While on the promotional tour for Fargo Season 5, Writer/Director Noah Hawley recently spoke with KCRW’s ‘The Business,’ about his upcoming FX Produced Alien series. NPR critic and self described sci-fi nerd Eric Deggans asked Hawley about the show. The discussion starts with Hawley reiterating some of his goals with FX’s Alien, including the exploration of human societal dynamics.
“There’s a moment in the second film where Sigourney Weaver says, ‘I don’t know which species is worse — you don’t see them screwing each other over for a percentage.’ I think there’s something really intriguing about exploring humanity in all its goods and evils and then trying to recreate for an audience those feelings you had in watching those first two films — which isn’t easy in a franchise that has had four subsequent films and another film coming out soon, but I think I have some tricks up my sleeve.”
A Xenomorph attacks a crane arm in Alien: Covenant
One particular quote of interest was his response to the question of if his show would connect to the Alien prequels, and it doesn’t sound like it will. Hawley emphasized his preference to the ‘retro-future tech’ of the first two films as opposed to the more advanced technological aesthetic of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. He also alluded to how he didn’t much care for the idea of the Xenomorph as a recently created creature…
“Ridley and I have talked about this — and many, many elements of the show,” Hawley says. “For me, and for a lot of people, this ‘perfect life form’ — as it was described in the first film — is the product of millions of years of evolution that created this creature that may have existed for a million years out there in space. The idea that, on some level, it was a bioweapon created half an hour ago, that’s just inherently less useful to me. And in terms of the mythology, what’s scary about this monster, is that when you look at those first two movies, you have this retro-futuristic technology. You have giant computer monitors, these weird keyboards … You have to make a choice. Am I doing that? Because in the prequels, Ridley made the technology thousands of years more advanced than the technology of Alien, which is supposed to take place in those movies’ future. There’s something about that that doesn’t really compute for me. I prefer the retro-futurism of the first two films. And so that’s the choice I’ve made — there’s no holograms. The convenience of that beautiful Apple store technology is not available to me.”
Head on over to KCRW to listen to the full audio interview. Thanks to The Hollywood Reporter for the news. Keep your browsers locked on Alien vs. Predator Galaxy for the latest Alien Series news! You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube to get the latest on your social media walls. You can also join in with fellow Alien and Predator fans on our forums!
IT'S ANOTHER STRAIN!
I think if davidjockey becomes a widely touted fan theory, it could actually pre-empt Ridley from doing this (assuming he ever gets to make a third prequel).
He'll seek out some other unexpected twist, rather than playing into something expected.
With or without acid blood? 'Cos the Neomorphs in Covenant don't have it, and the Neomorphs in Inferno's Fall do.
(A question asked by Prometheus itself.)
Face it, it's David in that chair. You know it's true. So do I. There is no elephant man.
Absolutely. David should have absolutely nothing to do with the downed ship on LV-426. I like to think the Jockey is a more ancient ancestor of the Engineer, or even their creator.
And I want elephant man. But we don't all get what we want, do we?
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Something like David finding another type of Juggernaut older than the Engineer civilization. The ship is a black monolith from Odyssey 2001 with very advanced artificial intelligence. Once David sits in the chair, the ship engineers David and transforms him into a biomechanical avatar of the ship, which takes control of David's synthetic consciousness. The biomechanoid ship, David, the Space Jockey (David fused with the ship, becoming its pilot...and in a way a manifestation of the ship itself
https://i.ibb.co/mDCpM2H/Picsart-24-02-09-18-42-37-184.jpg
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I wouldn't mind the idea as a what if-kinda comic/graphic novel.🤓
The 26 Draconis strain of the pathogen actually can affect synthetics and turn them into biomechanoids, so there would be precedent for that.
No! Bad NA! He can be in the suit. He can be in a chair. But he cannot be in THE chair. It's not allowed.
