‘Alien: Earth’ Episodes 1 and 2 and the ‘Task’ Trailer

26:12Andy Greenwald:It does seem that Mark Ruffalo, the star of the show, the heroic figure in the two-hander that is Task, seems to have, and I respect this, chosen a path of I'm just a working guy voice. Yeah. Which, for the record, in my opinion, is much, much better than being like, I'm a working guy from a city. And then you kind of sound like you're from Boston or New Jersey because you're not doing the specificities of this accent. It does seem like Tom Pelfrey is ready to do this voice from Monday to Sunday, if you know what I mean. From the roof to the water? From the reader to the tutor, as our Southern friends, not Southern Philly friends would say.

26:52Andy Greenwald:How do you feel about the accent disparity? Because look, we're from there and we don't eat water ice. I honestly didn't even notice. I was just like sitting with how good of a song Wish You Were Here is. Did you even have your eyes open? Did you loop with the blast shield down for this trailer because you just want to trust your feelings about it? I closed my eyes and all I saw was Taylor Swift making a college football album. I closed my eyes. I'm psyched for that. It looks fantastic. Speaking, I mentioned True Detective. I do want to mention to you that my current True Detective season five is trying to figure out what's going on between Lana Del Rey and Ethel Kane.

27:30Andy Greenwald:Yeah, I didn't know you had dogs in this fight. but you do I got I got some I got a couple of Ethel Cain stocks in my my portfolio and I I've been known to enjoy the the tunnel under um Ocean Boulevard uh huh that's the line that's a banger did you because when you know like I said at the beginning we we are fairly open books with each other I did not know the shack shack meme I did not know this was part of your game Ethel Cain when you it's been a long summer when you added Ethel Cain to your portfolio was it like did your taste management advisor I like some of her drone music suggest it or did you seek it out I sought it out and then I got more interested when Cara Monica and Joe had had her on Popcast Deluxe right I was like oh that's right as someone who also kind of did performative trolling on the internet 10 years ago like did you feel a kinship I'm staying out of that one fair that's why that's you're not as brave on podcasts as baby yoda is i guess nope when when baby yoda went on flagrant i learned i learned my lesson um all right let's take a quick break we'll get into alien for adults with crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms every choice matters trimphaya offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start.

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29:33Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Tremphaya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit TremphayaRadio.com. This episode is brought to you by Panda Express. Telling someone you love them, it isn't always easy, but showing them through food, sometimes that's better than words, especially when that food's wok cooked at Panda Express, a Joe House favorite. Pick from delicious classics like orange chicken, honey walnut shrimp, Kung Pao chicken, and black pepper sirloin steak. Perfect for when you're watching the team you love or eating with the person you love.

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31:19Andy Greenwald:Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven-day return policy at Carvana.com. All right, bud. Alien Earth, one of my most anticipated series of the year, is finally here on FX. The first two episodes dropped Tuesday night, both written by Noah Hawley, the first episode directed by Noah Hawley, second by Dana Gonzalez. It is a riff on the alien universe in a very distinctive, specific way from Hawley's POV in so much as you can feel a lot of the ideas that he is interested in right now being grafted onto this futuristic sci-fi world. It draws from the Ridley Scott films and James Cameron films.

32:04It draws things from aliens. I think that earlier in the week, I may have mentioned that some stuff in the show was annoying me because I felt like it broke with alien tradition. I actually rewatched Prometheus and Covenant this week. And I'm happy to report that I was kind of wrong that both Prometheus and Covenant feature plenty of nostalgic slash contemporary pop culture references, whether it's people singing John Denver or Crosby, Stills, and Nash or Michael Fassbender's Walter character, David character watching Lords of Arabia at the beginning of Prometheus. So dinging any Alien Earth references to pop culture may be off, but I do think the preponderance of it in this series is definitely something to watch, and it might turn various viewers off in different ways.

32:58I'm, I would say, very impressed, but still not totally like, I feel like I'm not totally in this show. Where are you with this after two episodes, and we're going to be spoiling up through two episodes.

