Hybrid humans, corporate nation-state competitors, and xenomorph chat rooms: we’ve learned much since the USCSS Maginot went splat on New Siam in Alien: Earth Episode 1 (“Neverland”). We’re also halfway through this enjoyable debut season. So it’s worth heading backward, back onto the ship, to 17 days before it brought its murderous space cargo back to our home planet, when containment aboard was already a joke, two of its crew were already dead, and Rumor Control was expressing a cynicism that does not feel specific to this show’s future century. 

Looking down at their captain, deceased, the man’s face summarily facehugged, Maginot medical officer Dr. Rahim (Amir Boutrous) takes his millionth drag off like the same stub of cigarette. It’s been that kind of work trip. “This space bug is proof of how stupid smart people can be.” 

Security Officer Morrow is roused from cryo-sleep to the sound of a clanging alarm, a fire aboard, escaped alien lifeforms, and Zaveri (Richa Moorjani), the acting captain, arguing with Dr. Rahim, ship scientist Chibuzo, and Schmuel (Michael Smiley) and Malachite (Jamie Bisping), the engineering team. Most of the rest of the crew is still in cryo, but for creepy and abrasive Mr. Teng (Andy Yu) and – well, as Morrow quickly learns, one cryo tube is completely empty. There is a saboteur on board, using the vents to sneak around and cause havoc, just in case a giant starship hurdling through space with no rudder control while its crew is stalked by alien entities wasn’t enough of a problem.

As it takes place almost entirely on the Maginot, Episode 5 of Alien:Earth (“In Space, No One…”), written and directed by series creator Noah Hawley, leans even further into its reimagination of the analog-style Alien franchise aesthetic. In the security bay, Morrow toggles between camera views with a microfiche-style selector. His chair is on a mobilized track in need of some WD-40. And as he punches the unit’s big square buttons, bulbs light up on a metal-stamped indicator pad. It’s some absolutely wonderful production design the series shows off whenever it isn’t transforming the same spaces into claustrophobic death traps. 

In her lab, Chibuzo hums a song to her collected specimens. (Remember, we heard Wendy do this, too, once the same critters reached Neverland.) And while we love the way Karen Aldridge plays her, as a compassionate thinker who can also be annoyed with crewmates like Rahim, Chibuzo exhibits the same creepy-crawly carelessness endemic to all Alien projects. First, “Species 19” – the little grasshopper-like bug thing – hooks its way out of a manual container valve, vomits xeno-infected ticks into a water bottle, and proceeds to hide in Chibuzo’s sandwich. This is all observed by one of the lifeforms we’re more familiar with, Eyeball Tentacle, who actually taps on the glass. Is “she” warning the scientist? But as violins on the soundtrack pluck and skitter, Chibuzo is a mixture of oblivious and too trusting.

Later, the scientist dies alongside Rahim, overcome by poison gas emitted from the ticks as they swarm all over the exposed insides of young Malachite. Right before he drank from her contaminated xeno water and was ripped apart from within, the kid was complaining about the 65-year terms of his shitty Weyland-Yutani contract. 

Morrow maintains the company line, even as more of his fellow crewmembers become genetic fodder for the creatures. It’s as Grandma Yutani told him years before. “Nothing matters but the cargo. Whether or not the crew survives.” But the acts we’ve seen the security officer carry out since being back on Earth – especially his manipulative mind-meld with Slightly – now feel informed at least in part by what we learn on the ship. In Morrow’s quarters, he pages through the notes and cards of an entire lifetime. His daughter’s handwriting, first as a child and then as a student looking at universities. His sacrifice of decades, his dedication to Yutani, funded his daughter’s education. But she died in a fire at age 19. With nothing left to lose, Morrow decides to keep fighting, but only for the gain of his benefactor. He’s bitter, but it’s also easy, because digging through ship’s logs and comm files has revealed the identity of the saboteur’s own benefactor. “Bring me the creatures,” Boy Kavalier tells Petrovitch (Enzo Cilenti), a disgruntled crewmember, in a recovered recording. Betray Weyland-Yutani, sabotage the ship, and deliver the deep space critters to Boy Kav, and Prodigy will put the man’s mind inside a robot. 

While we were learning about these new layers to Kavalier’s awfulness – he also insults Petrovitch to his face while the guy’s agreeing to conduct this deadly game of corporate espionage – we also catch a load of carnage in the Maginot corridors. Alien on human? You know it. But what about alien vs. alien? Just because they became part of Weyland-Yutani’s collection of terrifying shit doesn’t mean these creatures like each other. And once Tentacle burrows into lead engineer Schumel’s brain, she uses the man’s body to directly attack the xenomorph. Both creatures fight and bite at each other, with the latter’s infamous spiked tail finally poking holes through Schmuel’s back as Eyeball Tentacle slithers away. It’s all Zevari can do to scramble for the exits, though it doesn’t seem to do her any good. Our last view of the acting captain is a splatter of blood as the Xeno attacks and her screams from Episode 1 – “Morrow! Let me in!” – are ignored. 

In the end, Episode 5 of Alien: Earth returns to its present, and the top floor of Weyland-Yutani corporate headquarters. It looks like a Japanese karesansui garden crossed with Westworld’s design language, and as Morrow seeks his audience with Yutani (Sandra Yi Sencindiver), the CEO says her grandmother was always fond of him. (“She had no reason to take me in, a feral boy with a palsied arm, begging in the street.”) With Weyland-Yutani’s cargo alive and kicking at Neverland, all that’s left is to get it back, and on that front, Yutani says Kavalier has agreed to arbitration. But we don’t wanna hear about lawyers squabbling in some 22nd-century boardroom. We think Morrow’s notion is closer to the destruction this series is bringing. His plan remains: take back the creatures by force. “And then I will kill the one called Kavalier.”

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.