.
- [30:29]
Professor Jeff Dudas
It's a revolution. It's a rebellion and it's a turning of the tables. Right.
- [30:36]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. And I mean, I was really sort of gratified to see that because I think bringing it to that revolutionary end really brings all of the thematics of the show together in a way that's actually quite cohesive and sort of bends them towards an end point. It's very definitely Massey's revolution. I thought what we might do is we'll structure this episode by talking about the revolution Marcy has affected and why she's the central figure and how she's arrived at that point and maybe then contrast it to some of the filled or overthrown or alternate visions of political life that she's succeeded over.
- [31:13]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah. And it's been Marcy's story, really, from the start. Right. This is. At times, it has felt as though we have kind of moved in and out. Right. For example, the episode, the flashback episode on Imagino, she's not in at all. And so one thing that does happen is that there's kind of a moving in and out of focus. But I do think it's become clear Right. Over the course of the eight episodes, she is our central figure. The story is being told through her eyes.
- [31:38]
Professor Stephen Dyson
It's been obvious since the start of this show that this is a show about liminal figures and about boundaries, and in particular, the inability to maintain boundaries and transgressive figures. And why Marcy is the ultimate leader or embodiment, and maybe literally of. Of the revolution, is that she is amongst the most amongst the figures who is best able to negotiate their liminality. She embraces her liminality. She gives this long speech of, you know, I'm not a child, but I'm not an adult. I'm not human, but I'm not fully synthetic, you know, and I don't know what I am. But it's not a speech of despair. It's not Knowing what I am, it's a speech of, you know, I've been able to embrace. I am able to embrace these contradictions and hold these seemingly opposite things inside myself at once. And I'm going to present this new model of governance, you know, the Massey's revolution, which is based around her working through all. All her problems and understanding her liminality, not by deciding I'm one thing or another, but by understanding that these contradictions have to be held inside her and then uniting a coalition around that basis.
- [32:43]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And it's also critically important, it seems to me, in this episode, that this is the episode in which she fully and finally embraces all of her capabilities. And the whole thing is orchestrating. She's orchestrating the entire thing. Right. She is putting all of the chess pieces, so to speak, in play and manipulating them and controlling them. Sometimes I think, as we'll talk about, it's very. It's done in a very sort of ruthless way that is highly directed and specific and efficient towards the end goal of effecting the revolution. Sometimes it's done in playful ways, in ways that are meant to introduce a little bit of terror. Right. To her antagonist. It's done with a kind of whimsy in a certain way that is redolent of, kind of her approach throughout the whole series.
- [33:28]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Absolutely. And the way in which she's able to orchestrate all of the revolutionary events is that she. She stands as the only figure that's able to. To easily cross different boundaries. Right. So only she can talk to the xenomorph and understand it and give it direction. Only she is regarded by the other hybrids as the. The kind of natural leader.
- [33:48]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [33:48]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And then only she is able to exercise the kind of mastery over the organic technological divide by getting into the prodigy computer systems. And even at one point, I mean, it turns out that she's exercising a mastery over. Over technology. But at one point she seems to stop. Adam, I called, and you think, my goodness, can she now control, like, time? I mean, what are the. What are the extent of her superpowers here?
- [34:12]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Well, he's plugged into the system.
- [34:14]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right. But we didn't know that at the point.
- [34:16]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Well, we did. I think it had become clear in that scene. Yeah, right. That he is a synthetic.
- [34:20]
Professor Stephen Dyson
But I hadn't thought he was until. Until this point.
- [34:23]
Professor Jeff Dudas
No, that's one of the big reveals.
- [34:25]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. Which is another. Another thing that classically goes on in the alien fr. The alien property is the sort of misrecognition of one thing as another Thing. So rather, most famously, Ash is regarded as a human until he's revealed as a synthetic in the first movie. And here I think we've got the reverse. Right. Adam Irons had certainly appeared to me to be. To read as human until he's finally revealed as synthetic.
- [34:47]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yes. And there's a little bit of foreshadowing in the previous scene where Boy Cavalier is trying to intimidate Wendy and the children by telling him. Telling them his backstory. Right. And I. I think. I think we're supposed to believe that the. The Right Hand man, this Adam, I figure, is in fact the synthetic figure who. Boy Cavalier Bill, when he was six years old, allegedly to kill his father. Kill his father?
