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The minute you hear that there's a new TV spin-off of the Alien movie franchise, you think you know what to expect.
Facehuggers, chestbursters, dark metal corridors, lots of space mucus.
And, to be fair, Alien Earth has plenty of all that stuff but, as the title suggests, the series brings the alien to our planet along with a host of other creepy-crawly off-world species and has them tangled with humans, human cyborgs, synthetics and something new.
It all comes from the idiosyncratic mind of Noah Hawley, who made the series Legion and Fargo, two shows we kind of loved around here.
I'm Glenn Weldon, and we're talking about Alien Earth.
This is Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
Joining me today is filmmaker, pop culture critic, and iHeartRadio producer, Joelle Monique.
Hey, Joelle, welcome back.
Hi, Glenn.
Thanks for having me back.
Of course.
And also with us is writer, Chris.
Always has a bit, Clement.
Hey, Chris.
Hey, Glenn.
You know, Joelle and I were talking before we got going and we think we'd like to discuss the bonus situation before we go any further.
There we go.
That's a pull.
That's a deep pull.
There are lots of characters and storylines on Alien Earth, but here's the basics.
It's the year 2120.
Earth is divided between five corporations.
A spaceship belonging to one of those corporations Weyland-Yutani you've heard of them crashes into territory belonging to another corporation called Prodigy.
That's a big deal, because the ship was collecting alien specimens that are now running or crawling or oozing free.
Specimens including, but not limited to, the xenomorph species we first met in Ridley Scott's original alien movie.
Prodigy is led by a smug and smarmy boy genius named Boy Cavalier, played by Samuel Blinken, who sends a team to retrieve the monsters.
But these aren't just any soldiers.
They're the next step in human evolution.
Humans who've had their consciousness uploaded to artificial bodies.
They're called hybrids.
And the thing is, their consciousnesses originally belonged to a bunch of kids, because only children's brains are fluid enough to survive the transfer process.
What could possibly go wrong?
They are led by Wendy, played by Sydney Chandler.
Timothy Olyphant is on hand as a synthetic, which is to say an android named Kirsch who oversees the hybrids for Prodigy.
And there's a cyborg named Moro, the only survivor of the crashed ship, who is a loyal company man determined to get the aliens back to Weyland-Yutani.
He's played by Babu Cisse.
Alien Earth was created by Noah Hawley.
It's airing on FX and streaming on Hulu.
Joelle, kick us off.
This is an odd show.
What'd you think of it?
Odd.
I loved it, Glenn.
I loved everything about it.
I love the acting performances.
I love the production design.
I love the music.
Everything about this show is like... an extreme alien fan resonates with me.
I think one of my favorite things is there's so many characters and so many deep relationships that, as the season goes on, you really get to dive into and explore.
Two early favorites to look out for, Slightly and Smee, They're super cute.
They're besties.
They're constantly kind of palling around, and I just find them adorable.
They're played by Adarsh Gaurav and Jonathan Ajayi.
What I really walked away kind of being impressed by and I think we can maybe talk about that's popping up in horror a lot is just the terror of being a child.
And really in-depth exploring that.
For folks who've had a chance to see weapons, that's really at the center.
There's also her film called Bring Her Back.
And it's been really interesting to watch the exploration of these like really intense horrors and the way they're sort of asking us to look at what our general world is putting children through.
I think it's done really interestingly in this series.
So yeah, I loved it.
I had a great time.
Okay.
Chris, what'd you think?
Yes.
Cute and adorable.
The two things I always want out of an alien.
I don't mean to jump right onto Joelle's point here, but as someone who came into this not quite old enough to see Aliens in the theater in 1986, but who saw it on VHS a million times and bought the novelization, That was really my point of entry into this broad universe.
For anyone who has ever said yes, I loved Aliens, but one thing it could have used more of was more Newt, more Carrie Hen.
If you could have eight or ten Carrie Hens going oh, they mostly come at night mostly then you will feel well-served.
Newt is an icon.
Certainly.
Love to Carrie Hen.
The great prevalence of adults playing children was, to me, one of the more irritating aspects of this show.
Even though Sydney Chandler our central character, is that she gets to have a broader characterization.
We get to see her kind of straddling that line between childhood and premature adulthood characters.
I came into this with no prior familiarity with the prestigious Noah Hawley shows.
I have not seen Fargo.
We are in this IP-driven era where it's all about what can you –, as an independent artist smuggle into the Trojan horse of an existing IP?
What new ideas can you introduce?