But how about him and one of those suits fuzing together, via some (potentially black goo-enabled) Engineer-hybridization process that leaves David as something of a biomecchanical being? One maybe... grafted to a chair, at that?
https://i.ibb.co/p1qqRwJ/Screenshot-20240208-220615-Gallery.jpg
Thank you Mr.Jones
#canon
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brainfarts~https://s13.gifyu.com/images/SCRJd.gif
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I Duno...At lest not made be me, I foubd it on google🤓🙏
🙈🙈🙈🌌☮🤘
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Can you make a davidjockey AI image? 👀
I want as little explanation as possible. Find an egg in the crashed ship, and get cooking.
https://i.ibb.co/8zQ9sb5/360-F-286518064-B2-RHTi5-GNO19-Tyl5e-Mdk7z3543o-Li9-Fj.jpg
Thanks for the info. I have a little unfulfilled scientist in me, so I love hearing this. And this is exactly why I hate when someone says we shouldn't explore the Alien's biology, cause it would take away the mystery and make it less scary. When you can get exactly situations like you described which could be a great basis for a story. You try to learn and probe and understand. For every new bit of info, you get 2 new questions/mysteries. There's the true horror. You try and you try, you get pieces here and there, but you never can truly understand and predict the creatures.
But I guess writers just don't care enough about biology to go that rout often. That's why Scott Sigler's short was so brilliant and why Alex White's novels really struck a chord with me. They actually did some research and made the creature more compelling, made me want to know more.
Good worldbuilding is hard to come by. I mean, Ridley didn't care that his Engineers looked different in Covenant, made them look like poor Romans, and have one single relatively small city?! That's Paradise?! One Pathogen bombardment really got the whole planet sterilized? With no hints of how or why... The definition of anti-worldbuilding.
To be honest, I was really just focusing on the AI aspect of the discussion.
BETTER: AI generated genomes.
Quite the contrary- it "generates a unique reaction to every genome it encounters".
He states that the pathogen is an AI.
Whilst I agree that's very interesting take (I really need to find the time to sit down and read the RPG, it's been sitting on my shelf an eternity!) and whilst I also hold my hands up and admit I'm probably the first to be guilty of reaching for the CMTM when fact checking something (habit I guess), I gotta agree with SiL on this one; the EU has very little baring (close to zero to be fair) on the movies. That doesn't make it any less fun to contemplate (I prefer Alan Dean Foster's novelisation of Covenant over the movie for example, though whilst I have brought it up to suggest others (in this case, the writer) have a shared interpretation/preference of how the Xenomorph was created, I couldn't/wouldn't use it as an actual argument as "this is what happened" as EU is simply licensed fanfiction that occasionally references/is referenced by other EU media. As this is the alien movies section, we cannot take anything the RPG offers as fact, just a cool "what if". 😊 The titan books series on the other hand, and the current video games, most likely do take the RPG into account, so that fits nice in their continuity. But for this discussion we have to go by what we do or don't see on screen (for better or worse).
When does he state outright that it's like the Thing?
According to Heart of Darkness and Building Better Worlds, the Trilobite was one of the Protomorphs created by the Fulfremmen and the Living Proto-Hive, and its size is consistent with the big one in Prometheus. Maybe the version in the mural is the Naiad, which is the juvenile form.
Kinda... the mural shows a face-hugging parasite with a resemblance to a trilobite, but its head-sized.
No, the Trilobite was already a stage in the Protomorph life cycle millennia before the Prometheus mission.
Spoiler
Fair point on the DNA similarities, but it was still a bit specific. A person infected with a minute amount of accelerant has to have sex with a sterile person. Maybe Shaw's sterility didn't factor into it, but as presented in the film - it's quite specific.
I do love the Jockey's being obsessed with reproduction, though. I remember that being one part of Original Sin I did genuinely enjoy.
That is stated outright by David in Advent.
I like a post that lets me pretend I'm a little bit smarter for having read it.
I had an idea that the black goo may be a type of molecular AI, like a T-1000 but on a microscopic scale. So unlike real evolutionary forces that have no end-goal in mind, the goo has a specific agenda that may take several generations to achieve. The agenda will change depending on current circumstances. The goo would draw upon a database of past organisms it has encountered and formulate its strategy based on that, a bit like the shape-shifting alien in The Thing. This would account for the variability in its behaviour.
TC
When you factor in Ridley's comments about the Engineers not being able to reproduce themselves anymore and experimenting with pro-creation, and the fact the Engineers and humans have identical DNA - it's not terribly specific.
I must confess, initially I was the same as you on this one, but I was more forgiving once seeing 'Covenant' as we did get some correlation; it appeared (to me) to demonstrate that when the pathogen adapts to an organisms reproductive system, hybridises and creates new forms; in Humans (delivered via sperm) in fungus (delivered via spores)- both organisms method of reproduction, the end result of each being not too dissimilar overall (deacon or neomorph). This is another reason I like to think the mural shows a source creature, and no matter what you do with it, it is so dominant that you will always eventually get a xeno-esque creature down the line from it one way or another (a lot like the Xenomorph; we've seen human hosts morphed into ovomorphs, and a queen lay ovomorphs, but it always gets there in the end, and the end result is always similar no matter how it gets there, or which host organism is used (human vs dog/ox for example still produces a xeno-form).
