This article contains spoilers for Alien: Earth through Episode 5, “In Space, No One…”
Up until now, Kumi Morrow (Babou Ceesay) has been painted as the villain, or at least a main antagonist, of FX’s Alien: Earth. He’s a cyborg with a knife that pops out of his arm like some sort of futuristic Wolverine, he’s mercilessly focused on his goals, and when we first meet him, he’s locking Zaveri (Richa Moorjani), a crew member of the doomed spaceship Maginot, out of the Mother interface room on the ship, allowing the xenomorph to kill her. We’ve watched him manipulate children and threaten to kill families, and he will seemingly stop at nothing to retrieve the xenomorph eggs and other assorted “monsters” that are the property of Weyland-Yutani and are currently stuck in Boy Kavalier’s (Samuel Blenkin) science playground/private island called Neverland.
Episode 5, however, flips the script by showing us that Morrow isn’t the villain; he’s just as doomed and complicated as everyone else on the series. Not only that, it does this by turning him into none other than Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver).
To be clear, the show doesn’t literally do that, though given that we’ve gotten some serious weirdness with the xenomorphs and synth/human hybrids already, we wouldn’t put it past show creator Noah Hawley to somehow turn Morrow into Ripley, despite her currently being somewhere out in space on the Nostromo on her own doomed voyage in the continuity of the franchise (depending on what month Alien: Earth takes place). Instead, the episode, written and directed by Hawley, flashes back to the opening scenes of the series to show what went on between the crew of the Maginot waking up from cryosleep and that scene of Morrow locking Zaveri out of the interface room.
The short version is what you probably could have intuited from the flashes in the series premiere, albeit with some variations. A saboteur named Petrovich (Enzo Cilenti) who’s working for Boy Kavalier is breaking parts of the ship, turning it into a “missile,” as the ship’s senior engineer, Shmuel (Michael Smiley), refers to it. In the process, Petrovich releases two facehuggers, which take down the ship’s captain and one other crewmember. One xenomorph hatches and escapes, while the other, thanks to an attempted removal, dies and melts the dude’s neck. Gross!
Morrow is woken out of cryosleep and is trying to investigate who the saboteur is while also keeping the crew focused on the only thing that matters: the cargo. But they’re all steadily losing it as more and more creatures get loose. Ultimately, everyone on the crew is killed except Morrow, who puts himself in the safe area under Mother’s interface room, looping us back to where we began.
The first and simplest trick Hawley uses to get us to sympathize with Morrow is to make him the point-of-view character for the episode. It’s somewhat shared by Zaveri, but she’s such a spiraling mess thanks to the fact that she was “fucking Bronski,” the other crew member who got facehugged, not to mention her whole “having morals” thing, that it’s hard to get on board with her general lack of action. In a crew meeting after things have already gone seriously sideways, it’s Morrow, not Zaveri, who gets them under control, with Ceesay’s deep, commanding voice shutting everyone down immediately by conveying the dire nature of the situation.
Another trick? Hawley makes Morrow’s arc a detective story. Fiction is littered with complicated, morally grey detectives who are in too deep. They make tough choices when they have to, and we don’t always agree with them, but we love them anyway. That’s the slot Morrow neatly fits into in the episode, thanks to his investigation into the saboteur. He interrogates suspects, combs through footage, and is the thematic missile inside the ship, razor-focused on the cargo they’re hauling for Weyland-Yutani. “Nothing matters,” Morrow explains. “Not you. Not me. Not the fucking cat.”
Bummer for the cat, but to keep diving into this particular aspect of the episode, Morrow is dark and complicated, with tragedy in his past that motivates him. Add in Zaveri as the doomed dame who hands him the mystery, Mother as the police chief who puts him on the case, and Petrovich as the corporate patsy who opposes him, and this is one step away from being Space Chinatown (queue up someone saying “she’s my chestburster” SLAP “she’s my facehugger” SLAP “she’s my chestburster AND my facehugger”). Even in the midst of vicious alien attacks and the inevitability of the Maginot crashing into New Siam, it’s easy to see the one-to-one Hawley set up here with classic detective tales in order to help us understand where Morrow is coming from.
