Alien: Earth Boss Breaks Down Wendy's Power Move In The Finale and Season 2 Possibilities — Plus, Grade It!
Warning: This post contains spoilers for Tuesday's Alien: Earth season finale.
Looks like the xenomorphs aren't the only creatures Boy Kavalier needs to be worried about on Alien: Earth.
In Tuesday's season finale, Wendy and her fellow Lost Boys fought back against the tech genius who created them, with Wendy commanding the xenomorphs to devour his soldiers using the special clicking language they share. Boy Kavalier was left unharmed — dammit — but Wendy and her friends locked him up along with Kirsh, Morrow and Dame Sylvia, taking control of his secret island lair. Wendy declared, "Now we rule," but she might have been a little hasty: Several alien species were still at large, including the tentacled eye monster inside a reanimated Arthur, and a fleet of Yutani's warships were converging on the island, too. (It all felt like a cliffhanger leading up to another season, although Alien: Earth hasn't officially been renewed by FX yet.)
TVLine spoke with showrunner Noah Hawley to get some answers to our burning questions, like: Where do Wendy and her friends go from here? And what does he have planned for a possible Season 2? Read on to get his answers.
TVLINE | I want to start at the end, with Wendy declaring, "Now we rule." Now that she has control of the xenomorphs and of Boy Kavalier's island, what is her next move? Is it just her asserting a freedom that she's never really had?
Yeah, I mean, I think on some level, she's trying to take control because everything feels so out of control, right? It's a very childlike thing to do. And I think it's gratifying to us. We always root for the underdog. And we've been watching these kids kind of be manipulated. Slightly is manipulated by Morrow, and [Wendy] is manipulated by Boy Kavalier. These kids are all gaslit and muscled, so I do feel like it's very gratifying to see them take control. At the same time, she says, "Now we rule" with such conviction, but we see the ships coming in, and we see the creatures that are out, and we realize that there's a lot of hubris in that statement. I grappled with this theme in the fourth season of Fargo, where Chris Rock's character thought that in order to have more safety, he needed to have more power. But the reality was that more power is less safe, right? Because the more power you have, the more people are coming after you. So I think that something similar might be true here, that Wendy and the Lost Boys, they've made the statement. They've declared themselves their own nation state or whatever, and now watch out.
TVLINE | I think some fans will be disappointed that Boy Kavalier was not, in fact, mauled to death by a xenomorph in the end. What made you decide to spare him?
Well, in success, I'm making a lot more seasons of this show, and you don't want me to make it without him, you know what I mean? It's the challenge Shōgun faces going into the second season, having killed off one of everybody's favorite characters: Now what?
TVLINE | And as you mentioned, the dangers aren't done. There's the eye monster that crawled inside Arthur's body and reanimated him, and the plant monster is still out there. Wendy really only has control of the xenomorphs, so she's not as safe as she thinks.
No, and the fly, obviously, eats synthetic creatures. I think what the fifth hour, that took place in the spaceship, was designed to show you is that there's a level of complexity to one creature, let alone five creatures, right? And the human monsters. That compounds, you know. It's sort of geometric, how out of control things get, once the ticks are out, and then the eye midge is out, and then, oh right, there's a xenomorph that's out. There's so many moving pieces that my feeling was, as in that fifth hour, it creates a really thrilling sense of "I don't know what's going to happen next."
TVLINE | Joe and Dame Sylvia both did things to hurt Wendy in their own way, but they're both sympathetic to her, too. Is she still holding a grudge against them, or do you think she can find a way to forgive them?
I think Dame Sylvia, she's still really crosswise with. I think Joe, less so, because he's her brother, and I think he does have her best intentions at heart. Whereas Dame Sylvia, I think, is convinced that what she's doing is right for the kids, but it's really what's right for herself. It's interesting: Early on with [actress] Essie Davis, we had these conversations, and she talked about Dame Sylvia's relationship with Marcy, and how Marcy must really look at her as a mother figure. And I thought, "Well, I'm not going to correct you, but I think that's really messed up." Because you have this girl who lost her parents, and she's been taken to this research island by these strangers, and this nice woman is saying, "Call me Mom" or whatever. It's kind of f–ked up. I like that you, the actor, have internalized the good intentions of your character, but for the audience... There was a moment before the transition where she kisses her on the head, and I decided to keep it in, because to me, it's not professional. You know what I mean? She's sort of showing that she is not objective about this relationship in a way that I think later, you see, "Oh yeah. She was never really a scientist in this moment. There was always some weird mother thing she had going on."
TVLINE | I loved the Kirsh/Morrow fight in the lab; it was like WrestleMania in there. What went into choreographing a fight between two superhuman combatants?
You know what's great, when you have actors like that who are very physical, is that they can sell it. Tim [Olyphant], especially, is a very precise [actor], and can really sell it. And Babou [Ceesay], he brought that sort of fury to it that I thought was really great. Rob Inch, who is our stunt coordinator, they choreographed a great fight that had enough beats to it to feel really substantive. And it was narrative, with setbacks, and who had the upper hand, and then, I think, it probably ended in a way that was surprising to most people, that Kirsh lost that fight. Then, of course, Morrow is saying, "Man will always win. It's a question of will." And then 20 seconds later, he's choked out by the machine, right? It's like, well, don't count your chickens, right?
TVLINE | You haven't officially been renewed for Season 2 yet, but this ending really felt like the start of something new. What kind of things would you want to explore in another season? Would you pick up right where you left off?
When I think about Alien, I think about levels of containment, right? And the ship is a level of containment, and now it's on the earth, and now they're in this lab, and now they're out of the lab, and now they're on the island. So it feels like Season 1 was a story of those levels of containment being broken, you know? And so Season 2 feels like it's about, well, what's next, right? The island can't contain them anymore. What's next? There are too many wild cards, too many moving pieces, Yutani is landing... so it's an expansion in scope, which I think is important. My job in a first season is to invest you as heavily as I can in these characters. And then once we've done that, now we have to expand more. If the show's not growing, it's shrinking, right? So I guess that's what I would say about it. Obviously, where we are on the timeline and the constraints that we have, given the history that we know, that's something that, with a green light, I'll really have to delve into. Because if the first season is a proof of concept, now I have to build something that can sustain over multiple seasons.
TVLINE | Yeah, like you said, there's sort of a natural end point, with the original Alien movie taking place just a couple years later. Do you see the show dovetailing with the movies at some later point?
I think that's a larger conversation, and one that I probably will need to have on the film side as well, since as far as I know, they're continuing to make Alien movies, and to the degree that those might have connections. It does feel like now that both [the 2024 film Alien:] Romulus and Alien: Earth have succeeded, it's probably good to have a little coherent strategy there.
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