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- [00:00]
A
I'm NFL linebacker TJ Watt and this is my personal best. YPB by Abercrombie is the activewear I'm always wearing. That's why I reached out to co design their latest drop. I worked with designers to create high performance activewear that holds up to my toughest workouts. Shop YPB by Abercrombie in store, online and in the app because your personal best is greater than any when did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more@WhatsApp.com this episode is brought to you by Indeed. When your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again. You fix the problem. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use Indeed's sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast. And even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast terms and conditions apply. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
It's the Pop Culture Professors, and today we continue our analysis of the FX series Alien Earth. First we bring you our discussion of episode five, called In Space no. 1. And then right after that, we bring you our analysis of episode six, called the Fly.
- [01:51]
A
The story is being told this week from the perspective of Morrow, so it's a highly perspectival vision of what's happening, and it's maybe worth asking how reliable the narrative is.
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B
I'm Professor Stephen Dyson. And I'm Professor Jeff Dudas, and we are two political science professors who have just watched alien Earth episode 5 in in space no. 1. Obviously an allusion to the original tagline for the early movie. No one can hear you scream. We're going to break down the themes and ideologies and ideas that we saw in this episode. Jeff, what did you make of that episode?
- [02:28]
A
So I thought that this was what has now become this classic flashback episode. In these kinds of prestige TV shows, it occurs as Episode five. So right in the middle of the run of the show, which is pretty consistent now with how these episodes have been placed in other series. And I think in a way the flashback episode now feels a bit hackneyed and predictable. You in fact, had predicted this exact episode at least two or three weeks ago, I think. So it doesn't feel like a creative move that is particularly original at this point in the kind of the development of these prestige TV shows. On the other hand, I actually thought the episode was very well executed and it was very well done, and I thought it was really watchable. The pacing was excellent. It felt to me, and we'll talk a lot about this, it felt to me like more of a one off episode, certainly, than any of the others. I think we learn a few more things that are likely important plot wise, and I do think there's some themes that maybe get folded in that we'll talk about that are unique to this episode. And I think we learn a lot about one of our most important characters, Morrow, and that we learn a lot about him in a way that makes him a more well rounded character than we've seen. And so I think it's extremely well executed. But I don't know how essential this episode feels to the overall trajectory of the story.
- [04:00]
B
Yeah. So my thoughts on it are that as a device for the plot, that introducing new information, it's sort of unnecessary and peripheral. But I have enough trust now in the writing to imagine that there's something else going on there. And so I was drawn to trying to isolate its central theme and say what is pushed forward thematically by the episode. And because it takes us out of or back in time from the main story, maybe some of the themes we've talked about you could say are put on hold a little bit. But I did think there were central thematics going on. And I thought the key quote came from the Doctor where he said, yes, Raheem, where things started to go wrong. And he says, in this sort of sardonic way, you know, another victory for the. For the enemies of reason. Right. Proof that smart people can be really stupid. You know, we as a species. And I suppose whenever you start saying we as a species, you recognize that now we're being introduced to some grand thematic that's going on. We as a species are capable of splitting the atoms, sequencing the genome, but we haven't yet learned that you don't bring parasites home with you.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And it did occur to me while I was watching that episode that these were. That this was a human crew that was some combination of what, as Morrow had said, you know, stupid, odd or incompetent or saboteurs. Mostly incompetent. Right. These are all almost universally sloppy, stupid people behaving in sloppy and stupid ways. And I think there's maybe two things going on that explain that within the plot of the show. One is these are all people that at the. That are at the end of a 65 year journey which, which we know has been sort of very costly and really bad things have happened to them along the way. People have died. It's also a journey that they've experienced sort of in different realities. Some of them are asleep while others are awake. They're all. They're all aware that they're kind of out of phase with their life back on Earth, that they're people out of time and things have really started. They're all strung out, they're all at the end of their tether. The second thing I think that's going on is, you know, they're just not very competent people who signed up to go on this. This journey.
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A
Yeah, there's, you know, we talked about this off camera and you called them. These are the sort of the dregs of, of humanity. It's kind of what's left in 21. Well, now it's 2120. But I guess when they signed on it would have been somewhere in the 2000s, the mid 2000s. But there's also a kind of an analog here to like, you know, the, the kinds of. I mean, this is a crew that has signed on to do a job. I mean, these are your. These are your sailors, right, who, you know, who are being plucked out of various debauched circumstances in the 1500s to go on these colonial trips abroad. These are. They're people who don't have much of a tie that grounds them or set of ties that grounds them to a particular life. So it's very particular kinds of people who are going to find themselves drawn into this kind of lifestyle and drawn into this kind of profession in the first place. And so I do think that's a lot of what we're getting here. The other thing that's happening again, I do think it's important that the story is being told this week from the perspective of Morrow. So it's a highly perspectival vision of what's happening. And it's maybe worth asking how reliable the narrative is. We know that this is how Morrow sees and interprets everything, because we don't see anything contemporaneous that happens in this episode on screen when Morrow is asleep. Right. All of the contemporary action takes place when he is awake and the stuff that has happened while he's been asleep. He spends the episode trying to piece together in a kind of detective story way. So I think you're right that we've got the portrayal of the Maginot human crew in ways that are pretty unflattering, as opposed certainly to the portrayal of Morrow, who comes across as highly competent and capable and skilled. Some of that. I think the viewers maybe are left to wonder whether that is a reliable narrative or just how much of the narrative is being told specifically through the perspective of Morrow himself.
