Review: Alien: Earth, "In Space, No One..." | Season 1, Episode 5

It’s an oversimplification to reduce a flashback episode to the question of necessity, but it can’t be ignored. If you’re going to make an eight episode season of television, and you dedicate one of those episodes to events that transpired before the series began, you raise the question whether you want to or not.

So let’s say it up front: “In Space, No One…” doesn’t need to exist. At least based on what we’ve seen in the season so far, I’m not convinced anything we learn here will be vital to understanding the story being told. While we get some more information on Morrow’s experiences, everything we needed to know was already found in the premiere’s flashbacks, and by the time we return to that moment here I found myself wondering what Hawley thought this episode was contributing.

There’s one new piece of information: despite presenting the crash as a stroke of good fortune to those around, Boy Kavalier was in fact responsible for it, working with Chief Engineer Petrovich to sabotage the ship and send it on a collision course with Prodigy City. That piece of information is compelling, but it’s hard to suggest we needed to spend an hour on it. It certainly spins us closer to considering Boy Kavalier as a “villain” in a more traditional sense, even if Weyland-Yutani itself is hardly any better, thus reinforcing that none of the corporations governing this world have any investment in the humans involved. They’re just in it for whatever counts as “progress” to them, which is a race to the bottom soon to be coming to a head as Morrow heads for Neverland.

By the time it concludes, though, it’s clear that “In Space…” has no real desire to prove its necessity from a plot perspective. Instead, the episode sees itself as a solution to the problem of maintaining a connection to the action-oriented expectations of an Alien series while the creatures are fully subdued in the present tense. Hawley wants a contained threat so that he can focus his attention on the thematic material he’s interested in using Alien to explore, but that would mean bookending the action with little in between. Sure, it’s mildly creepy to see The Eye do its thing with a sheep, but it’s all so scientific. By inserting the Maginot’s final days into this mid-season juncture, Hawley gets to let loose with his new creations, telling the stories behind all the dead bodies the Lost Boys and Hermit’s team found amidst the wreckage.