- [35:15]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah.
- [35:15]
Professor Jeff Dudas
As. As the trigger for Patrick.
- [35:17]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Nothing. Nothing symbolic in that. No building. A building. A giant toy to kill your. Kill your own dad.
- [35:23]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, yeah. Careful there.
- [35:24]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Well, she becomes a central figure in that way. By exercising this kind of mastery, she unites a coalition around her that includes the xenomorph, the other hybrids, and her. Her brother Jo, though she goes kind of back and forth on whether we should include that guy.
- [35:40]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah. And so, I mean, two points. So first of all, it's. I think it's Smee who convinces her.
- [35:47]
Professor Stephen Dyson
He'S one of us.
- [35:48]
Professor Jeff Dudas
That he's one of them.
- [35:49]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah.
- [35:49]
Professor Jeff Dudas
That Joe is one of them.
- [35:50]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah.
- [35:50]
Professor Jeff Dudas
The second thing is, I thought there's a really nice callback to the theme that you picked up on last week, which is Ghost Story. And here it's explicitly so. Right. And Marcy says, we are ghosts. Right.
- [36:02]
Professor Stephen Dyson
She.
- [36:02]
Professor Jeff Dudas
She looks at. And, you know, it turns out that Nibs, I think, thankfully, is not dead. I think that was pretty unclear, at least to me, at the end of last week's episode.
- [36:11]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right.
- [36:11]
Professor Jeff Dudas
She's back and she's okay, to the.
- [36:14]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Extent that any of them are not dead. To the extent. I mean, they're in this liminal space.
- [36:16]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Exactly, exactly. And, you know, it's during this scene in which Curly says, yeah, but we're not dead. Right? We're not dead. And I think that's in response to Wendy saying, we saw. We saw your grave. You know, we. And Curly says, yeah, but we're not dead. I'm not dead. And it's at that point. Right. That that ghostly figure again reemerges. And Wendy asks them, what do ghosts do? Right. And Smee says, well, they haunt houses.
- [36:43]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah.
- [36:44]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And. And this ends up being the kind of the template, in a certain way, for the. The. Or the revolution that Marcy begins to. Or the Wendy, I should say, begins to orchestrate.
- [36:53]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, absolutely. And it has, as you'd alluded to those two dimensions of. It's a series of actions that practically achieve the goals. You know, sees the TV station and, you know, the classic revolutionary things. But also, playing in a haunted house is ludic. There's a ludic nature about what's going on here that they're kind of playing with.
- [37:14]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And it's the introduction of terror. Right. There's a terror like element as well to what's going on. Particularly as you had talked about off screen, the elevator scene.
- [37:22]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yes.
- [37:23]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Which is just. I mean, she's just playing with them.
- [37:25]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right, Right. Yeah. So this is a scene where the elevator initiates a self destruct sequence, which is, I think, one of two episodes or one of two points in the series where Noah Hawley is indicating to us that he's not interested in sort of hard science fiction. And that's not the only genre he's operating in. Because taken literally, that's ludicrous. Literally. Like, why would an elevator need to self destruct? I can see why the whole facility might have something. And of course, that is a grand SC fiction trope. Right. That the ship has a self destruct mechanism. It's. It happened in the Alien movie. Right. Ripley sets the Nostromo to self destruct and then she realizes she needs to kind of undo the self destruct because she can't, you know, she doesn't know where the alien is. And the aliens on her only means of escape. Classic things. Ship is about to self destruct. Happens in our. In hard science fiction all the time. But the elevator, like the little. What would be the circumstances under which you would need to. To trigger that? And I think that's one. One part of the series or one moment in the series where Holly is making fun, literally of science fiction. And you can take that as denigrating science fiction or you can take it as drawing out the ludic elements that are always present in science fiction. The other moment was earlier in the season when Curly comes into whatever the control room and there's all these again, another science fiction trope. There's millions of buttons on the wall, none of which are labeled or seem to do anything. They just all flash different colors, which, like the starship Enterprise always used to have that in the 60s DV show. And boy Cavalier says, oh, just stand over there and push some buttons. And she does, and she pushes the buttons and all of a sudden they kind of all light up. And she's like, oh, Shit, you know, making fun of some of the tropes of hard science fiction, I think, is what Hawley's doing there.