- [08:18]
B
Yeah, and I think you've got. As you're talking, I was thinking two things. One is, you know that in terms of people who would sign up for this journey, they're people who value their lives, who value 65 years of their lives in a quantifiable, you know, as quantifiably as money. Yeah, exactly. And apparently not very much money. Yeah, Right. So that's making a point about their personal circumstances, but also a broader point, kind of ideologically about the commodification of human life and how you can create circumstances in which people become debased enough that they're willing to sell, or that human lives become this sort of viable and sellable, which is a sort of fairly classic sci fi theme. The other thing that I think is a really sharp point is, as you say, it's from Morrow's perspective, and he sees everyone as either an idiot or a threat. And those. Those are his two categories of people. And so, yes, you do wonder how much of that stuff actually happened versus how much of it is just a version of Morrow's split screen kind of security officer. Yes. Surveillance of people.
- [09:21]
A
Yeah. In. In particular, as you were talking, I'm thinking about that scene towards the end, when is it Zavia.
- [09:29]
B
Zaveri.
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A
Zaveri are who becomes the acting captain, where she basically goes catatonic in the middle of a crisis situation. And that is the moment in particular in which Morrow seizes control of the ship and becomes the captain. And on one hand, it makes some sense, right, that this. That this happened. On the other hand, this is not. We learned from this episode, or actually we already knew from the very first episode when we saw this collection of people. We know that it has been a long and arduous and already violent and traumatic journey. And so it's a little odd that this would be the moment in which Syvari goes catatonic. I understand that she feels the responsibility here for having, you know, made the decision to ensure that the. That the. The Doctor and the Science Officer are effectively dead, although they're already dead. But it is a little Odd, right? That she would behave in that way, given everything that they have already been through and given the already heightened sort of trauma circumstances of the situation in general. And so it does make me wonder if how accurate, how reliable that version of Morrow's narrative is.
- [10:42]
B
Yeah, and she's a very story. She's sort of a replaying of Ripley's arc in Alien Aboard the Nostromo. And you could have just called this episode like Nostromo Nostalgia or something like that, because they deliberately kind of recreate all of the sets and some of the kind of story beats, but Severia's at least as we're showing her, a sort of less effective version of Ripley and certainly meets a worse end. But Ripley's story is told straight on. You know, it's told almost in documentary kind of style, whereas Zaveri's story is told in this strange kind of off Kilda way, as everyone's story is, which does make you think, you know, Morrow is the one who's. Who's narrating this. And this is a show that's about, in general and in this episode in particular, voyeurism, surveillance. You know, one of the central creatures, maybe the central creature, is this eyeball monster that's constantly showing you refracted multiple sort of Rashomon like versions of. Of the same sort of reality. We see Teng voyeuristically kind of invading the sleep of another crew member. Sometimes people are. Some people are awake while others are asleep, which is always creepy. Sometimes people like the Savitar Petrovich are pretending to be asleep, but they're not really asleep. You know, all of this is in the background. Mother is silently kind of monitoring things, but turns out to be not just programmed, but actually a very willful sort of protagonist in events, but is just seeped into the background of kind of everything. So that thematic's really going on. Yeah.
- [12:19]
A
And Morrow as well. Right. This is how Morrow pieces together who the saboteur is eventually is by going through, I guess, months and months or maybe years and years worth of security footage. And there are cameras everywhere. And Petrovich's capacity to be a saboteur is that he has learned which parts of the ship are hidden from the security camera.
- [12:40]
B
Yes.
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A
And so he's able to kind of, you know, navigate his way around in a way that makes him somewhat immune to that surveillance society that has been created aboard the ship.
- [12:52]
B
Yeah. And it was. The Petrich story was. Was interestingly handled because, you know, in a. In an episode that was a Lot about containment breaches, things breaking out of largely glass containers. Well, Petrovich had engineered own escape from his own glass container by pretending to go into hypersleep and not going into hypersleep. And then the way that he moves around the ship stealthily using the ventilation shaft is precisely the way that the xenomorph in alien kind of gets around the ship. And so he's totally mirroring its behavior. And so you have the xenomorph and there's a xenomorph human parallel.
- [13:28]
A
Or is the xenomorph learning from Petrovich?
- [13:31]
B
I hadn't thought of it that way. That's also entirely possible. Absent from this episode completely. And it must be deliberate because they're such a central part of the show's thematic are Synthetics. You know, I was 100% convinced from the first episode in which you see flashbacks of what happens on the Maginot that Tang is a synthetic. I mean, they really set him up in that way. He had that same kind of mannerisms, creepy mannerisms that Ash had, or actually his own set of creepy mannerisms. But in the register of synthetic, that's gone a little weird. Yeah, I'm pretty certain when Tang is killed, he bleeds red blood and not white blood. And you know that that would mean that this is a ship. Everyone else is accounted for. Then there's no synthetics on the ship. Right. There's a cyborg. That's really strange. It's strange in universe because whaling Yutani ships, customarily, if not, you know, absolutely canonically, would carry synthetics. Certainly on a long range mission, you would expect there to be a synthetic because it doesn't have to sleep. That would be the whole point. It would be a much better security officer than Morrow, who goes to sleep for huge periods of the fight. And then when he wakes up, he's like, what's happening? And there's like. Well, there's 10 security threats. Let me bring you up to date.
