UnEarthed: An Alien: Earth Aftershow | S1 E1+2 "Neverland and "Mr. October"

[MUSIC] This ship collected specimens from the darkest corners of the universe. Each one, a unique, deadly species, and monsters. [MUSIC] >> Something's here. [MUSIC] >> It's getting close. [MUSIC] >> We don't lock them down. [MUSIC] >> It will be too late. [MUSIC] >> There's a price. [MUSIC] Do you know what it is? [MUSIC] >> You're listening to the audio version of Unearth, an alien Earth after show. Brought to you by Perfect Organism, the alien saga podcast. >> Welcome to Unearth, an alien Earth after show. I'm your host, Jamie Prater, and I'm joined by my co-hosts. >> Patrick Green. >> Harry Cheakos. >> And Andy Geekrow. >> And this is a new thing for us. We're really excited. This is alien on TV, and I'm going to pass it off to Patrick for a brief summary. >> Yeah, this is all new. We've done a few live things in the past, but this is, we're trying something very new. So bear with us as the first time we're doing it. If we have some issues, it might be a little clunky, but we're going to figure it out. We're going to get things going with motion detected, which is our first segment of this after show, which is a quick summary. So tonight, we're doing something a little unique for this series, in that we have two episodes to talk about. So we're going to kind of put them together into one because it kind of works as almost like a little movie tonight. But in the future, we'll just do a kind of one by one episode. So basically, we start off with episode one, Neverland. We have the crew of the USCSS Maginot, which is a class C, science vessel, I screwed that up on our spoiler review, not an M-class star freighter. And so they wake up on board the Maginot. We are introduced to Wendy and the Lost Boys through this very interesting sequence that takes place on Prodigy Island, which is a research facility, owned by the Prodigy Corporation, which is run by Boy Cavalier, who is a delightfully obnoxious, tech-wonderkind. And Wendy is this new synthetic body that's been imbued with the consciousness of a dying young child named Marcy. And she then becomes kind of this beacon around which these other Lost Boys characters can learn the ropes and she gets this little crew. And we then have the Maginot crash. We have this wonderful scene with Morrow inside the mother room, which I'm definitely going to talk about tonight. And it crashes into Prodigy City, carrying all of these deep space research specimens. And now they are in a Prodigy territory, even though it's a Yutani ship. Then we have this extended recovery sequence. We have the Hermit, we're introduced to, who is Wendy's brother, who is a medic, who has put medical school on leave, and is currently working with this Prodigy, you know, search and recovery services. And he and his team go on board the ship to try to find survivors and to try to help people and see what's going on. And then we have Wendy and the Lost Boys going to rescue Hermit after that. My headphones just turned off in the middle of that. So I'm going to hope that this keeps working. Can you hear me okay? Okay, we then have in episode two, which is called Mr. October, which I got to say getting the payoff for why it was called that was really interesting to me. We start with Hermit and his team, which is Rashidi and Siberian, exploring the ship, you know, the crashed ship. We see Boy Cavalier having a really interesting conversation with Dame Silvia, wherein he talks about how his goal really is to find an intelligence greater than his own, which is just the most hubris stick perfect. Like totally believable thing for somebody like that to be doing. Whereas Dame Silvia is more about finding immortality. We then have Kirsch, who is now, you know, kind of in charge of the Lost Boys, who are going to this recovery site. And they arrive there and they encounter some new specimens, which we have been looking forward to seeing more of and I can't wait to talk more about. We have the alien making its grand appearance in the series for real this time after kind of getting a little bit of episode one stuff. It creeps out of a hole that separates Hermit and he's separated from his team for the rest of the episode. We have Boy Cavalier and Utani discussing what to do with the crash. We have the Lost Boys encountering things like the T.O. cellus, which is made its way into a cat. And we have the orchid making an appearance for the first time, which is something I'm really excited to see what happens with that. We have a Baroque dinner party, which is hosted by this group called the Caspians, which I did not see that coming in a million years. And we have the Grand Queen All to end all Grand Queen Alls of Gory, you know, slash fests happening at that. We have Morrow making it appearance once again. We have, as he's trying to recover this, you know, Zeno, then we have Hermit finding Reggie Jackson's World Series ball. And of course, we're reminded that this really is clearly in a lot of ways taking place in a very direct, facsimile of the universe that we ourselves find ourselves in. If you didn't get that from cream opening the show every episode. And if you didn't get it from tool closing episode two, you probably got it from Ice Age. And if you didn't get it from that, you get it from Reggie Jackson in the World Series. And it's a beautiful scene where Wendy rediscoveres her brother and they, you know, find each other. And in Hermit discovers the truth only to be absconded and taken away by the alien. And that kind of gets us through those two episodes. Anything I missed. No, I think you hit all the major points. Yeah. All right. Let's hand it over to Andy who's going to take us to our next segment. Yeah. Now we're going to head into what we're going to call short controlled bursts, which is basically no deep dives yet. Just our raw unfiltered initial emotional responses, which I think we all absolutely have right before we jumped on here live. We were talking a mile a minute, um, so just give us like your overall feel that we have obviously have two episodes to go through. But what do you guys think in terms of just immediate reactions and thoughts? Yeah, I absolutely loved it. I was just like blown away by everything, um, was there strapped in for the ride the entire