Movies & TV Alien: Earth Alien: Earth Works it out in the Remix: “In Space, No One…” In which human greed (and stupidity) has predictably disastrous results… By Leah Schnelbach | Published on September 3, 2025 Credit: Hulu Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Hulu And we’re back with another chest-bursting episode of Alien: Earth! Episode Five is titled “In Space, No One…” and was written and directed by Noah Hawley, and it’s, well… We spend the whole episode trapped on the Maginot with a whole mess of aliens! I loved all the alien action, and got really annoyed by most of the human action. Let me explain. Let’s Dissect a Still-Quivering Facehugger This week’s episode takes us back to the Last Days of the Maginot. We primarily follow Morrow, as he’s woken from cryosleep and learns that their Captain, Dinsdale, and another crewmember, Bronski are dead—Bronski has a facehugger attached to him, while the Captain was splashed with alien acid while trying to help Bronski. The aliens escaped because of a fire on the ship, but… how could there have been a fire, when everyone’s been in cryosleep pods? And why is the Nav system messed up? It’s clear, to Morrow at least, that there’s a saboteur aboard. Zaveri is now in charge, and clearly overwhelmed. Morrow attempts to take control of the ship from her, citing her forbidden romance with Bronski but, unwisely, settles for reminding her that the cargo is the top priority here. Rather than immediately consulting with MUTHR, she takes time to say goodbye to Bronski, who is now frozen in cryosleep with a facehugger still affixed. She pours soil helpfully labelled “Utah” over his pod while musing over happier times… in bed. Which is a REALLY bad idea because suddenly he has the facehugger attached in her memory of him, but it’s a fun thing to intercut with scenes of Morrow watching the security footage of the two of them having sex. After this she finally talks to MUTHR, who, like Morrow, tells her that the cargo is the top priority and insists she acknowledge that. Meanwhile Shmuel and his apprentice, Malachite, try to fix the ship, Teng wanders around being a fucking creep, and Morrow goes through security footage looking for evidence of escaped aliens and/or sabotage, before taking a break to sit in his quarters and read the mail he’s received during cryosleep, which is how he learns his daughter has died in an accident. He remembers the two of them together on the beach, as he tells her that whenever she wants to talk to him she can look right up into the sky and know that he’s thinking of her. Credit: Hulu But we don’t get to spend too much time with Morrow’s emotional wreckage, because there’s a quarantine breach. Obviously a little frozen cryosleep isn’t going to stop a determined chestburster. And this is where things really started to split for me. For some reason, even after the quarantine breach, Dr. Chibuzo decides to work, alone, in the lab, with the Leech Aliens and Eyeball Octopus. And she’s eating a sandwich and drinking from a thermos as she does this. This is hilarious—as a person who doesn’t get squicked out by anything, really, it always amuses me when stories set up en-squickening scenarios. In this case, she’s explicitly testing whether the Leeches will only eat living, oxygenated blood, or if they can get hungry enough to eat, say, a long-dead rat. She’s been starving them. She knows very little about this lifeform, and chooses not only to taunt them with her own food, but also risk contamination by eating during this test. So what happens. Leech #2 figures out how to wiggle the top on its tank, Eyeball Octopus notices this and distracts Dr. Chibuzo by banging on the wall of its tank, and Leech #2 escapes and spits ummm Leechpoles (???) into Dr. Chibuzo’s water, and THEN it wiggles into her sandwich while she’s putting Eyeball Octopus back on its shelf. Teamwork, baby! When this show hits it really hits. But just then Dr. Rahim walks in, spots Leech #2, and grabs it with a pair of tongs. But wait! Acting Captain Zaveri has called a meeting, and Dr. Chibuzo brings her thermos with her. We may yet see the triumph of Leech & Octopus. And thus we come to the most annoying scene of the episode. Teng insists on smoking even though it annoys Dr. Chibuzo. Acting Captain Zaveri repeatedly yells at everyone to “shut up” and “focus” as she attempts to explain what’s going on, but they just… keep talking, interrupting her, and joking around even though their Captain is dead, another crewmember is dead, specimens have escaped, and everyone in the room knows it. Like I get