33:12Andy Greenwald:So I do have a lot of questions for you as the senior communications advisor for Weyland Yutani. I kind of put that out there like this is my shit. And then you will never feel dumber than if you go onto the LV246 Reddit page and just like, oh, I obviously haven't thought about this stuff very hard. And some have. But I do love these films a lot. So that is where my protective nature is coming from. And I, as I said on the last podcast, I have a more robust familiarity with the franchise than I even realized that I did just from seeing a bunch of these movies a bunch of times when they were on cable, whatever.

33:53Andy Greenwald:But my understanding of the larger canonical benchmarks is paper thin. So I do have some questions for you about that. I think that my first takeaway from these first two episodes is I kind of want to just note and to some degree applaud how Noah has managed to be kind of the last auteur standing in our contemporary television marketplace who is able to, which is another way, a more polite way of saying he's funded, to pursue his particular aesthetic hobby horses. at such a high level within the bounds of what gets made these days, which is often pre-existing IP, right? Or what he did with Fargo and what he's doing with this.

34:44Andy Greenwald:He's playing in pre-existing sandboxes. And Legion, to some extent. Exactly. He goes in, but he does his thing, regardless of whose sandbox he's playing in. And one of the things that I think shouldn't be glossed over as we talk about the show, and there are things about the show through two episodes, but particularly about the pilot, that I loved, unambiguously loved. I think it's worth noting, and not necessarily in a pejorative way, that there were also things about the show and the pilot that I viscerally disliked. And viscerally is a good word when talking about this franchise or the way this show unfolds.

35:23We are so smoothed out these days

35:28Andy Greenwald:with the stuff that gets to us, that makes it through the development process on television, that having visceral reactions in either direction is pretty novel and worthwhile. Like, I noted with some excitement how much I didn't like some of the choices because they were just unambiguously choices. So we could get more specific. Yeah. Broadly speaking, the series is about, It's like a sprawling story about an Earth and a galaxy for the most part, but a world conquered by a few remaining corporations, including Weyland-Yutani, which is a very famous moniker in alien history and is the owner of the ship that you find that goes out in the first film and then the second film.

36:23and then Prodigy is the other company and Prodigy is a company run by a puckish boy genius named Boy Cavalier and the first episode documents the mission and crash of a Weyland-Yutani ship called the Maginot and they are carrying xenomorph samples essentially back from a mission where they were sent out to go and get these aliens and bring them back to Earth for study and God knows what. This somewhat goes against what I feel like you go into Alien, and when, you know, earlier in the Alien sort of canon, you're under the assumption that this is a science vessel that has strayed or has been brought to this planet where all these alien eggs are, and that it wasn't...

37:15I think it's safe to assume that the corporate overlords are happy to have this bioengineering miracle rather than a bunch of minerals that these people have brought up from a planet. But that being said, a lot of this stuff is in the background or maybe in between the lines of like, who's sending people where, etc. This is a much more explicit, like these people were sent before the events of Alien are sent out into space to get these things and bring them back with them. They do bring them back. The aliens do break containment. The Maginot crashes in what is basically Bangkok, New Siam, which is a city owned by Prodigy.

37:58So you have a Weyland-Yutani ship crash landing into a city owned by another corporation. and in that city we have essentially like a extended quasi family where you've got a kid named Marcy who becomes a young woman named Wendy by becoming the first person to have her consciousness transported or put into a synthetic being so it's essentially the mind of a young girl in the body of a young woman and her brother who is still human being is a kid named Hermit, a young man named Hermit, played by Alex Lothar, who people may remember from Andor, who is a medic with a corporate security team, corporate search and rescue team that works for Prodigy.