time. Like I was really loving the characters. I'm loving like these themes of Peter Pan. I was really like off-put by that when we first heard about that, um, probably a year maybe bored, uh, now. But it just like that that feeling of these kids living in life and these adult bodies and sort of grasping for that feeling of like wanting still wanting to be children. And I feel like that's a theme throughout all of this, which which I just absolutely love. Uh, I love the ship just like crashing into the city, the whole search and rescue going out. Like when that scene was happening, I was like, oh my god, it was like getting really intense. And I was just loving like, oh man, what's going to happen next? And I'm still really mystified by like, borrows, motives, even boy cavalier. Like Patrick, I don't, you know, you were mentioning how he's wanting to talk to somebody smarter than him, which is, you know, just like, what a huge ego this dude must have. But like, um, but you're still there's a lot of these moments where you're just like, is he being really nefarious right now? Like is there something evil behind his eyes that's going on? And he's just saying that, you know, so I'm just floored. I'm really loving it. I loved it as well. Um, I, I love the texture of the show. It is texturally it feels like alien, just the richness of the colors. The blacks are black, often like you see films in the 70s. The original alien film really, um, had this on display. I just love the texture of the show. I love that the characters are characters. These are people we can get to know. They're fully developed. They don't feel like caricatures. They feel like real people. None of them feel like callbacks to other characters. Wendy, who is essentially our guide or star for this show, feels like her own person. She doesn't feel like a cipher of Ripley. She doesn't feel like anybody else who's gone before. And what I love about Wendy is that she is this little girl in a grim fairy tale in some ways. It picks up that Peter Pan motif that Holly has weaved into the show and puts this little girl in the most frightening place possible. And it's just lovely. And one thing I also really loved about the show is the parallels between this show and Romulus. Specifically, when Joe goes to, I don't know, prodigies, headquarters or whatever, headquarters for, um, employees. And he's trying to get out of his contract. And he's talking to a computer and how like he couldn't talk to anyone. And just, and reminded me of rain when she went to Wayland, Utah, and also trying to sort of say, hey, my time is up. I'd like to go a little bit different circumstances. But similar, similar things that are happening in just the weight of corporation, the weight of empire sort of saying, no, you can't do this. You do what we say. I thought that that was really, really beautiful. And again, just the characters in this. I'm really gravitating towards them. Moral Steel has ever seen that he's in. I think it's wonderful. Live entertainment, my mic was muted there. I was just saying big ups to Julian D'Souza in the YouTube chat right now, who's a music buddy of mine. Yeah, big shout out to Stinkfist by tool closing episode two. I was also very excited about that. So, I'm going to lay my cards on the table here and say that I hated it the first time I saw the first episode. And I struggled. I was really upset. Actually, I really, and I, Jamie and I had a whole talk about it. And I really, I was like, I don't know if I can watch this fucking thing. And then I watched it again and I watched it again, and I loved it more and more and more. And now I'm like, the hooks are in me so deep. And I'm realizing that a lot of that has to do with something very important, which is that I'm uncomfortable with a lot of it. And I swear to God, I have been begging for this since Alien 3 came out when I was seven years old. I have wanted to feel scared and unsettled and unsure and an alien thing. And every single time, I mean, part of why I go to that recovery so often is because it kind of touches on that sometimes. And then it kind of becomes a play colored by numbers wrote, you know, this scene that's all before kind of thing again. This is like starting from a place that's so different and so uncomfortable. And then it's just pushing those buttons over and over again. Like we were saying, you know, like having direct pop culture references to our universe, like, of course, most alien fans are going to be like, that's inappropriate. Like you can't do. What is this bullshit? But that feeling that we are having to me is actually kind of what's important because it's making us question, question what the boundaries of this thing are. And what have we been asking for this whole time? We've been asking for things to push against those boundaries and break them wide open. And to me, what's so exciting, especially in episode two, is those walls are coming down. And I don't know what the fuck's coming up. And that like for me, this is this is the most exciting I've been about anything alien since the first time I saw the first covenant trailer and I thought this thing is coming back to life. And then I was kind of wrong. Now it feels like I might be right about it. I'm with you on the that initial excitement, comparing it to others. I have to go way back to aliens. I haven't felt like this after watching something since aliens or alien because I did see aliens first. For me, all of that stuff that on paper, if you had told me about if I knew, if I knew all of the pop culture references and things like that, I probably would have pooped them in my mind. I would have said, nope, it's not going to work. It all worked for me. It hit some kind of nerve. And I have to tell you the the baseball references, the Ice Age movie quote references, like at my heart sang because that is my brother and not my relationship. That is our relationship. We would quote movies to each other. We still do. We bonded over baseball. So when I'm watching this, and I know it doesn't have that connection with everybody, but for me, it just made my heart saying, there was that moment in the second episode where he just leans into her shoulder, like almost collapses from grief and relief and love. And I felt it. I had a tear coming down my eye. I don't