Season 1, Episode 5

17 days before the Maginot's crash, Morrow is awakened by Clem, who tells him that there was a fire, some creatures got loose and are now in the medbay—attached to the faces of two crew members. One was the captain, but Rahim, the ship's doctor, tried to cut the facehugger off, which predictably went poorly. After some argument, the crew agrees to put the other crewman, Bronski, back into cryosleep still facehugged. As Morrow is leaving, Shmuel tells him the fire fried navigation and thruster control—meaning they can't slow down, and they're headed straight for Earth.

In engineering, Morrow suspects sabotage. He tells Zaveri, who's next in the line of command after the captain, to declare a shipwide emergency, which she initially refuses to do. Morrow uses ship's gossip of her relationship with Bronski, which is against regulations, plus the threat of mutiny to blackmail her into compliance.

In the lab, he discovers a sparking, destroyed security panel, as well as a hole melted through the floor. Reviewing the security footage, it seems the fire was caused by that panel shorting out abruptly. He watches as Bronski and the captain rush to contain the fire only to be facehugged by the two escapees. When he replays the scene in slow motion, someone can be seen tinkering with the panel shortly before a cloud of steam obscures them.

Morrow pays a visit to engineering to get the ship's schematics and see how their saboteur is moving around, then goes to visit his gossipy friend, comms officer Clem. Clem mentions the communication logs were scrubbed—the saboteur knew what they were doing.

Zaveri goes to MU/TH/UR and registers the captain's death, making her acting captain. She requests permission to destroy the other cargo should the threat increase, but MU/TH/UR reminds her that the cargo is the top priority. Meanwhile, Rahim gives the captain a burial at sea and Morrow looks over keepsakes from his daughter.

Not long afterwards, he, Shmuel, Zaveri, and Teng are drawn to the bridge by a hull breach. They're discussing rousing the rest of the crew when an alarm alerts them to a quarantine break in the cryo room. Morrow arms the crew with stun guns and reiterates that they are to capture the escaped chestburster, not kill it.

In the lab, Chibuzo is recording her observations on the alien ticks, while T. Ocellus is observing her. While she watches one of the ticks feed, the other manages to open the top of its enclosure just enough to wriggle out. T. Ocellus tries to warn her, or perhaps distract her, but she waves it away and returns its containment tube to its shelf, while the alien tick spawns dozens of larvae in her water bottle. She grabs it and leaves, not noticing T. Ocellus letting itself out of its containment tube behind her.

During a very tense crew meeting regarding the sabotage situation, Malachite, the ignorant young engineer apprentice, takes a drink from Chibuzo's contaminated water. Morrow and Zaveri put the ship on lockdown and Morrow begins interrogating the crew one by one.

In engineering, Malachite begins vomiting blood and collapses, while in the lab, Zaveri and Chibuzo discover T. Ocellus's escape. Teng, in his unsettling way, informs Morrow that someone has been tampering with the cryopod readings in order to be awake when they shouldn't. Morrow rushes off, while Teng is observed from the vent above.

On the recovered ship's logs, Morrow discovers Petrovich, the chief engineer, making a deal with Boy Kavalier to crash the ship in exchange for a new robot body. He runs to cryo and sees that Petrovich is indeed out of his pod, only to be called off by a containment threat in the medbay. Chibuzo and Rahim have discovered the alien ticks lining Malachite's digestive tract. While Rahim attempts surgery, the Xenomorph introduces herself to Teng in the interrogation room. When Rahim detaches one of the ticks from Malachite's intestine, it releases some sort of toxic vapor that sends him and Chibuzo reeling. Zaveri hits the decontamination override and gasses the room, killing Rahim and Chibuzo... but not the ticks.

Receiving the news that Teng is dead, Morrow tells the surviving crew they'll barricade themselves in the bridge and try to find a way to shift trajectory so they don't crash into Earth. First, they have to find the Xenomorph, so Clem and Morrow go hunting. Petrovich finds them first and shoots Clem, forcing them to take shelter in the lab. Morrow tries to stabilize Clem, but Petrovich shoots him in the head. Morrow fatally stabs Petrovich, but Petrovich laughs, saying that Morrow can't stop it.

Zaveri is still in the corridor, undergoing a Heroic BSoD, when the Xenomorph makes itself known. It waits for Zaveri to notice it and turn around, then swipes her feet out from under her and lets Zaveri start to run before giving chase. Zaveri barricades herself in another room with Shmuel, who's acting weird—he's got something in his eye. He still helps her seal the door, though, and the Xenomorph scurries off to look for another entrance.

However, when Morrow arrives, it's to Zaveri's unconscious body. He pulls his gun on Ocellus-Shmuel, who vocalizes in an alien tongue that alerts the Xenomorph to them (though it's unclear whether this is deliberate, or a warning). Morrow ducks out of the way and Ocellus-Shmuel tackles the xenomorph, who impales them with its tail and throws them off. Zaveri runs to the MU/TH/UR room, where Morrow is sealed inside, while T. Ocellus ditches its host and launches itself at the Xenomorph instead. It manages to slow it down, but it throws it off to go after Zaveri.

Morrow seals himself inside the impact room, the xenomorph kills Zaveri, and the Maginot hurtles onwards towards Earth.

