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- [00:00]
Amazon Kid
Mom, Dad, I humbly suggest you save some money and shop Amazon for back to school. It's for my growth, meaning my body's growing at an alarming rate. And clothes you buy me this year will be very small very soon. Plus, the clothes I love today will be out of style tomorrow. But at least your wallet doesn't have to be my fashion victim. If you shop low prices for school at Amazon, hopefully this is helpful. Amazon. Spend less, smile more.
- [00:30]
Marshall Po
Hello, everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do to day. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:37]
Professor Stephen Dyson
It's the pop culture professors. And today we continue our analysis of the FX TV series Alien Earth. We bring you our reactions recorded fairly shortly after we watch the show to episode three, Metamorphosis, and episode four, observation. I was very reassured and sort of delighted actually by episode three, because I do think it's a show that that's in strong control of its dominant problematic. And the problematic is in the title, right? Metamorphosis, transformations, boundary crossings, the changing of one thing into another. I'm Professor Stephen Dyson.
- [02:12]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And I'm Professor Jeff Dudas.
- [02:13]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And we are two political scientists who have just watched Alien Earth episode three, and we're gonna give our instant thoughts and reactions on the ideas, themes and ideologies that we see in that episode. These are, of course, just our thoughts and our thoughts fairly soon after the fact of watching the episode. We would love to know your thoughts, whether you agree or disagree with what we're kind of seeing in the series so far. In this episode, specifically on last week's video where we talked about episode one and two, there was some really great comments that really helped me think about the the series and refine some of my thoughts. As an excellent comment about H.R. giger and how Alien was always about transhumanism. That wasn't just something that Hawley had introduced into the series, you know, for Alien Earth. So please do get down in the comments section. We try and engage with all the comments and let us know what you think. What did you think, Jeff of Alien Earth Episode three, Metamorphosis?
- [03:05]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, I thought it was a really strong episode. I thought in the first place, aesthetically it looks really good and the pacing was excellent. I thought the musical choices were really strong. So I think there's a lot about the show aesthetically that is really hitting on all cylinders from a storytelling perspective. I also thought it was really interesting. I thought the themes here, which we began to see and talk a lot about last week and we'll talk a lot about this week, but in particular the theme of boundary crossing and the passing of seemingly or apparently impermeable boundaries between the real and the fantastic, the biological and the synthetic, even relationships of parents to children and brother to sister. I thought that those themes were really tightly on the surface this week. And we're really beginning, I think, to see a very strong sense of just what the show means to be about and how it's going to employ its various characters to engage those themes. What did you think of it?
- [04:15]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Well, so I. So I agree on all counts and I was really reassured by this episode. I developed doubts. I mean, I think you can see it in the first video we did on episodes one and two. And then as I thought more about that over the week and engage with some of the comments, I had actually started to develop some doubts about the show. And I was a bit worried after what were essentially the pilot episodes. Pilots are very difficult, right? It's very hard to do them. You have to get the plot going. You have to introduce the characters. You have to introduce the characters at a point where maybe the actors don't fully have them yet or the writers don't. And you have to introduce them in kind of overdrawn ways. Cause they have to read immediately as having this truth. This is the quirky one, this is the X1. And so pilots can be kind of strange Beasts. I was getting a little bit worried that the show was not gonna be in control of its dominant problematic. Right. What questions it was asking and where was it looking for answers, which I'd taken to be transhumanism. I was a bit concerned that the aliens were gonna be peripheral to that and that really the synths in their varieties were gonna be the central focus. And I was a bit concerned about the adult children, or particularly the children thing. I was standard struggle to see how it would fit together. I was very reassured and sort of delighted, actually, by episode three, because I do think it's a show that's in strong control of its dominant problematic. And the problematic is in the title. Right. Metamorphosis, transformations, boundary crossings, the changing of one thing into another. And what I thought episode three did really, really well was it drew the, you know, a tight connection between the aliens who all. All of those species, you know, most famously the xenomorph and its life cycle, but also the other species are all varieties of metamorphizing, you know, creatures.
- [05:56]
Interjecting Commentator
Yeah.
- [05:57]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And then it started to draw them into elements of boundary crossing with the synthetic and human characters in the show. Whether that's kind of telepathically, which is what seems to be going on with Wendy and the Xenomorph and the Facehuggers, or whether it's more kind of biologically, you know, there was a lot of that going on. I was really reassured. I also thought the kind of children in adults bodies thing, which I had been worried about, was really effective and really worked well. There was, I felt, a brilliant scene between Slightly and Smee where they kind of get into this, like, bro, dude, like, did you see the monsters? That was full on sci fi. That was extremely effective in kind of crystallizing the strangeness and the strangeness of the transformations that are going on. And then once he introduced Moro, another boundary crossing, you know, chimeric metamorphized character, the cyborg in. As a counterpoint there in that scene. That was also extremely effective while also being, like, really, really sinister and disturbing and de. Centering and kind of you lose your equilibrium. And I think that's what the show's trying to do. Yeah.
- [07:08]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And in that scene in. Morrow quickly puts himself in control of that situation because he understands almost immediately that he's dealing with children.
- [07:17]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [07:17]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Children and adult bodies, but children. It's at that point that he then begins this process of He's. He's manipulating them in that scene. And then, of course, he has figured out Some way to create this kind of telepathic link with Slightly that is clearly going to be his way in to Neverland. His way into trying to, I don't know, rescue or reclaim.
- [07:41]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [07:41]
Professor Jeff Dudas
The. The alien specimens.
- [07:43]
Interjecting Commentator
Yeah.
- [07:43]
Professor Jeff Dudas
That were sort of under his control or under his charge. And he's now going outside of his. His charge to try to recover them. He has clearly decided that his life's work.
- [07:55]
Interjecting Commentator
Yeah.
- [07:56]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Is taking care of or shepherding these specimens back to Weyland Yutani.
- [08:01]
Professor Stephen Dyson
So it's really interesting you. You read that as telepathic and I. And it may just be that we've just watched the episode and haven't had a chance to review it. I sort of. He kind of hacked into the technology or something, but somehow it almost doesn't matter because it's another one of these really interesting boundary crossings and even violations. Right. That's a violation to go into it. Was it Slightly to go into his essentially bedroom and start speaking to him.