know when the last time I cried at an alien anything was. And I was scared. My husband, like I hold on to my husband's hand in certain parts. I loved being scared again. So just those two initial feelings of the emotional connection and the fear, I'm in. I'm in. I love it. Yeah. That's a beautiful reaction. Andy, yeah, I felt very much a lot of those same things and Jamie and Patrick too. Just, yeah, it's it's a journey. And I love that we're going to get eight episodes of it. So now we're going to dive a little bit deeper and we're bringing you a little company debriefing deep dive analysis. I think we're going to talk some major story arcs, character development, some thematic elements here. So opening it up to you guys, maybe Jamie, you want to fire us off here on the deep dive. So deep dive, I think there's so much here. I mean, these these two episodes, it's just, it's littered with so many layers and so much so many things happening while and it reminds me of a film that I just saw a little bit in terms of the film weapons. In terms of what we're seeing in the show is bigger than the show itself. It's not just about aliens. It's about who are we as people? It borderlines blade runner things more than borderlines. I think it crosses right into them. In fact, I was talking with another fellow alien fan and they said, yeah, this is weird. They're going all into the synth and Android stuff. And I was like, give it some time, give this some time to unfurl and we'll see where it goes. But I love this because there have been droids in the alien universe since day one. And we're getting a show that's going to dive deeper into what that is. Who are they? Are they us? Are we them? Like, those are questions Patrick knows this the most about me that I love. What makes this human? What makes Wendy human? Is she human? We don't know that. There's she know that. I mean, there's the whole questions that come up and like, what am I? And Kirsch says, you're anything you want to be. And then later, Wendy says, I am human. She declares her agency. She takes it for herself. And it's really, really interesting. And I think one thing that we haven't discussed at all. I mean, of course, the show is very new. The Patrick and I have been talking about the show for a few weeks now. And of course, there was last week there was the theatrical screening, the idea that there's children on there are children on the ship with the some of the darkest nightmares we could ever imagine. That is really interesting. That is some place that alien, except for with aliens. And it was an actual little girl. But these are little children in adult bodies in a nightmare asylum. And that is really interesting. Was this is the appropriate? Are they children? What I mean, and their reactions to what they're seeing, they're reacting like children, like to me, that was some of the parts that just made me brought me joy in terms of like how children react to things like this. I was scared they were, they were so scared they didn't know what to do. Again, just brilliance. And I think what it does for me is it taps the child in me. What would I, how do I feel about this? Because I think when we're all faced with going into a ship like this, I think we all become children. Honestly, we're all faced with the unknown. I think one of the wonders of childhood is seeing the world for the first time. And that happens, you know, a lot until you're about 18, but you're seeing things for the first time. You're seeing an ocean for the first time. But with these children, they're seeing terror for the first time in ways they could not possibly imagine. I'm here for it. And yeah, it's so funny how in some ways that children are less scared than an adult might be to. There's this wonderful push put like because their reactions are kind of hard to predict, you know, like in something like when the TSL is crawls out of the cat, SMEs just like it was in the cat, you know, which an adult would not be able to even articulate that, but like, but maybe a child could, you know, but and then there and then other things terrify them so much. A couple quick shout outs to our friends in the chat. It's so nice to see so many names. We love some dearly in here. Gene McDonald, Doug, the Wendy and Joe relationship. Oh, shit, it's my sister. He's really liking those characters. Poop vein. What up, what up, man? It's just finished in the last 20 minutes of episode two as he's on this and he's enjoying what he's seeing. Some people are saying that, you know, they didn't click with them at first, but they're kind of excited to go back and try to kind of reengage with it. And in terms of my personal thoughts on it, I'm going to start my timer now, so I stay on on target because I want to talk a lot more about this. Something that I love is the way that the XX121 is being handled here. It occurs to me that on many episodes of this show, I have gone to bat for in screwed ability. And by that, I mean, I like when the alien is hard to understand or when it's motivations are kind of, you know, difficult. Like my favorite alien of all time until I'm a dead person will always be big chap. I just think that's the greatest thing I've ever seen in a movie. And I think a major part of that is because of that in screwed ability where you really just don't have any idea what it wants and why it's so langerous and so slow. But the reality is is audiences have nearly five decades of familiarity with the creature at this point. So nobody's going to be like, what is it doing in here? And the other side of that is make it as scary as you can make anything. The the rapidity with which it dispatches people. I don't know why I'm using big words tonight. I'm, you know, whatever. I'm going to get some some hate mail about that one again. The way that it kills people is so quick and so scary and so gory. And to me, this is the payoff that Fede never gave us. Love Fede Alvarez, Romulus, still great movie. But to me, a major letdown of Romulus was that Fede Alvarez, who's a maestro of horror filmmaking, didn't give us anything really that scary, really that unsettling. This one we have by far the goryest sequence we have ever seen in an alien film. The massacre of the Caspians is like just fucking gross. It is just, you know, gory. We have the soldier, the