As long as, in this case, you know, it has an acid blooded monster in it with two jaws and all of the expected elements of an alien property.
The big idea here is the attempted abolition of death for profit, right?
The Boy Cavalier character has pioneered this technology that allows you to implant the consciousness of a human being into a synthetic body that doesn't need to die.
And that was enough to keep me in.
I mean there are other formal things about the transition from a feature franchise to a aiming for prestige TV show that really bothered me.
I particularly like the way that in a lot of shows I go back to The Sopranos for this, where I really look forward to the Final moment of punctuation on each episode, like where are they going to end it?
And then what needle drop are they going to give me to kind of bring home the theme of that episode?
And when that's done well, I always feel like a real hit of propulsion and excitement for the next episode.
That's one thing that in this series really failed for me every single time, every last needle drop.
I thought those were all kind of tinier.
Overall, I did like this, but there were a lot of things that troubled me about it.
Now, Joelle, you said you liked the music.
Where do you come down on that?
I sure did.
Which include things like Tool, which I kind of see Chris's point.
Stink Fist by Tool.
Stink Fist.
Stink Fist.
Stink Fist, which was an awesome ending.
A song I've never heard.
I was immediately captivated by it.
I was like, wow.
I really like the music for a lot of different reasons.
I got a chance to talk to Noah Howley while I was at San Diego Comic-Con and we asked him about the music, because it does stick out.
It is jarring at first.
Yep.
His point was aliens, which I was like, enough said.
He was like, listen, if you look at the guys in Aliens, they're punk rockers.
He's like, they're bold.
He was like, it fit the vibe to me.
He's like, I thought it fit the theme and it works for me.
And I totally... It works for me.
It's aggressive.
It's rebellious.
It feels... grimy in a way that this whole series feels a little grimy and underhanded.
I also think Alien as a franchise has not the first movie.
By the time we're in Prometheus, they're using Lawrence of Arabia as a reference for the main droid in that movie to sort of figure out like what is humanity?
If you're the definition of humanity, then why not look at the arts and why not let that be like a thematic background to play around with?
I think it works on that level.
No, sure.
Joelle, you said the magic word tone.
I didn't know what to expect from this, because this is a genre property and Holly historically has used genre as a jumping off point right.
Legion is, became the weirdest show on television, also my favorite show on television.
It was so weird that you forgot that it had any notional ties to the Marvel Universe.
Fargo certainly operated in the shadow of a very good movie, but all he really took from that is tone.
That's what he was working with.
The tone of that movie became the tone of that show.
And it quickly went on to do its own thing.
But Alien is an established, very familiar IP.
And that kind of IP doesn't usually play well with a idiosyncratic voice like Holly's.
But for the first few episodes, I was getting straight-up Alien.
And I like this franchise well enough, but I don't need to see more dutiful iterations of it.
And so the first couple episodes with the ship and the dark metal corridors, and there's something moving quickly in the background.
I was like why are we getting more of this in 2025?
But then I got why that was done, because you name a show Alien...
Audiences are going to want you to play the hits, right?
They want you to hug faces and burst chests and do the muppety mouth thing.
It takes until three or four episodes for, I think, Holly to really get his hooks in this thing and really start injecting his voice, his vision, his weirdness, his humor.
Not coincidentally, that's when Oliphant as Kirsch gets more to do.
It's when Babu Sisay as Moro gets more to do.
What a great character.
And it's also when the sheep gets more to do.
The sheep.
The breakout character find of 2025.
I love that sheep.
Yes, a woolly element to the narrative, Glenn.
Get some of the best reaction shots in this show.
But I came around to this the more we saw of this world and the more we got weird about.
There's a lot here that is borrowing from not just a lot of various established science fiction concepts, but from the franchise itself.
Like I don't think the –
The original Ridley Scott, James Cameron films were really that concerned with what makes us human.
Certainly, when Ridley Scott came back to this franchise and made those prequels Prometheus and Covenant, that's what became a central theme right.
So that's something that the hybrids are really all about.
Yeah, he took in a much more Blade Runner direction.
Yeah, if we talk about what the original films are sort of exploring, which for me the big takeaway is particularly Alien and somewhat Aliens.
It's like the horrors that women face regularly sort of being thrust upon men and watching them navigate those things.
It's interesting to me that a prequel then might examine the horror's children face and explore it in this way.
There is such intense oversight over these beings.
It's the point where they're not quite sure like –
When people are literally seeing through their eyes what information they're observing is being stalked.
And I think too, this idea of being thrust into adulthood way too early with these very intense responsibilities.