- [14:42]
A
Well, Morrow has this kind of junior lieutenant, right? Who I guess that must be the workshare, right. Morrow's sleeping. The junior lieutenant is kind of taking over.
- [14:51]
B
But he's Captain Maron. I mean, he's totally ineffective.
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A
What does he spend his time doing? He spends his time filming his shipmates.
- [14:59]
B
Have amid a pawn. He's like a weirdo, which is again the voyeuristic aspect and the sort of, you know, this is ship of idiots, sabotagers and perverts as far as I can tell. But where is the Synthetic now. So there's two possibilities. One is there's no Synthetic. There's several possibilities. The Maginot launcher. That was a Synthetic. That would be weird. The synthetic was killed earlier in the mission. We know that bad things happened along the way. In the first episode, they say we lost a lot of good people collecting these specimens. Petrovich bemoans the loss of his wife.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Which you assume. I assumed anyway, was. Was to a sort of earlier. Earlier kind of bad incidents. So there's. That. Those could be the. The kind of plot explanations why there's no Synthetic. What. What is Noah Hawley trying to achieve by having this episode? That's about the stupidity of humans and the hubris of humans and the. The outrunning of humans. Capacity for caution by the. And. And sort of moral sensibilities by their capacity to achieve scientifically. Right. That's what the atom bomb is. That's what the genomic sequencing is. That's what going and collecting these parasites are. There's. There's wisdom is outrun by capability is outrun wisdom.
- [16:10]
A
Yeah.
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B
Right. That's clearly what's going on. Why. Why would you set up that thematic and then very noticeably remove synthetics from the scene when synthetics have been a central part of the.
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A
Yeah.
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B
The ideology of the show. It's. I would imagine it's because you want to. You want to really shine a light on the. The pretty degraded essence of humanity.
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A
Yeah. I. I think that that's a sharp point. And I think you're like, I wonder if we're going to get another bit of backstory on the Maginot. It seems like we would have to.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Right. If for no other reason than to fill out Petrovich's sabotage a little bit better. Right. Because it does leave. I mean, it's. It is not a show thus far, it seems to me that has left a lot of loose ends. Right. It's planted. It seems to me a lot of these kind of Easter eggs are falling foreshadowing kinds of elements. And I actually went back and as we were talking about off camera, I went back and rewatched the first half of the first episode where we are introduced to these characters again and there are a lot of little hints and tells about Petrovich's eventual sa. I guess at that point it's already. The sabotage is already going on, but it's going, of course, to get much worse and come to fruition in this episode. It makes me wonder if we're going to learn even more. Right. About at least about Petrovich. And maybe this will be the moment in which we learn more about what happens, presumably, as you say, to the synthetic that probably launched with the ship.
- [17:33]
B
Yeah. It's another way in which I think no, Hawley's kind of clear love of Blade Runner is present in this show, is showing a human society full of degraded, weird people. Because that, of course, is entirely what's going on in, in Blade Run, in which the remnants of humanity that are left on Earth have been subjected to kind of the environmental circumstances and just the fact that they're the people who couldn't afford to go off world. The people that are left either have some kind of disease or they're cognitively declined, or they're just kind of lower status people. And that's what seems to be the humanity that's on the Maginot.
- [18:13]
A
Yeah. And so I agree. I think that in terms of the big theme, that does seem to be what we're getting here. I think the other thing that's happening from a storytelling perspective is that there's a real attempt here to flesh out Morrow's character. Right up to this point. Everything that we have seen about Morrow is quite sinister in nature. And this is really the first time, as we say, this entire episode is really told through his perspective. And it's the first time when we see him filled out as something that seems to retain a bit of the humanity that he has bemoaned that he's lost earlier in the series. Right. Remember when he's talking about what it means to be a cyborg, he's talking to the lost boys, right. On the burned out remnants. I think of them as, you know.
- [18:53]
B
And he says, I'm the worst parts of the map.
- [18:56]
A
I'm the worst parts. I've been left with the worst parts of it. But here we see some flashes as to. Well, there. There probably was a better part of this guy, right. And it seems to revolve around his relationship with his deceased daughter. And those carry a lot of meaning. Right. And the. The recurring motif of fire is, I think, really important here as well, right. What keeps happening on board the ship? Well, fires keep breaking out, right. And the fires keep breaking out in ways that are both in causing both intentional damage to like, major systems like communication systems and engineering systems and fuel systems. But it's also fires that are, as a fire will is, is running rampant and doing things like freeing the specimens. Right. Which, you know, creates even more of a kind of catastrophic situation for the crew. Well, it's Also that Morrow has lost his daughter in a fire. Right. 57 years in, I think is what.
- [19:56]
B
We said as explained to him in that heartwarming.
- [19:58]
A
Maybe I guess it's eight years into.
- [19:59]
B
His journey, the heartwarming message of deep sympathy that comes from Will and Yutani.
- [20:03]
A
Exactly.