- [08:25]
Professor Jeff Dudas
But he's not the only one. Sorry, just to stop you on that. He's not the only one who's engaged in these kinds of privacy violations with the Lost Boys.
- [08:32]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [08:32]
Professor Jeff Dudas
They learn.
- [08:33]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [08:33]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Smee and Slightly learn that in fact, everything that they see.
- [08:39]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [08:39]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Is being monitored and watched. But apparently not the audio.
- [08:43]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah.
- [08:44]
Professor Jeff Dudas
But the visual. So they are not living lives that have any sort of shell of. Of privacy in them. They are. Are fully. They've been fully developed as appendages of Prodigy.
- [08:58]
Interjecting Commentator
Right?
- [08:59]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yes. And you've also. You've also got that a connection that does actually seem to be telepathic between Wendy and the xenomorph and certainly the facehuggers and all of these things.
- [09:10]
Professor Jeff Dudas
But also now then becomes literal, I think, right. In the killing scene, right?
- [09:14]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yes, I think so too. And the other thing that's going on, why I say this episode was so in control of its problematic and really drew the original ideas of Alien into this sort of much more transhumanist kind of AI synthetic kind of environment, is that these boundary crossings in Alien were always non consensual violations. And you know, one of the big sort of themes of the. The original movie was. Was this kind of sexual, penetrative, you know, aspect that the facehuggers and the aliens would. Would enact upon the. The human body. And here again, it's. It's not always that kind of penetrative kind of sexual aspect, but it is voyeuristic, non consensual. There's another instance of this. Where is it Nibs who asks why couldn't we keep our name? Why is Peter Pan the mythology word? Why couldn't we choose? And she's not only objecting to, you know, them being. Being sort of killed and put into synthetic bodies, she's objecting to the whole mythos of the thing. And in particular why is it done at the behest of someone else and not at our behest? And here we go into what I think is really sort of. This is a horror genre, really sort of horrifying territory because another thing you've brought into the mix with children is children cannot give consent to these kind of things. Right. Can a child give consent to being removed from its physical body and reincarnated into a synthetic model. Into a synthetic body can slightly give consent to have his bedroom invaded. I'm sorry, by an older man. For the older man's purposes.
- [10:52]
Interjecting Commentator
Yeah.
- [10:53]
Professor Stephen Dyson
When the older man has started to kind of try and develop a sort of behind the scenes relationship.
- [10:58]
Professor Jeff Dudas
He's grooming him.
- [10:59]
Professor Stephen Dyson
That. That's the word I was, you know, I didn't know if I should use. But I think that is what's going.
- [11:03]
Professor Jeff Dudas
That's the clear analogy.
- [11:05]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. And so, so.
- [11:06]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And of course the other non consensual border crossing is taking place is at the end of the episode when Joe is. Has his heart removed from him by the prodigy surgeons.
- [11:15]
Professor Stephen Dyson
I thought it was long. We did, we did disagree on this. It could be, could be hot, could.
- [11:20]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Be the organ that's belongs central to Joel, which has now been implanted with some alien. A part of the alien or one of the alien shells.
- [11:30]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [11:30]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And so he hasn't consented to that.
- [11:33]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [11:33]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Like he's comatose essentially when this procedure is being enacted on him.
- [11:38]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. And it's all operating in that register of almost Cronenbergian kind of body horror. You know, there's. I think Cronenberg is a big influence in the, in the background here. You know, the other thing I thought was going on was there was. There's a lot of Spielberg's. Maybe you said this last week, Spielberg's AI, you know, happening especially once you bring the children in. And there was again a lot more. You know, I think I joked last week that the series should be called Alien Call on Blade Runner. Yeah, there was a. There's a lot of Blade Runner still happening. New Siam seems like a very Blade Runnery type city. It's aesthetic and the kind of prodigy call making its announcement, its advertisements, sorry, over loudspeakers and so forth.
- [12:20]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And it does the same, same thing that a lot of that version of sci fi does is that employs sort of Asian ness as the other.
- [12:30]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [12:31]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Or as the backdrop for displaying otherness. Right. This is exactly what Blade Runner does.
- [12:35]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [12:37]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And so New Siam is pretty explicitly figured, right. As having these kinds of stereotypically Asian touches.
- [12:45]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [12:46]
Professor Jeff Dudas
It's geography, the, the way the buildings work, the kind of the construction of the streets. These are all. And Name Right points to a kind of, I mean, there's a kind of an under the surface racial politics, I guess, that seems to be emerging here as well that hearkens back to some of the aesthetics of Blade Runner.
- [13:06]
Interjecting Commentator
Yeah.
- [13:06]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And in Blade Run, it was all the white people had, had gone to the off world colonies where they, they kind of had synthetics as, as slaves and, and that. That was what was going on. Yeah, great, great episode. The other thing I wanted to bring up was Morrow, you know, a genuinely sort of sinister kind of character when he goes rogue.
- [13:24]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [13:25]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And the, the, I thought it was very, very effective aesthetically and thematically when he kind of puts the data cables to his temple and starts, you know, getting the kind of data upload and that just framed that whole scene in a sinister light. But he also said something that was really important to the thematics of the, of the series, which is he's asked by Smear slightly like, are you a robot? And, and he says, well, wouldn't that be nice to be a machine instead of what I am? The worst parts of a man.
- [13:54]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [13:54]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And again, he's obviously this transgressive or literally cyborg, cyborg eyes character, but he believes what he's been left with is the, you know, the natural part is not the good part of him. He's actually just left with all the detritus of a human rather than the realities of a man. And he's a sort of man out of time as well. I mean, these are all time travelers who've been on the mash.
- [14:13]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [14:14]
Professor Jeff Dudas
But he also considers himself as he's me, to be. To be a kind of a damaged son. And this is the, the monologue that he offers here when he's talking with SME. And, and slightly, what would you do if your mother instructed you to harm all of these people, Right. In the name of the mission or, or to at least not help them?
