Call it what you will, but this felt more like a penultimate episode to me. Or at the very least, this is the turning point in the third act, where we start heading toward the resolution of the season.
Because we’re in a flashback episode. And it doesn’t suck.
The episode is called “In Space, No One…” Ellipses. Which obviously points at the fact that in space, no one can hear you scream.
Spoilers from here, because I’m going to start at the end.
Flashbacks Done Right
I keep wanting to equate a lot of what I review to Star Wars: The Acolyte. Why? Not because I think this sucks. Not at all. It’s because The Acolyte was one of the most egregious shows out there when it came to setting up time jumps and flashbacks incorrectly, essentially telling us events in the wrong order compared to how stories are normally, stereotypically told.
The most important part of storytelling is laying the groundwork and then providing information contextually that helps us move forward. That’s what this episode does.
What we get is the story of the Maginot. The Maginot, if you remember from the first episode, is that Weyland-Yutani ship that reminded us all of the Alien crew. It’s got the guy. It’s got the smoking people. It’s got everybody sitting around in the mess hall. It’s got the aliens. The whole nine yards.
But what you really get is a backstory about Morrow. This is Morrow’s story, and this information is going to be important for whatever ultimately comes.
The Company Man
At the very end, we finally arrive at what I believe to be the present, and Morrow has come back to Yutani. Specifically, to the granddaughter of the person who originally hired him and sent him out 65 years ago.
You can see this relationship clearly began offscreen. She tells him her grandmother was very fond of him, that her grandmother said she could depend on him, that he was all these wonderful things. He’s grateful. She had no reason to take him in, a feral boy with a pied arm begging in the street. Her grandmother always said he was the fiercest thing she’d ever seen.
Then she says maybe the lawyers can fix this. And he tells her that unless lawyers mean soldiers, they’re going to have to do this his way.
He has become the epitome of a company man.
So when she walks out and says “give him whatever he needs,” I went, whoa.
If you understand the lore of the Alien franchise, you understand that Weyland-Yutani, and Yutani specifically, is the foundation of the entire thing. To see that at this point in time they’re loyal to him because he’s loyal to them is a type of relationship we don’t see often with Weyland-Yutani in any way, shape, or form. Normally Weyland-Yutani is give me the thing, give me the thing, give me the thing. He’s in that corner.
The Investigation
Watching the whole thing play out, he gets woken up because of the mistake that happened. So he begins an investigation.
First he has to rebuild all the logs, because someone tried to delete them. Then he uncovers that a crewman woke up. The one thing the computer tells him is that the cryo tubes don’t report whether someone’s in them. They only report whether they’re on. I thought that was a funny distinction. Literally.
So he finds this crewman talking to Boy Kavalier. And apparently the guy was trying to get whatever they were searching for out in space.
That makes this a very different proposition. Because you sit there and think, hang on, I thought it just crashed, and that’s why it happened to catch his attention, look, something shiny. No. Not at all. Apparently he was after this.
It begs to reason that in this future time period, with corporations running everything, they would, like any good government, have espionage. Whether or not they call it corporate espionage or something else, at the end of the day it boils down to having someone hired to keep an eye on what’s happening in other countries, other corporations. That person makes contact: hey, there’s this thing going on. And he says okay, cool.
So the guy sets it up to crash. There’s a line where somebody says this has just gone from a spaceship to a missile. Then he cuts off all navigation capability, so they’re stuck on their course, and the follow-up is that it just went from a missile to an arrow. Meaning it isn’t even coming in on any approach. It’s just crashing.
We get all the way up to the doorstep of episode one. The crew member who ends up as captain is at the window while he’s inside the control center, and she’s saying let me in, let me in, and she turns on the welding hand and welds the door shut. You remember that from the opening montage pieces in the first episode. So this is the fullness of that story.
The Show We Thought We Were Getting
Did anybody else watch this and think, this is the show we thought we were going to get with Alien: Earth?
I sure did.
When I first signed on to watch this show, I figured the whole series would be this. I assumed there was no way you could bring the xenomorph to Earth, one, because of the nature of how highly infectious it is, at least from what we’ve seen in the other movies. But they’ve done a great job controlling that.
