Season 1, Episode 3: ‘Metamorphosis’
The “Alien” franchise explores two overlapping nightmares. The first is the Alien, a cold and implacable force against which humanity is defenseless. The second is humanity itself, which through technological hubris and old-fashioned greed might well invite its own destruction. Against the first we are helpless; with the second, we are all too eager to help.
Where, then, does this leave a man like Morrow? The cyborg science officer aboard the doomed deep-space research vessel the Maginot may or may not have the freedom to make his own decisions regarding his mission to preserve the hostile alien life forms the ship was carrying. It seems highly possibile that his paymasters at the Weyland-Yutani Corporation have hacked his brain and forced him to comply.
He also speaks of those awful aliens as his life’s work, however, the mission to which he gave up 65 years of his life, in frozen slumber, in order to see it through. Everyone he knew in his old life, from his daughter to his crew, is now dead. The eyeball octopus, the bloodsucker, the dangling tentacle plant, the barfing bug and xenomporph are all he has left. Even when Ms. Yutani waves him off, he tells her that he will get those specimens back.
Whether motivation or compulsion drove him to seal himself inside a safe room and allow the monsters to slaughter his fellow voyagers, the decision clearly weighs on Morrow. While downloading the ship’s data into his computer-augmented brain — a process that involves a set of light-up tubes and, evidently, a good deal of pain — Morrow tries to explain his plight to Slightly and Smee (Jonathan Ajayi), the childlike human-synthetic hybrids left behind to guard a cache of Alien eggs.
“There’s a feeling you get,” he says, “when the monsters come, and you can’t — you don’t — help.” The dilemma leaves him wishing he were the robot the hybrids suspect him to be, since being fully mechanical would relieve him of the moral burden of what he has done. But when he is interrupted by Kirsh, the hybrids’ synthetic guardian, and he sees one of the Alien eggs beginning to hatch, he makes a leap into the chasm created by his crashed ship and disappears.
For a time, at least, it seems as if Morrow’s mission is a failure. Kirsh and the hybrids secure the alien specimens and bring them back to the island headquarters of the genius inventor Boy Kavalier and his upstart mega-corporation, Prodigy. (The company’s teddy-bear logo is particularly noxious considering its conduct.) Kavalier is especially smitten with the xenomorph corpse, seeing an ocean of potential in that hunk of obsidian exoskeleton and acidic blood.
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