Review: Alien: Earth Episode 5

Alien: Earth Episode 5, aka “In Space, No One…” aka “The One Where They Straight Up Remake Alien” is an extremely well crafted episode of television. I feel like that’s important to note in the back half of the same sentence in which I make a Friends joke at Noah Hawley’s expense. But the title of the show's fifth chapter tells you everything you need to know. It’s obviously a riff on the original film’s famous tagline, but it’s the ellipses that does it. That ellipses says “you know the rest, etc. and so forth.” More than that, it’s emblematic of the tightrope this series has been walking since it was announced.
Spoilers follow for Alien: Earth Episode 5 - "In Space, No One..."
“In Space, No One…” takes us back to the events that lead to the Maginot’s crash-landing in Prodigy territory. The opening moments of the first episode were already an effective recreation of the iconic Nostromo, the setting of Ridley Scott’s original, but Episode 5 takes it a step further. The hour-long episode essentially remakes the entirety of Alien, complete with unsuspecting engineers playing victim to an alien’s nature, crew members ignoring quarantine protocols in spite of other, more correct crew members warning them of the consequences and a guy getting speared from behind and lifted into the air as the blade sticks out of his chest.
Noah Hawley, who directed the episode himself, remixes each of these elements. Except for the engineers buying the farm. They’re a one-to-one stand-in for the never-to-be-topped duo of Parker and Brett from 1979. But for Alien: Earth’s fifth episode, instead of Ripley talking sense, it’s Morrow. And instead of the xenomorph jabbing it’s tail through the torso of an unsuspecting victim, it’s… well, it’s Morrow again.
The real lesson here is that “In Space, No One…” is another opportunity to put Babou Ceesay’s Morrow front and center, and we’re all better off for it. It’s an entire chapter that casts him in a different light, a not so subtly Ripley-hued light. He’s got a daughter that’s passed away while he was on his mission and, even though we didn’t find out until the director’s cut of James Cameron’s Aliens, so did Ripley. But suddenly his cold and ruthless nothing-to-lose demeanor and his claim that the creatures he was ferrying back to Yutani were his “life’s work” begin to be a little more sympathetic. We can at least relate to that, if not manipulating children by threatening their family members. But this is another episode that proves Alien: Earth is never better than when Babou Ceesay is on screen.
The rest of the crew on the Maginot aren’t far behind though. They’re a collection of passive aggressive, sniping little kids. They don’t seem like good people, even a little bit. Granted, assistant space engineer Malachite is just kind of an idiot who’s mostly there to be an idiot the screenwriters can use as an excuse to write exposition (it’s a great trick by the way. If he wasn’t an idiot there’d be no reason to talk out loud about basic stuff everybody should know). He probably didn’t deserve to be sucked dry from the inside out by space ticks, but everybody else on the ship, at minimum, had an incompetent hand in their own demise.
But the thing about this episode that’s such an impressive threading of a needle is in the dramatic irony of it all. I’m typically not a fan of flashbacks and dramatic irony is a device more often than not used incorrectly. So an entire episode halfway through a season that jumps back to see the beginning of a story we’ve already seen the end of is not my favorite type of television. In this case though, it’s a savvy bit of structure. Narratively speaking, all of this could have been in the first episode and the series could have proceeded chronologically and it would have been fine. However, if the first bits of Episode 1 were a recreation of a few iconic moments from Alien, doing a full Alien five episodes later is a proposition as slippery as the KY they use on the xenomorph costume. Had the series started with a “sorta remake” of the original film, I don’t know that it would’ve gotten the credit it deserves. The comparisons to the original might have been too overbearing, too unfavorable, for the real story of this season to unfold without holding a grudge.
As it stands though, placing the flashback in Episode 5 allows us to spend some very worth-it time with Morrow, while the revelation that Boy Kavalier had a hand in the sabotage helps shift the official antagonist role onto him and off of Morrow. Kavalier is clearly an unscrupulous prick, but now that we know all of this is his doing, he’s so much worse. It further adds to the at least small amount of tragedy at play with Morrow. He’s always been a pawn in somebody else’s game, but there’s one more layer added to it, and one more reason to keep doing my…
Credit Roll Needle Drop Check In
“In Space, No One…” ends with the opening track off Siamese Dream, The Smashing Pumpkins’ second album. “Cherub Rock” is full of a grungy desire to rebel against the groups you’re aligned with.
Freak out, give in, Doesn’t matter what you believe in.
Stay cool, and be somebody’s fool this year.
For Morrow, having devoted his life, including missing the death of his daughter, to this, it’s about finding himself still plugged in to the machinations of the mega-corporations running the planet, and doing what he can to play by their rules and stay in their good graces. But all that thematic stuff is hidden under an urgent, building opening riff that brings an intensity front and center to mask the more insecure elements of Billy Corgan’s lyrics. There’s regret in Morrow. We saw it in the tearful way he looked through his daughter's letters on the Maginot. But more than that, there’s anger and determination to the cyborg that’s his true driving force.
Plus they skip the second verse then go straight to the chorus that leads into that guitar solo that absolutely rips. Early Pumpkins were the best Pumpkins and I’ll take no feedback that says otherwise.