- [20:03]
B
Mr. Morrow, your daughter has died in a fire.
- [20:06]
A
Yeah.
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B
We've kept as stuff you can get it in 58 years.
- [20:08]
A
It's fires everywhere. Right. Which, which hearkens to the sort of the chaos of nature in a way that is maybe interesting for helping to understand the relationships between the natural and the synthetic. Or the biological and the synthetic.
- [20:24]
B
Yeah. Which has been a key part of the show. And you know what Blade Runner did was it used those degraded that setting of a degraded humanity to sort of spotlight the arising teutonic perfection of synthetic Roybadi. And by removing the synths completely, you're left with rampant, invasive, uncontrollable nature that's really overwhelming. The self perceived superior reasoning being of the human that's gone out in classic human style to conquer nature and remake it for its own, for their own use.
- [20:59]
A
And aboard the Maginot, it turns out the real danger is fire. That's the real danger in a ship full of saboteurs, idiots, perverts and aliens. Murderous aliens. The real danger is nature.
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B
Yeah, well, and it's fire, which is once, you know, one of the original kind of human conquerings of the natural world is the capacity to create fire. Right. And so to have that most elemental of things and that one of the earliest technological achievements be the thing that like overwhelms you even when you're on this cusp of post humanity is sort of a satisfying thing to have happened. All right, maybe the last point we'll talk about here, Jeff, is we had been wondering what we would find out about the Xenomorph and why it was. Why that particular one was so weird once it got to Earth. Assuming that it is weird and it's not just kind of badly, badly written, I'm assuming it's. It's weird. And it didn't just kind of want to kiss and cuddle with Joe and Wendy for plot convenience or plot armor's sake. But something thematically was being said and I'd assumed that what we would find out in this Maginot flashback episode was that something had happened to that xeno on board the ship that had changed it. And I'd assumed that it had been on the ship for a long period of time and they'd formed Some sort of bond or whatever experiments had been done on it. Turns out it's a newborn. And so I was left at the end of the episode being confused as to what had happened to the xenomorph. But you picked up what you think was quite significant.
- [22:28]
A
The eyeball jumps into it. Right. The eyeball monster jumps into it sort of at the very end, just as the. So it jumps out. So the eyeball monster has jumped into the Engineer. Right. And then. Then something curious happens here, right? So Zaviri, right, encounters the Engineer when he's got the eyeball monster in him. The eyeball monster does not attack or kill Zaveri.
- [22:57]
B
Right.
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A
He just sort of incapacitates her. Right. Which is consistent with what we have seen earlier in the behavior out of the eyeball towards the lead scientist, where.
- [23:08]
B
It taps on the glass to try and say, okay, pay attention to the.
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A
There's been an loss of containment from one of the other aliens. So it's at that moment, right. The xenomorph sort of enters into. I guess that's the engineering bay where they are. And the eyeball jumps into the. Into the xeno after fighting it. Right. So they get into a fight, and then the eyeball jumps into the xeno and we don't see it jump out. So what. What I sort of was led to believe was that the xenomorph has become a kind of hybrid alien.
- [23:41]
B
Yeah.
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A
In that moment. And. And it seems now to be made up of warring kinds of tendencies or personalities. Right. What we've seen out of the eyeball is not always murderous. It's not always invasive. Sometimes it is. Right. I think we learned that, you know, one of our lost boys from last week has almost certainly been contaminated and impregnated by her encounter with the eyeball. But then it seems like there are other moments in which the eyeball is assuming more of a protective kind of stance. And so I'm wondering if what we're left with in that xeno, the one that Wendy eventually kills and that behaves so strangely towards both Wendy and Joe. I'm wondering if what we're seeing there is some kind of split personality. Right. That points to its invasion by the eyeball.
- [24:28]
B
Yeah. I'd be interested in hearing from people in the comments what they made of that. I mean, these are instant reactions. We haven't had the chance to rewatch the episode multiple times and sort of figure out what had happened. I certainly saw it. One scientist that containment was being lost. I certainly saw both it and the xeno react towards each other like they had a history. And the xenomorph was actually, I think, quite scared of the. The eyeball monster. I. I hadn't picked up. I picked up the. Kind of jumped on it. I hadn't kind of taken the next thought that it had burrowed its way in there and then controlled the xenomorph and. Which would be really interesting if it had done that, especially if it. If it was either still in the xenomorph when they got. When it was discovered, when the rescue party went in on Earth. Although I thought there was only one eyeball monster and it was clearly separate by. By the time the. The hybrids went onto the. To the ship. I suppose another possibility is it's capable of burrowing in there, leaving behind some. Some part of itself or, you know, and then going off on its own separately.
- [25:28]
A
Some of the. Some of that strange behavior. I think this is from the second episode. Some of that strange behavior with Wendy and Joe is like kind of playful behavior. It seems like in episode two, they're playing. It wants to play hide and seek. Right. With. With Wendy. It seems like you had noted at the time that it certainly seemed like the xeno had allowed itself to be dragged into the kill room. Right. And so I'm. It. It makes sense to me that. That at the very least, the show is telling us that that xenomorph has been altered in some way.
- [26:00]
B
Yeah.
