This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of Alien: Earth, now streaming on Hulu.
In the early seasons of Fargo, Noah Hawley was careful to get only so close to the specifics of the Coen brothers’ film. Yes, Molly Solverson, the first season’s hero, was a polite female cop from a small Minnesota town, who in some episodes was, like Marge Gunderson in the movie, visibly pregnant and married to a mailman. But she was written as palpably different from Marge, as was Season Three’s police chief Gloria Burgle. Various storylines echoed the events of the film — and one supporting character in Season One briefly intersected with the plot of original recipe Fargo. Hawley waited until the start of the fifth season to lean all the way into the comparison, by borrowing the movie’s inciting incident where a Minnesota Nice housewife is kidnapped by two goons — one hapless, one relentless and seemingly mystical. Hawley said that after making the series off and on for a decade, he felt he had earned the right to step right into the center of Coen country, rather than playing around on the fringes.
Hawley clearly didn’t feel the same level of hesitance regarding comparisons between Alien: Earth and Ridley Scott’s Alien. He waited until only the fifth episode of the new show’s first season to write and direct an episode called, “In Space, No One Can…” The title is borrowed from one of the greatest movie taglines ever written: “In space, no one can hear you scream,” used in the marketing campaign for Scott’s film. The story is set on a long-range spaceship, not unlike that movie’s Nostromo, where a Xenomorph — with some help from the eyeball monster and our other new creepy-crawlies — kills off the crew until only one member is left. It’s as close as Hawley could get to recreating the structure of the original movie short of taking a page from Alien: Romulus and digitally resurrecting, say, Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton, so that the Xenomorph could kill Parker and Brett again.
Doing something like this at all, much less this early in the show’s lifespan, could come across as an act of colossal hubris. And Hawley certainly doesn’t lack for either self-confidence or the willingness to publicly assert it. Somehow, though, “In Space, No One Can…” works. It’s not as terrifying as Scott’s movie, because almost nothing in cinema history has even come close to that. But nor does it feel like a pale, desperate imitation — Hawley bragging that he’s got “Alien at home.” It’s exciting, and creepy, and also plays a crucial role in the season as a spotlight on Morrow, who has seemed like our chief villain, only for things to turn out messier than that.
The action this time out is confined to the Maginot(*), in the period leading up to the crash that happens in the series premiere(**). Morrow is awakened ahead of schedule to discover that the captain is dead, another crew member is critically injured, and the engines have been sabotaged in a way that has turned the Maginot from a spaceship into a missile. Things inevitably grow worse from there.
(*) Before you try to impress all the cool kids by declaring this a bottle episode, please remember that not all self-contained episodes — this one included — are bottle episodes. Bottle episodes are designed to save money for more ambitious episodes elsewhere in a season through some combination of only using preexisting sets, hiring few (if any) guest actors, and not doing time-consuming set pieces. Yes, this all takes place on a collection of sets built to be used in multiple episodes. But those sets needed to be redressed for all the other installments to represent the post-crash Maginot, plus there are lots of guest actors playing the crew, plus there are multiple action sequences. Depending on how creative the accounting got, I wouldn’t be surprised if this were actually one of the more expensive episodes of the season.
(**) The opening scene of the premiere, where the Maginot crew wakes up briefly for meal break, was filmed for this episode, then relocated in editing when Hawley decided that he wanted the show to begin in a setting more evocative of the films, rather than beginning the series with Marcy and Kirsh talking about the scorpion.
Though the overall structure is incredibly similar to Alien, down to one member of the crew secretly working against the others, Hawley makes a few key changes. First, he has multiple creatures to play with, rather than just the Xenomorph itself. The eyeball, the blood bug, etc., prove to be just as dangerous to the crew, and in some ways more interesting. The eyeball is turning out to be the series’ breakout character (or, at least, monster), because it’s new, it’s weird, and it does so many unexpected things — even briefly trying to help one of the crew members, it seems. When one of the other creatures has gotten loose in scientist Chibuzo’s lab, the eyeball bangs on its receptacle, trying to warn her. It’s hard to think of this as pure altruism — perhaps the monster just had its, well, eye on her as its next host? — but the creature is nonetheless proving to be highly intelligent, and powerful. When it later possesses the body of senior engineer Shmuel, it makes the old man at least temporarily strong enough to, like Wendy, hold up OK in one-on-one combat with the Xenomorph(*).
