Alien: Earth Episode 5 Turns Into a Full-Blown Alien Movie — the Best Entry in 39 Years

Alien: Earth’s fifth episode, titled *“In Space, No One…”*, narrows its focus to the crew of the cargo ship Maginot and a sudden outbreak of captive alien specimens. The episode is roughly an hour long, and it mixes creature scenes with a shipboard investigation led by the cyborg security officer Morrow.

– What happens in episode 5
– The creatures shown
– Morrow and the mystery
– Broadcast details

What happens in episode 5

Spoilers ahead. The episode begins with the Maginot crew waking from cryosleep after a 65-year mission that involved collecting alien lifeforms for the corporation Weyland-Yutani. Soon after, several specimens escape containment and attack the crew. As a result, most of the ship’s passengers are killed, leaving only the security officer Morrow alive on the bridge.

The narrative focuses on the immediate outbreak, and the episode runs for about one hour. Importantly, the episode shows that putting a facehugger and its human host into cryosleep does not halt the gestation process.

The creatures shown

The episode features multiple specimen types. First, a facehugger appears and behaves in line with established franchise biology: it attaches to a host and begins gestation. Second, an “eye” alien — smaller and stealthier — is shown to be an active threat. Third, a bug-like alien escapes its cage and deposits eggs into a crew member’s water bottle.

Consequently, there is a medical-bay sequence in which the ship’s doctor attempts to remove large parasite-like organisms from a patient’s lungs. The scene parallels earlier franchise medical moments, but the removed organisms resemble large insects rather than the classic xenomorph chestburster.

Morrow and the mystery

Morrow is portrayed by Babou Ceesay and is presented as a cyborg security officer. Throughout the episode, Morrow conducts one-on-one interviews with the surviving crew members to determine how the outbreak began. These investigative scenes structure the episode and serve as the primary method for revealing backstory and motive.

Production- and plot-wise, the episode also identifies outside tampering: the tech company Prodigy is revealed to have been involved in causing the ship’s crash as part of an effort to steal the collected alien samples from Weyland-Yutani. In addition, the episode repeatedly uses the same sets — corridors, the med bay, containment areas — to tell a compact, self-contained story within a single episode.

Showrunner Noah Hawley is credited with the series’ creative direction, and this episode highlights both the series’ creature-design elements and its corporate rivalry plotlines.