recovery soldier getting swung around by the, you know, mouth inside of his. I mean, it's just it's crazy. But that is what we need because now it's scary again. Now it's like, oh my god, there's no hope. And when Mauro turns around and in the entire recovery crew that was holding him at gunpoint is just gone within two seconds. I mean, that is like so cool. And then when the alien comes around the side and it doesn't quite know how to handle him because it's probably, you know, for one thing he's seen it before. So he's not like emitting fear as much if that's going to be this new mechanic that it seems like it might be. But in addition to that, because he's not really entirely human anymore, the last thing I'll say before I hand it off is it's important to note that when the recovery team addresses him when he raises his hands, they say, it's a cyborg. And I think that is a major thematic thing that we're going to be coming back to is the otherization of people who have incorporated these technologies. And it goes back to what Samuel Blinken is boy Cavalier was saying about artificial intelligence versus human intelligence and about the race between the two. That I think is a really cool thread that I can't wait to see more of. Yeah, I agree. The, the, as you said, the rapidity of the kills. At first, it's almost jarring, but then when you see the aftermath, which is almost scarier than what's going on. The chaos, it's creepy. And that's what I wanted. I'm loving the other species. I love how much we've got in of them and how little like we've seen them in snippets. We see what they put the potential of what they can do. The orchid. We're getting hints of just how nightmarish this thing is possibly going to be. I love when Kirsch is like, it could be Flora, it could be Fauna, and just kind of throwing that question out there. Somebody who is, you know, a scientific officer who has all of this knowledge and he's confused by it. I like that unsettling feeling we get. I love going back to what Jamie said, too. I love how the children are sometimes not as fearful as we are. And for me, I love that they are in adult bodies because it almost gives us the comfort of not seeing children in danger. We get both the best of both worlds. We get to see these adults in danger, but they're not. And we get to see the mind of children. But it's a little less uncomfortable for us not seeing a 12 year old body put in danger. So I like that juxtaposition. I thought the actors, especially the one the lost boys nailed what it's like to be a kid. And they each had a slightly different way about them in terms of sometimes the child's fear is just staring at the thing. What was her name? Like the red head I'm blanking. The one who plays, not tipsy. Not yeah, nibs. Nibs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She's just staring at this thing. And like not like shaking or vitally scared, but you can see she's just like, what the hell is this? I love how they each brought something else. And going back to that theme in the beginning, in episode one, I love how Wendy asks where are the others. There's others going to be like me because that's all we want. We want a sense of belonging. Right. As a kid, you want to find your tribe. So the fact that she knows she's not going to be the only one. She kind of just like opens up and gets this like wonder like, oh, I'm not the only one. That's what all of us would do. We seek that out that belonging. I love the random throwaway comment. One of them says like, oh, I miss eating. That's something a kid would say. I think it's grounded in realism. And I think they really thought about the child's like wonder. And they without making it so obviously, oh, I have a teddy bear. Yes, there's stuffed animals in there. And she talks to him. And I love that. But there's these little moments where you're absolutely like, yeah, a kid would say that. So I totally buy that their children. And I'm and I can't wait to see more of that. But I'm loving it so far. Perry, what about you? Yeah, absolutely. I have so much to say. And before I really kick it off with my thoughts, I just want to touch on a few things like Patrick, the xenomorph. Yes, it's scary again. I was terrified with hermit crawling his way to that elevator shaft and closing the door on it. I mean, the xenomorph is unreal. The kills are just like, this is so what we needed. And I just want to talk on Andy and Jamie to your points of the children, these thematic elements of kids and exploring the ship. That's how you would feel. You'd feel like a kid like going through a haunted house for the first time, you know. And I just, it's cool to see a lot of things that Noah Holly had talked about in his SFX article are coming to fruition. A lot of those things, the idea of how he wanted this to feel like you're an explorer. Again, I just think is such a cool thing. And so what's really awesome to see is there's a lot of these seeds getting planted that he is saying he wants to be able to build into five seasons or more of a show, right? And I think we're really seeing, you know, the inception of those. And so, all right, officially, what I really wanted to talk about, I was very, very awed by this camera movement scene after Boy Cavalier is talking about how he wants to talk to people smarter than him. He's like, that's as cool in life. It's not about the money. It's about this. And he has that conversation. And then it pans over to the wall. And you see this artwork of these three monkeys. And one's covering his eyes, covering the mouth, covering the ears. And it's here. No evil, see no evil, speak no evil. And I think that theme is going to be embedded throughout this entire show. And you see it with Marl. Like, I was writing so many times in my notes, I wrote, why is Marl hiding like WTF, exclamation point, exclamation point. But there's like things that we're seeing in this greater company ask like element that's really unnerving, that's really scary, that's really getting dark. And we're seeing just the beginnings of that. But it's like, what are they hiding? What are they not trying to speak on another piece too? Is when you see the guys on Neverland Island, like cleaning the stuff on the wall, I'm like, what is that? What are they doing? But they're hiding something, right? They're