38:44There's this crash. Hermit is dispatched to the crash site. It's an incredible set piece of design, like a wonder of design that they put a ship inside of a skyscraper, which is like basically offices and condos. And then they have to go in and save remaining crew members from the ship, people who have been hurt by the crash, and also on a kind of sub-level get these samples back. There's a lot going on there. There is repeated explicit references to Peter Pan. Marcy's new body and new character is named Wendy. Boy Cavalier reads from Peter Pan. The other synthetic, or sorry, rather hybrids who are basically human consciousness put into a synthetic person are known as the Lost Boys.

39:41They all have character names drawn from Peter Pan. And there's also lots of repeated references to Pinocchio, to the animated film Ice Age, which I did not know I was going to need to know about going into Alien Earth. So you've got a lot of pop culture references. The character Hermit is obsessed with baseball and is named after Joe DiMaggio. Reggie Jackson comes up in this show already. And that's kind of what I meant about Noah Hawley's obsessions coming in through the back door and animating the characters in an alien story.

40:16Andy Greenwald:Yeah. And I think that there's something, again, there's something kind of commendable. We talk often about how it feels almost necessary these days to Trojan horse bigger ideas, personal interests into the types of stuff that's just going to get through basically. And he's certainly done that here. I think through two episodes, one of my major takeaways though, is that the world and the franchise stuff is to me much more compelling than the stuff that is more explicitly Noah-coded. What I mean by that is... Which is like, what is a human being? Well, also just the little children with adult bodies I find to be a struggle, at least through one or two episodes.

41:04Andy Greenwald:It feels like... It is a conceptually interesting idea. I'm not shitting on that. Yeah. But so was when Van Leeuwen made Kraft mac and cheese ice cream. you know what I mean like wow that's interesting I don't like it but I'm glad you did it I found the alien stuff again not as a super fan so we'll get into some of these specifics to be pretty compelling like I really liked the opening stuff on the Maginot I really like that somehow he found in Babu Sise Yafet Kodo Jr he's awesome As a cyborg. And he is just such an awesome presence on screen and a fascinating character to be alongside from the beginning.

41:58Andy Greenwald:I thought that the notion of the corporate takeover of the planet and the solar system is prescient and also fascinating. I like Samuel Blenken, who plays Boy Cavalier. He's an actor, British actor, who got his start or got noticed in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on stage. He has a really interesting manic energy that I really like. And the set piece that you're talking about is astonishing. Like the scale of a massive spaceship crashing into a densely populated urban area. And again, kudos to Noah and FX and the entire production department for not only making the show look like it cost tons of money, for taking advantage of the things that made it cost slightly less money, like shooting it in Thailand, and being like, no, this is where we're shooting and we're going to show you things that you don't usually see in these shows.

42:48Andy Greenwald:I love the scale and the spectacle of that and it got me pretty hype in watching the show. Then there were the other things that are what you get when you hire Noah to do a show like this. There is the very dreamlike, quick cut, flashback, flash forward visual style that is at times both kind of like frantic and then also times a little too frantic and other times too dreamy. And I noticed that most when the xenomorph is stalking people in a dark hallway and I'm like, oh, the action piece of this is not translating for me. The part that you're more stereotypically, not stereotypically, that you're more comfortable assuming as part of the Alien franchise, that kind of took me out.

43:29Andy Greenwald:And then the kind of thinky, what am I? What are these breasts on my body scenes that are like... That's the clip, Kaya. I mean, who among us haven't asked these questions? You know, as our bodies grow and change. But that stuff is what animates him. I've worked with him. I know this, and I respect it. But it was, as a viewer, it was a bit of a collision. It was two tastes, and I don't know if they taste great together. The first half hour of the show, or the first 20 minutes or so, is incredible. It's basically the beginning of Alien itself. It's Alien. So it's an homage to it. I will say this for the choices visually that Holly makes and Dana Gonzalez follows up on in the second episode.