- [26:00]
A
And now whether the eyeball is still in there or whether, as you say, it's left behind some kind of, I don't know, detritus that's influencing the. The behavior of the xeno, I think we don't know, but it does. That did feel like a meaningful.
- [26:14]
B
Yeah. Plot revolution. There's a worse possibility. Worse if you're enjoying the show. Right. Which is the xeno is just written in a way to behave in the manner that the plot requires at any given point in time. And if I was going to pick nits about the episode, there was some odd. I don't know what the right word would be. Geography or choreography of the fight between the xeno and Zaveri. At one point, the xenomorph and Zaveri are looking each other in the eye and for some reason it just trips her up rather than killing her. I mean, all right, fair enough, you know, but then they're right next to each other and then a split second later, she's about 200 yards down there. I'm like, how fast does she run? Because the Xeno is really going for it and she's sort of, you know, pretty comfortably keeping keeping pace. Yeah, so. So the hope is that it's behaving in these differentiated ways for thematically interesting reasons. The sort of dark possibility would be that it's just behaving in those ways because, you know, it's its capabilities are sort of adjusted to the needs of the story at any one point in time. I don't think that's the case. I think it's a high enough quality show that someone would have that kind of hackish behavior wouldn't have been indulged in.
- [27:17]
A
Yeah, you would think so. I mean, and that's what I meant earlier when I said, like, thus far, I mean, a lot of Easter eggs have been left, a lot of foreshadowing elements have been left and they've been picked up again.
- [27:27]
B
True.
- [27:27]
A
And so it gives you hope that those kinds of things will also be picked up and explained.
- [27:33]
B
Yeah, I agree. Is there anything else you want to touch on?
- [27:35]
A
No, I'm looking forward to next week.
- [27:37]
B
Yeah, me too. Me too. Continue to enjoy the show. Continue to think it's sort of worthy of kind of deep critical analysis. Hope you agree. We really have loved the interaction that we're getting in the comments. Really picked up a lot of useful information. So please share your reactions. Kind of good or bad? Both. About the shore, about our attempts at instant analysis with us. And on that bombshell, hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun.
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B
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And so is the relief from EBGLIS.
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After an initial dosing phase, about 4 in 10 people taking EPGLIS achieved itch.
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Relief and clear or almost clear skin.
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At 16 weeks, and most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. A 250mg per 2ml injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis, that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies. EBGLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to ebglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Epglis. Before starting Epglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection searching for real relief? Ask your doctor about epglis and visit epgliss.lily.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545-5979. Go further with the American Express Business Gold Card earn 3 times Membership Rewards points on flights and prepaid hotels when you book through mxtravel.com whether your destination is a business conference or a client meeting. Your purchases will help you earn more points for future trips. Experience more on your travels with Amex Business Gold terms apply. Learn more@americanexpress.com Business Gold AmEx Business Gold Card built for business by American Express it felt like it was sort of at war this week's storytelling aesthetic with the the aesthetic that's been established up until this point.
- [30:37]
B
I'm Professor Stephen Dyson. And I'm Professor Jeff Dudas, and we are two political science professors who have just watched episode six of Alien Earth. We're a little troubled by this episode, though. Geoff I think we we both sort of independently had the experience of being a little maybe underwhelmed or confused by what was going on or not going on in this episode. And then we both kind of walked in wondering if that was a an individual experience or the other person had shared it. I mean, what did you make of it?
- [31:04]
A
I found the pacing of this episode to be inconsistent with the pacing that the show has established up to this point. I really thought that one of the strengths of the show for me is the way that the aesthetics of the storytelling have developed over the previous five episodes. Everything has felt calm and not rushed. Everything up to this point has felt like it's been a very careful kind of orchestration of the different scenes and the different characters and the way that the story's being told and being developed. I have really appreciated the prominent use of music to frame some of the more important scenes in the development of the story. And I really felt like this week there's like, seven or eight different storylines that are being collided together in a way that was. While competently and professionally done. I never felt like I was lost or I didn't understand what was happening or where the scenes were going. It felt like it was sort of at war, this week's storytelling aesthetic with the aesthetic that's been established up until this point. And I think that's problematic for this show because this is a show that means for its audience to consider its themes deeply. And if you are rushing from scene to scene and racing towards what feels like a kind of big finish, I think the themes can get buried and lost. And so one of the things we talked about, and I'll be curious to hear you talk a bit about it a bit more that we talked about off screen, is whether this episode is fine because of all of the thematic work that has already been done. And so the scattershot character of the storytelling this week allows for some calm in the viewer or in the audience, because you feel like you sort of already understand the major themes of the show.
- [33:06]
B
Yes. To the extent that I could engage successfully in the episode, I think it's because I was so convinced and interested by the thematics that had been established in the previous episodes. I had the oddest experience with this episode of thinking that simultaneously it was moving very quickly, but also that nothing was actually really happening. Nothing thematically was happening. Right. There was a lot of repetition of points that had already been made or beats that had already been established. At one point, I thought it was really sort of unfortunate that you had the Maginot episode the week before. I'm right about that.
- [33:44]
A
Yeah.
- [33:44]
B
Okay. The Maginot episode the week before, which was all about stupid people kind of letting the creatures out of containment. And then you had a similar sort of set of beats in which people act in stupid ways or they're manipulated on Malignas, but mostly stupid. Like the hybrid that gets killed by the fly is Just an idiot. That's just like a stupid.