trying to clean something up that's obviously something bad happened. And I'm hoping we, you know, these are some things that really build into the show that we get not just in this season. I don't need to see that in this season. Like if they recall that back in season two or something like that, and it turns into this other thing, like, please. And so, yeah, just floored by all of that. And I'm really excited for what we're about to see. And I just can't, yeah, I can't wait to see the T.O. Celis. All these other creatures that tick like thing that kills those Marines, like sucking their blood out. I was so grossed out. And like, oh, I haven't, Andy, to your point, I haven't felt that since Hicks opened up the vent. And you see all the aliens crawling on the ceiling. And you're like, oh, my God. And, you know, and then it's chaos. Like, I just, yeah, I can't wait. Yeah. I love it. I wanted to do another shout out to our very good friend Kyle in the chat who's talking about how it's important to keep in mind that if an individual episode might not be working great for you, that, you know, this is all in the context of a much larger, you know, eight, nine hour movie. So it might in retrospect work a little better. And to that end, I do want to say, I think this is something, I'm surprised that the reception has been so great for it, honestly, not because of the quality or lack thereof, but because it does so many things so differently. So, you know, take it from me, if it didn't quite work for you the first time, maybe given another shot before you kind of write it off. And that being said, it's entirely okay to have criticisms. We still have them too. My personal criticisms are very much being supplanted by this like, I feel like I did like a line of cocaine or something. I'm like, so excited because there's so much because there's so much to talk about. You know, there's like, I've never done cook by like, but there's, there's so much, there's so much going on. And I'm like, it's like staring down a hallway into this like, I mean, there's just so much opening up. And to that end, we're in our last segment here, which we're calling Building Better Worlds, which is also the name of our Facebook group, which you should join. And in this segment, we're going to be talking a little bit about how the mythology is expanding, you know, the biology of new alien species, how new concepts are showing up, what these companies are liking, things like that. I think for tonight, because there's like, so much new to talk about, we're going to just skin the surface of this a little. But in future installments of this, we're going to try to focus on some big, very specific new things that change or subvert our expectations. I think the first and most obvious one of these, and again, I'm just going to kind of bring a bunch up and tee these up for whoever wants to talk about them more, is the new diversity of biology in this. We have, you know, five organisms now with life cycles that we don't even fully know yet. I mean, who knows if that take is the end stage, I think that might be an intermediate stage before something else happens, right? We have, of course, the new treatment of synthetics. We have, I mean, it's interesting. When you look back at the ways that synthetics have appeared in previous films, they're always like the tips of these spears that we never get to see the rest of, right? We just see one, you know, that's sort of in a company setting somewhere like on a ship or, you know, with the, you know, group of soldiers or something. But now we have, like, we get to see an entire ecosystem that's humming with synthetic and artificial intelligence and how that society operates, which is really interesting, I think too. And then of course, we have, you know, these companies. I think it's safe to say that the thing that many of us have had the hardest time with and I'm absolutely in this camp is how, how fast eluce Noah Hawley is being with Canon. In this, we've had a whole episode in this. We've talked about it a lot. This will be something that we will kind of continue to wrestle with a little bit. For my personal two cents on this, I have come to a place where I'm okay with it because I'm looking at it. And Christian mentioned this earlier today. I'm looking at it kind of like an expanded universe item a little bit. You know, it's not one of the main film continuities. Although it probably will ultimately become that. You know, for now, it kind of exists on this island and it kind of feels like a place where Noah can take chances and take risks. I still love the idea of a really vibrant universe, you know, with where the union of progressive peoples and the three world empire and these, you know, massive city states that have different jurisdictions over different planetary, you know, areas that are fighting their own civil wars, you know, where we have, you know, new Britain and things. I love all that kind of stuff. In my personal head canon, this doesn't overwrite them. This is just a, in a, in a, a chance to tell something new. And I think again, I am checking my own, has reservations a little bit because I know that this will be uncomfortable. Like I just know this is going to drive me fucking crazy. And it's just happening and it is out there. And I can't change that. So I might as well watch this for what it is and see if it works for me in whatever context it is. And for now, it truly is working for me. And I'm really excited because if this were the story of the UPP, for example, we already know a lot of that. Like we know how white was founded, et cetera. We don't know anything about these corporations. We really don't. And we don't know what's going to happen next, whether we're talking about, you know, biologically, artificial intelligently, or geopolitically, we are in an unknown region. And we are waiting through it together in real time with all of you in the chat right now. And it's a very exciting. Yeah, something that I'm really excited to see is the the hierarchy of those three aspects in terms of the biology. Like Jamie, you brought this up on your episode of Patrick. What happens if one of these species is infected with another species? Like which one is ultimately the perfect organism, right? I'm intrigued to see them