44:20Andy Greenwald:And for the record, Dana is Noah's long-time director of photography and cinematographer who began directing on previous Noah series and is the DP when Noah's directing and is also clearly stepping in as a director as well. It's an incredibly difficult bar to hit to follow Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher, and even Fede Alvarez. And to reach that height of visual exactitude... By the way, the Jeunet erasure will not stand. Sorry, I like Resurrection. I do too. But I will give Noah Hawley a ton of credit for thinking of a new way of imagining this world. Because you could probably get pretty far into this show and just do Ridley Scott karaoke.

45:09and the fact that I've seen people compare it to sort of like these sort of Lynchian kind of like dreamlike shots with dissolves and superimposing images and there is like an idea being worked on here and I think he is looking for a different way to visually express himself in a cinematic world that has been trod by some of the greatest people the greatest artisans to ever get behind a camera and call action. So I think it's really cool. I find myself butting up against what happens when, for instance, Wendy and Slightly, who are two... I gotta get it all straight. There's Synthetics, which is...

45:55We'll get to Timothy Oliphant in a sec, but that is a fully synthetic person, or fully synthetic robot. There are Cyborgs, which is what Moro is, which is a person who has been changed or modified, modified by robotics. And then there is a hybrid, which is a synthetic with human consciousness.

46:18Andy Greenwald:That's right. Transported into it or put into it. When Wendy, who is a hybrid is talking to other hybrids, it's, it's, it's not, it's just not my tempo, but that's like, like exactly what you're saying. It's like, there's just a little bit too much, like I'm scared no you're not we don't get scared like it's it's like all right man like that's that's just me though that's just my my palette and I think that you're right like there are all so so much tv where you're just like this is just boring this isn't boring it's just not always what I want out of there's such an element of um like college acting class exercises to that that like, like become an animal and they're like, ooh, I'm a snake.

47:05Andy Greenwald:You know, there's a lot of like, what is this? It's a monster. And it's like, it is 100 % a choice and the actors go for it. And we haven't said her name yet. Sydney Chandler plays Wendy. This is the daughter of Kyle Chandler. And she, she, uh, got the memo. She read the brief. She is executing a childlike wonder. she's like, what if Amelie was also, you know, a killer, the world's strongest man. Yeah. I find it to be a little bit discordant because the show wants you to be scared and also wants you to be curious and also wants you to be embracing, I think to some degree, the heightened, almost expected silliness of it.

47:50Andy Greenwald:And there are moments of when the whimsy meets the gore that take me out. But again, sometimes shows take a minute to sort of settle in, and they require more of their audience as well. And so I kind of don't want to get too far down a path of distaste. Because there's a part of my brain that there's the moment in the second episode when the search and rescue knock on the door of an apartment building, and it's basically Dangerous Liaisons cosplay going on. Yeah, that's sick. Did you like that scene? Well, that's the thing. I'm like, I want this in my that. Like, I want that sort of visually surprising, just hardcore choice.

48:33Andy Greenwald:That was no note. That was what he wanted to do there. Yeah, he was like, what would happen if this happened? And we were living in like the J.G. Ballard condominium. That said. Where people are just getting fucking Bacchanali. That said, it also kind of bumped me the way it bumped me when Noah plays Joe Hermit's dad in flashbacks. you know it's like I the hand of the author is never very is always present I feel like in the show in a way that is earned um but also is sometimes a little bit um like a little bit bumpy for me I there are other smaller choices like like Alex Lothar who you mentioned um truly a unique and exciting British actor doing an American accent, being super into baseball.

49:26Andy Greenwald:It's like, it's the thing. And then there's the other thing. Even though it is, and he's into a 1950s, he's named after a 1950s baseball player, even though this show is set in 2120. So even if he was into Shohei Otani, it would still be weird. You know, like much less Joe DiMaggio. but maybe there will be some explanation of like how pop cultural artifacts are disseminated and i think there's also an argument to be made that this whole project may have needed a coco chanel pass of like let's take off one thing before we go out into the world you know uh but i also wonder and then and then i do want to steer into some of the um alien specific questions that i have for you.

