“I think we can all agree that the planet is about to get much warmer and much wetter,” says Hawley, and Bangkok is a tropical location filled with rivers and channels. Originally, he envisaged the Previgy soldiers to move new Siam on trains, but as soon as he visited Bangkok: ‘It became very clear: we will put people on boats, [and] This will help sell this idea that the water has regained some of the city. “

Hawley’s design team built a square mile of new Siam in Unreal Engine, the same graphic software used to develop video games as Fortnite and Final Fantasy VII rebirth. In the eyes of Prodigy, there is a ‘low low’ of the city, according to Hawley: Humanity Minus, Humanity Plus and Humanity Prime (although this concept is not discussed on the screen in the final cut of the series).

“The higher you go, the richer you are, and the lower you go, the poorer you are,” Hawley says. When miracle child soldiers descend to where the Maginot crashed, we see ‘Humanity minus’ living in dark underground houses, but as they climb the company’s supertatings, they stumble on a Louis XIV-themed party straight out of JG Ballard’s Highly. Even higher, we first meet the CEO of Weyland-Yutani thousands of feet above another corporate city (an unnamed one that Chicagoane will admit).

“Where are the adults” in a world run by trillionaires?

In our real present, Elon Musk, a 54-year-old man who still thinks that 4/20 jokes are funny, becomes one of the first trillionaires. In the 22nd century of Strange: EarthThe ‘latest trillionaire ever’ is Boy Cavalier, played by Samuel Blenkin, an egomaniacal ‘boy Genius’ who founded Prodigy when he was 6 years old and is now in the early twenties.

“The CEO of this company tells himself that he is Peter Pan,” says Hawley. ‘And then you read Peter pan And you go, “It’s a dark book.” He kidnaps these children, he takes them to this island, [and] It is implied that he gets rid of them as they start to grow up. ”In a nice literary parallel, Cavalier creates the first hybrids in a research facility on a secluded island called Neverland and renamed them afterwards Peter panlost sons.

Next to his costume designer Suttirat Anne Larlarb, Hawley decided that Cavalier would wear pajamas without shoes throughout the series because he owned everything in Prodigy City and Neverland. “Everything is his house,” Hawley says. “The thing with money I noticed is at some point, everything is just free. You do not feel the loss of the money; You don’t actually buy something or aware of the transactions. ‘

But Cavalier’s ultra -healthy mindset also affects the way he sees and treats other people. “Triage the Rescue by Income Bracket,” he commands his right hand to the Maginot Crash becomes Prodigy City in a massage case event. Hawley says Cavalier “is a way of being too literal I feel when I look all over the world in which I live now, what is: Where are the adults? Where are the people who think more about tomorrow than today?”

“Retro-Futurism” meets brand new samples

The first episode opens on the Maginotwhere Hawley’s production designers carefully create the look and feeling of Ridley Scott’s Nostromo. “That’s what Stranger is, as far as I’m concerned, ‘says Hawley.’ This is the retro futurism. This is that old cathode [ray] Tube monitors. This is the green ASCII text. These are those crazy keyboards with the Egyptian hieroglyphs, how do they even know what they write? ‘

While 1979’s Stranger spent Hawley 40 minutes to establish the everyday lives of space trucks, Hawley knew Strange: Earth Had to achieve the same thing in four minutes. “If you translate a film on television, your first job is authenticity,” says Hawley, so the Maginot is designed based on Ridley Scott Nostromo Blueprints “to the props.”