While Alien: Earth fans nervously await FX’s confirmation that the Noah Hawley show will be returning for a second season—that cliffhanger finale made it seem pretty likely—there’s still plenty to ponder about season one. There are lots of big lingering questions around exactly how the superpowered hybrid Wendy (Sydney Chandler) was able to talk to Xenomorphs—and why these apex predators decided to obey her commands.
The people behind the show aren’t divulging any details just yet, but we do have a little more sense of how Alien: Earth approached those crucial communications.
We get a visceral demonstration of Wendy’s special connection with the Xenomorphs when we see her close encounter with something entirely new in the sci-fi franchise: a sort of toddler-age Xenomorph. We’ve seen eggs, facehuggers, chestbursters, and seven-foot monsters, but a cute li’l Xeno is unexplored territory. That’s right, we said cute—which is exactly how the show’s sound editor/designer, Lee Gilmore, also described it in a new interview with IGN.
“We wanted to make sure that when we see the baby Xeno, when he comes out for the first time and she’s talking to him, there’s almost a cute element to it,” explained Gilmore. “And it was great, because it kind of lulls the audience into… This is a cool little pet, you know. And then he totally rages out and slams himself against the window, and you realize, oh, this thing’s a killing machine.”
One of Gilmore’s biggest challenges for Alien: Earth was coming up with the language Wendy uses to talk to the aliens, no matter their size. It’s a clicking, whirring array of sounds, and the pint-sized guy got his own special adjustments. On the show, it’s totally convincing: these two are fully conversing.
“You had to find a balance between cute, chirpy things that signify that he’s still a baby, and then you slowly start integrating more aggressive sounds,” Gilmore said. “And when he’s full-grown, he has a much deeper body to him… We really were very specific in what kind of low elements we added to it. But once he’s like a full-grown adult Xeno, he’s got a lot more weight, a lot more body to him, his growls, and he’s seething.”
Read the full interview, which goes into a lot more detail about not just the Alien: Earth language but the creation of sci-fi languages in general, at IGN.