(*) When it becomes clear that even a supercharged Shmuel can’t defeat the Xenomorph, the eyeball leaps out of Shmuel’s body and attempts to take over its opponent. The problem is, H.R. Giger’s design of the Xenomorph doesn’t include visible eyes, so there’s no clear socket for the eyeball to burrow into.
Because most of the monsters are so new, Hawley uses our relative lack of knowledge to ratchet up the suspense. When Chibuzo’s water bottle gets contaminated with extraterrestrial larvae while she’s not looking, the scene turns into an incredibly tense example of the old Hitchcock axiom about suspense being when the audience knows there’s a bomb under a table, but the characters in the scene don’t. Nor does the audience know exactly what will happen to whichever character drinks the water. In the end, it’s poor Malachite who makes that mistake, and dies as a result — taking Dr. Rahim with him because Rahim’s belief in the Hippocratic Oath supersedes his sense of self-preservation.
The episode also doubles as a character study of Morrow, who to this point has largely been an aloof, menacing figure. Our glimpse of him in the premiere suggested he wasn’t close with the rest of the crew. And though he mentioned a daughter to Slightly, it seemed like a tactic to get the poor, confused kid to open up to him.
Here, though, we see that if he isn’t exactly warm and cuddly with his shipmates, he does genuinely care about them and their safety, and is upset on a human level when they keep dying in such horrific ways. And we get flashback glimpses of his very real daughter, Estelle, whom we later learned died in a fire at age 19. As it was, a 65-year mission meant he was probably never going to see her again(*), but we find out in the concluding scene that the current Yutani’s grandmother took him in when he was “a feral boy with a palsied arm.” He owes the Yutani family (and company) everything, which is why he would be willing to leave behind the daughter who likely wouldn’t have existed without Yutani taking him in.
(*) Most versions of Aliens, including James Cameron’s director’s cut, insert a scene deleted from the theatrical cut, where Ripley finds out that the daughter she left behind died as an old woman during her mother’s long mission. Though in Ripley’s case, the mission wasn’t meant to span decades like Morrow’s.
This unflinching loyalty ultimately leads to the moment we already saw in the premiere, where he coldly leaves Zaveri to be killed by the Xenomorph(*), because his mission is ultimately to protect the specimens and not the crew. With Estelle long gone and his crew mates all dead, doing his duty for Yutani and retrieving the specimens is all he has left in this cold world.
(*) Zaveri versus the Xenomorph is easily the episode’s weakest segment. Not only is she able to improbably outrun the thing for a while, but when it stands at its full height before her, it looks for the first time on this series like a person in a costume.
Or almost all. He also can get revenge on Boy Kavalier, who is revealed to be the mastermind behind this whole disaster. We see that the traitorous crew member, Petrovich, was in communication with Kavalier, seeking a reward far greater than his Weyland-Yutani salary and bonuses. He doesn’t realize that Kavalier can’t, in fact, put him into a synthetic body like Wendy’s, and that the Prodigy CEO is using him just like Ripley was continually used by various Weyland-Yutani executives in the early films. Kavalier has already been presented as an overgrown child who views everyone around him as a plaything, so it’s not too shocking that he would so blithely orchestrate the deaths of many, many people (including everyone in New Siam who was killed in the crash itself). But the episode nonetheless makes clear just how villainous he is. And while it doesn’t in turn make Morrow into a heroic figure — he is, after all, threatening to murder Slightly’s mother to blackmail the kid into doing his bidding — it at least complicates our loyalties on how the rest of this conflict will play out.
“In Space, No One Can…” doesn’t match the exquisite sense of terror and disgust generated by Ridley Scott and company, in part because we’ve had nearly 50 years of this franchise. But it’s scarier, creepier, and more exciting than anything deliberately echoing the original has any business being.