I think this show is finding a way to, you know, manipulating the way that they've explored horror for women in the original films and place it on children here in this series.
And I find that very interesting, particularly when we look at the way other horror films have been doing that lately.
Yeah.
But I mean the disconnect between the synthetics adult appearance and their kid brains is is something that Holly is really playing with here.
He's playing it for laughs.
It becomes a key plot point.
And it also becomes clear that and there's some dialogue, especially in the first episode, that tries to work around this, but that the scientists don't really have a handle on this yet, on this whole process.
And that's important, because the fact that they don't have a good handle on it means certain things happen which, if they didn't happen, you wouldn't have a show, right.
But I kind of see Chris's point about some of this stuff with the synthetics as kids, because sometimes in the performances these 10-year-old characters seem to be acting in their adult bodies like five-year-old characters.
Did that hang you up at all?
It didn't me, but this is so funny.
Every guy I've talked to, they're like, it's too plucky.
They're like, it's too cute.
It's too precocious.
We don't like it.
This is the behavior line.
There are some mature nine-year-old boys who are maybe like, this is silly.
But the pushing, the like, we said a curse word and giggled about it.
Like, this feels... accurate, to me anyway, of that age group.
I think this makes it sort of accessible to a slightly... I really liked horror coming up.
I was watching... I saw Alien...
Probably by the time I was five.
Wow.
It was always on in my house.
So I like horror movies were never like out of the realm of accessibility to me.
And I love that.
There's like a path if you're a weird horror kid, like I was, so you can like get into this show and find characters to connect with.
Yeah, the exploration of different types of artificial consciousness.
I mean, I think that's what clearly interests Holly the most in exploring this.
You know, when Ridley Scott came back to do Prometheus and Covenant, he makes David the Michael Fassbender android who we're given to understand is.
You know, he is not like a factory model.
He's special.
He's more sophisticated.
He's more advanced.
He's more thoughtful.
And that is the closest thing we have to a through line in this series.
I guess more than even the xenomorphs.
It's all a way of saying I'm a little puzzled by Oliphant's presence in this.
Like, you know, I love Timothy Oliphant.
I think he is a great, versatile actor.
I like him as a character actor.
I like him as a leading man.
But I really wonder what drew him to this.
I'd be curious to hear what you two think about that.
Well, I will say it's nothing in the first two episodes.
So if I think a lot of listeners who've only seen the first two episodes are going to be exactly where you are, because they're like there's, why do you have this guy, this actor, in the background?
What are you doing?
Kirsch and Morrow, that's the show for me.
I tend to drift from it a little bit further when it's about the hybrids.
Babu Sisay is the breakout star of this for me.
He is completely compelling.
I wanted more of him at every second.
And he's sort of the I think I can say this without spoiling anything.
I mean, there is a bit of like Inspector Javert in his character, right?
He has just as many reasons to feel aggrieved or betrayed by them as various other characters do.
And yet he does not deviate from his mission.
I think the character is fascinating.
I think the performance is fascinating.
Yeah, I like what Babu's doing quite a bit.
There's a lot of fear there.
I think for Timothy, he's cooking.
Is he cooking in the background?
Yes.
But every line delivery is so delicious.
In the animal kingdom, there is always someone bigger or smaller who would eat you alive if they had the chance.
That's what it is to be an animal.
You're born.
You live.
His character is so against these kids being children anymore.
And he can't sort of bridge this idea of like why can't you just be the machine we've made you to be?
He's the audience surrogate in that way.
He was like me going, stop that.
Yeah.
I mean, sure.
For a lot of folks, he really is, you know, he's like, you're not animals.
Stop being afraid at one point.
And I think as that agitation grows.
When we see any of the sort of droid creatures rebel.
I mean going all the way back to your original Alien franchise.
It's always this sort of crux of like.
I don't understand why you can't think logically about this task we've been given.
I'm hoping we get the big meltdowns.
I hope we get the giant speeches from Timothy.
I think...
Giving the kids sort of space to.
You know there's so many characters.
Giving them space early to sort of be your leads and understand what their issues are and what their archetypes are.
You know another critique I've heard about this show.
A friend was like your villain.
Your boy genius is just so mustache twirly.
Is he going to surprise you?
I'm like, that's Aliens though.
I disagree.
Paul Reiser in Aliens is so much more layered.
It takes him so much more time to reveal himself as a slime ball.
He seems like a good guy in the early stages of that movie, even though you're not really buying it.
Not if you're a woman.
He's Constantly interrupting her.
Point taken.