gallows humor, believe me, but this isn’t that. This is just people who are trapped on a ship with an alien acting like middle school class clowns with a substitute teacher. Zeveri finally docks the Apprentice Engineer Malachite’s pay, but this barely registers because—stay with me—he puts a comically large pile of seasoning on the pasty he’s about to eat, it makes him cough uncontrollably, and he grabs Dr. Chibuzo’s thermos and chugs her water. Yes! Infection! Morrow interviews the crew, gets some extremely obvious information from Teng (perhaps the person sneaking around and sabotaging them is faking cryosleep to avoid suspicion!) He sifts through the newly restored logs, and finds the saboteur: Petrovich, who’s talking to none other than Boy Kavalier. Boy Kavalier bribed a Maginot crewmember to set a collision course with alien wackiness? Man it’s like you can’t trust trillionaires who have no sense of human empathy. But this snaps the first half of the season into focus: Morrow knew he had to survive at any cost, because he’d be the only one who could expose Boy Kavalier. There was no advance warning to New Siam because its barefoot jerk of a ruler didn’t want there to be any warning. And the aliens weren’t a sudden distraction from the Transhumanism Project—he was already planning alien experimentation behind the rest of his researchers’ backs. He just jumped on Wendy’s suggestion that the crash site also become a test site. But hang on, we can’t dwell on the Boy Kavalier reveal, the rest of the crew are doing stupid shit again. Credit: Hulu Poor Malachite vomits blood and is taken to the Med Bay. The doctors scan him and see a bunch of the little alien larvae things all over his organs, Morrow yells at them to stop, Zeveri and Shmuel yell at them to operate, and they decide to crack the kid open and operate without so much as slapping masks over their faces. WHAT. FUCKING WHAT. The second Dr. Rahim tries to remove one of the larvae, it emits a burst of poison and both doctors are dead. Morrow finally takes control of the ship, goes off to hunt Petrovich with his assistant Clem, and tells Former Acting Captain Zaveri to work with Shmuel to try to keep the ship from crashing into New Siam. Clem doesn’t last long, but Morrow is able to stab Petrovich with his sword arm. Former Acting Captain Zaveri is frozen with fear and grief outside the Med Bay, and by the time she pulls herself together to join Shmuel the Xenomorph has found her. It chases her through the halls, she reaches Shmuel, but, alas, his left Eyeball looks an awful lot like our Octopus friend. The Alien, annoyed, leaves—which I found kind of hilarious. Even more hilarious is the next moment when Morrow pops out of a vent like a Whack-A-Mole, having waited for the coast to be clear. The Xenomorph comes in after Shmuel/Eyeball Octopus and kills the host body (RIP Shmuel, you were the only genuinely nice person on this ship I think) and then Eyeball Octopus slithers out of Shmuel’s eye socket and fucking leaps at the Xenomorph’s face. Respect. Morrow assesses the alien clusterfuck, ducks around them both, and dashes down to MUTHR as the episode joins up neatly with the opening moments of the premiere. Poor Former Acting Captain Zaveri wakes up to what is both an objectively terrible and objectively awesome situation. How often in life do you get to watch two aliens fight? I mean, granted, it’s the last thing she gets to do in life, but it’s still kinda neat. But now we know why Morrow welded himself into the panic room alone: (a) he had to make sure people on Earth knew of Boy Kavalier’s treachery, and (b) his crewmates were all the STUPIDEST PEOPLE WHO HAVE EVER LIVED AND HE NEEDED TO GET AWAY FROM THEM. In This Space, Everyone Can Hear My Opinions Credit: Hulu Here we have something of a remake of the original Alien, with a few elements from the prequels stirred in. This episode is taut and, when it wants to be, really frightening. I love it when the show becomes a full horror. As ever, Babou Ceesay’s performance as Morrow is excellent, and I loved Amir Boutrous’ chaotic energy as Dr. Rahim, Karen Aldridge’s deadpan Chibuzo dealing with the aliens, and Andy Yu’s fucking creepiness as Teng. Shmuel’s genuine care for his apprentice, Malachite, was a bright spot of compassion in this often bleak fictional universe, and Michael Smiley and Jamie Bisping sell the hell out of the relationship. Most of all, seeing Octopus Eyeball and Leech #2 work together to escape the lab, and then later, seeing Octopus Eyeball launch itself at a whole Xenomorph was fantastic. But there are