Alien: Earth Episode 5 Unveiled – The Shocking Twist That’s Changing Everything!

Getting cozy with Weyland-Yutani? Yeah, that’s basically signing your own cosmic death warrant. It’s not just the nightmarish Xenomorphs lurking in the shadows—sometimes, it’s the cold, crushing loneliness of drifting through the endless void of space that does you in first. After last week’s letdown of an episode, “Alien: Earth” is back with a vengeance in episode five, “In Space, No One….” This prequel unravels the horror-soaked tale of the USCSS Maginot’s doomed journey, turning a cold metal tomb into a theater of suspense, gore, and heartbreaking revelations. Following Morrow’s gritty, no-holds-barred fight for survival, this installment isn’t just another sci-fi thrill; it’s a brutal reminder that even in the bleakest places, human emotion—rage, loss, and that fierce will to survive—still burns bright. Curious how Morrow, a man with nothing left to lose, claws his way through this nightmare? Well, buckle up, ‘cause this episode delivers in spades. LEARN MORE

Getting in bed with Weyland-Yutani really is a death sentence, isn’t it? If it isn’t the Xenomorphs that kill you, it’s the anguish of a life in deep space that will do you in.

Following last week’s bummer fourth episode, Alien: Earth bounces back with an incomparably stronger fifth episode, “In Space, No One….” Essentially a prequel that revels in gruesome detail how the USCSS Maginot became a tomb that crashed in New Saigon, this new episode still unearths plenty of suspense, horror—even heartbreak—never mind that we know exactly how this journey ends: violently.

We follow who else but Morrow (Babou Ceesay) as the episode’s main point-of-view character, whose moving backstory reframes his ruthlessness in a sympathetic light, Alien: Earth proves itself as a TV show that warrants the hype and the hoopla that it’s the best thing on the small screen right now. That there isn’t much competition (for now) is besides the point.

There’s basically just one storyline to follow this week, and it’s how Morrow survives this oversized missile headed towards Earth. So, how does he do it? By being a real son of a bitch, that’s how. Here’s what happened in Alien: Earth episode 5.

Babou Ceesay shines in Alien: Earth’s fifth episode, “In Space, No One…”

Wake Up, Dead Man

Seventeen days before the USCSS Maginot is scheduled to arrive on Earth, security officer Morrow is awoken from cyrosleep due to a problem: The captain is dead.

A fire led to the escape of the “octopus with long fingers” to latch onto two crew members, among them the captain of the Maginot. There’s no way to get the things off, and they bleed acid. With half the crew still in slumber, the woken half figure out what to do, from cementing the new chain of command to what, exactly, takes top priority of the mission.

Meanwhile, Morrow has a mission of his own “from Yutani herself”: Secure the cargo, and figure out who started the fire. Still in his underwear, Morrow is caught up on the ship’s gossip by blabbermouth Chibuzo (Karen Aldridge), who informs him that Executive Officer Zoya Zaveri (Richa Moorjani) and fellow crewmate Bronski (Max Rinehart) are in a hot-and-heavy fling. You get the impression Morrow could not give less of a shit, except that coworker hookups are a violation of regulations that could potentially place Morrow in charge over Zaveri.

Even Mother agrees. When Zaveri consults the ship’s computer—a staple of the Alien franchise that now feels predictive of our current array of chatbots—Mother informs her that the “survival of cargo is top priority.” Their lives may be expendable, but the species they’ve retrieved are not. Mother threatens Zaveri to “acknowledge” the order, lest the resident security officer (conveniently, that’s Morrow) takes over command. Zaveri is unwilling to give Morrow the satisfaction of a justified mutiny, however.

The crew of the Maginot, who perished at the start of season 1, finally get some more time to shine in their “prequel” episode.

For the better part of the episode’s extended hour-long length, Morrow conducts an investigation to suss out the saboteur. Mercifully, the show’s writers don’t make you wait long to know the culprit. Some 40 minutes in, the episode flat-out reveals that it’s Petrovich (Enzo Cilenti) who conducted corporate sabotage on behalf of Boy Kavalier.

Apparently resentful over his decades-long work for Weyland-Yutani that ended in bugs laying eggs “in my woman’s eyes,” it seems Petrovich was all too ready to sell out his employers and not only make it rich, but enter a new body thanks to Prodigy’s breakthrough hybrid technology.

Recall in the show’s prologue that Captain Drisdale mentioned the ship’s communication logs were corrupted, which Petrovich offered to look into. Now we know why: Petrovich had been in secret conversation with Boy Kavalier, and corrupting the files was his way of covering up his tracks. But because the captain assigned Morrow to fix it per protocol, well, Petrovich’s whole ship-wide sabotage suddenly makes sense.

But the real meat of Morrow’s story is a diversion into his personal life. As told in an emotional montage set to “We’ll Meet Again” by The Ink Spots, Morrow spends time reviewing letters from home, where he left behind a young daughter. It’s visual storytelling at its finest, where the letters jump from crude doodles of aliens (which foreshadow the Xenomorph’s inevitable appearance near the end) to a teenager’s scribblings about considering Harvard. And then, the gut punch: Morrow’s daughter died suddenly in a house fire. She was nineteen. All of a sudden, Morrow has no one to get back home to.

It doesn’t make his current grooming of Slightly any less weird. But knowing that we’re watching a man with quite literally nothing to lose—who is possessing all the anger at the world—is genuinely moving stuff that makes it hard to root against him from now on.

No thanks to Alien: Earth, I’ve been neurotically inspecting for bugs in every drink I’ve had lately.

“…Can Hear You Scream”

The first episode of Alien: Earth wowed us all in how it replicated the very atmosphere of Ridley Scott’s 1979 original. But episode 5 takes things up a notch, being a compact, TV-sized Alien installment that doesn’t at all feel “made for TV.”

As I wrote before in my pilot recap, the prologue made the Maginot feel lived in, with enough fully-defined characters and tension that made us feel like we’ve entered things in media res. “In Space, No One…” doesn’t just succeed in all the ways a good TV episode ought to—from story pacing to bang-up performances, Babou Ceesay most of all—but from defying its own limits as a “prequel” that still finds suspense out of all its twists and turns. We’ve already seen this ship crash and burn in New Saigon. We’ve already known that Morrow is the only survivor. But it doesn’t make several crew deaths hit any less.

Nor are the show’s gross-out moments any less gnarly. Infected water bottles, bugs crawling over exposed organs—Alien: Earth is becoming catnip for entomology nerds. Yes, the Alien franchise has always been violent and quite icky, but it’s never been disgusting. Alien: Earth is slowly finding its identity as the show that made Alien’s vision of space feel overwhelmed by parasites and creepy crawlers. It’s a helpful reminder to stock up on bug spray if we’re running out.

“In Space, No One…” is simply what anyone ought to be looking for in an Alien television series. It hits all the same notes you expect from this series without simply regurgitating familiar moments (see: Alien: Romulus). Alien: Earth is finding its own footing as an emotionally-charged saga where feelings like love and loss aren’t totally meaningless in a cold, cruel, capital-driven world. Sometimes, they’re the only things that can save us.