I figured when the first episode started that we’d be on a ship, and that crew would be the ones observing this thing. We’d see them collect them. We’d see them catch them. Then things would go bad, very similar to what happened on the Nostromo. And eventually you’d get to this moment, and at the climax of a series like that, oh, we’re going to get to Earth, it gets to Earth, it’s going to infest, blah blah blah. Almost like Andor, you’d watch heroic crew people sacrifice themselves so the xenomorphs could never reach Earth.
That was the show I originally thought we were signing up for.
Au contraire. What we signed up for is this horror alien menagerie show. And a lot of folks are going to say this episode took us off the track. No. This gave us the contrast. Episode five hands us the show we thought Alien: Earth was going to be, and then proceeds to blow that out of the water.
The first part of the season was telling us who Morrow was and what his mission was, with little tidbits as we went forward. This episode is showing us who Morrow is, what he’s willing to give up, what he has already given up. We come away with a better understanding of the economics of that future too.
Everything Out There Is Intelligent
Seeing the other creatures showcased here was surprisingly, very, very exciting.
Everything is intelligent, by the way. That thing we thought was a big alien leech from earlier? Super smart. It finds a way out of its little containment case purely through observation. Then it gets to where one of the science team has left her water bottle and squirts its offspring, these tadpole things, into the water.
Then you go through this tension follow: she picks it up, she goes to drink it, she gets distracted, all of it, until eventually you land in the mess hall with the kid, who starts choking, grabs her water, and guzzles it down. And you go, oh God. Then they have to open him up, and you see all the little tick things crawling around inside him, and when they try to remove one they squeeze it, which releases this noxious thing, and they have to lock down the medbay.
Super dangerous creature. To say nothing of the eye creature, which is one of the most terrifying because it so clearly looks like the most intelligent one. It appears intelligent to the point that when it inhabits the mechanic and Morrow points the electrical shooter at him, the creature stops and backs up. It’s intelligent enough to know.
To say nothing of the face huggers themselves, which of course get loose, and then we see the alien, and that eventually takes us full circle to the original scene from episode one.
This series did more than just say here are xenomorphs on Earth. It really did set the stage for the idea that there’s a whole lot of other scary crap out there in space, and in space, no one can hear you scream. What a neat show.
Watching the Performer Work
The one thing I found most interesting about the alien is the craft. We’ve already seen there’s a practical suit a performer wears for the more vigorous work, the running and chasing scenes, and there’s also a puppet they use for a lot of the close-up material, where the little mouth comes out and everything.
So to see the scene where she’s running from it, and you watch it come around, and you see the way it’s moving, I found it fascinating to watch the way that actor performs it. It honestly reminded me of the kind of performance you get from the actor who played the alien on Discovery, who also played the Silver Surfer. His name escaped me while I was recording, so I did the same thing I did with Tim Meadows during my Peacemaker review and dropped it in the bottom corner. No notes over here. Just blind.
Perfect Placement
Then you end where I started: him meeting Yutani in the present and swearing he’s going to get this thing back.
We see nothing else. We don’t see Wendy. We don’t see the Lost. We see none of what’s happening over at Prodigy. All we see is this scenario.
Normally this would be a filler episode, or I’d be annoyed because the momentum wasn’t moving forward. But this was timed correctly. This was the perfect sweet spot. I would not have put this episode anywhere else in the season. It fits perfectly here. It told the story it needed to tell and it progressed us, and it didn’t go too far back, so I’m not in danger of there being more flashbacks coming.
This told a wonderfully encapsulated story, butted us right up against where episode one starts, and now we can jump back into the present with a full understanding of who Morrow is and what he’s doing.
This episode did what this type of episode is supposed to do. That is impressive.
The Verdict
I loved everything about this episode. Not only is it a character piece, and not only is it a pseudo-filler episode, because it isn’t one, it actually delivered wonderful storytelling and wonderful character work.
This episode gets a solid 9 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
I’m truly excited to see what comes next, and I hope you are too.
Did you love it or hate it? Are you enjoying the story they’re telling, and the lore they’re building around everything? Let’s talk about it in the comments on the video above.