It's awful.
So this woman we know has been through this and has experience.
To me.
I just feel like all of these characters are pretty upfront about.
Sometimes the reveals are maybe more eloquent, but I think it's a much longer play in a TV show.
And so hopefully you know we're getting those reveals over a much longer time and they're still satisfactory by the time we get to the end, I hope.
Yeah, and when it comes to that character, I hate that character of the Head of Prodigy, but I love that performance.
He's just...
Such a slime ball who relishes his slime ball-osity.
And I think if that's mustache twirling, go ahead, twirl that mustache, bro.
At some point, he tells one of his surrogates, played by S.E.
Davis, she's one of the human scientists who's involved in the the creation of the hybrids right.
And seems more emotionally invested in their well-being than some of the others.
And he tells her, he's like, you know, I just want to have one interesting conversation in my life.
You know what I really want?
I want to talk to somebody smarter than me.
Thanks.
Yeah, I mean, you're smart.
You're just not smarter.
I mean, sure, people delude themselves.
And we have plenty of real life examples now of people who have been very monetarily successful but who make public statements that display no kind of insight or empathy or anything.
That's all quite believable, but I don't know.
I wanted him to do something a little bit more enigmatic at some point, other than just run around in his pajamas.
He really was a one-note character for me.
Yes, but one of those notes, Chris, is holding his laptop with his feet.
That's true, yes.
That's a character choice.
I did want to copy that.
That's a beat.
I also want to say there is a scene in the first episode when Wendy, the Sidney Chandler hybrid, wakes up in her new adult woman body.
She's getting the briefing from Essie Davis, one of the human scientists, and from Kirsch, the synth played by Timothy Olyphant.
You know, they're each giving their, like, sort of respective spin on what she's feeling.
The human body manufactures hormones.
Dopamine, serotonin, estrogen, testosterone that create moods.
You don't have those anymore.
We've tried to simulate them.
Which I have to say is the most Weldonian explanation of human emotion that I've ever heard.
Well, I'm glad you mentioned that, Chris, because that kind of tripped me up.
They do spend some time explaining that yes, the reason we transferred kids into this synthetic body is because their minds are pliable.
But then there's a lot of talk about how you have to replace the hormones with these emotional protocols and programming.
That was a sticking point for me because I kept thinking, why have them have emotions at all?
If you're going to have them be corporate soldiers, why not wipe their emotions?
But the show has an answer for that, which is that the idea is to grant emotions immortality, to transfer human minds into perfect bodies.
And the fact that you can use them as a slave army, well, that's a bonus, right?
But there was so much exposition around that that it kept tripping me up every time.
It's like, well, why these kids are pushing each other around.
Some of them are having very emotional reactions to what they've seen.
You could shut that down at any minute and you wouldn't have a show.
Yeah.
Two interesting points.
One.
In episode one you get the scientists sort of talking about wanting to be really trying to protect the humanity of these kids.
And then on the other side, you know, it seems that maybe the company asked that we give her Wendy, the ability to manipulate technology.
She does it instinctually.
She's trying to have a conversation with her brother.
She's been watching him through security cameras.
And they're mystified by it.
They don't know what she's capable of, truly.
I'm comfortable letting it all kind of glaze over until we reach the end when we're like okay, this is what's concretely fact and this is concretely reality, what they're capable of doing beyond what they initially thought they might be able to do.
I didn't love the introduction of superpowers to the alien universe basically, and that this hybrid is so much more powerful than we even intended for her to be.
I kept thinking as I went through this.
This show is like If you took the Saturday morning cartoon version of Alien but then gave it the absolute A production values and all of the permission for gnarly horror and profanity and violence and all the things we associate with Alien.
But that's really what this feels like to me.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you.
I didn't know what the superpower stuff was doing there, because it doesn't get a lot of use, except in the sense that they are clearly setting up a parallel between Wendy, the head of the hybrids, and the xenomorph.
They're alike and unalike in an interesting way.
But I wanted more to be done with those.
Like she can leap tall buildings in a single bound kind of stuff which doesn't really come into play.
Do you want to burn yourself out in the first two episodes?
We got time.
We got time.
Yeah, sure.
We got time to get into these skill sets.
We'll see.
I hope we will back off the Peter Pan stuff at some point.
That really felt like the author of this just imposing himself.
Yes, I understand Noah Hawley has to bring his own obsessions and interests, and that's what I want.
I wrote a piece a year ago, when Romulus came out, about how this has always been an auteurist franchise.