interacting with each other. If they do it all, but that even the even the possibility of that happening, I find fascinating. And then you talk about the synthetics and the cyborgs. Where do they fit in terms of like a caste system if there is such a thing, right? It's sort of just starting to explore like you were saying with the pronouns calling calling morrow it, right? Where do they fit? Wendy claiming she's human. Are they the top of the ladder? And then within that, obviously, within the humans, you have boy Cavalier, who's just so brilliant that no one even comes close to him. He's like hungry for, you know, somebody to match him. I love how he said, by the way, it's not about ego. And then he makes that statement, which is all about ego. And then just the the corporations themselves, right? Like ultimately, we know Whalingutani. But where do they fit? We get brief mentions of some of the other ones in the beginning. I am really curious as to how they will interact with each other going forward. I think those three aspects, there's so much there. And I'm loving this format of a TV series that unfold slowly. And we're along for the ride. I'm loving this new, I love the newness of it. Yes, I'm loving it too. And in terms of like world building, one thing that Patrick said, week or so ago, that sticks with me. But it's really a theme and underlying and an overlying theme in the alien series is becoming. This show is about becoming. It's about the creatures becoming us, the creatures using us. Who are we becoming as a species? That's a question we're asking ourselves right now. And that is the one big question to me in this show is what are we becoming? Who are we? And they're not answering that. They're just asking that. And what does that look like? And Andy, you brought this up when Kirsch and the other guy or the other kid are approaching the orchid, he says, be careful. It's presenting as flora, but it could be fauna. And I love that line so much because that is so much like what alien is. I mean, it's this egg. It's presenting as something else. But what the egg in some ways presents as flora, but it is not flora. It is fauna. Maybe is it flora? Is it fauna? But again, then we can redirect those questions back to us. What are we? Who are we? What makes us who we are? Does our empathy make us who we are? And one thing, again, in terms of larger themes in world building, I feel like all these questions point right to world building lack of empathy, which I think is fueling boy cavalier. This man, this young man is not empathetic. He is not, you can see his, his, he's a sociopath. You can see in his eyes. I mean, the actor plays this role to perfection. He's drunk on the idea of who he is, similar to Neander Wallace in Blade Runner 2049. These are what these billionaires, I mean, if you've seen them in interviews, they're drunk on the idea that their money has made them gods. Boy cavalier things. He's a god. But he's not the only one dealing with that. I think Morrow has a little bit of that going on too, where Morrow's like, I'm not your brother. And then that's flipped when he's like friend, and he's talking to the Marines or whatever, and they're like, we're not your friend. Like, that's, it's flipped on him. So I just love that. These, this tension between who we are and what are, what are we becoming and who we are and what those things want to become. And I, I also love in terms of becoming that moment with a cat. Like, they cross some, like, you don't kill animals or dogs, but they did it. And that cat's crawling out with its two legs because the back legs are useless and the TSL, like that thing looks gnarly as fuck. I loved it. It was terrifying. This is the first alien, whatever, where I've been, where the creature has scared me. Like the first time I've been scared since seeing aliens, honestly. It's, it's unbelievable. And again, as I come back to becoming, I'm, I can't wait to see what the show becomes and what we become when we watch it. Well, well said, Jamie. Yeah, you all bring up some really, really great things that I think are going to be cooking here throughout the season. I'll just add like one really simple thing. Like I, I'm really loving the whole synthetics, the transferring of, you know, their mind to these robots and just having these themes or these inspirations from like Blade Runner. I'm seeing like a little bit of Westworld too, which I just adore as well. But there was one line. I really love her. There was like this scene in episode one where they're talking about simulating adolescence in Wendy. And then a boy cavalier. Are they explaining to her like why they can only do children and transfer them is grown up grown up minds are too stiff. They can't make the jump yet. So I feel like we're going to see sort of like another view. We're seeing almost another view through these children's eyes through their adult bodies and what they're able to do. But maybe how they're going to understand humanity a little bit different. And then the last thing I think we all need to just be very realistic about is I think Wendy asks like when do I get to go home and they say you don't get to go home. And I think that's what this whole show is going to be about like nobody gets to go home. Like after this the imagino crashed and these specimens escaped. Yeah, nobody's getting out of this alive, which is very similar to like Alien, right? And these people working this nine to five job and well nine to five. Several years long, you know, job out in space that they or were signed up for or forced to do. But they don't really get to go home and in Alien in a very tragic way, right? Where they're used to be food essentially to be able to bring this specimen home that Wayland Yutani wanted. And now we're seeing this through Alien Earth. And I just, yeah, I love that. I can't wait to see what else we have to watch. So our chat is absolutely blowing up right now. And we're not going to get to all these comments. I wish we could. But just a couple quick shout outs. Before I do that, I want to just announce that we officially as of two minutes ago hit 1,000 members in our perfect organism subreddit, which has, I mean, it's literally logarithmic growth. The conversations in there are nuts. So if you go to reddit.com/perfect organism, join