Thank you, I'm glad to hear that! 😊 Truth be told, I try not to use many lab examples here on fear of coming across pretentious (or boring the hell out of people 🤣) But in truth (and going a little off topic a moment), we've *just* published a peer-reviewed paper on a topic not too dissimilar, highlighting anthropomorphic assumptions and complexities with bioassays in aquatic chemosensory research (it's in the latest edition of 'Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution') and part of the reasoning for that was there has been a lot of controversy in the science community lately with (long story short) two different teams basically accusing the others of falsifying results and that each others work cannot be reproduced (It got a bit nasty with lots of teams and universities taking sides and supporting one or the other). Our findings have been that actually, neither were wrong; there are just so many damn variables to consider, that in reality, it's almost *impossible* to reproduce another's work exactly in different lab settings.
Myself, I've had a similar experience; my research identified a sex-specific chemical we could use to trap an invasive crustacean. We tested it in the lab - it worked a dream. We tested it in the field - it worked a dream. The university put up the money and we secured an international patent, our partners in the US who are crying out for a solution have been waiting eagerly as we go into the product development stage...everything was great. I went to Portugal last year and decided to use it as an opportunity to grab more data. Same setup, same species, same conditions. It didn't work. They were terrified of it. Fearing the chemical hadn't survived the flight, I spent last year testing in the uk again, confirming everything was fine (worked perfect)... and planned another Portugal trip last September where I spent a month there testing. Once again, it didn't work, and the animals were burying/hiding from it.
I've checked every damn variable imaginable; pH, temperature, salinity, average crab size, ratio of males to females, diet, etc etc.. but for whatever reason, the same species in Portugal, does not respond the same way as the same species in the UK does to the cue. 😅 And on the surface, this makes no damn sense! Why the same chemical under the same conditions produces two totally different results - Especially when we know it's a sex cue, and both green crabs in the uk, and green crabs in Portugal will mate. Unfortunately, we can't say "this doesn't make sense" - that's what it does, we see that's what it does, so now we have to address the how/why and make logical sense of it (frustrating doesn't cover it, especially when I'm now in PhD write-up year and
now have the equivalent of a whole other PhD worth of testing to do to figure this out - argh!) 🤣
Going back to the pathogen in Prometheus/ Covenant, I confess, I do have the bad habit of approaching the fiction as if it's reality 😂 (which standing back and looking at the bigger picture must be annoying/frustrating to others) my starting point is usually "the movie shows this, so that's what it does.. so how does it do this?" And work backwards from there... perhaps I give the writers too much credit, but I always like to think there was some logic to their thinking when they put pen to paper, even if it's not explained. Of course, we all know this isn't always the case (egg on the Sulaco anyone? 🤣) but even in that situation- the movie shows an egg in the sulaco, so that is "fact" - my take is we now need to look at the available evidence and work out the most logical reasoning behind the "how" it got there; even if in the real-world was simply studio demands.
I only consider something a retcon if you have to actively change something. If it can be explained by simply interpreting what is provided on screen, or there's a suitable gap in the knowledge that leaves an opening for suggestion, I'm usually ok with that. 😊 And I think that's why I don't mind the diversity of the goo.
However, during his time in PROMETHEUS, he was probably working in 'mystery box' mode. 👽👉👈
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Btw, the worm in
Commander ShepardHolloway's eye was a mutated sperm?https://s13.gifyu.com/images/S0eqb.gif
Cause Plot Goo. I do agree it's ridiculosly inconsistent even in the least inconsistent depiction of the Pathogen. Like Hicks said, if it was just a movie version of the Royal Jelly, I'd be okay with that. The problem is that that isn't the case. The prequels barely fit into that idea and Alex White nudged it more in that direction which was a breath of fresh air. But the comics, novels and games said "to hell with that"...
Rules and clear effects. Consistency. As an example, anime use crazy plot devices/powers all the time and the best ones demonstrate clear rules, effects and consistency.
I don't get how writers get excited by the idea of "my plot goo can do anything I want" (using the age old bland excuse of "a mystery is always more fun than explaining things") instead of "lets create an interesting story mechanic".