The episode starts about three-and-a-half months after the prologue. A man named Clem (Tom Moya) wakes Morrow from cryosleep to rattle off a litany of problems facing the ship. A fire burned up its fuel and destroyed its navigational system. Two Face Huggers escaped; the captain died in surgery; and another crew member, Bronski, is mid-Face Hug. Curiously, Clem’s interests lie in Zaverni and Bronski’s sex life. It’s the first hint at what Hawley has in store for the episode: a crew of immature, distracted, and tired people more worried that Morrow is in his underwear than the fate of their captain. The Maginot takes its name from the Maginot Line, a series of fortifications France built along its border with Germany in the years leading up to World War II. It failed. Germany invaded and conquered France, and the Line has since come to represent a costly false sense of security. That can explain some of the actions of the Maginot‘s crew because all the preventative measures designed to keep safe are only as effective as the people using them. Morrow muses that the ship’s recent troubles must be the result of sabotage or incompetence. It’s both.
Coming off several episodes of hybrid-heavy philosophizing, “In Space” gives the show a jolt of energy as we watch this crew of numbskulls get torn apart by their own foolishness. “Another victory for the enemy of reason,” Rahim says while watching over Bronski’s body. “This space bug is proof of how stupid smart people can be—smart enough to build ships capable of space travel, of splitting the atom, and decoding the genome, but too stupid to realize, you don’t bring parasites home with you.” Rahim sums it up nicely: Maignot‘s crew are d-u-m-b. The ship’s engineer’s apprentice, Malachite (Jamie Bisping), might be the dumbest character ever to grace an Alien movie, and that is really saying something. However, while his stupidity can be irritating, it’s Chibuzo’s (Karen Aldridge) carelessness that really does them in. How can she forget to screw the top on her bug jar or properly secure The Eye? It’s hard to imagine. But Chizubo, like Malachite, is more interested in eating than following protocol, and it leads to both of their deaths. That’s not sabotage; that’s incompetence.
One could apply the false sense of security to the audience. Hawley knows we know what an Alien movie is and wants to use that against us. I appreciate the swerves. Characters that appear to be synthetics of the Ash mold, like Mr. Teng (Andy Yu), who are prime saboteur suspects, turn out to be nothing more than creepy assholes. Set pieces, like a dinner table chestburster scene, don’t go as planned. In fact, the bursting happens offscreen, with the Xenomorph hiding for much of the episode. Instead, the tension surrounds Malachite sipping Chibuzo’s drink and infecting himself with the ticks. When Malachite’s time comes, it’s through another visual callback, this time to Lambert’s (Veronica Cartwright) spotlit death in the 1979 original. But the episode isn’t merely in service of subversion. Hawley deepens Morrow’s character, and Babou Ceesay is more than up to the challenge, finding pockets of sadness, obsession, and frustration in his performance. We get to see what the worst parts of a man actually are: grief. Morrow left his daughter so that he could leave in the service of his surrogate mother, Yutani, the elder. As he goes through his daughter’s letters to him, we see the letter from the company informing him that, eight years into his mission, she died in a house fire. Her effects will be there waiting for him when he returns in 53 years. That is some bleak shit.
But Morrow has something the others don’t: purpose. There’s a strain of nihilism circulating in the crew that manifests in Petrovitch. Throughout the episode, the crew is reminded that they are expendable—it’s not kept a secret, unlike in Alien. Morrow reminds them. MU/TH/UR forces Zaverni to acknowledge it. It’s enough to make one of them vindictive. As Morrow learns, while looking through the ship’s communications, Petrovitch is working for Kavalier. In exchange for a hybrid body, Petrovitch will crash the ship in Prodigy City. “You can’t stop it,” Petrovitch says. “They want their monsters. Here they come.” He doesn’t care about humanity and seems almost happy to give them what they deserve. His goals aren’t so different from Morrow’s. Morrow just prefers a different corporate overlord. The episode ends with Morrow reaffirming his mission to the younger Yutani. He stares off from her balcony as Smashing Pumpkins’ “Cherub Rock” kicks in. “Freak out and give in. Doesn’t matter what you believe in,” Billy Corgan sings. “Stay cool. And be somebody’s fool this year.”
Stray observations
- • Morrow’s knife stabbing through Petrovitch resembles many Xenomorph stabbings of days gone by. (Memories light the corners of my mind.)
- • The cast tonight was really something. With one episode to sell us on a tragedy of errors, each character came alive almost instantly. Much of that is due to some fully realized performances, particularly by Yu, Boutrous, and Aldridge, who convey so much with just a glance.
- • It was also lovely to spend more time in Earth‘s recreation of Alien‘s legendary production design. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen so many buttons that I desperately wanted to push.
- • I’m dubious of Noah Hawley saying he’s ignoring Prometheus and Covenant. The ticks ejaculating in Chibuzo’s water and the spores that kill her were too similar to elements from Ridley Scott’s two prequels.
- • I wish we could’ve spent more time with the cat.
- • It’s a credit to the writing that every bit we learn about the crew is interesting. What the hell was Teng up to? How did they get those bugs on the ship? That’s one of the things that used to make Alien exciting. Before Prometheus came along, the Space Jockey was one of Alien‘s most fascinating and uninvestigated mysteries.
