Editor’s note: The below interview contains major spoilers for the Alien: Earth finale.It’s hard to believe it, but we’ve already reached the season finale of Noah Hawley‘s FX series Alien: Earth. The last few weeks have already been packed to the brim with major surprises and reveals, some of which could be poised to change the entire Alien franchise as we know it, but this week’s finale, “The Real Monsters,” co-written by Hawley and Migizi Pensoneau, definitely leaves the door open for a continuation that hints at an even deeper threat as far as the xenomorphs (yes, there are at least two of them now) are concerned. There’s also that somewhat disturbing development with T. Ocellus (aka The Eye) and its new human host…
Ahead of the premiere of Alien: Earth‘s season finale, Collider had the opportunity to sit down with Hawley once again to break down the episode’s biggest twists, from what’s unfortunately befallen poor Arthur Sylvia (David Rysdahl) to what might be in store for Wendy (Sydney Chandler) and the other hybrids now that they’ve decided to rule over Prodigy’s Neverland research island. Over the course of the interview, which you can read below, Hawley also delves into whether he considered having a higher body count in the finale, that heavyweight fight scene between Timothy Olyphant‘s Kirsh and Babou Ceesay‘s Morrow, where a potential Season 2 will likely pick up from, and more.
COLLIDER: It’s nice to be able to have had these bookending conversations, but it feels like this season has flown by. I don’t know if that’s your perception as well.
NOAH HAWLEY: I mean, it took so long to make. It’s sort of like it takes you four hours to make Thanksgiving dinner and 20 minutes to eat it, and then two hours to clean it up. So I hope everyone enjoyed the meal.
Was there ever a part of you that considered having a higher body count in the finale?
HAWLEY: Yeah, I could have, but you ultimately have to play the long game, right? And I really wanted the deaths of this season to be meaningful and impactful to people. When you overdo it, it just starts to blur together, certainly the violence of the deaths. For people who are like, “Yeah, violent death!” there’s some satisfaction there; they got their monster movie hit. But I need these characters going forward. And trust me, the show’s called Alien: Earth. In the long run, you never know who will survive. But I want to reward people for investing in these characters; they’re going to stick around for at least a little while.
‘Alien: Earth’s Noah Hawley Wants You to Have Complicated Feelings About Arthur’s Fate
“He really is the moral center of the show…”
One character who has a fate that people might not be expecting is Arthur. With that moment involving the eye, it kind feels like David [Rysdahl] is being set up to do Vincent D’Onofrio inMen in Black next season. Was that always the endgame?
HAWLEY: I think I just have a hard time quitting David Rysdahl. I took him with me from Fargo to Alien. He’s such a great screen presence. A bit of the tragedy of Arthur [is] he really is the moral center of the show and has, on some level, the worst death of everybody. And in this sort of insult to injury, now taking this incredibly kind-hearted, moral person, and turning them into a vessel for something that seems pretty evil, it complicates your feelings about him.
Samuel [Blenkin] has that great monologue in this episode where Boy Kavalier is talking to the hybrids and revealing the truth about his backstory — or is he? How much of what he’s saying is his own perception of events, his own recollection, versus what may or may not be the truth? Or is that the question we’re meant to ask after watching that scene?
HAWLEY: The one thing I never want to do is kill people’s dreams of what they think is going on in the show. But, I think what that story does, no matter how you interpret it, is it shows us that he’s not someone with a moral center. He’s someone who is ultimately acting in his own self-interest at all times.
As we find out that Atom Eins is also synthetic, is the implication there that he was what Boy Kavalier first built to protect himself?
HAWLEY: Yeah, the idea is that he made himself a daddy who looked good in a boardroom, versus the drunk that he had.
I’ve previously spoken with both Tim and Babou about the Kirsh/Morrow fight scene. The elevator conversation that they have in Episode 6 is really the prologue to this sort of inevitability, this big clash of titans. I wanted to ask you about building up to that showdown between the two of them, because it really feels like those pieces get laid brick by brick.
HAWLEY: It starts in the third hour when they meet for the first time, and then they see each other again in that sixth hour. The turnaround in the seventh hour, where Kirsh sort of outsmarts Morrow, you can look at this as an interior battle for Morrow as well, of man versus machine. He describes himself at one point as the worst parts of a man, and yet he has this kind of indomitable will and spirit, and he’s a survivor, literally.
I think that that fight and the way it turns out, we’re left with the feeling that this struggle is not going to be so easily resolved between man and machine. It’s nice to think that, in a movie, you’d put a bullet in the machine and walk away, but what we’re finding is that technology is really hard to get away from once you’ve introduced it into the world.
I spoke with Sydney [Chandler] , as well, about Wendy’s struggle with her identity this season, which crystallizes in that scene she has with Joe. When, for you, is the moment she decides, “Maybe I’m not Marcy, maybe I’m not Wendy, but something else, and I just don’t know what that is yet”?
HAWLEY: Definitely, it’s a series of moments. There’s a scene she has with Dame Sylvia, and she says, “If this is what people are, I don’t think I want to be people anymore.” Ultimately, the show is very concerned with what a child is and how they become an adult, and what kind of adult they become, and what role models they have. This idea of life being complicated becomes an excuse for letting things go that should be solved.
Why are children going to go hungry on the Earth? There’s no reason for it, right? Except it’s complicated, and we’d have to change our priorities and all these really “difficult things,” but children see the world with much more moral clarity and simplicity. They know that people aren’t supposed to live on the streets, and then, when you tell them, ultimately, “Well, you just have to get used to that. That’s part of being an adult,” it’s, “I don’t want to get used to that. That’s something wrong with it, and I don’t want to have to get used to it.”
Some level of the story becomes metaphorical for those everyday things that our children face when you say, “Welcome to the world. Let me teach you about the Holocaust.” Look at this amazing, beautiful planet, and then look at what people do to each other. The story becomes a vehicle in which to talk about that.
‘Alien: Earth’s Noah Hawley Reveals Where Season 2 Will Likely Pick Up
“How do you manage the level of complexity that they’re about to have to face?”
We’ve touched on the ending before and how, to a point, it definitely leaves the door open. Now that we can actually talk spoilers, was that the ending that you were always building to, or did that kind of find itself in the process of writing?
HAWLEY: If you think about Alien as levels of containment, that the island containment level is broken at the end of Season 1 was always the idea. Then it just became a question of scale, on some level, in terms of: how much deeper into the story do we go? It felt to me, ultimately, that the end of this story, this chapter, has to be Wendy’s, an end of the chapter for her and not necessarily the bigger chessboard. That whole Yutani arrival and what happens next, that can be a Season 2 opener versus a Season 1 ender.
I know that there’s probably not much you can say about Season 2, but you’ve said, previously, that there is a destination in mind. Is it safe to say that a potential Season 2 will pick up pretty quickly from where this episode leaves off?
HAWLEY: What was the mindset for each episode, which was these big cliffhangers with a big rock song that throws to the next week, is probably true going forward into a second season. As a fan, I know that when you end in real time like that, the last thing the audience wants is to come in with a chyron that says “One year later.”
I would imagine that it will pick the story up pretty much where we left it off, but I think there are big story moves that have to be made. And if we’re saying that this level of containment has been breached, we should start thinking about, well, what’s the next level of containment? This, “Now we rule,” which is a very exciting moment, is kind of like the end of The Graduate, where the camera stays on their faces. What happens next? And what does “rule” even mean? They have to learn that. How do you manage the level of complexity that they’re about to have to face?