50:08Andy Greenwald:But like, I do wonder to what degree this project is, like all projects really, a result of compromise and where the compromise is and how the compromise will play out over time. Because for example, I think that it is ultimately good for the medium and creative and creativity that Noah's like, here's what interests me. And I will put on the xenomorph suit in order to explore what interests me or otherwise I'm not interested. I think that is a, that's just top to bottom good. Good job John Landgraf and FX for empowering him. Fantastic. There's also the feeling, at least in the opening of the pilot, that the trade-off for Wendy's you know, body dysmorphia wonderland was you better fucking show me a xenomorph in the first four minutes.

50:58There's a lot of xenomorphs. There's way more xenomorphs. I was like I wonder if we'll get an alien in the first season of this show.

51:03Andy Greenwald:And I feel like the trade-off was you have to do that. Or maybe it's like a chess move by him where he's like, actually, I'm going to take the tension out of this and do a lot of more like a chess move. Get it? Because that's what they, you know. You get it? What alien questions do you have? So the big thing that I wanted to just mention is the relationship between this show and Prometheus and Covenant. Because Prometheus and Covenant were part of a planned, at least, trilogy that Ridley Scott wanted to do that led up to Alien. So it would have covered this territory and has a lot of very religious coded stuff in it about Peter Whelan played by Guy Pearce in Prometheus and then in a long title sequence in Covenant and his quest for eternal life and mortality.

51:56And that's what drives him and animates him and sends him across the galaxy looking for basically like the engineers, the signal from the heavens or from the stars about how to live forever. And I'm curious to see whether or not he winds up reckoning with that at all. I think he has said that he is not acknowledging Prometheus, and that obviously comes to some extent with Ridley Scott's blessing because he's an executive producer on the show. But to the extent that I follow along and look at alien canon stuff, this is a pretty rebellious piece of work, I think.

52:34Andy Greenwald:Okay, well, I want to talk to you about the canon. So, as you said, the franchise Cornerstones, at least, or not Cornerstones, Alien, right? That there is a, we're in the future. Which takes place two years after this show. And in the pre-existing canon established by that movie, there is a crew, they discover something previously, at least as far as the universe of the movie is concerned unknown and certainly unknown to them and it wrecks shit. Yeah. This show suggests that the Weyland-Yutani and other people on Earth knew about the xenomorph aliens and that in fact they had been on Earth and I think the solve for the the canon stuff is that this ship crash lands in a controlled city that is for a company that will never be mentioned that is cut off so basically installations this city is the what is it Nostromo in the first movie in the sense that it is a closed circuit that is now that then you can explain why no one else has ever heard of this or expected this or seen this but potentially right like that that is the the framing of it I think there is a throwaway line from Boy Cavalier where he's like make sure none of this gets out for now like obviously we'll we'll probably grapple with that more as it goes on.

53:57But yes, in this show, the thing that will not be discovered by humans until two years later, but was discovered by humans, I don't know, like 40, 50 years prior in the canon in Prometheus and Covenant, is now in Bangkok. Right.

54:15Andy Greenwald:And then the idea, oh, right. So the basic idea of this century's alien content is that it's a big universe out there and humans and xenomorphs have been dancing for a long time. And it makes sense that some people on a ship not only make sense that they might not know about it, maybe they were expressly not told about it or else they wouldn't have signed up. Or just they didn't get to that episode of Ken Burns' Aliens. You know? The letters home. Can you imagine? A Shokin farewell. Is that what it's called? A Shokin? Yeah. The... do you think shelby foot would be like romantic about the early days of the xenomorphs you know what i mean like there was a way of xenomorph society before the great conflict between the companies yeah and now today they would be like we got to put those xenomorph statues back up this is exactly what i'm see i put it down and you pick it up even from across the country that's real history this is what i'm saying like what yeah like the the deacon alien belongs outside of this military academy yeah we can't we can't erase our history our proud proud history um okay so i okay i'm on i'm on board with that i get that um i do have some questions about the prodigy city search and rescue teams mandate because i in my experience limited i've i've lived a very fortunate life, but I understand, like, usually search and rescue, they kind of privilege the rescue, not the, let's walk in to the massive spaceship crawling with hideous aliens, and just kind of, like, poke around in there for a while.

