Alien: Earth Season 1, Episode 5
"In Space, No One…"
Writer/Director: Noah Hawley
Cast: Babou Ceesay, Richa Moorjani, Karen Aldridge, Michael Smiley, Jamie Bisping, Andy Yu, Max Rinehart, Enzo Cilenti, Victoria Masoma, Amir Boutros, Sandra Yi Sencindiver, Samuel Blenkin
We know things went really bad for the crew of the Maginot well before it crash landed on Earth. What this bottle episode presupposes is … maybe it was really, really bad?
Dead Space
We return to the Maginot in the hours before it makes planetfall. Security Chief Morrow (Ceesay) stirs from cryosleep to some rotten news: the captain is dead and the science officer has an alien specimen hugging his face. The skeleton crew attempted to surgically remove a Facehugger while it was getting cozy with the captain's face. The resulting acid blood ate through the guy's neck and into the operating table, the floor … we know how it goes. New captain Zaveri (Moorjani) was engaged in a forbidden romance with said science officer, Bronski (Rinehart), who is now an unwitting incubator.
Perhaps just as pressing: there's a non-alien saboteur about, fudging the navigation and exploding their fuel reserves. Nobody's especially helpful as the cyborg Morrow launches into his investigation. As we gleaned in the pilot, this is a crew of washouts tasked with transporting some of the most dangerous parasites in the galaxy. Now one of them is committed to weaponizing the ship in its final approach home.
If we didn't know Morrow is such a sinister Yutani hardliner, I'd almost feel bad for the guy.
Showrunner Noah Hawley takes a stab at humanizing him though, revealing through cold corporate missives that Morrow's daughter died in a fire ten years into this 65-year voyage. Still not an excuse to go all Ian Holm on your crewmates though. Yutani's the problem, man. Not these sweathogs!
The episode zeroes in on the plight of the space truckers — even before any aliens enter into the equation — as implied in the original film. This is a rough life, sleepwalking in the dark. As senior engineer Shmuel (Smiley) reminds his dimwitted apprentice, Malachite (Bisping), they've all traded away decades for a pittance. When they act up, officers like Zaveri dock fractions of their promised shares. They sleep for months or years at a time only to return to an unrecognizable Earth, most opting to do it all over again.
Chain-smoking medical officer Rahim shares Shmuel's nihilism, bemused by the absurdity of humanity's push to collect these monsters.
"This space bug is proof of how stupid smart people can be," says Rahim, sounding like a less caffeinated Ian Malcolm.
Zoo Crew
Our newfound alien friends get busy this week and we learn some new details about their behaviors, all of it troubling.
Dr. Chibuzo (Aldridge) is a bit lax with her monstrous charges in the ship's lab, lazily dumping a dead rat into the specimen vat with those gluttonous ticks, then failing to secure the lid. She's even got a sandwich like a bored pathologist in a crime procedural. One tick manages to prize its way out — potentially aided by some pantomime from the Eye Midge in its nearby enclosure? We know that this tentacled eyeball is hella smart, but its actions in this episode beg some fascinating questions as to its relationship to the other specimens. Are its gestures to the ticks the equivalent of Kino Loy's "One Way Out" speech in Andor?
I mean, it's probably a lot more self-serving than all that, but I don't think charisma is its dump stat.
The fugitive tick excretes baby ticks into Chibuzo's water bottle when she's not looking, and we don't take our eyes off of it until Malachite takes a gulp from it several minutes later. The episode is rife with fun (?) fake outs and reversals like this. See also: creepy Mr. Teng (Yu) not turning out to be an android saboteur, just a dude who likes watching people sleep.
He ultimately leads Morrow to the actual culprit by way of the communication logs. An engineer named Petrovich (Cilenti) has been FaceTiming with Boy Kavalier (!!!), plotting this sabotage all along.
Petrovich wants one of Prodigy's rumored body transfers in exchange for his efforts. Kavalier says he'll add him to the top of the list if he succeeds and doesn't die trying. We already know that only adolescents are deemed suitable for the hybrid procedure, and Petrovich is well into middle-age, and far older on paper. With that anemic carrot dangling before him, he sneaks out of his scheduled cryosleep to engineer the collapse of the Maginot.
Let's just pause and picture Petrovich climbing out from a vent only for a drooling xenomorph to scurry back inside. A pretty spooky Far Side panel.
Teng's nights of ogling sleeping crewmates are over; the xenomorph administers death-from-above.
Elsewhere, Malachite vomits a good liter of blood to escape Shmuel's latest civics lecture. We've seen what those ticks do to the outside of a human body. Now to see what happens when they're ingested. Zaveri and Shmuel observe through a window into the med bay as Rahim and Chibuzo pry open Malachite's chest for a better look. Rahim is adamant on life saving measures, but when he forcibly removes one of the bugs from the kid's digestive tract, it releases some kind of noxious, deadly gas. Zaveri floods the room, killing everyone inside. Every human anyway.
Morrow ultimately subdues Petrovich, impaling him through the back with his augmented arm, inescapably reminiscent of a xenomorph's barbed tail. In the process he unintentionally opens the lab to the rest of the ship. In his final moments, Petrovich is looking high on his own supply, not too bothered to leave Morrow and the rest of humanity to the monsters.
The Eye Midge orchestrates its own escape from the lab and manages to take Shmuel as its host, piloting the graying engineer like a fleshy mech from its roost in his eye socket. Again, always the left eye. From there it's able to attack Zaveri. When Morrow reaches them, the eye puppets Shmuel to let out a bestial cry, summoning the xenomorph. When Morrow and Zaveri escape, the Eye Midge seems to turn on the xenomorph, attempting to attack from its human host. Now, xenomorphs don't exactly have eyeballs, per se, so that rules out one of the Eye Midge's favorite plays. We don't see the full fight, but we can presume both escape, with the Eye Midge forced to abandon Shmuel's ruined body for the ship cat's.
Crew Dead
The xenomorph catches up with Zaveri, of course. Thanks to Morrow for the assist, locking her out of the communications room and stowing away inside the crash chamber just in time.
We flash forward to Morrow meeting with the latest generation of Yutani CEO, and it's probably nice to trade alien drool for some serious 2120's drip. Lady Yutani suggests letting the lawyers work all this out, but Morrow wants to deliver Kavalier's head. We learn that Grandma Yutani pulled Morrow up from poverty, replacing his "palsied arm" with something new and shiny. Was that enough to make him this fiercely loyal company man for life? How much direct control does the company have through his cybernetic components, which we know extend to his brain? He clearly still feels guilt. So many questions!
Leaving Morrow to survey a gleaming skyline, she instructs her assistant to provide him with unlimited resources. Uh oh.
Next week's episode is called "The Fly." No body horror connotations there, surely.