- [14:33]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [14:34]
Professor Jeff Dudas
When, when you could.
- [14:35]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [14:36]
Professor Jeff Dudas
What would you do?
- [14:37]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [14:38]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Would, would you do that? When he then learns that the, the elder Yotani, I guess, is no longer in charge of the corporation because you know, they have been out there for 65 years. He no longer feels any fidelity to the corporation. There are familial things happening with that character as well. And then, of course, as part of his pitch to slightly the sort of the grooming pitch, he talks about how he was a father himself. Now, that may or may not be true. I presume we'll maybe find out more about this, as you'd suggest off camera. You think that there's. We're gonna get some kind of return episodes to the Maginot to see what was happen.
- [15:14]
Professor Stephen Dyson
You have to. I think that was pretty heavily teased in what was an effective part of episode one, where they showed things going wrong in the Maginot and they didn't just, ba dum, ba dum. This is happening then. This is happening. And it takes place over several weeks. It was just in almost this dream or nightmare sequence where you see just flashes of the disaster that's happening. At one point, you see Mr. Tang, who I think might end up being a synthetic, on the Maginot. You see him kind of just going like. Almost like he's lost his mind. And that is asking questions that surely the show is gonna answer later on. The other reason why I think we're gonna get a lot of flashbacks or maybe even whole episodes devoted to what happened on the Maginot is I think it's pretty clear that the xenomorph that they brought home on the Maginot is not your standard xenomorph. It's not the xenomorph that's met by the Nostromo, because it doesn't behave in that way, like it wants to chase around after Joe and give him a cuddle. It's really interested and has some sort of psychic connection with or when especially that's. That xenomorph could have been on the Maginot. I mean, what was it, 65 year? Let's say the first stop was pick up the Xenomorph. That thing could have been on there for decades. Yeah. Who knows what they were doing to it and with it. I mean, I know they were asleep a good portion of the time. And it was in containment.
- [16:30]
Interjecting Commentator
Yeah.
- [16:31]
Professor Stephen Dyson
But especially once things started going weird. What. You know, did it. Did it exercise some sort of influence on the crew? And that's where they're doing experiments on it. Something has happened because it is. It is a xenomorph that is attuned to Wendy in particular. When it gets back for some as yet unexplained reason. And it's not behaving in the purely hostile, murderous fashion. It did not behave in the purely hostile, murderous fashion that they usually do.
- [16:58]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And it makes me wonder if Morrow's reference to being a father has to do with his caretaking of the Xenomorph.
- [17:06]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, well. And also, who hatched the xenom? Right. Who was the. The incubator for that xeno? Yeah, it probably was someone on the Maginot.
- [17:15]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [17:15]
Professor Stephen Dyson
You know, so who knows?
- [17:17]
Professor Jeff Dudas
I think it definitely was.
- [17:18]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [17:18]
Professor Jeff Dudas
I think one of the. One of the corpses that we see from last week's episode was.
- [17:23]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, I think. I think you're right. I think you're right. There is a great scene that really sort of warmed my. My heart as someone who likes a show to have a good integration between its cinematography, its aesthetic, and it's. And it's thematic, it's problematic. And that was the kind of aftermath of the fight between Wendy Jo and the Xenomorph. That Xenomorph was definitely not trying to kill them. Point 1.
- [17:47]
Professor Jeff Dudas
I think this is worth exploring a little bit. The sense that we get, I think you're right is the Xenomorph is not behaving in the typical ways that we have seen on screen in this franchise in the past. In particular, it's not behaving in those ways with regard to Wendy and Joe. And I got the sense from those initial scenes that it was, like, playing.
- [18:07]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [18:08]
Professor Jeff Dudas
This was not playing with them in a sinister way, but, like, this was play.
- [18:13]
Interjecting Commentator
Yeah, right.
- [18:14]
Professor Jeff Dudas
As you had mentioned, off camera, the Xenomorph seems to be allowing Wendy to pull it by the tongue Right into the. Into the room. The xenomorph kind of looks at them and then kind of. It's almost like it's trying to play hide and seek with them.
- [18:27]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [18:28]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And being rambunctious rather than being murderous.
- [18:30]
Professor Stephen Dyson
It's like a set of backups. Yeah, it's really dangerous, but it's just trying to bat you around a little bit. Yeah, yeah. No, and where I was going in saying that there was a really tight kind of integration between aesthetics and thematics was after Wendy chops its head off with the sword. You see the xenomorph kind of on one side of the frame and it's bleeding. It's kind of acid green blood. You see Wendy laid next to it, and she's bleeding her synthetic white kind of blood. And then Joe vomits and then bleeds sort of human blood, red blood. And there's real. You know, in a show that's about all of these kind of conjunctions and transformations and metamorphoses, that was just a really nice visual way of representing what was going.
- [19:13]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [19:13]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And that's a sharp point. And it's also. It's the boundary cross. It's all of the bodily fluids intermixing with one another.
- [19:18]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yes.
- [19:18]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [19:19]
Professor Jeff Dudas
At that same time, in exactly the way that the. The consciousnesses are going to intermingle.
- [19:25]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [19:25]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And that's great because that's. That's not just being about transhumanism and AI and post humanism and all the rest of it. It's actually doing something that's within universe or within the problematic of the original alien idea. But taking it out of what I think Giger's original art and maybe Ridley Scott's original vision and Dan Oban's original vision was of the alien, which was this kind of sexual, penetrative thing as a metaphor for the way the social system of capitalism kind of exploits and consumes human bodies. As a commenter said very aptly, Giger was doing transhumanism. It's just transhumanism looked like the human body transmuting into industrial forms and pipes and metal in 1970. In the 1970s.
- [20:10]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [20:10]
Professor Stephen Dyson
In 2025. Transhumanism is about the kind of the human body becoming sort of virtualized and cyborgized and. Yeah, yeah. And about human consciousness being being kind of. Kind of separated from the real world or the real biological world used with.
- [20:26]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Our phones, for example.