Then there’s his essential tragedy. To the tune of “We’ll Meet Again” by Vera Lynn, we discover Morrow’s heart-wrenching backstory. He’s looking through photos and documents from Earth, and as we discover, he left his 11-year-old daughter Estelle behind. A lovely scene on the beach shows Morrow pointing to the sky and telling her, “There. See that? I’m going there. When you miss me, or you want to talk. Look straight up. I’ll always be there, looking back at you. So be good because I’ll be watching.” This is followed by an absolute gut-punch, a document from year eight in the Maginot’s 65-year mission stating, “Mr. Morrow, this is to inform you that your daughter Estelle, 19, died in a fire that destroyed her home on the 12th April. Her effects have been placed in storage for you on your return in 53 years.”
Could Morrow have saved Estelle if he had stayed home? We don’t know, and neither of course does Morrow. There’s a clear parallel between his inability to stop the random event of a house fire and Morrow purposefully using a blowtorch to seal Zaveri out of the Mother interface room later in the episode, figuratively sealing the deal that whatever human part of him exists was left behind on Earth, on the beach with his daughter. While Morrow is a cyborg, he might as well be a synth, because there’s no pity or humanity left in him other than in those private moments looking at old documents in his cabin. Even given this, we feel for him anyway, and it’s manipulative for sure: How can you hate a man who mourns his daughter? But history is littered with men who have tragic backstories and use that to motivate nihilistic and destructive impulses. Morrow is no different.
To loop back to what we said at the top, the last layer Hawley puts on Morrow is to connect him with Ellen Ripley in an episode that almost parallels the original 1979 Alien. It’s not exact, but there are clear notes present. In the original, Warrant Officer Ripley was the member of the crew of the Nostromo telling them to stick with the quarantine protocols, just as Morrow does in this episode. Morrow also has a complicated relationship with the antagonistic (and possibly perverted) Teng, a riff on the similarly complicated relationship between Ripley and Ash (Ian Holm) in the original film*. The dinner scene in the first episode of Alien: Earth is almost a direct analogue to the one that opens the original film, while the crew member meeting parallels the famous chestburster scene from Alien, albeit with the bloodsucking Species 19 instead of the xenomorph and the blood spurting coming a little later.
(*Not to muddy this up, but Hawley does give Morrow elements of Ash as well through Morrow’s devotion to Mother and the xenomorph.)
But there are two elements of the episode that most clearly parallel Morrow with Ripley, one sort of funny, the other tragic. The kind of silly one? Morrow is noticeably in his underwear when he’s woken from cryosleep, something that Zaveri calls out to him. Similarly, there are several famous scenes of Ripley wandering around in her underwear in Alien; nobody calls her out, but the scene in Alien: Earth is too pointed to not be a parallel. As for the second, Ripley also had a daughter who died while she was in space. Amanda Ripley isn’t established until Aliens, but the star character of the beloved video game Alien: Isolation was 10 years old when Ripley left Earth on the Nostromo, and after searching for her mother, Amanda died by the time Ripley was brought back home in the first sequel. There was no dying in a fire for Amanda; she passed away at age 66 of unknown causes. But it is a tragedy that spurs Ripley on in Aliens.
That’s actually where Morrow and Ripley differ, because finding out her daughter died is what motivates Ripley to become a de facto mother to Newt (Carrie Henn), thus becoming more human, not less, because of the experience. Morrow goes in the other direction, cutting off his humanity so he can’t feel the overwhelming heartache of a child dying. And as we’ve seen, he has no compunctions about using another child, in this case Slightly (Adarsh Gourav), to get what he wants.
Midway through the episode, Shmuel complains to his assistant about the mission: “It’s 65 years of your life. Equals a quarter share. And then you go, ‘oh, yes, please sir, send me on another mission.’” For Morrow, that’s exactly what happens, not because he loves killing or working for Weyland-Yutani, but because it’s the only thing he has left.
We discover in the final scene of the episode that Yutani (the grandmother of the current Yutani, played by Sandra Yi Sencindiver) essentially adopted Morrow as a child. “I’m very grateful,” he tells Yutani the younger. “She had no reason to take me in. A feral boy with a palsied arm begging in the street.” Again, we feel sympathy for him because of his condition, as well as everything mentioned above: the point of view, the detective story elements, the similarities to Ripley. But the final shot of the episode, set to the tune of “Cherub Rock” by the Smashing Pumpkins, dissuades us from any notion that Morrow will be the hero going forward. The whole city lay ahead of him, and he will stop at nothing to achieve his goal of getting Yutani what she wants. He is the most fearsome thing she’s ever seen, and while we may have spent an hour and change getting to understand Morrow, he’s not ultimately Ripley; he’s the xenomorph.
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