- [34:04]
A
Breaks protocol.
- [34:04]
B
Yeah, it's a stupid thing to do. And so you have those episodes back to back because you're like, last week I understood this as being a broader point about kind of hubris and about, you know, bringing parasites back to your home, but more broadly, human hubris in trying to conquer the sort of natural world and finding that it bites back. And that's a grand science fiction theme. And then you're hitting all the same beats the week later. And so you do wonder about the placement of this episode and the run of the season and the sixth episode, there's two episodes left, which mean they're trying to get us on track for a sort of grand finale. So simultaneously, I thought individual things were rushed and also kind of repetitive and sort of not that much was happening. Which is a shame because we've been huge sort of defenders of this show, largely because we see it operating in a critical and thematic register. And so some of the things that people who don't like the show have not liked, quote, unquote, unbelievable characters or people acting in stupid ways, or just its weirdness, its oddness, its willingness to. In that kind of strange zone between fantasy, fairy tale and a sort of hard science fiction, I think we found very interesting because it's a new thing to do with the franchise, whereas other parts of the audience have found it very frustrating. And so it's. To have an episode where those elements seem imbalanced or kind of out of control is a little disappointing as an individual, in terms of the individual episode. And you do now start to worry, like, where is this gonna go for the rest of the season?
- [35:41]
A
Yeah, I am worried. This is the first time in the show's narrative that I am a bit worri worried that it's hurtling towards a very predictable and kind of hackneyed form of storytelling. So there's got to the big finish, right? Everything gets wrapped up and there's going to be tons of chases and explosions and whatever.
- [35:58]
B
There's got to be a big battle. There's going to be some sort of assault either on the Prodigy compound or assault by Prodigy forces to contain the creatures. They're going to escape in some way. But I think we know, because it's ultimately a prequel, that they don't. They can't fully escape and colonize the Earth because in later iterations, like they never say to Ripley when she's found in deep space, we're bringing you back to Gateway Station. By the way, the Earth is overrun with eyeballs and xenomorphs. And so we know it must be contained to some degree. And yeah, it's a bit worrying that the plot mechanics are just getting us in position for the grand finale.
- [36:36]
A
Yeah. Which is, as you say, I think it's a shame given the what I thought was the strength of the storytelling aesthetic that had been established up until now. I'm hopeful that this is kind of a one off, unsatisfactory viewing experience, but I am increasingly concerned that we're now on a trajectory that is going to be ultimately not very interesting.
- [36:59]
B
Yeah. So I did see some satisfying thematic elements. I'm not sure that they're new, but then it's episode six or an eight episode season, you know, maybe we don't want them to be introducing new thematic elements, but just pushing forward established parts of the problematic. And in some ways, I think the episode did some of this successfully. I thought that there was a narrative or a theme about growing up that was hit several times, which is obviously going to be a fertile one when you're dealing with children, essentially. I think at one point, you know, growing up is said to be sort of forbidden. Maybe it's in when Boy Cavalier is doing his Peter Pan audiobook. By the way. Did we ever establish, by the way, why he's doing a Peter Pan audiobook other than.
- [37:43]
A
So he's reading it to the children at night.
- [37:44]
B
Oh, that's what it is. Okay. All right. I must have missed that. You know, and suddenly he's got a microphone there. Is he like, is this a new venture for Prodigy? You know, is he little short on money? So they're gonna kind of get some. Something up on audible and maybe that's what's going on. All right. He's reading it to the children. And I think the quote says something about, you know, growing up is forbidden, but it's also sort of inevitable once you hit a certain age.
- [38:06]
A
Once you hit two.
- [38:07]
B
Yes.
- [38:07]
A
So after two years old, you know that you. That you will grow up and that you will not be stuck in this or arrested in this state of childhood.
- [38:17]
B
Right. And Wendy is undergoing a sort of moral revelation. It seems to me in this episode. She starts out having this exchange with her brother, who also comes off as like a weirdly sort of vampiric character in this episode, which suggests there's something off with the pisses, our characterization. All of a sudden he's like, the aliens are just animals. They don't think, they don't have society. He'd always seemed a more kind of panspeciesist kind of character than that up till now. But he was important for Wendy to play off his dismissal of the moral worth of the creatures, where she says, well, they didn't ask to be brought here.
- [38:52]
A
Yeah.
- [38:53]
B
And so she's developing a sort of independent moral sensibility that's obviously tied to her effective motherhood of the Xenomorph. And just as the xenomorph, in following its life cycle, experiences rapid growth in this episode, Wendy seems to be experiencing rapid moral growth. Because she starts out sort of lecturing Jon, this is a yes place, not a no place. And sort of parroting boy cavaliers. We are the people who move fast and make lots of money, is what he says. Things move fast and break things is the. The kind of tech, bro, real world quote that he's. That he's going off of. And then by the end of the episode, she's saying, you know, if this is what people are, I don't want to be people. You know, we just take things apart. We kill creatures and take them apart just to kind of see how they work. And she seems to be moving towards a sort of Synth morality, as has been outlined by Kurt, that people are just food. They're just sort of flesh sacks, and, you know, we should be generally disinterested in their fate. And she seems to be kind of going in that direction, maybe aligning herself more with the creatures and less with her human heritage.