- [39:04]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, yeah. And that comes through. And as we've talked about, that is one of the real dividing lines, it seems to me, with regard to how the series has been received to the extent that this has not been the sort of hard sci fi that maybe the foundational alien texts seemed to lean into at times has. Has been a point of contention amongst certain audiences.
- [39:25]
Professor Stephen Dyson
We see it in our comments section.
- [39:27]
Professor Jeff Dudas
We see it. We've seen it in a lot of our comments section for us, or at least for me. And I think for you as well, it's. Maybe it took you a little while to get here, but that it's exactly the kind of the hybrid element of the storytelling which matches all of the boundary crossing that we see in the characters themselves that is actually the hallmark of the show, and it's what has made the show interesting and I think worth engaging with.
- [39:49]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So Massey, at one point has a conversation with Jo that I think is crucial to the politics of what's going on here in the Revolutionary project. Jo says to her, you know, she's kind of critiquing the way that. Where Joe's allegiances have been in particular, why in the last episode, he was still on the side of the humans of his Friends of the Soldiers. And Joe says, you sound like a child. I didn't make the world. It's complicated.
- [40:15]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [40:15]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And the rejoinder is, no, it's complicated is what powerless people say to justify their own powerlessness.
- [40:22]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And she doesn't justify doing nothing.
- [40:24]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, to justify doing nothing. And she. She doesn't mean she. She's saying, you. You are powerless because you've been conned into thinking there's nothing you can do. Right. You've been conned out of your agency with this trope of it's complicated. And it's not complicated for me, Marcy, because I'm now, you know, I've negotiated my liminality. I'm able to hold these contradictions within myself. I am a complicated being. But I actually see with clarity now, and things are simple and they point in a. In a direction of action.
- [40:54]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Well. And what has not been complicated from. For Wendy and for the other Lost Boys is that they have been subject, they have been objects, they have been without agency, and they have been put in situations, as we've talked about periodically throughout this series, of unfreedom and powerlessness. And so she clearly has come to see this actually, it's not complicated. I am seen and treated as an object who has no capacity to act in the world in ways that should be respected. And so it is not complicated for the powerless in that situation. They have a very clear eyed vision of how power is working. Right. And this is also. This is a kind of a foundational insight of a lot of late 90s, early 2000s critical theory and feminist theory in particular, that if you want to understand how power works, you don't look at the top. You don't look at how things come flow down from the top of the hierarchy. You look at how power is experienced at the lowest level. So what does subjection and powerlessness looks like? That is the key to telling you how power works. And this is the insight, I think, that Wendy is making as well. This is what leads her to say, no, this isn't complicated at all. Right. It might be complicated for you, Joe, because you are in a strange space yourself. You're in a strange kind of liminal space yourself where you are a part of the sort of the benighted team, humans, but you do not occupy a particularly high role on that team. Now the other thing, of course, that Morrow I think is interesting, reminds Jove, is actually you're not really human anymore. You're just like me now because the lung is a manufactured lung.
- [42:46]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. So I think Massey's clarity in that moment is contrasted and her successful promulgation of a revolutionary idea is contrasted with. With two failed. The two orders that she's overthrowing are two failed conceptions of that very same question of what are we? And on the one hand, you have the one that you've just alluded to, which is a notion, yes, associated with Prodigy Corporation, but even more explicitly associated with Weyland Yutani, of people as disposable objects, Right. In pursuit of profit, essentially. And then the second sort of conception that's been overthrown by Massey's revolutionary project of what people are is Boy Cavalier's notion of people as toys.
- [43:30]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [43:30]
Professor Stephen Dyson
To entertain him. And I think they're the two orders that have been. That have been challenged by, by Marcy and, and as you said, Morrow and Joe's conversation is really, really important to one of those things. The kind of objectification for profit by the capitalist entity always been at the core of the alien story, you know. And Morrow and Joe have this conversation. Morrow says, feels good, doesn't it, to be more than human. Because of course, Joe has the iron lung, I guess. Yeah. Pretty literally now. But when the Corporation gives you something. They've given Joe a lung. And will New Tyne, he's given Morrow the cyborg capabilities. There's always a price.
