We return to space for a chapter that harks right back to 1979. Our spoiler-free review of Alien: Earth episode 5… NB: The following is spoiler-free for Alien: Earth episode 5, but does contain spoilers for previous instalments. As previously suspected, showrunner Noah Hawley hasn’t let that hugely expensive-looking USCS Maginot set fall by the ... Alien: Earth episode 5 spoiler-free review | Oh, MU-TH-UR
We return to space for a chapter that harks right back to 1979. Our spoiler-free review of Alien: Earth episode 5…
NB: The following is spoiler-free for Alien: Earth episode 5, but does contain spoilers for previous instalments.
As previously suspected, showrunner Noah Hawley hasn’t let that hugely expensive-looking USCS Maginot set fall by the wayside after it was used in a few brief moments of backstory in episode one. No, as Alien: Earth’s first season nears its final quarter, Hawley leaves terra firma behind for a flashback episode that explores exactly what befell the luckless Maginot crew a few days earlier.
Although much of it was already given away in the season debut – crew collected monsters, monsters escaped confinement, ship crashed – it turns out there’s more to the whole disaster than first met the (infected) eye. In between the bracing moments of body horror, where we’re shown exactly what a couple of the collected specimens are capable of, we’re treated to an Agatha Christie-esque mystery, of sorts, with security officer Morrow (Babou Ceesay) providing the role of particularly formidable detective. Is there a saboteur aboard the ship? Did someone deliberately start a fire, affecting the navigation systems, effectively turning the vessel into a gigantic missile headed straight for Earth? Morrow’s determined to find out.
Meanwhile, episode five gives us more time to meet those characters we so briefly saw in episode one. This writer’s favourite is Shmuel, the softly-spoken, worldly-wise engineer played with typical charm by the great Michael Smiley. He’s lumbered with the unfathomably wet-around-the-ears apprentice, Malachite (Jamie Bisping), a character so breathtakingly naive that it’s a wonder why Weyland-Yutani let him aboard what must be a multi-billion dollar exploratory vessel. (The pair are clear analogues for Alien’s below-decks duo, Parker and Brett, though they look like intellectual titans compared to poor old Malachite)
Then again, much of the crew suffer from what we’ll call the Prometheus effect; like the cast of that 2012 prequel, the people aboard the Maginot seem too scatty to even hold down a job. The most obvious example is Teng (Andy Yu), a character so unfailingly creepy that we can only presume that the only people willing to go on these long outer space missions are Earth’s biggest misfits and weirdos.
Read more: Alien: Earth | The franchise expands to TV, but greed remains the true villain (spoilers)
Still, the characters all make an impression, from Richa Moorjani’s beleaguered Zaveri, trying to control a situation deteriorating by the minute, and medical officer Rahim (Amir Boutrous) whose well-meaning attempts at surgery only serve to make matters worse. Again, like Prometheus, there are lingering questions over safety and quarantine protocols (no drinks in the lab, please) and an air of suspense that ebbs and flows rather than builds, at least in the first half of this hour-long episode.
As we’ve often noted in these reviews, Alien: Earth is consistently engrossing but seldom frightening, and icky in a blackly comic way rather than being outright shocking. Much of this appears to be by design; each episode ends with an upbeat rock/metal needle drop, suggesting that Hawley and his team want us to have a good time with Alien: Earth rather than be left gibbering behind the sofa.
Maybe we’ve reached a point where the bracing horror of 1979’s Alien, which legendarily left some audience members queasy and reeling into the aisles, is impossible to replicate in 2025. We’ve had almost 50 years of imitators and rival monsters that have all tried to push what’s showable in a mainstream genre film, making the Freudian notions of the first film feel less taboo and shocking than they once did.
But even with that in mind, there’s a goofiness to Alien: Earth’s body horror that is far from the nightmares artist HR Giger once conjured, and perhaps he’s the missing link in all this. Without Giger’s twisted imagination, the franchise has a tendency to revert back to critters that look like regular bugs and octopuses. It might be hard for younger audiences to appreciate, but there was a time when the Alien of the film’s title felt truly other-worldly, especially in its earlier lifecycle stages.
In the place of genuine horror and threat, though, lies plenty of intrigue. Ceesay is a real presence in this episode, filling up corridors with his imposing presence and staring down his opponents with those furious, unblinking eyes. Episode five gives us reasons to feel a touch of empathy for Morrow, but he remains a force of nature – perhaps more so than the specimens he remains determined to recover.
Back in the present (and on Earth), we’ve already seen how Morrow is willing to go to extreme lengths to get his purloined creatures back from Prodigy and its brattish CEO, Boy Kavalier. It’ll be fascinating to see whether or not he succeeds.
Alien: Earth is streaming now on Disney+.