You know, it has launched a lot of big careers, but actually like having Boy Cavalier read Peter Pan and Wendy aloud via a what looks like a contemporary USB microphone.
Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children's minds.
It is the nightly custom of every good mother, after her children are asleep, to rummage in their minds and put things straight.
Nothing about that character made me think that this is a thing that it would ever occur to him to do.
That's what's interesting to me about it.
Like a lot of people snagged on the Peter Pan of it all.
But I think because the feeling was like that it was coming from him.
I think this is an exploration of like, who is she?
He's so infatuated with this thing he's designed and created.
I'm really intrigued by both the God complex and the search for God within this character.
And again, I think in this exploration of children and the natural fears they face and the ways that adults put them in danger, You know that book is all about exploring how much of an adult do you want to be as a child and how much of your childhood do you value and try to cherish.
I think it sets up a nice archetype.
I think if they stop right now, then it's completely a waste and they shouldn't have included it in the first place.
But if it pays off in the end and we get some kind of conclusion on that.
I think it could be really nice.
Yeah, it's worth it for me, only to remind me just how dark and twisted that book is.
I had forgotten.
It's really twisty.
Well, you see, we have arranged ourselves along a spectrum, as we so often do.
So we want to know where you place yourself.
What do you think about Alien Earth?
Find us at Facebook.com slash PCHH.
Up next, what is making us happy this week?
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Now it is time for our favorite segment of this week and every week.
What is making us happy this week?
Joelle, kick us off.
What's making you happy this week?
Okay, this is an oldie but a goodie.
It's an album by Lauryn Hill called MTV Unplugged 2.0.
Wow.
It came out in 2002.
It's a sensational album that is completely just a showcase of her vocal ability.
There's a song called Just Like Water that is my favorite track on the album.
I think it's so beautiful and moving and stirring.
And if you're a kind person, I meditate to music a lot.
And this has been a go-to lately.
So if you just want a little retrospective appreciation of Lauryn Hill, I completely recommend this album.
So yeah, the album is called MTV Unplugged No.
2.0.
That's a terrific pick.
Thank you so much.
All right, Chris Klimek, what's making you happy this week?
All right, I'm getting hyped for Highest to Lowest, the Spike Lee remake of the Hell yeah.
This was an original screenplay by Russell Gerwitz.
It's a hostage thriller.
It's riffing on Dog Day Afternoon and shot through with Spike Sensibility.
So the real theme of this movie is the levers of power in New York City and how there's always someone with more.
No matter what your title is, no matter how rich you are, there is always someone more powerful.
And of course, you know, it touches on race, but not in a didactic one-sided way.
It touches on law enforcement abuse, but not in a didactic one-sided way.
Nothing in this movie plays out the way you expect.
It is totally compelling story.
As much as something can be riffing on all these great 70s classics, but also wholly original, it walks that line.
So it is Inside Man from 2006, available for rental or purchase from various VOD dealers.
Thank you very much.
That's the film Inside Man.
Thank you, Chris.
What's making me happy this week?
I've talked about the Las Culturistas Culture Awards on the show before.
The Las Culturistas podcast, which is hosted by Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers.
They've been doing this fake award show for the past few years.
Recently, they turned it into a staged event in New York City.
And this year...
It's become a television special that aired on Bravo and is now streaming on Peacock.
That's where you can find it.
This is the perfect award show.
It answers the question, what if award shows were funny and annoying and somehow even more queer?
What if you ensured that everyone was on the same damn page by scripting not just the presenter banter, but the acceptance speeches too?
What if you could make fun of a thing while also demonstrating just how deeply, how passionately you love that thing?
Yang and Rogers were great hosts, but they also scripted some very, very funny jokes, along with Sudi Green and Celeste Yim.
There were lots of celebrities on hand and the vibe is perfect.
The vibe is we're all in on this.
We all get it.
Let's just have fun.
It's still fake, but it's become real in a way.
There is a truth in all that falsity.
That is the Las Culturistas Culture Awards now streaming on Peacock.
I hope it becomes an annual television event. and maybe ultimately a national holiday.
That is what is making me happy this week.
And if you want links for what we recommended, plus some more recommendations, sign up for our newsletter at nprorg slash pop culture newsletter.
That brings us to the end of our show.
Joelle Monique, Chris Klimek, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you, Glenn.
Thanks, Glenn.
This episode was produced by Janae Morris and edited by Mike Katziff.
Our showrunner is Jessica Ritti, and Hello, Come In provides our theme music.
Thanks for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
I'm Glenn Weldon, and we'll see you all next week.
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