- [20:27]
Professor Stephen Dyson
100Y. Yeah, yeah. And so. And so I do think that's really. No, Hawley is really. And the other writers have really hit on something there that's effective. Okay, here's my question then. So Wendy has some kind of. And it's really going to the last scene of the episode. Wendy has some sort of psychological or psychic connection with the xenomorph, or at least the facehuggers. When she wakes up, when she's rebooted, essentially, there is a scene that I think can be read as really happening or a scene that can be read as Wendy in a dream. So she wakes up, the machine changes from red, which it's fixing her, to blue. She's fixed. The person alongside her stays asleep, even though the machine makes a heck of a lot of noise when it reboots her. So you've got two characters who are asleep, one of whom then wakes up. Then it's kind of. So you're already being signaled. Is this really happening. Who's asleep here and who's awake? That, at least is on the table. The scene is then shot in this very surreal way. There's kind of smoke everywhere. There is a mysterious guy. Maybe someone in the comments can help us, or maybe you understand who he is. There's a guy in a Hazmat suit who keeps being in Prodigy Corporation blowing something into the walls.
- [21:36]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Is that Nibs vision, though?
- [21:38]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Nibs has that vision, but then I'm sure he's in Wendy's visions. So Nibs is. That's a surreal. Is that guy actually there, or is Nibs, like, imagining it? Nibs and Wendy. So anyway, something is going on with that guy, who's just a kind of incongruous presence. And then he turns around and he's smoking a cigarette. Something is going on with that. Then Wendy kind of wanders into the room where the xenomorph kind of embryo is being implanted into Jo's organ without Kirsch hearing the door opening, even though Kirsch is a synthetic with, you assume, excellent hearing. And she's physically pained by what's. As the face of Greg's being cut open. And then she sort of collapses. So what is the nature of the connection between Wendy and the xeno and the face? Okay, it's obvious what it is thematically, right. Or metaphorically within the show. But what is it literally or is it literalized in the show? Maybe we'll get the answer on the Maginot. And then was that really happening to Wendy, or was it just a dream that she was having?
- [22:38]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, I think it's unclear, but I suspect that you're right, that this is some kind of dreamlike state that she's having while she's being rebooted in that kind of coma like, status. Because it is odd.
- [22:50]
Interjecting Commentator
Right?
- [22:50]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And it's not just. It's not. I mean, there are three synths in there doing the surgery.
- [22:55]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [22:55]
Professor Jeff Dudas
You would presume that at least one of them would notice that someone had come into the room.
- [23:01]
Professor Stephen Dyson
So they've locked the damn door. Like, hey, we're going to do this, like, actual surgical procedure on this Hazmat, you know, alien organism. And should. Should we lock the door? Just leave it up?
- [23:10]
Professor Jeff Dudas
But we see the synths passing in and out of that.
- [23:12]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Okay.
- [23:13]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Laboratory or whatever pretty freely.
- [23:16]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Okay.
- [23:16]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [23:16]
Professor Jeff Dudas
What we're told is that humans are not allowed in because.
- [23:19]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Because the. Because the Face Hugger eggs react to.
- [23:21]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yes.
- [23:21]
Professor Stephen Dyson
React to them.
- [23:22]
Interjecting Commentator
Yeah.
- [23:23]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Which also is a nice throwback to last week. And you had wondered why the. The face huggers were. Or you had wondered why Tools was not afraid of the. The face hugger. Yeah, well, because. Or I guess not.
- [23:36]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Whatever that altruism was.
- [23:37]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, whatever.
- [23:37]
Professor Stephen Dyson
The hanging organism is not interested in synths.
- [23:39]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Not interested in since.
- [23:40]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the. The xenomorphs are dangerous to synths because they rip them apart. And that's been. Was really hard in aliens. But that. But they can't. They're not useful to them at the earliest stage of the. Of the life cycle.
- [23:52]
Professor Jeff Dudas
They're not going to implant themselves and Exactly. Grow out of.
- [23:54]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Exactly.
- [23:55]
Interjecting Commentator
Yeah.
- [23:55]
Professor Stephen Dyson
All right, good. So great. I mean, really a. Sort of. For me, I was delighted with the episode. Really reassured. Really sort of now pretty convinced that this show is going to bear the weight of, you know, extended critical scrutiny.
- [24:08]
Interjecting Commentator
Yeah.
- [24:08]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And really excited to see what comes next.
- [24:10]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah, I am too. I mean, the last thing that I think is worth talking about a little bit here as we close is the. The figure of parenthood.
- [24:19]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Okay.
- [24:19]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And parents and children. Because this is really starting to lurk now, I think, a lot in the background. We get. We get constant references about parenthood, Right. We get growing questions about who are the actual parents of the Lost. Of Wendy and the Lost Boys. Is it their biological parents or is that relationship severed entirely when the children die and have their consciousnesses implanted in a synthetic body? Is Boy Cavalier now the parent Who's. Who is. How does that lineage work now? And it's clear that Nibs is really struggling with this question.
- [25:00]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [25:01]
Professor Jeff Dudas
She's the character who seems to be struggling the most with the transformation from a biological being into a synthetic being. One of her big concerns appears to be like, who. Who am I?
- [25:13]
Interjecting Commentator
Who.
- [25:13]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Who are my actual relations? This, of course, is also the moment. I mean, this. This is kind of the critical moment when slightly sort of confesses.
- [25:22]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [25:22]
Professor Jeff Dudas
That they have parents.
- [25:23]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [25:23]
Professor Jeff Dudas
This is what gets Morrow's. Confirms Morrow sense that he's dealing with things that are not what they seem and then sets up what appears to be this kind of the dynamic for the grooming that's taking place as well. I think the show is beginning to ask some questions about what is the nature of the relationship between parents and children when a child dies or when one party dies?
- [25:46]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [25:47]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Are you still a parent if the. If your child has died? Are you still a child if your parent has died? And how does all of that work?
- [25:55]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [25:56]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And it gets very messy with all the kind of compulsive boundary crossing that we see as well, who is Wendy's parent going to be? Is Wendy's parent now a xenomorph is Wendy's parent. Boy Cavalier is Wendy's parent. Her original biological parents the same, I think, is. We're going to find out about Joe.
- [26:12]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [26:12]
Professor Jeff Dudas
What is. Is this a new Joe?
