I don’t know which is sloppier – the crew of the USCSS Maginot or the writing on Alien: Earth.
At long last, in Episode 5, we get to see what happened aboard the Weyland-Yutani research vessel. We only caught glimpses of it in the season premiere. I guess waiting until Episode 5 scores points for “nonlinear storytelling” or something, and this is series creator Noah Hawley trying to be clever, but tinkering with the chronology makes very little sense.
Don’t get me wrong, I often enjoy a bit of nonlinearity in my movies and TV shows. I loved how the various storylines in Weapons folded over one another, revealing tantalizing new details each time around. But here? Why save the most exciting storyline for the fifth episode? We already know what happens at this point. Ultimately, it just kills the suspense and turns what ought to have been an exciting episode into a slog.
Then again, in order to truly create suspense you have to give us characters we care about and want to root for, and the crew of the USCSS Maginot has maybe one of those, in Morrow (Babou Ceesay) and I’m still not sure if that’s thanks to the writing or thanks to Ceesay’s strong performance. Spoilers ahead.
Whatever the case, he’s the only character onboard the wretched space vessel that behaves with any sense whatsoever (and even that’s questionable at times) and the only character to be given any kind of fleshed out backstory. His involves a daughter he left behind on Earth to go on this decades-long space voyage. She was a young girl when he left and would have been an old woman by the time he returned. You have to be pretty desperate to leave your child to grow old while you’re away. We learn that she died when she was 19. She would have been in her 70s when Morrow returned from his interstellar voyage.
Space Saboteur
The episode picks up in media res, with Morrow being woken from cryo-slumber to deal with a big problem: An alien specimen has escaped. The captain was killed by a facehugger and another crew member, Bronski, has one attached to his face. An explosion caused a fire that has damaged the ship’s navigation system. Things aren’t looking good. “We’re a missile,” the ship’s engineer says. Headed straight toward Earth.
From here, it’s one sloppy or stupid decision after another, to the point where I was actively rooting for the Xenomorph and the eyeball alien (T. Ocellus, aka Species 64) to win. Which, of course, they do, so I guess I should be happy. Only, I’m not happy. This episode had all the trappings of a really great Alien movie, and at first I thought to myself, “This is what the franchise should have been doing all along!” But it’s trappings only, nothing of the meatier stuff.
It looks like Alien and feels like Alien but at its core this is a shockingly amateurish take on space horror. Let’s go over a few of the inane things this episode wanted us to choke down:
- First, they put Bronski and the face sucker into a cryopod. I guess they assume this will freeze both the alien and the human until they make it back to Earth. But they reveal later, after Bronski is dead and the facehugger is gone (transformed into the Xenomorph) that they already knew it could survive in the vacuum of space. What made them think it would freeze in a cryopod? This is just on item on a long list of security snafus.
- One of the ship’s scientists, Chibuzo (Karen Alridge) sits calmly with various alien specimens in the lab. I’m not sure why everyone is so calm throughout so much of his episode, but this is just one of many moments that make little sense. (They talk about Xenomorphs at one point, so they clearly know what these monsters are capable of – though, this also confuses me since I was under the impression that at this point in the timeline, humans didn’t know about Xenomorphs at all; this was something that bugged me when Boy Kavalier mentioned them in an earlier episode). In any case, Chibuzo sits eating and drinking her water in the lab, which feels like a weird thing to do in this particular environment, but it’s necessary for the plot, so she’s throwing all caution to the wind. One of the blood tick aliens, cockroach like insectoids, is able to open the top of its container and sneak out while Chibuzo is distracted by the eyeball. It dumps a bunch of little alien tadpoles into her water bottle, which she keeps open on the desk, before it’s caught and returned.
- Chibuzo is perhaps the sloppiest member of the crew. Not only does she eat and drink in the lab and carelessly allows the blood tick to escape unnoticed, when she’s summoned she fails to properly secure the eyeball alien’s tank to the wall. A red light flashes but nobody notices. I guess that despite having a bunch of dangerous alien species on the vessel and a major security breach, there is no system-wide alert that goes off when this happens. This is bizarre. Surely the technology for this exists in a fictional universe that includes faster-than-light space travel. All it would take is a basic alarm. But no, the crew is blissfully unaware of this wildly sloppy mistake, and the eyeball easily frees itself. Once again, this makes no sense until you realize it’s just necessary for the plot. Most of the episode is written this way.
