The first two episodes of Alien: Earth have given us a lot to take in, including Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin): the trillionaire boy genius behind the Prodigy corporation who eschews footwear and, overall, seems like an egotistical a-hole.
Show creator Noah Hawley was deliberate in creating the Peter Pan-like character, who also is the mind behind the technology that creates the hybrids: beings with synthetic adult humanoid bodies that have a biological child’s human consciousness uploaded into them.
“So much of what defines Alien and Aliens is this idea that there’s this nameless, faceless Weyland-Yutani corporation and these individuals—the space truckers or the soldiers—they’re really at the mercy of this nameless, faceless corporation,” Hawley said about Boy Kavalier in a press conference Reactor attended. “In our day and age, our corporations have faces and the faces of these young technocrats, who are celebrity CEO billionaires. So, if I had done the 1970s version of capitalism [that we see in Alien], it wouldn’t have felt right for the world that we live in today.”
He later added that “it always felt to [actors] Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton [in 1979’s Alien] that they were at the whim of this larger corporation. But here, I think we really feel like it really is all about the whim of Boy Kavalier, how he feels from moment to moment. ‘Yeah, let’s send these billion-dollar prototypes to a crash site. That sounds like a good idea, right?’ So, we’re in a different state where the individual is at the mercy now, not just of this nameless, faceless corporation, but these sort of boy geniuses.”
You can follow the destructive whims of Boy Kavalier when new episodes of Alien: Earth premiere on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET on Hulu and FX.
