Breaks

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Alien: Earth, Season 1 Episode 6, “The Fly.”]

Alien: Earth continues to explore the growing tensions between corporations Prodigy and Weyland-Yutani in the show’s latest installment, “The Fly,” which stages a pivotal negotiation between Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) and Yutani (Sandra Yi Sencindiver).

As viewers recall, Episode 5 revealed that Boy Kavalier’s Prodigy had infiltrated and orchestrated the crash of USCSS Maginot on Earth, with the intention of claiming the alien cargo aboard it. Finally, the corporations come face to face at a hearing during which Kavalier sits back and throws his bare feet up on the table.

Yutani makes the argument that the cargo aboard the ship is Weyland-Yutani property that must be returned, while Kavalier lays out the reality of that cargo in front of a mediator representing the governance known as the Five; he is gaslighting to the extreme, suggesting Yutani aimed to attack Prodigy territory.

While Kavalier agrees to deliver Yutani’s ship back to her, so long as it doesn’t knock over his building further, the pair end up in a bidding war over the extraterrestrial cargo. Kavalier argues that if she wants it back, she’ll have to pay, as he drives the price higher and higher. Yutani goes so far as to offer $50 billion, to which he seems to agree, before reminding her she can retrieve it after the required quarantine.

“He’s going into this meeting with that little trick up his sleeve, which gives a little bit of light in your eyes as you go in,” Blenkin tells TV Insider about Kavalier’s approach to the pivotal conversation. “But I think also he’s just a character who doesn’t believe it’s possible for him to lose,” Blenkin adds.

In a way, Blenkin notes that the blind confidence his character carries likely comes from a place in which he’s never really faced consequences. “The recklessness goes so far because I don’t think he’s ever had anything come back to bite him in his life. We all go through those little moments in our lives when we have our little comeuppances, and what’s funny about him is that he hasn’t learned many lessons.”

Patrick Brown / FX

According to the star, during filming, “We didn’t really have air conditioning in there, so it was hot and intense, and it really felt like a kind of pressure cooker situation.” Despite the tense nature of the conversation, though, Blenkin notes, “Sandra and I had a great time.” The scene was almost more extreme as well as Blenkin reveals when he was rehearsing with director Ugla Hauksdóttir, “I had the idea of getting up on the table and stuff… she let me push it a little bit too far.”

Ultimately, he says, “I got up on the table and she was like, I’m not sure if it’s gonna work because it’s meant to be a business meeting, it’s a professional meeting.” Still, Blenkin adds, “My instinct with this character is that you might as well just go the whole hog as long as the performance is not completely like a caricature. He’s an affected person because he’s his own hero in his own hero’s journey.”

Perhaps that explains Boy Kavalier’s fascination with Peter Pan, whose stories he reads over the intercoms to his hybrid creations. The choice to interpret the text for his own narrative is something Blenkin says is “quite on trend.”

“In this case, a trillionaire… having a really formative reading experience that he’s clearly really attached to this book, but completely misinterpreting the point of the book. I really love that.  I love that he doesn’t even stop to think twice about whether the book might have a different meaning,” Blenkin adds, hinting at his impressionable and mostly indestructible hybrids.

What will playing with aliens and Yutani mean for Boy Kavalier? Stay tuned to find out and let us know what you thought of his deal-making moment in the comments section.

Alien: Earth, Season 1, Tuesdays, 8/7c, FX