some elements of the prequels dotting this episode—and they happen to be the things that annoy the crap out of me. While I have gradually come to appreciate some elements of Prometheus (largely the enormous conversation about whether a Creator God would ever want to speak with Their Creation, and, sidenote, whether said Creator God retains Right of Repair, and can pull the plug if They decide the Creation isn’t up to snuff. [I leaning farther and farther toward “Yes” on that second one with each passing day]) and Alien: Covenant (largely David 8 in general, and his relationship with Xenomorphs in particular), I maintain that those movies don’t work for me for three big reasons: the annoyingly aggro leadership of Charlize Theron’s Meredith Vickers in the first one, the annoyingly milquetoast leadership of Billy Crudup’s Acting Captain Oram in the second, and the BRAIN-BURSTING STUPIDITY OF EVERYONE IN BOTH OF THEM. And I’m divided on this week’s episode because while I loved a lot of it, and found a lot of the human reactions realistic, it also just bugs me when people make this many stupid decisions. A few stupid decisions I can understand—these people are underpaid gig workers in an incredibly stressful situation. But when everyone on the ship, the scientists, the Acting Captain, everyone, acts like they were, I don’t know, raised in a Truman Show-style suburb where nothing bad ever happened and then got dropped into the ship? And have the combined survival instincts of a newborn fawn? At least fawns know how to burrow into fucking leaves. (I also don’t know if I buy that Formerly Alive Former Acting Captain Zaveri could outrun a Xenomorph as well as she did, but also that scene was tense and fun and the show needed to get her up to MUTHR’s door, so she could die right outside the window while Morrow sealed himself in.) And now we know that that shoeless scamp Boy Kavalier was behind all this, and Morrow’s planning to hunt him down like a Xenomorph after its prey, which promises a fun second half of the season. On Immort(AI)lity Credit: Hulu The whole reason Petrovich agrees to sabotage is because Boy Kavalier has promised to upload him into a synth body. Now all he has to do is survive the part WHERE HIS SPACESHIP CRASHES INTO A BUILDING. THESE FUCKING PEOPLE. Boredom’s Not a Burden Anyone Should Bear I choose to believe that Dr. Chibuzo quoted Pee-Wee Herman to the Eyeball Octopus. Vera Lynn’s 1939 classic “We’ll Meet Again” plays as Morrow learns of his daughter’s death, and this is both a genuinely touching moment, and a reminder of the awesomeness of Bioshock. This week’s end credits song is Smashing Pumpkins’ “Cherub Rock”, from their second album, Siamese Dream. David 8 Was Right Dr. Rahim makes a snippy comment about Morrow being a cyborg, but, well, I notice Dr. Rahim didn’t make it to the end of the episode, did he? Whatever Happened to “Save the Cat”? I’ll quote Morrow here: “Nothing matters except the cargo. Not you. Not me. Not the fucking cat.” This is extra shitty because the only time we see the cat, who seems perfectly nice and friendly, they’re hanging out in Morrow’s quarters. Scattered Transmission in the Void of Space! Credit: Hulu WHERE did they recruit these people??? Both the Apprentice Engineer and Morrow’s assistant seem like college interns who were, I don’t know, lured into the ship via a trail of candy or something! I understand that Acting Captain Zaveri is thrown into a terrible situation, while grieving, but didn’t she get any training that made her second-in-command in the first place? What is UP with Teng? Why hasn’t he been put back into cryosleep until he can stop being a creep to his sleeping crewmates? Why does he smirk at Morrow in a way that seems to scream “It is I, the saboteur you seek!” during an interrogation? When he says the thing about faking cryosleep, are we meant to infer that he’s been up to, uhhh, shenanigans, too? Cause I don’t want to think about that! You know what’s great? Every single time Morrow uses the sword embedded in his arm. Quotes! Dr.  Chibuzo, to the Eyeball Octopus: “Take a picture, it’ll last longer.” Boy Kavalier promises to make Petrovich the richest man in the “cousin-marrying shithole you fuck cows in.” Petrovich: “What if I don’t survive the crash?” [ed note: IF???? FUCKING IF????] Boy Kavalier: “Well that would suck for you, wouldn’t it.” Petrovich: “They want their monsters? Here they come.” [ed note: OK, at least you went out with a good line.] [end-mark] The post <i>Alien: Earth</i> Works it out in the Remix: “In Space, No One…” appeared first on Reactor.