- [39:58]
A
Yeah, I think that's right. I do think that to the extent that there's interesting thematic development happening in this episode, it is exactly that. And it's this kind of mirroring that's beginning to take place between the children and xenomorphs or the aliens. Right. And there's a dawning realization that we get from this episode from Wendy, that she and the Xenomorph are essentially the same. They're both basically lab rats, glorified lab rats. The only difference is that the. The aliens are contained within obvious containment boxes. Whereas the other thing that we do increasingly get the sense of this week is that the island of. Of Neverland is a containment box. It's beautiful. And it seems like it's not a containment box, but actually it is. Right. It's nearly impossible to get off of it. And there's no reason to believe that the main action of this story is gonna take place anywhere else except Neverland from here on out.
- [41:03]
B
Yeah. And it's. Well, it's sort of boxes within boxes. Cause the other box, Wendy, is Trapped in is the synth box she's being given. And the other really significant thing I thought we learned, or that did move the story forward a little bit, or its thematics forward, was the arc to do with Nibs, where turns out that once your consciousness is transferred into the synthetic body, that's not a one and done thing. You're actually subject to perpetual reformatting and reprogramming. And there is a nice sort of. Not paradox, that's the wrong word, but a nice sort of opposition set up as to how you would deal with someone who's undergoing psychological trauma, which. Which Nibs is. And there's the human way that the scientist kind of offers, which is a lot of therapy that would take a lot of time. And then Adam, the kind of thug in the suit, says, well, or actually you could just plug her back in and we'll reset some of her parameters and erase some of her memory. And do that very mechanistically. Which means if those hybrids are the wave of the future, which is how the story begins. Right. We're at a point in history where there are different models of immortality. And which one wins is going to determine who rules the universe, or whatever that opening text scroll said in the first episode. And the hybrids are one. Well, that would be a. A post human future in which you're subject to continual mechanical readjustment. And Nibs is readjusted in such a way that she is effectively given an abortion.
- [42:28]
A
Right.
- [42:28]
B
Right. Like her memory is her memory of being pregnant or a sense of being pregnant and of the eyeball sort of infiltration is erased from her. And there's. It's hard to read it in any other way than that's a kind of false abortion.
- [42:42]
A
Exactly. And. And the forcible nature of it, I think, is essential. This is what Wendy. I think what dawns on her and what leads her to this increasingly close association with the aliens is that none of this has taken place through consent. And there's the kind of the dissembling moment on the part of Dame Sylvia, the scientist, when she says, well, she was sick and we gave her medicine. This is how medicine works. Of course, that is not. Not the appropriate analogy here. Right. She's lying or otherwise deluded in what she is claiming here to Wendy. And Wendy is smart enough to understand that that's not what has happened here. Right. That this has been, as you say, it's been the reformatting of a hybrid consciousness in a way that is far more manipulative than what we have seen up to this point. Remember, up to this point, we have simply seen the transfer of an already existing consciousness into a synthetic body, presumably without any messing around with the, you know, the nature of that consciousness has been portrayed as a kind of one to one transfer, transfer. Here it turns out that they can go in and they will go in, right? Because they do not envision these hybrids in the same way that they don't envision the aliens as beings that have agency and subjectivity and that are like enough to them that they can do things like have the moral capacity to consent or not consent. And so I think you're right. The thing that we see here that is maybe unique to this episode is the maturation, the moral and in a certain sense, emotional maturation of Wendy, at least as she realizes that she is growing up and that she's growing up in a context of unfreedom, in a context in which consent is denied. The other character who has a little bit of a discourse here about the difference between childhood and adulthood is our poor character, slightly, who is. I mean, really, the. The manipulation from Moro comes to its obvious fruition here in this episode, right? And remember, he tells. He tells his friend, he tells me, he says, you know, being an adult is not fun, right? You don't just play games all day like you do when you're a child. It's not fun. And so we have a mirrored kind of development of maturation from slightly as well, right?
- [45:26]
B
I think so. I think so. Maybe one of the thematics we're going to end up with from this series is. I mean, it's the old cliche and you almost don't want to see, want to say it's like what it means to be human. Usually that's just a throwaway line whenever you encounter any sort of AI or, you know, and this is really about what it means to be human. But I think there's something more specific going on, which is two things are now being juxtaposed. You've got what it means to be human is the attempt to exert mastery over the natural world, which is going to simultaneously lead to great progress and to sort of overreach and hubris. And we'll always encounter limits that are either scientific in nature or if you're that way inclined, sort of religiously given, that are going to push back against the attempt to achieve a total mastery, whether it's immortality or whether it's going out into the galaxy and collecting all these species. And you're always going to run into the kind of Icarus Syndrome, you're always going to fly too close to the sun. And that's one element of, quote, what it means to be human. There's got to be a better way to express this. The other thing that you're coming across is what it means to be human is humans will, in positions of unfreedom, or in positions of even artificiality, or in positions of a sort of imposed childhood, will undergo a struggle for agency and autonomy, will undergo a moral awakening, will undergo a maturation process. And both of those are inherent in, quote, what it means to be human. So it's not just like, here's an artificial person. This shines a light on what we are. There's actually a more specific and detailed explication of what it is to be in that constant dialectical struggle, right? Like both sides, both the striving and the hubris, the failure and the. And the triumph are necessary. The kind of unfreedom and the struggle for freedom, the moral immaturity and the coming to maturity, the domination and agency, they're all inseparable parts of a dialectic. That's really what moves history on.