- [44:08]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And Morrow asks him, what do you think the price is? And Joe says, everything.
- [44:12]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And Morrow says, it's more than, it's more than everything. Yeah. And then there's a funny line related that comes very soon after where is it? Joe sees Adamines and then Adam Irons says, oh, come with me. And Joe's like, oh, you're gonna tell me now the lungs free, you're just gonna take everything else. Which kind of nicely nicely tied those two things together.
- [44:33]
Professor Jeff Dudas
It's also interesting that one of the ways that Joe gets manipulated into going with Adamines is that Adam Ions says, you know, we think, we know that Wendy has rights. And you're gonna, you're gonna like this because we understand that they have rights. It's a manipulative line precisely because this is the hope that Joe is holding onto. Right. That what makes you human or human like is that you have these kinds of rights that protect you, that enable you to do certain things and protect you from the exercises of certain types of subjection or power. And so if you were looking to manipulate somebody who's not quite certain about where they stand and where others stand along this line of kind of human slash post human existence, you would throw in the line of rights. You would manipulate them with that possibility. Hey, you know, there's rights are kind of hanging out here. Yes, we understand. We, we get that they're, they're human enough like that you should feel comfortable.
- [45:33]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right.
- [45:33]
Professor Jeff Dudas
With the thing that I'm going to propose. And of course the thing, what they're actually doing is they're, they're leading him in to try to get himself infected with the eyeball. Right?
- [45:41]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yes, yes. And all of that alludes to one of the ways, maybe the main way in which the show is reflecting contemporary political concerns, which is the adequacy of traditional discourses of human rights in a society where we're on the cusp of post humanity due to technological change, you know, and what rights do things have that are not kind of born in the normal, if you like, way. Yeah.
- [46:07]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And in a society where we're in a world in which power is increasingly exercised with the hardest of possible edges. Yes, right. With the least number of limits in the conventional kind of modernist enlightenment ways, limited, for example, by a conception of rights.
- [46:22]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right. And those, there's also sort of a, there's a hard edgedness of power. But there's also sort of post modernity about it in that. In that people are not meaning what they're saying. They're deploying human rights discourses in ways that are clearly disingenuous in service of a hard political project. It's precisely what Adam Ions is doing. He's deploying a human rights style in order to bundle Joe into a room to get. To get his eyeball ripped out by the eyeball monster. Fairly straightforward sort of project that's going on there. And so. So that notion of people as these kind of disposable objects, you know, in pursuit of profit is. Has always been the Weyland Yutani kind of trope. Boy Cavalier and Prodigy have had, I think, a different understanding of power or a different political project. And it's driven by the fact that Boy Cavalier is. Is not Yutani. You know, the projects of these corporations are gonna reflect quite closely in this world of kind of superhumans, if you like, the personal considerations and concerns of the founders. And Boy Cavalier is not Weyland or Yutani. He's a person who, as he said on several occasions, just wants to have an interesting conversation. He's bored.
- [47:29]
Professor Jeff Dudas
He's a disruptor is how Noah Hawley, the showrunner and writer has described him. He's a disruptor and, you know, sort of on the nose in the same way that a lot of the Silicon Valley tech bros imagine themselves as disruptors.
- [47:43]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right. And so his. His objectification of people in the denial of their agency is to render them as toys. In fact, he says at one point, Utani is coming here to steal our toys, you know, and that's. That's why we should fight. And it's not about. It's not about profit fame. He continues his fascination with the Eyeball Monster and says, you know, I wish. I wish you could talk now. That would be an interesting conversation, which is a callback to something you'd said in an earlier episode. And the Massey's revolution, again, is the overthrowing of Boy Cavalier's project or Boy Cavalier's understanding, to which at one point she'd been attracted. I mean, she's been attracted to various of these other political orders throughout the season. And she's finally kind of reached her own understanding at the end. And she says that the reason why your project is not gonna succeed is that you were never a child. You believe that you're a child. And we all thought Boy Cavalier was nominative determinism, but it's actually a misnomer. He's very cavalier but he was, in Marcy's telling, never a boy.