55:58Andy Greenwald:They seem very committed to doing that, but then again, maybe that is less an error on the part of their mandate, and more that they work for a trillionaire who is more interested in the contents of the ship. Yeah, and in the second episode, there's a scene where Hermit tries to get out of his contract with the Prodigy Corporation, which echoes a scene that's in Romulus, where there's a lot of going up to a faceless kind of bureaucrat and trying to get out of this indentured servitude to a corporation. It happens on a planet called Jackson Star in Romulus. But it's a good idea to be like, you basically can never get out from under this corporation, and you have to sort of do what you're told.

56:41I like that a lot.

56:41Andy Greenwald:I also like the kind of, I forget, there is actually a term for this that I don't have, but it's a similar aesthetic to Star Wars where it's the future, but it's old at the same time. The retrofuturism or whatever it is, I like that. I also feel like Joe's contract gets, he's forced to keep his contract, his request to retire or go to medical school is denied because Wendy can touch screens and change code, which was a little bit hard to track, but I'm on board now. Okay, another question is, how many of the aliens, shout out Big Jim Cameron, in these two episodes are canonically accurate or familiar?

57:23Andy Greenwald:Because I know that there are facehuggers and then there's the xenomorphs. And there's like the trilobite. There's some new ones here. The eyeball is new. Okay. There's some really like phantasmagoric stuff in this show. And I have to admit, I'm pretty impressed with the gallery of nightmares that they've cooked up for this. I would have to probably crush some more tape to tell you whether or not that guy jumping out of the wall has been... I find that they are doing all sorts of different stuff in this series. They're grabbing, they're pushing, they're doing different things. But as far as like flora and fauna, to borrow a phrase used by Kirsch, who's the synthetic play by Oliphant, who I want to talk about last.

58:17Yeah, there's a bunch of different ones, but they're obviously constantly going through this process of metamorphosis.

58:25Andy Greenwald:So behind, sort of running low-key underneath the surface of the A story of the show and of the world building, right, is Morrow's tete-a-tete tango with the xenomorph that right from jump suggests that he has a set of orders from Mother, which is either... He's mission-oriented. Yeah, he's got a mission from Weyland-Yutani to keep these samples. No matter what. To get them back. Including sacrifice anyone else on the ship and get the ship. And anybody from Prodigy who's trying to help or anything like that. Talk to me about the xenomorph's motivation because the energy I got from him or her, I don't know, in these two episodes is a little early Silicon Valley, move fast and break things.

59:17Andy Greenwald:Do you know what I mean? No, see, I think it's just easy to think about them as pure predator. Now, there's a lot of debate in the community online about whether or not the engineers from Prometheus created the xenomorphs. And I think that for the most part, people have landed at, the xenomorphs are even pre-engineered. That they're like natural life from deep in space that have been basically like planet hopping through the centuries and eons. And that the engineers messed with their DNA a bit. But there is some debate about what Prometheus suggests versus what then interviews after Prometheus and Covenant suggest.

1:00:00but for the most part like I was always a big engineer guy I always thought that whole thing was super fascinating in Prometheus and for people who don't remember the engineers

1:00:07Andy Greenwald:are like the race of Jokic looking dudes who stand over water and they are the it was initially in Alien they come across this basically sarcophagus of an engineer and for decades that had gone basically unexplained and then Ridley Scott essentially made two thirds of a trilogy based on that stuff which is fucking sick that he did that and Lindelof wrote obviously did write on Prometheus. Okay, so what do you think as a xenomorph scholar, even... I think I'm a xenomorph... I'm a fan. You're a fan first. But I can't say that I have a degree in advanced xenomorph studies. You like what you've seen from them.