- At a meeting about the deadly and horrifying Xenomorph’s newfound freedom, the ship’s apprentice engineer, Malachite (Jamie Bisping) goofs off and acts like nothing’s wrong, much to the annoyance of the acting captain, Zoya (Richa Moorjani). Malachite is written as the ship’s resident idiot. He’s so stupid that he thought biology was the study of rocks. I don’t understand how someone this short on brain cells is hired for an extended scientific space voyage, but the really galling thing is he really isn’t that much lower IQ than the rest of the crew. The food he’s scarfing down is spicy, apparently, so he takes a big drink out of Chibuzo’s water bottle – or should we call it Chekov’s water bottle? Chibuzo also drinks down some of the parasitic water. They’re no more screwed than the rest of the crew.
Things go badly for everyone. Ceesay’s investigation goes nowhere fast. He sees a mysterious figure sabotaging the ship and letting the facehugger go free on the security footage, but he can’t make out who it is. He can’t figure out the puzzle until the resident creep, Teng (Andy Yu) strongly hints that not everyone in cryo is actually always in cryo. (Teng was one of the most interesting crewmembers and I strongly suspected he was a synth, but since he’s killed by the Xenomorph whatever speculation we had over his true nature is moot).
This leads Morrow to check all the communication logs and he comes to one with a crewman who was supposed to be frozen in cryogenic sleep having a little chat with Boy Kavalier back on Earth. His mission is to sabotage the Maginot and crash it into Prodigy territory. This means that Kavalier plotted the whole thing. It wasn’t an accident at all. He’s been trying to steal the alien species all along, which is impressive for a boy genius who wasn’t even born yet when the ship first blasted off from Earth. I’m curious, though: Do they have FTL communication in Alien now? How were these two men speaking in real time with one another? I thought it took a long time for communications from space to reach Earth and back again?
In any case, it’s a bit of a lame reveal since we hadn’t been introduced to the traitor prior to this. It’s more fun when the bad guy turns out to be one of the characters you already knew. Later, he and Morrow and Morrow’s lieutenant get in a shootout, and only Morrow escapes. Of course, this entire episode we know that only Morrow escapes, which really robs it of all dramatic tension throughout. The bodies keep dropping throughout the episode:
- The eyeball alien gets out and takes over the lead engineer’s body. This leads to a genuinely goofy fight between the infected human and the Xenomorph.
- Malachite starts spitting up blood, so they rush him to the Med-Bay where Rahim (Amir Boutrous) operates to save his life. He’s told not to pull the blood ticks from his internal organs but does it anyways, resulting in one of the little pests letting out a spray of toxic gas, killing everyone in the room.
- I assume that all the people in the cryopods are just killed by the Xenomorph (and/or other aliens) offscreen. The saboteur is killed by the Xenomorph.
- Zoya has a very Alien-esque sequence running from the Xenomorph but we already knew what was going to happen to her since the first episode showed us Morrow locking her out of the control room and saving himself instead.
The really frustrating thing about this episode is that we’re never given a reason to care about any of these people outside of Morrow, and that makes it hard to feel any kind of real fear. Not only was their fate sealed from the outset of the season, most of them were intolerably stupid or annoying. Zoya was an indecisive leader who froze completely after the Med-Bay incident. Chibuzo was sloppy and careless. Malachite was the village idiot. Even Morrow, easily the best and most interesting of the bunch, was mostly bad at his job. The ship itself was woefully inadequate for the mission, with no basic alarm system in play and wildly insecure labs and equipment (though as we’ve seen back at Neverland, the security isn’t much tighter there).
This is the kind of writing that drives me absolutely bonkers. Characters are stupid and careless and blithely unaware of the danger they’re in despite being scientists and seasoned space travelers. Instead of writing compelling conflicts where smart characters struggle to contain the threat, the writers here create stupid characters who make stupid decisions that lead to bad things happening. Combine this with our foreknowledge of everyone’s fate, and you have an episode that A) ought to have been the season premiere and B) would still have been lousy regardless. This should have been the best episode of the season, and it still was in some ways. There were no Peter Pan references, for one thing, and no children in adult bodies for another. Getting away from all that nonsense was certainly a welcome change of pace.
It leads me to question the entire premise of this series and its decision to take place on Earth instead of in space. But even if the show had chosen instead to focus on the ship and its crew, giving us the mission and the mystery of the saboteur, instead of the goofy conflict back on Earth, wouldn’t that have just felt like a retread of the original Alien, something this episode is certainly guilty of? A newer version of the same story, just not as good as the original. I love the costume design, the attention to detail in the ship, little moments like the facehugger coiling around Bronski’s neck when Zoya leaves, but all these great bits and pieces fail to come together into a compelling story.
Like so much of what came after the 1978 film, Alien: Earth pales in comparison. I am not impressed.
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