- [48:44]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Never a boy.
- [48:44]
Professor Stephen Dyson
He was never able to embrace play for play's sake or play as a means towards the imaginative expansion of not only coming up with good ideas, but the imaginative expansion of kind of your horizons of empathy and love and acceptance of others and a way to work out contradictions and hold them within yourself. You were always a mean little man, she says to him. And I think this points to one truism of revolutionary politics, which is very often the people who foment the revolution, or at least have got it started, have disrupted the existing order, is a better way to put it, can't actually live in the post revolutionary order like the. The early utopians. Can't live in the utopia because they're so deformed by the violences that are done to them by the. By the old political order. And so to say Boy Cavalier was always a mean little man, I don't think is a. An indictment only of Boy Cavalier. It's much more an indictment of his father.
- [49:45]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [49:45]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And of the. Of the systems of violence produced him 100%, you know, so Boy Cavalier is, in the end, a tragic figure.
- [49:53]
Professor Jeff Dudas
He is a tragic figure, although he also gets that big smile on his face even as things have all gone badly for him when he sees what he takes to be his creation. Marcy has turned the tables and has completely dominated the situation in a way that he takes a kind of paternal pride in, I think is what we're supposed to see.
- [50:19]
Professor Stephen Dyson
I agree. Because he's still, at the end of the day, a revolutionary. Right. And he's fomented a revolution. And in that scene, I was drawn back to an intertextual reference, which is the. I'm blocking on the. Oh, ex machina.
- [50:31]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Exactly what I was thinking.
- [50:33]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Well, you were the one who came up with that original insight, so why.
- [50:35]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Don'T you tell that story at the very end? And I now can't remember the name of the character. It's Oscar Isaac's character who has created the Eva AI. And she has killed him. She's murdered him and escaped. In his final dying moments, there's very, I think, very clearly displayed a sort of fatherly pride or a paternal pride in what he's done in his creation, that he has created something that is so capable that it could break out of the most extraordinary circumstances. Right. The greatest forms of lockdown this character has been able to escape from and is now going to go out into the world and dominate the world in a way that that meets the imagination of its.
- [51:20]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. And they're very parallel stories, I think, at least in this moment. Is there anything else you want to say on this broader revolutionary side, or do you want to move to some individual kind of nice moments or other things we picked up?
- [51:31]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, some of the nice moments.
- [51:32]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Okay, so I saw nice moments. Well, the first one I have is Elevator Self Destruct, which we kind of covered. I thought there was a good moment that was quite funny and also quite apartment which is the re. Cyborging of Moro, which is. In order to stop him using his cyborg arm, they just put a giant, like. Like iron cast on him, which I thought was very funny. And that might be how you showed a cyborg in the age before, like, cgi.
- [51:54]
Professor Jeff Dudas
It's very man in the Iron Mask.
- [51:56]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right, exactly.
- [51:56]
Professor Jeff Dudas
So we expect a sort of a Tower of London aesthetic.
- [51:59]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right, right.
- [52:00]
Professor Jeff Dudas
But.
- [52:00]
Professor Stephen Dyson
But even better, at one point he just smashes someone with the. With the thing, which also, you know, I think he's wholly kind of acknowledging at some point the.
- [52:08]
Professor Jeff Dudas
The.
- [52:08]
Professor Stephen Dyson
The absurdities of science fiction and refusing to kind of. Kind of go along with them. And I say this as the. As the greatest lover of science fiction in the. Of the belief that it's the most important revolutionary genre in modern life. But that was very funny and very good. I did think it was nice that one of the early shots in the episode is Arthur on the beach and the lobsters eating him.
- [52:28]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yes.
- [52:28]
Professor Stephen Dyson
You know, monsters are all around us.
- [52:31]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And the alien is just sort of observing the crab.
- [52:35]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yes.
- [52:36]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Or observing the crabs, which I thought was also very interesting. And we never really see what happens to the crab. He seems to leave the crabs alone or is getting an idea, maybe.
- [52:43]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right, right. Yes.