us there. I'm in there like all day long, that's because I don't use Facebook really. So that's kind of where I interact with people, personally. And me and Holden, who is the guy that started it, are going to be doing an AMA in their tomorrow. And you can ask us anything you want about the show, about how the podcast works, you know, about what we have ideas about coming up, etc. So, you know, if you want other ways to interact with, you know, all of us, I mean, we love to get Jamie and Andy and Perry and other team members in there as well to do these, because it's a really great community. So please consider joining that. And as well as building better worlds and, you know, other forums that we like to, you know, be in. And just super quick shout out to LP Longmeyer, a good friend of ours, who we got to hang with in San Diego a couple of weeks ago, follow LP on TikTok. He's got an incredible channel there. LP points out to Perry's point. The three monkeys, you know, evil here, no evil, ignore evil, speak no evil, parallel what we know of the organisms so far. We have a creature that takes your sight to you tell us, we have a creature that takes your speech, a facehugger, and we have another creature that is interfering with Wendy's hearing. Remember she keeps grabbing her ear. Oh, yeah. There's might be something that might be something to that. And, and, and, you know, and then Kyle also has this wonderful, you know, reflection on what Jamie was saying, about the sense of becoming how Wendy is in this liminal state of being between human and machine and he thinks we're going to see more of this kind of nuance soon. And I really agree with that. And my personal kind of closing thought is we get to our final segment, which is building better world, which is we're calling the bonus situation, fittingly, is to Jamie's point about flora and fauna. To me, that is the heart of everything that this show is about and weighs literal and non-literal. And it tells you what it's about because that cream song at the beginning, strange brew, the only part of the song we hear is when he says strange brew, kill what's inside of you. That is what this is about. This is about things that are not what they seem and people who are not who they think they are. And that is a very scary idea. And it blows my mind that this has existed basically since 2019. I mean, Noah Hawley was already working on this thing during COVID. And it was kind of held back by COVID quite a bit. The character sheets, you know, where we started seeing all the revelations about the Peter Pan stuff and making fun of it. It's like three or four years ago now. So like these transhumanist things have already been in the script for a long time. And it's crazy that this is before Chatchee PT. And like now we are in this place where we are so scared all the time because we are losing sight of what's real and what's not real. And it feels like this rug is being pulled out from under our feet. Like we're seeing things in the news that we can't tell if it actually happened or not. We're seeing movies where we don't know if we're actually watching actors or if we're just watching AI. And we're interacting with people online and truly not knowing, you know, forget about if it's the person we think we're talking to. What if it's just not a person? That is a scary thing that we are feeling all the time now. And I don't care if you're pro, you know, AI advancement or not. It is scary for everybody. I mean, Sam Altman, Altman is scared of this too. It is a scary paradigm shift that we are living through. And it's wild to me that Noah Hawley's show is 100% about that. And again, it goes back to what Alien actually is about. And this is by Noah Hawley as a brilliant guy. Alien wasn't really about, you know, male rape and all these things that we, you know, those are all things that are very effective that are in it. But it's not that's not really what it's about. What it's really about is not knowing what's inside of you anymore. That is really, really scary because when something is different inside, the outside is different too, but it doesn't know it yet. So, you know, we might have a different form of parasitism in this, right? But no matter what, we're going to have things presenting as flora that may actually be fauna. We're going to have people who think they're people who might not be people. We're going to have Wendy, who thinks she's Wendy, but might not really be Marcy in there anymore. We're going to have people confronting this idea of where did I go? What happened to me? What happened to us? That is so, so scary. And to me, that is what will make this thing relevant for a long time. And we have been waiting for this, right? Romulus, great movie, really fun roller coaster. It has nothing to say about the human condition in my opinion, other than, you know, the bond between I think Andy and Rain, which is really powerful. This is like philosophically dense and is specifically about what it means to be human, which again, to Jamie's point is what Blade Runner is also about. But you know what? Blade Runner is a fucking masterpiece. And I am very happy with Alien playing in that sandbox and allowing that sandbox to get horror put into it too, because it is scary, right? The things in Blade Runner that hook us, you know, all the time are not just the beautiful things, sort of things that freak us out about it. And Alien presents this wonderful new vocabulary for us to interrogate those questions about what's inside me and how can I kill it? What's in fucking side bay? Don't bring up that film. To Patrick's point, I think that, yeah, I'm so excited about this. And yes, you know, I have issues, stumbles along the way, the things that maybe pull me out here or there. But the larger question is why I'm here of what are we becoming? What are we seeing? Just there are so many highlights in this in this show so far that just have me like, what is this? What are we saying? What is Kirsch? Kirsch is a big question mark. We don't know. I don't like to use like, sort of black and white terms as he good or bad. He could be a mix of in between. I love that. I love seeing that. I love the othering of Morrow, just because he's different, just because he has, he's human. He just has a bionic arm. And I think the end