- [26:14]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [26:14]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Is the metamorphosized Joe that we're going to get? Like, is he now the son of Prodigy?
- [26:21]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, because he's clearly getting a synthetic organ to replace the one that's. That's taken out and.
- [26:25]
Professor Jeff Dudas
An alien organ.
- [26:26]
Interjecting Commentator
Right, right.
- [26:26]
Professor Jeff Dudas
That has been engineered by the Prodigy corporate.
- [26:28]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Oh, you. You think they're going to put the.
- [26:30]
Professor Jeff Dudas
The lung back in jaw for sure.
- [26:32]
Interjecting Commentator
Oh.
- [26:35]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Man, I'm too stupid to have seen the next thing. Yeah, and they're gonna try and. But then isn't it gonna burst out of.
- [26:40]
Professor Jeff Dudas
I think they're. I think they're really curious and they.
- [26:44]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Just thought they were just using it like a slab of flesh and they were gonna.
- [26:48]
Professor Jeff Dudas
No, I think that that organ is going to go.
- [26:50]
Professor Stephen Dyson
That's interesting.
- [26:51]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And we're. It's going to create this kind of. I mean, who knows exactly what's going to happen, but it's definitely going to create an even tighter psychic and I suppose, in a way, biological connection between Wendy and Joe. So I think there's a lot of sort of big, almost kind of metaphysical questions that the show is starting to ask that removes it from. Again, removes it from the sort of the standard fare of TV storytelling and puts us in a register of really, we're beginning to ask some pretty meaningful questions about the human experience here in a way that I think is, as we've talked about here, sharply done and interesting, but also not so obvious that you'd feel like you're getting hit over the head with these questions. So all of this is my way of saying at this point, I'm pretty invested now, I think, in this show and I am pretty interested to see what happens.
- [27:46]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more.
- [27:48]
Interjecting Commentator
Yeah.
- [27:52]
Expedia Narrator
Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other. When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four litre jug. When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.
- [28:03]
Interjecting Commentator
Oh, come on.
- [28:04]
Expedia Narrator
They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia trip planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip. Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.
- [28:14]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Whatever.
- [28:15]
Expedia Narrator
You were made to outdo your holidays. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia made to travel.
- [28:22]
Professor Stephen Dyson
I'm Professor Stephen Dyson and I'm Professor Jeff Dudas and we are two political science professors who have just watched episode four of Alien Earth. The episode's called Observation. We are here to give our fairly instant breakdown of the ideas, the themes that we saw in this episode. As always, these are just our sort of fairly instant reactions. We would love to hear from you what your reactions are. We had some really great comments we have had, actually, throughout the series that have really helped us kind of understand things we might have not seen initially or got wrong or just advanced our analysis of the show. So please get down in the comments section and get involved. We always interact with the comments and we really love receiving them. We have, as I said, just watch this episode, Jeff and I think we have a. Not a disagreement, but we have a. We have two views on what the main theme of the episode was. That doesn't mean we can't both be right. It's a rich enough text that there could actually be two, three lines. But maybe one of us is catastrophically wrong. But why don't you give us the.
- [29:19]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Article, see us in really opposition here. I think that there are two big ideas that are emerging more and more in this series. The two big themes. On one hand, as you noted off camera, it plays on the name or the title of this episode, Observation. So here the reference is a scientific observation.
- [29:42]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. So observation is the name of the episode. Observation is a term from the scientific method, particularly the positivist scientific method, where you'd say, look, here is a phenomena in the world entirely separate from, that is an observer, a scientist. And what the scientist is going to do is sort of make measurements using their sensors of this phenomena and see how the phenomena responds. And therefore, then we will get data and we will understand the phenomena.
- [30:09]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Crucially, the observer is a neutral party.
- [30:12]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Neutral and separate from the phenomena that's been observed.
- [30:15]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Modest, distant viewer of the thing.
- [30:19]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [30:19]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Which requires, as you say, full separation between the thing being observed and the person doing the observing.
- [30:25]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Right. And of course, that's going to clash with the dominant problematic of the show, which is about the inability to really mean. To maintain stable boundaries between anything.
- [30:35]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [30:36]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Between the artificial and the natural, the biological and cognitive. We've seen Alien has always been about that kind of penetrative boundary crossing. And we've seen that really kind of supercharged in this show and in a number of ways in this episode. I think that the scientific method is being kind of subverted, whether it's by the introduction of the aliens, which is one of the main things that's it's the reason the aliens are in the show, right. Is to kind of, you know, cross boundaries or whether it's by the non scientific impulses of people who purport to be doing science, such as Boy Cavalier, or even the fairly sort of Frankensteinian scientific methodology of people like Kirsch. You know, these. These are not non intrusive experiments they're running. They're just literally trying to like, what would happen if we put one biological organism inside the other. Yeah.
- [31:24]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And so these are really sharp points that the scientific method, as it has been handed down over the last couple of centuries as a part of sort of modernist understanding and thinking in the world, very much linked to the Enlightenment era of thinking. It really demands a kind of. What I think this show is pointing out, and which a lot of people have pointed out in different venues, the scientific method demands a kind of impossible separation between things. It demands the idea that things are not connected in the world or that they can be severed, that obvious and natural connections can be severed. In this case, the connection that the scientific method wants to insist can be severed is the disconnect between the observer's neutrality and the observer's desire. And we see this over and over again. What's happening in these scientific experiments? Well, it's the intrusion of the desires of the observer to manipulate, to see, to put themselves in pride of place. Boy Cavalier does this particularly, as we also talked about off camera, when they're doing the experiment with the sheep. And the eyeballs are mirrored.
- [32:38]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [32:38]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Boy Cavalier's eyeball is mirrored with the alien eyeball inside of the sheep. And as you noted, the only thing the Boy cavalier says to the sheep is me.
- [32:46]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yes. Stop the experiment. Stop everything else. Alien sheep. Alien possessed sheep. Look at me. I'm the center of this. We're the ones who are going to have this kind of interaction.
