Maybe the most shocking thing about FX‘s Alien: Earth is just how funny it gets. For all the guts, gore, and grotesque new monsters, there are always moments of absolutely chaotic humor to undercut what’s going on.

**Spoilers for Alien: Earth Episode 3 “Metamorphosis,” now streaming on Hulu**

Case in point: About fifteen minutes into Alien: Earth Episode 3 “Metamorphosis,” a deeply serious situation is completely undercut by the childish antics of hybrids Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) and Smee (Jonathan Ajayi). While most of us would see a batch of Xenomorph eggs and probably run away in terror, the boys are literally children in super-powered synthetic bodies. Smee brags about the creatures he’s seen and Slightly is upset he missed the Eye Midge’s attack on poor Nibs (Lily Newmark). Slightly and Smee are literally swinging their legs over the Xenomorph eggs as tricks when the Weyland-Yutani cyborg Morrow (Babou Ceesay) stumbles in on them.

Alien: Earth viewers will remember that the series opens with a Weyland-Yutani deep space research vessel crash-landing on Earth. The crash was caused when several, if not all, of the ship’s five alien specimens escaped containment. Morrow, the ship’s chief security officer, abandons the crew in favor of getting the ship’s precious cargo to “Mother,” aka the head of Weyland-Yutani. Now that the ship has crashed in rival company Prodigy’s territory, he’s still on a mission to find, secure, and return these aliens to his boss.

In Alien: Earth Episode 2, we watched as Morrow nonchalantly captured a Xenomorph, stunning Hermit (Alex Lawther) in the process. As he approaches the boys and the eggs in Episode 3, we, the audience, know what he’s capable of doing to achieve his goals, but Slightly and Smee do not. What follows is a hilarious collision of childlike silliness pitted a stone cold mercenary heart.

“They are hilarious, those two,” Alien: Earth Babou Ceesay said of his scene partners. “Incredible.” 

“I’d done quite a few serious scenes before that, you know? Like on my own, thinking, dealing with Xenomorphs and everything else. And suddenly Adarsh and Jonathan turn up on set with this energy I did not expect.”

Morrow clearly doesn’t expect it either. He’s first confused that Slightly and Smee don’t have guns because they’re “not allowed” and soon pieces together that nothing about the situation adds up.

“You’re like a couple of kids,” Morrow observes.

“No, we’re not kids!” Slightly protests in only the way a kid would.

Morrow immediately changes tact. He asserts dominance by first talking to the boys in a way that explains the situation in child-like terms. Then, he makes it clear that he will physically dominate them, before launching into a troubling monologue that reveals his own guilt over abandoning the USSS Maginot crew.

“What would you do?” he asks them as he downloads data from the ship into his body. He wants to know if these childlike synthetics could imagine a situation where they might kill another person.

Slightly says he could if it meant killing a bad person to save someone he loves, like a friend or… parent. When Morrow hears Smee and Slightly refer to the concept of having parents, he begins to realize that the situation is even stranger than he initially thought. The boys are clearly synthetics, but act like children and believe they have parents. “When is a machine not a machine?” he wonders aloud.

Luckily Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant) arrives just in time to defend the boys and to challenge Morrow. The synthetic backs Morrow away from the Xenomorph eggs and taunts the cyborg as one egg begins to open. (Morrow, being still part human, is vulnerable to the facehuggers.) The sequence ends with Morrow fleeing and the Prodigy team returning to Neverland.

Morrow might have found himself challenged by Kirsh and the Xenomorph, but Ceesay had his own battle, keeping it together on set.

“[Gourav and Ajayi] were talking over each other and moving in a million miles per hour. So it did take some concentration,” Ceesay said. “But they’re incredible professionals.”

“You know, some of the other takes where I couldn’t keep it together don’t make it in,” he said laughing.