song is called stink fist, right? Which sort of is a dig on Morrow to, or a play on Morrow? To some degree, it's, it's very, very interesting. And again, just to see the creature so rabid and on all fours and running and being what it should be, I've not seen this since alien. I mean, alien three for sure, but since aliens, Cameron's aliens, like this thing has my heart racing and I cannot go on enough about how awesome it is. I have some issues with in someone when it comes over Morrow's shoulder. It looks like a big puppet. It doesn't look real. There's some, there's some issues here and there that we'll, we'll talk about. But I think for me right now, the praise is, is where I'm at like, and the idea that I think in order for things to grow, they have to become uncomfortable. If you think about, if you think about like a butterfly or all these things in nature that you see, what do they do before they transform, they become mush. They become this different thing. And I think if this shows really going to do well amongst fans, hopefully it's already going to do well amongst general population, but we have to allow, we have to be uncomfortable to a point that Patrick's made. We have to see like, yeah, this is weird. This doesn't fit right. And that's okay that it doesn't. But it's going to allow alien to become something bigger than just what we think it should be because there are a lot of gatekeepers in the world. I've been one of them at times, something I have to keep in check, but Noah Hawley is saying, no, let's, let's push this further. Not everything he's doing is working, not everything. I think there's a lot of, a lot of this feels like, sometimes the, the, the my dialogue feels like opera, it's overly dramatic. I'm just like, play this shit straight. Don't make this an opera. Don't, don't make every line this. Whoo, but you know, I can live with that. It's still amazing. It's still so amazing. And I cannot wait for next week's episode. I can't wait for it. I did not feel this way with Romulus. Yeah, I feel a connection already to most of the characters, which is what I wanted more than anything. I wanted to, I wanted these characters to breathe, to have a life, to have a story that I was invested in. And I feel that. And that question you were saying about, do we get to go home? To me, it's all a home is all about who you're with and the connections, right? Which plays on what you were talking about Patrick, about our lack of connection really with AI who, you know, people thinking they're talking to a human, right? We were just saying how chat GPT version five feels less human now, so people are getting depressed about that. And to me, when she finds her brother, she has come home, right? That's, that's sort of a, and when he finds that baseball, Mr. October, he's coming home a little bit to his dad. He's talking to him. I love those moments. To me, that's, you know, that's like why we love Ripley, why we love the characters in alien and aliens and even three, we sense her loss. I want to feel that. And I do already, which is really getting me excited. I think the acting is wonderful for the most part. I'm so intrigued with where this is going, but I love everything. I love the modernization. I love the music they're using. I love the score. It's really hitting the mark. But for me, the characters was my number one. And so far, I'm very pleased. Yeah, awesome, you guys. Yeah, I'm absolutely just so excited. I cannot wait for the third episode next week. And I'm really intrigued to see what we see on the other side with these other corporations, especially Wail and Dutani. That's been something I've always been intrigued by. I'm really, I'm just like really, really trying to figure out what Morrow's motives are. And, you know, hybrid, what does that actually mean? Like, is it just his arm? Like, can they see through his eyes? Like, boy, Cavalier is able to see through Wendy's eyes, you know, via camera? Like, what do they all know? How does Morrow know how to act around the xenomorph? Like, where he's telling those Marines, they can, it can sense fear. And maybe he was able to like control himself. Also on the Magino, he was able to control himself talking to mother. Like, it's almost like he knew how much time he had before he got into the, the little underground capsule. And so, yeah, I'm just, I cannot wait to get more of Morrow. So, I'm really, really, really looking forward to that. And so, I just want to remind everybody, we obviously have a podcast, right? Which you probably mostly all know about. But I know we're going to be doing a roundtable on all of this, where we're obviously going to be talking a lot deeper into all of these things we talked about tonight. But please, please, please, check us out on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, wherever you listen to your podcasts, perfect organism podcasts, shout us out, leave us a review, do all the things we're here for you guys. We're here for this show. Like, we, we absolutely love it and just cannot wait to keep talking about it. And just as we closed, just to let you know, we are working with FX on getting talent back on the show quite a bit in the coming months. So, we can't wait for that. And we definitely want your input on things to ask. And, you know, some of the voices you've heard on the show before, which is great. And some of them will be new. So, you know, there's going to be a lot of very cool chances for you to get your voice heard and to ask your questions to. So, please keep in touch. And we love you all. And we hope you are feeling it tonight, because this is a premiere night for Alien fandom. And we don't get these very often, although it feels like we're getting a lot lately. This is a, this is a big one. This is a big one. This is a big one. And please, those who are watching this on our YouTube channel, just like and subscribe. We have a nice following, but we could certainly use more, more subscribers just to get the word out about what we're doing. This conversation to Perry's point will continue. We're recording episode on Wednesdays, going to be released Friday. I'm really, really excited to dive deeper into that. But we will be here next week to talk more alien Earth. Thanks for watching everybody. Thanks everybody. [ENGINE REVVING]