- [32:57]
Professor Jeff Dudas
As you say, this is not neutral observation. This is the scientists, so to speak, from the outside, altering and manipulating the actual experiment, calling attention, demanding attention from the observed to the observer in a way that, as you say, I think quite rightly, just completely effaces and obliterates the supposed distinction that the scientific method. A set of distinctions that the scientific method relies upon.
- [33:25]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah. And there's a couple of the key points in the episode that I want to come back on, to come back to, to kind of drive home this point about observation and science and its subversion. But you have a secondary. Well, not a secondary view, an alternate view on what you think the episode is.
- [33:40]
Professor Jeff Dudas
I think that the series has been building towards this. And we began to really see it. I thought a lot last week. And this is the question of what is the relationship, or what are the relationships like between parents and children or between adults and children in this kind of transhumanistic era? And to me, it was very notable that pretty much all of our scenes revolved around the elaboration of a series of relationships between the different Lost Boy, between Wendy and the different Lost Boys, and some adult figure. And sometimes, in very obvious and explicit ways, these adult figures are pitched or are pitching themselves as parents right, to these synthetic Lost Boys. Sometimes it's ambivalent what the relationship is, but it's notable that at this point.
- [34:34]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [34:34]
Professor Jeff Dudas
I guess we're halfway through the series at this point, the show, it seems to me, has gone to pains to insist that each of these Lost Boys has some sort of adult parental figure in their lives. And that a lot of what's happening in these relationships, it's manipulative, it's dysfunctional, it's exploring, it seems to me, again, some of the questions that I was left with at the end of last week's episode, which is, what happens to that relationship between parents and children, between siblings? What happens to familial relationships when perhaps one of the parties in that relationship dies? What happens to that relationship when one of the parties, at least, is not fully human? And more broadly, what is it about the process or the experience of being human that relies upon particular kinds of familial dynamics? How important and in what kinds of central ways, in particular, is it important that the experience of being human is the experience of being a part of a family?
- [35:48]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Joy's in an ambiguous familial position. He's a brother, but he's also, because he's now. Well, he was always older than Massey, but he's in this weird position of now being a sort of father figure to her. Cause she's sort of severed from her own father figure. Arush, we finally learn his name, sorry, Slightly, is in a position where Morrow has inserted himself as sort of a dominant, even abusive father figure. And, you know, is physically proximate to his mother. And he's sort of holding his mother as a hostage to kind of get a rouge to do what he wants. There's also a new family dynamic in that Nibs has pronounced that she's pregnant. And this is one that crosses actually both themes. Because Nibs pregnancy, which I think we both agreed is something to do with the octopus eyeball having attached itself to her.
- [36:39]
Interjecting Commentator
Yes.
- [36:39]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Nipse's pregnancy clearly comes from that interaction. Yes. You know, may actually be. There may be some physical reality to it or it may be sort of a psychological seed that's been planted in her and the, the discourse that she has about it with who, who could. The people who could also be seen as father figures are kind of scientists who are, you know, the sub boy cavalier scientists in. In the facility centers on biological or the scientific process of pregnancy versus a more mystical or religious process of pregnancy.
- [37:11]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Indeed. Nibs announces herself have as an immaculate conceiving.
- [37:16]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Exactly.
- [37:17]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Being.
- [37:18]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Exactly. And the scientist says, you know how pregnancies happen. I'll let me tell you how pregnancies happen and why they biologically. That's the implication could not have happened to you. And she said, well, that's all true. Except for Jesus.
- [37:30]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Except for Jesus. And Nibs also subverts even that moment. She says, I grew up on a farm. I know how this works.
- [37:35]
Interjecting Commentator
Right, Right.
- [37:36]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah.
- [37:37]
Professor Jeff Dudas
There's so much happening there. But the other thing that's happening is you reminded me as you were talking, this is also all about names and about the reclaiming of names or the revelation of names. Notice what's happening.
- [37:55]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [37:56]
Professor Jeff Dudas
We get a long discourse between Boy Cavalier and Joe about Wendy.
- [38:02]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [38:02]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Is she really. Or I guess it's not with Boy Cavalier. It's with the sort of right hand man of Boy Cavalier. You know, is this.
- [38:09]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Oh, the sinister guy in the suits. Yeah.
- [38:11]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Is this really your sister?
- [38:12]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [38:13]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Do you, do you recognize your sister? And Joe insists on calling Wendy Marcy, which is his sister's name. So there's the naming confusion there. There's as you. As you talked about.
- [38:25]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [38:25]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Morrow basically tricks or manipulates slightly into revealing his real name by revealing his.
- [38:32]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Own names are very important. My name is Kumi.
- [38:35]
Interjecting Commentator
Yep.
- [38:35]
Professor Jeff Dudas
He reveals his name.
- [38:36]
Interjecting Commentator
He.
- [38:37]
Professor Jeff Dudas
He creates this kind of, you know, again, I. We called it last week a relationship of grooming. And I think that's obvious.
- [38:42]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [38:43]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Has come to fruition this week. He uses that bit of information to get Arush to reveal his name. Which is a huge mistake.
- [38:50]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [38:51]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Then we have the moment in which Smee renames himself.
- [38:55]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [38:56]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Isaac. And remember last week after scientists, after Isaac Newton. Of course. And remember last week it was Nibs who questioned out loud why she couldn't name herself. Why did someone else get to name her?
- [39:10]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [39:11]
Professor Jeff Dudas
So we get these kinds of. In some ways the proclamation of the name is an act of autonomy.
- [39:19]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Well, and Nibs says, my baby's called Clarissa. It's what she wants to be called.
- [39:22]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yes, yes. So on one hand, the proclamation of a name is an act of autonomy on the part of, you know, beings that are very clearly positioned as children.
- [39:34]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [39:35]
Professor Jeff Dudas
On the other hand, the revelation of a name is an act of treachery and makes one super vulnerable. And so there's all of this kind of. There are all these interesting dynamics, it seems to me, that are beginning to develop and be put in place about, again, what it. What is central to the human experience? How are those familial relations central or not? How is the process of naming.