1:00:48Andy Greenwald:You'd like to see more. What do they want? What do we all want, man? We want affordable housing. We want to feel like our kids are going to grow up in a better world than we do. because we're not going to get any of that we're mad and we're going to eat soldiers faces is that where you're going with this yes do you xenomorph welcome to the resistance that's right i love it um but like is the implication at the end of the second episode that this might be a mama bear and these are the eggs and that and that's maybe why it's so mad and and ripping people's faces off No, it's just, it's always mad.

1:01:30The xenomorphs are never like in a state of repose. Like the egg is just to get you to look over into them and then jump into your respiratory system. Xenomorph would do numbers to the podcaster

1:01:40Andy Greenwald:is what you're saying. I know. Like you were telling me the rundown of Michael Rappaport's podcast today. Like, do you think the xenomorph would have a similar, like? Yeah, his rundown was prepping for a colonoscopy, weapons, my fantasy football draft strategy, and why Zoran is a Moran. I feel like the Xenomorph could... I feel like the Xenomorph would be a guest for any and all of those segments. I love it. Okay, one of the challenges then, alright, so going forward... Do you actually find it at all challenging to understand the dramatic motivation for the aliens? I don't, honestly. No, no, no, but I was curious, and I was actually, I was going to speak to that.

1:02:25Andy Greenwald:That just like, I'll say this, in all of the films, there's very little evidence that they can be contained. You know, much like, much like Jalen Carter coming up the middle. Like, we haven't met the guy who can block him, you know? And, I don't know when they're going to get the message that these things can't be like put in a cage. That they can't be studied. They can't be, you can't get like the extract to put into, like your new vitamin supplements out of its blood. Like nothing is going to work. They should be nuked from orbit. But the challenge is in a movie, you know, you can suspend disbelief and one or two people could potentially survive a close quarters encounter with one of these things.

1:03:08Andy Greenwald:And then you move on. The show runs right at that problem by introducing five people whose selling point is, we're invulnerable. Isn't that cool? but then also has someone who's extremely vulnerable again the casting of Alex Lothar is interesting because he traditionally plays kind of sickly consumptive types in E.M. Forster adaptations and he's much more of a man of action in this and at the end of the second episode the xenomorph's like the xenomorph does the thing where he picks him out of the lineup and is like I want to dance with you and I feel like it's like Ray Lewis 100 % and it's like fool me once I thought that the construction of the fall of the French monarchy party was really well done because in the moment Morrow comes in gets the jump on the xenomorph, stuns it bags it and then also stuns Joe and I'm like okay Joe's now avoided the instantaneous death that every other human has come up against twice and at the end of the second episode presumably he's done it a third time that is going to be interesting that's an interesting challenge to sustain over a season yeah that's that's long term plot armor like that is tough to be but I am and I want to give credit where it's due here that like I think both of us came into this thinking that the way you do alien on television is you slow it the fuck down and you build the anticipation for the xenomorph going absolute apeshit for later and to their credit that the show does not do that.

1:04:49Yeah, and there's a version of this show that's like margin call, but for Weyland-Yutani. And it's all about these guys in the conference room.

1:04:56Andy Greenwald:Don't tempt me with a good time. But it's all these people in conference rooms and in meetings being like, is it moral for us to go follow this beacon in outer space, et cetera? And instead, he's come up with a very visceral, very action-heavy world for it to take place in. Before we go, I think we should mention - Yeah, I wanted to ask you your thoughts. Just, he's crushing it in this. It's been a minute. I love him, but I felt like he in City Primeval and to some extent in Stick, he was doing Oliphant. You know what I mean? He was basically doing either a variation on his persona from late night shows or from Justified.

1:05:35And I enjoyed him very much in Havoc, the Tom Hardy movie from earlier this year. But this is like, he's doing something here. You know, he is like, I'm David Bowie, but I'm also like a sassy robot. And it's just, it's great. He's doing a great job. He's, he in some ways is like, for me, the emotional heart of the show.

