"Alien: Earth" just snuck in a mini "Alien" movie — creator Noah Hawley and star Babou Ceesay explain how they did it Nick RomanoSeptember 3, 2025 at 3:04 AM Patrick Brown/FX Babou Ceesay as Morrow on 'Alien: Earth'Key Points Showrunner Noah Hawley and actor Babou Ceesay (Morrow) take EW inside the ...
- - "Alien: Earth" just snuck in a mini "Alien" movie — creator Noah Hawley and star Babou Ceesay explain how they did it
Nick RomanoSeptember 3, 2025 at 3:04 AM
Patrick Brown/FX
Babou Ceesay as Morrow on 'Alien: Earth'Key Points -
Showrunner Noah Hawley and actor Babou Ceesay (Morrow) take EW inside the mystery of the Maginot crash.
Hawley "wasn't about to hand the Alien movie within the season off to another director," he says of helming episode 5.
Ceesay explains why he was "worried" about the episode and the subtle changes in Morrow.
Warning: This article contains spoilers from Alien: Earth episode 5, "In Space, No One..."
The phrase "bottle episode" gets a bad rap these days, but in the hands of someone like Noah Hawley, they're inspired. "Standalone" feels more apt for that kind of TV hour, like the puppet-themed episode of Fargo season 5 or the black-and-white "East/West" of season 4.
For Alien: Earth, the showrunner is upfront about how he snuck what is essentially an hourlong Alien mini movie in the middle of the season.
"It's why I directed it," Hawley happily confesses to Entertainment Weekly. "I wasn't about to hand the Alien movie within the season off to another director. That was my opportunity. All the movies are really about people trapped in a spaceship, a prison, et cetera. There's always this claustrophobic element to it. In bringing the show to Earth, we were gonna try to open that up into something larger. But I did want to show you the story of what happened to make that ship crash. I think it's more powerful, once you've seen some of these creatures and what they can do, to then go back."
Episode 5, which aired Tuesday night on FX and streamed on Hulu, has a title that calls back to a popular quote from the marketing campaign of Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien, "In Space, No One..." (Fans can fill in the rest.) The 64-minute installment goes back in time to show exactly what happened on the USCSS Maginot that made the deep space research vessel crash land on Earth in Prodigy territory.
Patrick Brown/FX
Richa Moorjani as Zaveri on 'Alien: Earth'
"It's so wild," says Babou Ceesay, who delivers a particularly standout performance as Morrow, the cyborg who uncovers a plot by the chief engineer to steer the spacecraft toward Earth for Prodigy head Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) in exchange for becoming a hybrid. Complicating matters is several of the lethal alien creatures on board, including a xenomorph-spawning facehugger, escape from their confines and pick off the crew one by one until Morrow is the sole survivor.
"I was worried about this episode," Ceesay says. "[Episodes] 1-4 he doesn't have to play with anybody. At the end of the day, he's talking to Slightly [Adarsh Gourav], but Slightly has a very specific purpose. Then suddenly in ep. 5, he's in cooperation with a bunch of teammates. So I was really thinking, How do I balance that moral-ness with this group of people? That did throw me in the preparation, but you get to the threshold and you've done as much work as you can, you just have to trust. I couldn't let myself feel this pressure that this episode was on me. No, it's all of us. So I just gotta do my bit."
Episode 5 became a prime touchstone for the actor, who's also known for We Hunt Together and Wolfe, in pinpointing the specificity of this character, who is often mechanical and relentless in his pursuits. One was the relationship between Morrow and Yutani (Sandra Yi Sencindiver), the head of that half of the Weyland-Yutani corporation. Her late grandmother, the previous CEO, took Morrow off the street as a boy. "There is an emotional connection there," Ceesay says.
Another was the revelation of the daughter Morrow left behind before going off on a years-long space mission. "A man like Morrow, how does he get a girlfriend and have a kid?" Ceesay continues, laughing. "How does that happen? And then, what is it like to be on a ship eight years away from Earth and find out that you've lost the most important person in your life? What does that do to you?"
Patrick Brown/FX
Jamie Bisping as Malachite, Karen Aldridge as Chibuzo, and Michael Smiley as Shmuel on 'Alien: Earth'
Hawley doesn't have a distinct philosophy about approaching the "bottle episode," other than to say he's "an ensemble storyteller." It's clear he likes to build momentum, though. Hawley points to his work on Fargo, which routinely has "a lot of moving pieces on a collision course," he says. The same is true of "In Space, No One..." on Alien: Earth.
"You had this mystery about who sabotaged the ship, you had these three or four creatures that were all in play, and all of these stories were gonna collide in the last 15 minutes," he says. "It's thrilling, as an Alien fan, to see it escalate, to be invested, to have the slow build, the suspense of the mystery."
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He also gives us moments we haven't yet seen from this franchise — mainly a guy (Michael Smiley's Shmuel), puppeted by the alien eyeball in his head and what happens when he encounters the xenomorph. "I can tell you that filming an actor jumping onto a xenomorph and biting it was the craziest visual because, who would do that? It makes no sense," Hawley remarks. "But then when you introduced this other alien entity into it, you've lost any predictability, which is what I loved about it. There's a moment on that bridge in the last 10 minutes where you're like, I have no idea what's gonna happen now."
Ceesay, whose character finds himself smack in the middle of the xenomorph and eyeball Shmuel face-off, acknowledges the inherent comedy of that scene. "You finished the moment [on set] and everybody burst out laughing because it's so crazy," he recalls. "Noah said this wonderful thing where he knows he's come up with a really awful moment when your reaction is to laugh because it's almost ridiculous."
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