- [40:01]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [40:01]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And being able to name one's self or being the recipient of a name central to the possibilities of autonomy that are understood to be at the center of human experience as well? So I think the show is starting to get really sophisticated about its kind of existential themes in ways that, as we talked about last week, are really pretty unique and pretty interesting. Now, I think we both agreed off camera, we didn't think that this episode was as strong necessarily as episode three, but I think it's working through its themes now in ways that are pretty interesting and pretty sophisticated and again, I think continue to reward a fairly close watch.
- [40:44]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, I think you have to really be into the themes to have enjoyed that episode. And if you are, they were given a, you know, they were aired with some depth and some nuance and some kind of interconnection. Because the other thing. The other thing that's going on when Nibs pregnancy is being discussed is the subversion of the scientific method is on full display.
- [41:04]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [41:04]
Professor Stephen Dyson
The hybrids are supposed to be the beta testing of a new type of humanity, a hybridized transhuman humanity. And those who are more scientifically oriented around boy Cavalier's outfit need there to be clean observations of what is happening during the initial period of these hybrids coming into existence. And so at the end of the conversation, when Nibs has said she's pregnant, she's kind of taken away by the. By the guards. And the. The scientist who's been interviewing her reports this as a level three event. Right. We have a, you know, which is some sort of scientific diagnostic, you know, warning sign that something is going wrong with the. With the hybrids.
- [41:44]
Professor Jeff Dudas
But of course, because she's acted out in a hostile fashion.
- [41:47]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Sure. But. But why has she done that? Right. It's not. It's not actually a fair test of or a scientifically pure test of what the hybrids would usually experience. Right. Because you have an uncontrolled variable has entered the test tube has become contaminated because the damn aliens have gotten all of her. She thinks she's pregnant because the eyeball octopus monster attached itself to her.
- [42:08]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Not only that, but she's also been provoked by the supposed observer.
- [42:12]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [42:13]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Who has continued to question her on something that Nibs has told her multiple times she doesn't want to talk about.
- [42:17]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So that's really kind of central to one of the central things that was going on in the episode. There's an exchange between the married couple, Arthur, and. I'm sorry, I'm totally blocking. I keep saying the scientist. The female senior scientist. There's an exchange that initially reads quite strangely, but I think is centrally tied to this thematic of what the episode's about, where Arthur kind of storms out of the facility and he's upset by this contamination of the scientific process. And they've both said to boy, Cavalier, like, you're really screwing this up. Right. Should we not get back to the matter at hand? Have we not got enough on our plate with the hybrids? And he's become entranced with this, you know, shiny, shiny new object of the aliens which are contaminating all the experiments to do with the hybrids. And Arthur says, you know, this isn't science. And he says, in science, something either is or it isn't. Science is a very dichotomous process, which is totally against the show's ethos of you can't draw these hard boundaries. And the ethos of the Alien franchise, which is things become interpenetrated one way or another. And initially you think, why would the. Why would the show's chief scientist in a science fiction show just elucidate a philosophy that has. That is running absolutely counter to what the show is about? But the show is. It's actually dramatizing that inadequacy or failure of the scientific method to come to comprehend all that is and all that can be, which is a central question of transhumanism. Right. How do you comprehend what it means to be human? Is it comprehensible by positivistic processes where all of humanity is information that can be severed from the substrate and changed onto a different silicon basis or just become zeros and ones? Or is there something more? Is there something more ethereal or less directly observable? And that, I think, is what the show is getting at with a lot of this stuff.
- [44:08]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah. Yeah, I think those are all really, really sharp and interesting points. The show is foreshadowing that our scientist, Arthur is not going to meet. Meet a good end because he's out of place.
- [44:22]
Interjecting Commentator
Yeah, right.
- [44:23]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And. And in fact, the show has told us almost from the first minutes of its running that science is out of place. Where. Where are these experiments being conducted? In a place called Neverland.
- [44:34]
Professor Stephen Dyson
I think this is crucial, right? So I think this is entirely crucial. And I think it goes to a. A point that's at the heart of the show as it exists in it. It's a generic identity of the genre that it's in. There was a really, really, I think, clever episode period at the start of the episode scene. At the start of the episode where Boy Cavalier is asking Wendy, and we should talk about this. Wendy, about hearing the xenomorphs or what her connection is to the xenomorphs. And he says, you know, Wendy's asking, well, how can it be that. That I have this connection with them? How can I. How can I hear them? And Boy Cavalier, and clearly, by extension, the show don't really want to get into some of the obvious scientific questions about this, which is, you know, how good is Wendy's hearing? Given all the other hybrids can't hear it, why can she hear it? Because the show wants there to be some connection. We actually thought it was kind of psychological or even supernatural, and it's not. It's been revealed as being a matter of the hearing, which is something that a commentator said last week. But. But that creates a number of problems for the show, which is why can't the other hybrids hear it? How does it seem to have been established at such a great distance between Wendy and the xenomorph? And why does it seem that, you know, she not only hears, fears the xenomorph or the egg when it's being cut into, but seems to be physically affected by the xenomorph being cut into. And Boy Cavalier, instead of explaining it or coming up with technobabble, which would be the Star Trek thing. Well, if you tech. The tech and the phase inducer of the quantum, you know, injector, instead of saying that, essentially says, don't worry about that. Yeah, right. And he says any. Asimov said. Asimov, the great science fiction writer said any sufficiently advanced technology will appear as magic. Which is a quote that really help there, because he's saying, look, don't work. Don't look for a scientific explanation here, because this show is not existing purely as science fiction. Now, that's not what Asimov meant. That's a misuse of that quote Asimov meant when a really advanced civilization meets a less advanced Civilization, their actually scientifically explicable capabilities will appear as magic to the less. To the less advanced civilization. But he is, in a sense, by using Asimov, the great science fiction writer, he's sort of. And by extension the show is sort of. Of making fun of, on tipping the. Tipping the hat to. On making a nod and a wink, that this is not straight science fiction.
- [46:54]
Interjecting Commentator
Right.
- [46:55]
Professor Stephen Dyson
And should not be read that way. And so don't worry about things like this, because one of the. The things he says very shortly thereafter is to do with. It's an. It's another quote from Peter Pan, says the Neverland was very nearly real. Now, very nearly real, I think, is the genre the show is trying to operate in. Right. It's close enough that it seems like science fiction, close enough to reality, but it's, It's. It's operating in this strange fairy tale. Very nearly real.
