Season 1, Episode 5: ‘In Space, No One Can Hear …’
What manner of man becomes a Morrow? I don’t mean a cyborg, though this flashback episode of “Alien: Earth” gives us that answer: The chief security officer of the doomed spaceship Maginot was once a “feral street kid with a palsied arm.” He was “taken in” by a long-ago Ms. Yutani, the grandmother of the woman who is currently in charge of her family’s mega-corporation. She, or the company she ran, gave him his mechanically enhanced, transforming arm.
In exchange, he gave Yutani a lifetime. More than a lifetime, in fact.
It’s never been clear what tempts people to take jobs on Weyland-Yutani’s long-haul space flights. By the time the gig is over, you’ll have spent years, perhaps decades in cryo-sleep, frozen in stasis while the world moves on without you. Morrow already mentioned that he had a little girl back home who died long ago; now we know the circumstances.
Morrow clearly joined the mission in order to permanently provide for his little girl, whose painfully cute pet name for him is “Dadabear.” But eight years into the journey, Morrow received word from the Company that his daughter died in a house fire. A printed-out memo indicates 53 years would have to pass between Morrow hearing the news and Morrow returning to Earth to collect his daughter’s belongings. By then he might be the only person alive who remembers she existed.
So for the bulk of his time in the cold recesses of space, surrounded by people he doesn’t like, collecting disgusting and deadly creatures capable of wiping out everyone aboard, Morrow has known he has nothing to return to. All this time, all this loss, is for nothing. I think that might break me too.
But nothing can be turned into something if you try hard enough, or if you need it to badly enough. With nothing else to cling to, Morrow now has only two priorities. He must fulfill his mission to bring back the specimens safely to Earth, or it really will have all been for nothing, and that cannot be borne. And he must do so to honor the trust and care shown to him by the chief executive’s grandmother long ago.
The bulk of this episode is set on the Maginot, the vessel where Morrow has been trapped for decades, in the days just before the crash. As such, it’s a showcase for the crackerjack cast that Noah Hawley put together for the space mission, an impressive assemblage of actors who look about as 1979 as the original film’s crew. The problem for these voyagers is that there’s a saboteur on the ship who is running around blowing fuel tanks, frying navigational equipment and, you guessed it, setting aliens free. (To be fair to the culprit, several of the critters manage to escape on their own.)
Only a portion of the crew is awakened to deal with the mess. In addition to Morrow, there’s the ship’s new captain, Zaveri (Richa Moorjani), who gets automatically promoted when the original captain gets himself xenomorphed. Chibuzo (Karen Aldridge) is a slightly absent-minded science officer, in charge of studying the specimens. Rahim (Amir Boutrous) is a medical officer and ex-junkie. The salty old engineer Shmuel (Michael Smiley) and his deeply stupid apprentice, Malachite (Jamie Bisping), are tasked with keeping the ship in working condition. Then there’s Mr. Teng (Andy Yu), a creepy and obviously malfunctioning synthetic who spends his free time creeping on a cryo-sleeping woman he has a crush on.
Other than Morrow, none of these people make it back to Earth alive.
Almost everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. The xenomorph implanted within Zaveri’s illicit on-the-job lover, Bronski (Max Rinehart), erupts from his chest while he’s in cryo-sleep, bursting through the glass and running amok around the ship. Teng and Zaveri both meet their maker at the end of the beast’s retractable jaws.
It gets grosser. When those leech-like insects I’ve been mentally calling “blood bugs” figure out how to unlatch their own containers and escape, Chibuzi doesn’t notice one of them depositing its young in her water bottle. (Eww.) When Malachite drinks it, he swallows a quartet of creatures that begin exsanguinating him from the inside. (Ewwww.) Then the bugs emit a deadly poison gas that kills everyone in the med bay when Dr. Rahim attempts to remove the thumb-sized insects crawling around on Malachite’s esophagus. (Ewwwwwww.) Rahim, Malachite and Chibuzi all die from inhaling the fumes.
Here’s where things get kind of interesting. The whole reason Chibuzi left her drink unattended was to put away the eyeball octopus, whom she saw was becoming agitated. What she didn’t realize was that the creature was — there’s no other way to interpret it — banging on its glass enclosure in a vain attempt to warn her that the blood bugs were escaping.
Later, the eyeball octopus frees itself as well. That’s a wrap on poor Shmuel, the only member of the crew smart or cynical enough to realize the Company counts on the isolation of space travel to produce employees who are incapable of doing anything else. I don’t know why I never thought that most long-haulers would wind up being repeat customers, decades or even centuries removed from the friends and families they left behind, but it makes perfect sense.
But again, the eyeball’s actions are interesting. When it is puppeteering Shmuel’s body, it attacks a xenomorph. I don’t mean it defends itself — it makes its human vessel roar, then jumps on the thing’s back and starts biting through its exoskeleton with its plain-old human teeth. Eventually it goes after the creature directly.
This a good time to ask some pretty important questions: How did Weyland-Yutani know exactly where, in full the vastness of space, a bunch of grunts could retrieve four or five species of incredibly dangerous alien animals? Are they all from the same ecosystem? Do they have any experience or relationship with one another in nature, be it symbiotic, parasitic or predatory? Could the eyeball monster be some kind of lethal protector, evolved or designed to stop the other species from spreading?
Another question ties directly to the film series. I’ve tried to limit the degree to which I’ve let the movies influence analysis of the show and tend not to go much deeper than a working knowledge of the xenomorph life cycle and an appreciation for how the opening titles mimic Richard Alan Greenberg’s work on Ridley Scott’s original film. But depending on how much this show picks up on the continuity established when Scott returned to the franchise with “Prometheus,” are these animals, like the xenomorphs, also essentially the creations of sentient beings — humans, synthetics, another highly evolved race of aliens?
These questions are interesting, but incidental to the pleasures of this show. Foremost among them is Babou Ceesay’s performance as Morrow, a man who at any given moment seems both a million miles away and close enough to stick a cyborg knife-finger through your torso. That’s what he does to Petrovich (Enzo Cilenti), the crew member who turns out to be the saboteur.
Which leads us to the action item on Morrow’s agenda. In the only segment of the episode set after the Maginot’s crash and Morrow’s escape from Prodigy forces, he has an audience with the current Ms. Yutani, who is accompanied by some truly ludicrously Orientalist music cues and costumes. (In fairness, perhaps that’s the point: Trillionaires are unlikely to be purveyors of good taste.) Morrow tells his boss that with all due respect to her and her recently dispatched team of corporate lawyers, he is going to hunt down Boy Kavalier and kill him.
Morrow knows Kavalier paid Petrovich to sabotage the ship in such a way as to bring it down in Prodigy-controlled territory, the crew be damned. Kavalier couldn’t care less about the crew, of course — what counts is the cargo. To Morrow, his mission is literally the only thing that matters. When the Boy Wonder tried to scuttle that mission, he painted a bull’s-eye on his own forehead, though he doesn’t know it yet.
They never do. What is the “Alien” franchise if not a creature-heavy exploration of humankind’s hubris? And why should the richest and most powerful in its universe be any more likely to see when they’ve run off the cliff, waiting only for gravity to do its inevitable work?
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