Earth’ Episode 5 Should Have Been The Season’s Best, But Instead It Was Unbearably Stupid

Posted by Erik Kain, Senior Contributor | 2 hours ago | /business, /gaming, /hollywood-entertainment, /innovation, Business, games, Gaming, Hollywood & Entertainment, Innovation, standard | Views: 12


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





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