- [47:35]
A
Yeah, I think that's right. It moves history on, but it is also, as you were alluding to, it's the central component of the human maturation process, the capacity to understand and to hold seemingly unlike things in mind in ways that are compatible with one another. And here we get it in the. I do think there is this kind of felicitous use of the yes, no place. Boy Cavalier. It's all yes all the time, right? He has no capacity to understand that what mature human practice is, is the capacity to sometimes say yes and sometimes say no. No. And it. This is what's dawned on Wendy, right? She moves from a yes to a no place, or at least from a yes to a sometimes no place. As the episode goes on. Boy Cavalier does not. Right. Boy Cavalier is stuck. I mean, it's on the nose, boy. But he is stuck in this kind of arrested state of immaturity. Yeah. It is a fully hubristic, a fully Manichean vision of the world. It's black and white. He imagines himself and sometimes is in a place of complete mastery over all things. But he behaves as essentially the most immature possible of people because he never ever takes the interests or the wants of anybody else as meaningful or important. It's all just, what do I want?
- [49:08]
B
Well, and sometimes the way that personality type or maybe human characteristic is disciplined, certainly in contemporary societies, is through capitalism, right? And it's through money. And it's through the. The sort of the need for pragmatism and for strategy and for thinking that allows you to be very rich. And also the way that your. The personal or tyrannical desires of. Of the person can be subordinated within some. Some grander scheme and control can be exerted over you because we know in the end, well, it's just about money. And if you pay enough money or impose severe enough financial consequences, then the person will finally exert some ego control and kind of sublimate their wild desires. And what Yutani learns in this episode and what we're shown is that Boy Cavalier is the most dangerous sort of megalomaniac or the most dangerous sort of person in a capitalist society, which is the person who doesn't care about money because he rejects fantastic amounts of money. He's like, I've got money, I don't care. I'm actually more interested in this sort of adventure, which is the scariest thing of all for a capitalist system. The person who cannot be disciplined by.
- [50:12]
A
Any amount of cash and remember, I mean, is Boy's. Who's Boy Cavalier's avatar? Peter Pan. Yes, the boy who knows him grow up.
- [50:20]
B
Right, right.
- [50:21]
A
So this is a self conscious attempt to maintain himself in this kind of deeply immature state of being. And it, as you say, gives him the capacity to be fantastically rich and fantastically powerful. Obviously there is a reckoning coming, I think, for Boy Cavalier. I don't see any circumstances if this narrative is consistent with, I think, where it seems like it wants to go. There's no way that Billy Cavalier survives these eight episodes. And it's likely to be a gruesome and horrible death. So my prediction is certainly being eaten by an alien.
- [50:57]
B
Yeah. So that would be one way to go. Or the eye gets him. That would be the other way to go. And I suspect with Kirsch having the ability to stop it, but he just raises an eyebrow Spock style and says, oh, screw it. Unlucky. All right, so there's two possibilities here. I mean, as we were talking, Geoff, I was like, this sounds like actually quite a good episode of television. It's very thematically rich.
- [51:18]
A
We trapped ourselves into it.
- [51:19]
B
There's two possibilities. Right. One is we have, as people may think, as usual, sort of over intellectualized things and provided a framework around something that can't support it. In the shape of this, I think the show as a whole does support it, but in the shape of this specific episode, I guess that's one possibility. Or the other possibility is maybe we were too negative at the start. And this is actually a really solid episode of television. And these are just our instant reactions. We have nowhere to know. We'd certainly love to hear from people who comments like, where do you fall here? What's the appropriate.
- [51:50]
A
Both things are true. Maybe in contrast or in comparison with other TV shows. This was a strong episode. But given where we land within this story, it feels weak to me.
- [52:07]
B
Yeah, there are. It's a fairly unique TV show. And the thing you can always say. I think the thing you'll always be able to say in defense of the show, even if it ends badly, is that it's doing things that are not often seen on television, that are sort of thematically interesting and it's taken in a relevant way and in a way that's consistent with the Alien problematic. It's taken that idea to a different place. You know, it's used elements that were always in the Alien franchise, but it's done meaningfully different things with it. A lot of the way it's done that is by sort of smashing it together with Blade Runner. But that's fine. That's how things work. All these texts speak to each other anyway. Why not have them speak to each other very directly? Okay. All right. So we would love to hear from you what you thought of this episode. Was it good? Was it awful? Was it somewhere in between? Are we missing hugely important? And we will look forward to what I suspect is a pretty sort of rapid ride towards a finale with episode seven and then episode eight. And on that bombshell, Olivia loves a challenge. It's why she lifts heavy weights and likes complicated recipes. But for booking making a trip to Paris, Olivia chose the easy way. With Expedia, she bundled her flight with a hotel to save more. Of course, she still climbed all 674 steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower. You were made to take the easy route. We were made to easily package your trip. Expedia made to travel flight inclusive packages are atoll protected.