- [47:22]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yes.
- [47:23]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Land where the adventures are very tightly packed together. That's the other line he reads from. From Peter Pan and Boy Cavalier is that type of figure. He's not a. That's his approach to science. He's not a pure scientist. And he's, you know, he's. He's sort of achieving his dreams through science or he's exercising his megalomaniacal fantasies through science. But in the end, he's not interested in science. He's interested in a set of things that are larger than that, that are largely centered on him. And that's where the show is existing, in this generic Neverland, if you like hinterland between science fiction and fairy tale.
- [48:00]
Interjecting Commentator
Yeah.
- [48:00]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And it's a throwback as well to a line or a conversation from episode three that makes clear why it's so important that the hybrids are children.
- [48:11]
Interjecting Commentator
Children.
- [48:12]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Yeah.
- [48:13]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Remember last week in episode three, he says children have limitless imaginations, something to affect infinite imaginations. So when he says to Wendy, look, it's all there. It's in your hard drive. You heard it. All you have to do now is just open your mouth and let it out.
- [48:31]
Interjecting Commentator
Yeah.
- [48:32]
Professor Jeff Dudas
He's asking her effectively to trust in her imagination, to not worry, as you say about the science of this, to not worry about how things work technically. Just kind of allow your imagination to run and you will find it and you'll be able to reproduce it. You'll be able to reproduce that sound in a way that is actually consistent with how babies produce sound, with how human babies produce sound. And you will undoubtedly remember this as a father of a couple of young children yourselves those first couple of weeks in which human babies begin to make noises. They make noises that. That they will never make again over the course of their lives, not because necessarily they're endowed with some sort of amazing special biological capacity that dissolves after a few weeks of living, but rather because the scope of potential sounds that exist in the world are far larger than we become accustomed or habituated to hearing on an everyday basis. And so babies can make the most extraordinary sounds. They can mimic the most extraordinary things, not because they have some special capacity, but because they haven't had those sounds habituated out of their lives yet. And this is effectively, I think, sort of what's happening with Wendy and her capacity to speak xenomorph.
- [49:55]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Well, this sort of brings the themes of the. The themes we both saw in this episode are brought together in the very final scenes, right? When the xenomorph baby is born from the flesh of Wendy's family, right, Is born from Jo's lung. And all of a sudden Wendy, for reasons that they've gestured at a scientific explanation for, but also Boy Cavalier has said, you know, don't worry about teching the tech of this. Just kind of go with us on this, like, slightly fairytale ish leap. Because Wendy can now speak xeno effectively, at least to the extent of being able to comfort what is now sort of her baby.
- [50:29]
Professor Jeff Dudas
And there's a way that she calls it into life. It's not simply. It's not simply that she's able to speak to it afterwards. Remember, she is kind of sitting and observing and not observing, speaking to it, manipulating. She's bringing it into the world, right? And in doing so, in ways that, you know, Kirsch is himself observing and is kind of amazed by. And so the connection seems to be. I mean, at this point, it's a very obvious connection and it feels like a familial connection between Wendy and the xenomorphs.
- [51:04]
Professor Stephen Dyson
I think so, too. So where does this series stand? And I say this having watched a couple of reviews or consumed a bit more of the kind of discourse that's out there on this series this week. And I. I think the divide and it's. It's proving divisive is my. My reading. I think the divide is caused by whether you are willing to accept its generic positioning between science fiction and fairy tale. And a lot of people are frustrated by what they see as kind of plot holes or hand waving or, you know, things that don't quite make sense. Like how does Wendy. Does the thing about Wendy hearing the xenos at that distance and then the way it's affecting her and then she can internalize. The language does really make sense, you know, and there are people who are finding it hard to understand or some of my initial reservations, like, why send the kids into the crash site? Like, that's thrown a lot of people really, really kind of out of it. I think the people who are liking it have maybe glommed on to the generic distinctions between science fiction and fairy tale and a kind of accepting or understanding that Alien was always, ironically, a hybrid franchise. Right. It was all. The first movie was hybrid science fiction and horror horror. The second movie was hybrid science fiction and sort of war movie or action movie. And there's no point, as Noah Hawley has said, in trying to do that same thing again. And there's no real novelty in the alien life cycle and you have to do something different. So is it going to work to take an Alien movie that's really hybrid? It's on the surface. The, the, the, the influence is hybrid. Blade Runner and Peter Pan.
- [52:34]
Professor Jeff Dudas
Yeah. And it, it harkens back to something that my, my wife says about sci fi, which is that that sci fi is always a hybrid of some collection of genres there. Now, for the, I know for the hardcore sci fi people, this is maybe not what they're interested in hearing, but sci fi is a conglomeration of lots of different things. It's horror, it's westerns, it's romance, it's all of these things. And to, to imagine it as a pure form of storytelling that could be, for example, scientifically cabined off and excluded from all others or all other influences sort of misses what is potentially generative about sci fi. So from my position, what Holly is doing here with this fairly on the surface, hybrid itself, hybrid form of storytelling between the fairy tale and the sci fi is exactly consistent with what we have seen out of the sort of tent pole sci fi franchises from the beginning.
- [53:41]
Interjecting Commentator
Yeah.
- [53:41]
Professor Stephen Dyson
Okay, great. All right, so let us know what you thought of episode four. Are we kind of way off base here? Are we off in some kind of academic flight of fancy? For, for the first time ever in the history of academics, we've, we've, have we taken an intellectual wrong turn into a, into a dead end? Just let us know what you think and we will see next week. And on that bombshell.
- [54:13]
Amazon Kid
Mom, dad, you should shop Amazon for back to school and save some money. See, I'm currently obsessed with superheroes and need all the superhero stuff. Superhero launch box, superhero backpack back. But next year it'll be something else. Maybe dinosaurs, I don't know. I'm not a fortune teller, but I can tell you not to spend a fortune and shop. Low prices for school on Amazon. K. Good chat, Amazon. Spend less, smile more.