Episode Review: Alien: Earth Episode 5 - "In Space, No One..."

Welcome back to the blog readers. Alien: Earth (2025) has quickly catapulted itself to being one of my favorite shows of the year in just four episodes. It is uncomfortable, it is acted well, and it is overall giving me an experience I did not know I needed to have with a horror series. Can the momentum keep itself going this week with this fifth episode, titled "In Space, No One...," and written and directed by Noah Hawley? I hope so, because I have heard that this is the best episode of the show thus far. Stick around to find out if I agree with that opinion.

NOTE: I will be using spoilers for my thoughts, so DO NOT read ahead if you have not seen the episode.

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As I alluded to in my introductory paragraph, I had heard from everyone who watched this episode (since I am a week behind because I did not review the first two episodes together) that it was probably the best episode of the series thus far. And with us being at the halfway point of the season now, I was really waiting for an episode that could catapult this show into great territory. This episode was it and I loved every minute of its 64 minute runtime. Babou Ceesay gives the performance of his life in this episode, the story is going places I did not expect it to go, and the scares are real this week and I was legitimately creeped the fuck out.

I want to talk about Babou Ceesay's performance as the cyborg Morrow. Many people are calling Morrow the best character in this show, and I would be inclined to agree with them based on the material this character has been given and the insane performance that Ceesay has given us. Like I mentioned in the previous paragraph, Ceesay gives the performance of his life in this episode. When he has to be the stone cold killer we have seen him be in previous episodes, he does it to perfection this time around. But when Ceesay is asked to show off a different side to himself, like empathy, love, and loss, he completely gives it his all. Now I know that I have been doing nothing but singing this guy's praises, and I am honestly hopeful that the Emmys give this show the love it deserves and Ceesay gets the love he deserves.

Before I get into the awesome-as-hell story this week, I want to give a special mention in terms of performances, to Richa Moorjani. Her performance as executive officer (and later captain of the USCSS Maginot Zoya Zaveri is the most grounded and believable of the rest of the crew of the Maginot. She plays the person who is just trying to get everyone on the same page so good, and her scene in which she just freezes in fear at what is transpiring may just as well be the most bone-chilling moment in the series thus far that does not include an alien creature. I also began feeling for the remainder of the members of the Maginot (except for Petrovitch, but I will talk about that later), but especially for Zaveri, and it is all because of the earnest performance of Moorjani.

Now, we get into the aforementioned awesome-as-hell story, because it provides some much-needed context clues for what we have seen so far and what we are still yet to see. We start this episode with text that lets us know this episode takes place seventeen days before the main events of the series when most of the crew of the Maginot is still in cryosleep, including Morrow, who is woken up by a member of the crew named Clem that tells him there is a problem. The problem in question? A fire has broken out and two members of the crew have been attacked by facehuggers, with the captain being killed by his facehugger's acid when Rahim tried to cut it off of the captain (a big no-no if you know the franchise). Morrow wants answers on how the facehuggers got out and how the fire started, but nobody has an answer. It is determined that there is a saboteur on board, with the fire knocking out the navigation systems and engine relays. Morrow is told that the ship is on a collision course with Earth.

Command falls to executive officer Zoya Zaveri, and she orders scientist Bronski (who is the unlucky recipient of the other facehugger) to be put into cryosleep. In a conversation Morrow has with her, he reveals that she has been having a fling with Bronski and he believes her judgment is compromised due to this fact. He reiterates to her that the most important thing on the ship is the cargo, and he claims he will step over her and anyone else if the cargo is threatened. She goes to the computer's artificial intelligence Mother, who accepts her promotion to captain, but makes her acknowledge that the cargo must be kept as the top priority, despite her plea to destroy it if it becomes a threat to the crew. That night, a hole is blown in the side of the ship as Morrow is checking CCTV footage to determine who the saboteur (who he sees in the footage but cannot make out their identity) is, in addition to seeing Zaveri and Bronski having sex near the specimens. He later reads a letter from his daughter where it is revealed that she was killed in a house fire 12 years into the 65-year long mission. The crew discusses how fuel reserves have been reduced to 8%, as a warning comes on that there is a breach in the cryopod area. Whatever was on Bronski is gone, his chest bursted, and it has escaped the pod. We all know what that means.

The greatest return in television history is near: the return of our boy Big Ugly (what I graciously called the Xenomorph in the first few episodes), as Morrow has Clem and Zaveri fitted with electric weapons to stun and not kill the beast due to its acidic blood. Meanwhile, Chibuzo has been studying the leech creatures and the eyeball creature (known as T. Ocellus, but I will call it what they called it: the Eye). One of the leech creatures is able to escape from its containment chamber with the help of the Eye and infect her water with its larvae before going back into its chamber. When Chibuzo is leaving the lab, the Eye is able to smash its containment chamber to the ground from where it was placed by Chibuzo and escape. Meanwhile, at dinner, Zaveri is trying to get her crew on the same page but they will not listen as she declares a ship-wide emergency (as Morrow urged her to do earlier in the episode). Morrow chimes in and tells the awake crew that he wants them paired up, and they will be conducting a sweep to find the saboteur. Meanwhile, Malachite accidentally drinks Chibuzo's infested water after eating something hot. He is later working with Schmuel and collapses after throwing up blood.

Morrow is interrogating Teng and the two come to a conclusion: the saboteur must be someone pretending to be in cryosleep. He leaves Teng in the interrogation chamber to eventually be paid a visit by our boy Big Ugly. Morrow finds that the request of recovery of communication logs that were deleted is complete, and he is going through them until he finds a revelation: Petrovich has struck a deal with Boy Kavalier to become a hybrid in exchange for making the ship crash in Prodigy territory. He grabs a gun and heads to the cryopods, only to see that Petrovich is missing. Before he can react, an alert comes from the medbay: Malachite is not doing good at all, and the leeches have been feeding off his organs. They don't know that until he is cut open, and all three (Malachite, Chibuzo, and Rahim) are killed when one of the leeches Rahim tries to pull spews out an acid cloud that makes the latter two bleed out from their eyes. Morrow takes control of the ship after Zaveri freezes in fear, and they make it their priority to wake up the crew still in cryosleep and barricade themselves on the bridge as they barrel towards Earth.

Petrovich shoots at Clem and Morrow, causing them to take cover in the lab where Clem is shot in the head (and the leeches feed on his corpse). Meanwhile, Morrow sneaks up on Petrovich and stabs him through the heart, before hearing that the monsters are coming. Zaveri is cornered by Big Ugly and she takes off for a room that contains Schmuel, but he seems off. He turns around to give us the most shocking reveal yet: the Eye is controlling him, meaning it can possess humans. The Eye comes for Zaveri as Big Ugly makes his way into the room, and Morrow and Zaveri leave the two creatures to fight. Spoiler: Big Ugly wins, but the Eye is not done with Big Ugly. Morrow seals himself in the control room, leaving Big Ugly to claw out Zaveri before coming for him, and he tells Mother that the crew is dead and seals himself in a blast room to avoid the crash, thinking of his daughter. After all of this transpires, Morrow finds himself speaking to Yutani and swearing he will get the creatures back, and she gives him a blank slate to do what he needs to to get them back, including killing Boy Kavalier.

Alien: Earth gives us one of the best hours of television all year with A+ acting and sets up a major battle between corporations over aliens over its final half. Thank you all for reading, and I will see you for the next post.