1:05:56Andy Greenwald:He is a little bit like, what if, what if baby Billy minus$2 million in an eight ball of cocaine? That's the aesthetic. And we'll see how long we sit with that. I also really like, what's her name? Essie Davis, I think her name is, who's an Australian actress. Oh, she plays Dame. Dame Sylvia. Again, like, it's just, there's these little pro moves that I really do respect, which is, you know, they filmed on location in Thailand. They filmed mostly with equity actors, which helped them film through some of the actor's strike. And so, both because of location and because of the commitment, they were forced to hire a lot of people that might not be household names.

1:06:38Andy Greenwald:like with Tony and Andor like that's actually a huge strength. You have a deep bench of Australian, British and maybe even Thai actors we haven't seen yet like who are more than capable of dazzling us with their performances but more importantly like have the element of surprise. People we maybe have seen fleetingly or haven't really focused on and they have great faces. Samuel Blinken, S.E. Davis but also like Jonathan Ajayi like people who I'm checking for now who I wasn't. That is something that is essentially TV in a way that we've kind of gotten away from. And your boy, your guy David Rizdahl from the last season of Fargo.

1:07:16Andy Greenwald:Tapping them keys, keyboard keys. Sorry. So where are you? I anxiously await episode three. Eight episode run. So it's not going to feel too fatty. And I think the first episode was, I preferred it to the second episode. But the second episode had some cool stuff in it. And I think in three, maybe we get to see a little bit more about, okay, what's this really about? You know, and if we're still doing slow dissolves to sometimes I cut my own hair, then maybe I'll be bored. But I think right now I'm, I just, I think it's good to talk out some of our issues with it. And it's interesting as like franchise storytelling, but I still am broadly pro.

1:08:00Andy Greenwald:I think it is worth noting and considering as we watch going forward that, you know, when we did that, we did a podcast a few weeks or months ago, Time is a False Construct, about the second acts of prominent showrunners from this era of television. We framed it around Jesse Armstrong from Succession into Mountainhead. And I think we touched on Noah, but I do think it's worth noting that a lot of the people that we talked about or ones we didn't talk about because they haven't made something in a while have kind of left the stage. and whether that's because this type of stuff they do doesn't get greenlit as easily anymore and thus they've just aged out but that's also why you know maybe Matthew Weiner doesn't have a new show or David Simon doesn't have a new show I mean they're always working but what are they bringing to market so to speak or people like our old friend Sam Esmail who you know kind of has bailed on TV he's a director now Noah's still working within these frameworks and I think it's very it's going to be very interesting to see how the show is received and...

1:08:59It's being received generally quite well.

1:09:02Andy Greenwald:It's past the first hurdle, right? But I'd be very curious because it is a huge investment financially and a huge investment in terms of IP capital. Just bringing the conversation full circle, Universal is very excited to have Bourne back but they have to spend it wisely. Yeah, Fox Disney is excited that Romulus did really well. I mean, they're going to make another movie like that. So can they pursue the two-track strategy, Chris? The only way to know is to... The bridge to the future. Light years. Greenwald, great to see you today. Thank you to Kaya. Thank you to John. We'll be back next Tuesday.

1:09:35Yes, no show Monday. Maybe we will release after Alien Earth Episode 3 comes out. Oh. Because we're not going to be here on Monday, but...

1:09:44Andy Greenwald:One fun thing about that is watching us make schedule decisions in real time and seeing Kaya react to it. I don't think she was against it, but it was news to her. That actually works better for my schedule next week, so thank you both. That's because Taylor's coming on Good Hang, right? That's right. Let's put it out there. You never know. Let's just speak it into existence. Maybe she has alien earth thoughts, though, that she needs to get off her chest. Low-key, I think Taylor would be more likely to go on a podcast to express her strong opinions about something unrelated to her career or her knowledge of the intricacies of the cover zero defense.

1:10:16I do think that, I do think she would do that.

1:10:18Andy Greenwald:With us, absolutely not. But generally, yes. On that note, Godspeed. It's tough out there in space.

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