A Tale of Two Machines: On the First Season of “Alien Earth” | Interviews

Characters in the “Alien” franchise have always wrestled with identity crises. Whether it’s human beings trying to transcend the limits of their finitude through interstellar travel, or synthetic machines passing themselves off as humans, there’s always a disconnect with one’s baseline identity that drives protagonists and antagonists alike. “Alien: Earth,” the first television series set in the franchise, takes place two years before Ridley Scott’s original film and continues this existential tradition through the experiences of two new entities.

In the eight-episode first season, which concluded Tuesday night, showrunner Noah Hawley centered on three evolved beings: hybrids, synths, and cyborgs. Sydney Chandler plays the hybrid Wendy while Babou Ceesay plays the show’s only pure cyborg, Morrow. The two are fascinating inverses of each other: Wendy is human consciousness tucked away inconspicuously in a sleek synthetic body, while Morrow bears a clunky robotic arm. Both go on similar journeys but arrive at vastly different destinations.

Morrow, who is a loyal-to-the-end worker for the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, says early on in the series, “Wouldn’t that be nice, to be all machine instead of what I am, the worst parts of a man?” Yet by the show’s end, he’s learned to embrace his humanity and see it as a strength. This manifests when he fights with an enemy synthetic named Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant). In their battle, Morrow, bloodied and bruised but standing over a nearly offline Kirsh, rasps “In the end, man will always win … it’s a question of will.”

For Ceesay, the line is a full-circle moment for his character. “When you get a character, you want to take them from A to B,” Ceesay told RogerEbert.com, “But when I looked at ‘A,’ I saw a man who wishes he were more synthetic than anything else. He views his emotions as a liability and pushes down his feelings because they get in the way. But by the time you get to the final episode, the tone shifts. It’s as if in each blow he lands on Kirsh, he’s saying, ‘You might be two thousand times smarter than me, but be careful because I have some things you can never even fathom: love, will … you can’t mess with me.” Ceesay also sees the battle between Kirsh and Morrow as part of the larger conversation around technology’s invasive presence in our lives. “I’m sure these are all things we want to roar to AI right now,” he joked, “What Morrow believes humanity has to believe the same about ourselves, otherwise we’ll go extinct.

Yet whereas for Morrow, the journey was that of learning to make peace with his human and robotic halves, for Wendy, the journey was inverted. “If you look at Wendy’s movements at the beginning of the show, she’s more jittery,” Chandler told RogerEbert.com, “She’s swiveling in her chairs, can’t sit still, and is easily distracted. It’s very childlike and human. As Wendy progressed throughout the show, I wanted to play with her stillness and stoic nature as she embraced her machine side.” This culminates in a cathartic sequence when Wendy and her hybrid siblings are locked up by their maker, Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin). At the snap of her fingers, Wendy opens the door of the cell, and she and the other hybrids walk towards Kavalier menacingly. She facetiously tells Kavalier to run, almost curtseying with her hand.

“Throughout the show, Wendy has been preyed upon by these larger forces that said they had her best interests in mind, when in reality, they were exploiting her naivete, childishness, and body,” Chandler said. “It was fun to work with Sam for that scene. Wendy has entered Kavalier’s game countless times, but with that hand gesture, she’s making him enter hers. It’s Wendy’s game now.”

Additionally, the tragic arc of Wendy’s story is that as she becomes gradually disillusioned with the human beings around her, she goes from reluctantly shedding her humanity to willfully doing so. “When she starts to see cracks in other human beings, whether it’s with her disappointment with her brother or with her mother figure, Dame Sylvia, she doesn’t want to be a person anymore,” says Chandler. “When Wendy lets the machine in, the jitters are gone. Machines are extremely efficient and, above all else, care only about staying alive, and that’s what she adopts in these final moments.”

Ceesay and Chandler both cite how working on practical sets helped them better understand their characters. Ceesay shared that the glove he had to wear, which acted as his prosthetic arm, was three millimeters tighter than his actual arm, and that extra bit of comfort helped put him in the headspace of Morrow, who is still trying to reconcile his flesh and metal. “I view it as analogous to cooking,” Ceesay said. “Even if the team could CGI my entire arm, I still want that glove piece because that physical element makes me feel complete. I try to layer that sensation into my performance and see what comes out in the broth.”

Chandler found that the physical effects–a fun throughline she’s noticed having now worked on projects like “Sugar,” “Pistols,” and “Don’t Worry Darling,” which also emphasized real-life sets–helped stretch her as an actor in ways she might not have been as comfortable with if everything was CGI. “It makes my job a lot easier,” she reflected. “Especially when you’re acting against actors who are playing the creatures, you have something with weight that you’re working against.” She cites a moment working with Cameron Brown, the actor who plays the Xenmorph, in key moments in episode 3 and in the finale. “I was really pulling him… I had to use my whole body, which gets my heart rate up and puts me in the moment.”

As for a hopeful Season 2, Chandler hopes that any future stories explore the budding relationship between Wendy and the two Xenomorphs, who are now running rampant on Prodigy’s island. While they seemed responsive to Wendy’s commands and conversation, Chandler stressed that the dynamic isn’t as clear-cut as it seems. “It’s not a pet,” Chandler shared, “There’s still a fear factor; it’s not safe, and I think Wendy still does not know the line of safety in communicating with these Xenomorphs. It’s something she and the aliens are walking through together. She cites how the hybrids and the Xenomorphs have had mirroring journeys throughout this first season, and she wonders where they might deviate. “I’m curious to see where their relationship goes. Both Wendy and the Xenomorphs are hardheaded… I want to see what the backlash to each other might look like.”

Ceesay is curious as to how more “Alien: Earth” seasons might build upon another throughline of the franchise: that there’s nothing more dangerous to the universe than a corrupt CEO. “Boy Kavalier represents what we all love and fear. We all feel like we need exponential growth to be alive,” he laughs, “But that’s a scary prerogative to have at the forefront. Where are these people going to take us?”