- [52:44]
Professor Jeff Dudas
You know, it's unclear.
- [52:46]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. But I think one thing that's going on is I think we spoke in the last episode about the sheer implausibility of having gone gallivanting around the universe hundreds of millions of light years, or however far the ship went in 65 years, and managing to find, presumably on all sorts of different planets, a bunch of alien species that, remarkably, were all direct analogues to species on Earth. Ticks, you know, flies like that. And of course, what's been said there by the series is this is not a story about the far future. Fantastic. This is a direct story about, you know, living on Earth in this moment.
- [53:21]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And about Earth's past is the other thing. Right. There's a very primordial kind of aesthetic that's developed with Arthur laying on the beach and the Crabs kind of coming out of the water.
- [53:30]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah.
- [53:32]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Very prehistoric. Right. Crabs are, you know, famously or infamously one of the oldest animals to come out of the ocean. Right. And they, they, they kind of live extraordinarily long lives so long as they're, you know, kept in water.
- [53:46]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right.
- [53:47]
Professor Jeff Dudas
So I, that was a nice kind of, I, I thought, throwback to, as you say. Yeah. The sort of the implausibility of finding all these aliens that are analogs for what's on Earth, but also, you know, it's a way of collapsing time.
- [54:01]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah.
- [54:02]
Professor Jeff Dudas
It collapses what seems to be a very futuristic kind of storytelling with a very old and primordial kind of Earth like storytelling.
- [54:10]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. And it was, it was also a very nice nod to one of the central sort of raison d' etre of this as an alien property, as a property in the Alien franchise, when really it wants to be a story about post human AI, which is what are the possibilities for the biological in the age of the synthetic. And the reason the aliens are in there is that they are the revenge of the natural world upon the attempts to transcend it. And having the crabs kind of do the same thing as the facehuggers. Clean up after the facehuggers or whatever, get a meal, you know, because of the beneficence of the chestburster. Sorry. Is kind of a nice moment. Yeah, I agree. I agree. The other thing I really liked is the eyeball in the end crawls into Arthur and creates in him because I think the eyeball had always taken over and a living creature creates in him a zombie.
- [55:01]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah.
- [55:02]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Talk about liminal. Is there any liminal creature that has not been explored or invoked by this series?
- [55:08]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Which suggests if there's a season two, it's gonna lean hard into the zombies story.
- [55:12]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. At least it's sad Arthur is going to be chomping around there as a zombie.
- [55:17]
Professor Jeff Dudas
The. The scene that I really thought was one of the best scenes in, in the show was the. The very final scene, not just this week, but kind of throughout the run of the series, the final scene in which the. The tables have been turned. You've got the. The former masters are now imprisoned and you've got Wendy kind of leading, leading the charge, coming into her leadership moment. And you've got the two xenomorphs who are kind of hanging on the side of the cage. You've got all of the remaining Lost Boys who are forming up behind her. And then you've got Jo very weary, if not actually frightened of of what? Of what Wendy is capable of. I think it's a Rush says, what do we do now? And Wendy says, now we rule. And at that very moment we get something that I had missed in the last couple episodes, the reintroduction of music and of a very particular kind of song that comes in and finishes the episode. We saw this in the early episodes and here it is Pearl Jam's song Animal. And the chorus is, I'd rather be with an animal. And here it's obviously, Wendy has made her choice. She'd rather be with an alien. I saw that. Noah Hawley has admitted to being very specific and intentional about the musical choices. And he consistently was choosing songs, he says, that were arena rock songs from the 1990s and early 2000s to finish episodes. So that's why we get songs from bands like Metallica and Pearl Jam and Dio to finish these songs, is that the whole thing is meant to have a kind of huge open hearted appeal that consists of bands who themselves were kind of crossing perceived lines of demarcation, mixing rock and roll with heavy metal, with punk elements as well, in the same way that the show has been doing those things. And so I really. I loved that scene for all of those reasons. And I love the reintroduction of the kind of intentional sort of musicality.
- [57:22]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, absolutely. So it's been quite a journey. A really, really interesting series. It's not without its flaws, but nothing, you know what is. We've loved Shar understanding of the series with you. We'd love to hear from you in the comments section. But on that bombshell.