In the present, Morrow meets with Yutani and reaffirms his promise to recover the specimens. He also promises to kill Kavalier. Yutani says they're meeting tomorrow to discuss arbitration, but Morrow says that they're going to have to do things his way.

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Tropes:

• All for Nothing: The Maginot mission as a whole counts as this, spending 65 years in outer space and spending countless lives just for almost the entire crew to be killed and their specimens to end up with a rival corporation, due to the actions of Petrovich.
• Blood from the Mouth: Malachite coughs up blood and passes out when the tick larvae inside of him grow large enough to start seriously compromising his organs.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: T. Ocellus is a lethal Puppeteer Parasite that has no qualms about killing other creatures for hosts, but this isn't out of malice the way it is for the Xenomorph, and it still tries to help the crew of the Maginot deal with the outbreak on more than one occasion.
• Boom, Headshot!: Clem is killed by a headshot from Petrovich while Morrow is trying to reassure him.
• Call-Forward: The crew realizes that cryostasis wasn't enough to freeze the Xenomorph gestating inside of Bronski, reasoning that a species that can survive the vacuum of space probably wouldn't be affected by the procedure. This may actually be why Ash is unmoved in the original film when Parker suggests they freeze Kane (beyond playing along with Dallas, who didn't want to do it himself out of concern for his crew), as he likely already knows that it wouldn't stop the Xenomorph from being birthed and getting loose on the Nostromo and causing havoc, complicating its return to the company. It also shows just how desperate Burke had grown in Aliens, since he planned to smuggle chestburster embryos in Ripley and Newt despite likely knowing that cryostasis wouldn't affect the aliens.
• The Comically Serious: Morrow has no time for shenanigans with the deteriorating situation. When he begins watching Bronski's log where he, after having a passionate round of sex with Zaveri, claims he's in love, all Morrow can do is sigh in annoyance before skipping to the next log.
• Complete-the-Quote Title: "In space, no one can hear you scream."
• Curb-Stomp Cushion: While the Xenomorph still wins the fight with the Ocellus, the sheer tenacity, brute strength, and arguably audacity of the creature's assault genuinely seem to stump it for a minute. What seems to be a normal human openly physically assaulting it seems to have understandably been the last thing it was expecting, especially when conventional stab wounds don't slow it down (presumably, the Ocellus feels little to no pain from injuries inflicted on Shmuel), and it takes a minute to throw it off. Then the Ocellus attacks it by itself, and the Xenomorph spends several precious moments fighting to get it off.
• Deadly Gas: One of the ticks releases a toxic gas which almost instantly kills Rahim and Chibuzo when the doctor tries to pull it off of Malachite's lung.
• Didn't Think This Through: Bronski is placed in cryostasis when he's infected, but the crew fails to consider that a cryopod calibrated to humans would be insufficient for creatures that can survive in a vacuum, allowing the embryo to mature and break containment. Morrow even notes the mistake in hindsight.
• Dramatic Irony: Petrovich betrays Weyland-Yutani and sells out his crew mates to be at the forefront of Boy Kavalier transferring his consciousness into a synthetic body, since the audience knows that Boy was making empty promises, as currently the transferal process has only been successful for children; however, Boy makes it clear the hybrid process is still a work in progress and is only able to promise putting him at the top of the list while pointing out Petrovich is unlikely to survive the imminent crash he helped cause. The latter seems to accept this and is content with having gotten revenge on Weyland-Yutani.
• Dude, She's Like in a Coma: When interrogating Teng, Morrow berates him for breaking into the stasis room to masturbate over the unnamed woman in cryostasis. Teng simply lets out a creepy shuddering sigh.
• Due to the Dead: Played with in that Bronski isn't dead at the time, only facehugged, but Zaveri mourns him by pouring a tube of soil from Bronski's native Utah onto his cryopod (then emptying the rest out in libation when he does get killed).
• Enemy Mine: T. Ocellus, despite being a lethal parasitic entity like the others organisms aboard, seems to be more inclined to help the crew of the ship than actively threaten them when the outbreak reaches its worst point, even begrudgingly fighting against a full-grown Xenomorph when they are out of options rather than trying to attack the humans.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Morrow is shown to once have had a daughter, who died while he was on the mission. He cares about Clem and his desire to kill Boy Kavalier is as much to do with avenging his crewmates deaths as atoning for them. His Undying Loyalty to Yutani's grandmother is because she took him in when he was a starving street kid with a palsied arm.
• Failed a Spot Check: Chibuzo repeatedly fails to account for weaknesses in her lab's security, allowing a tick to get out and lay eggs in her water bottle when she wasn't looking; then failing to make sure the T. Ocellus's container was secured, which allows its escape.
• Foregone Conclusion: Given that the Maginot's crash is what kicks off the series, everything the crew does to try to contain the specimens and save themselves is obviously All for Nothing and only Morrow will survive.
• Heroic BSoD: Zaveri freezes up when Malachite, Rahim and Chibuzo are killed, standing by the sealed medbay for some time before finally dumping out her soil for their loss. The Xenomorph showing up snaps her out of it.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Ocellus-Shmuel is killed tackling the Xenomorph, though it's Downplayed in that T. Ocellus only sacrifices its host's body, not itself.
• Inappropriately Close Comrades: Weyland-Yutani forbids romantic relations between coworkers, something that Morrow uses to blackmail Zaveri into issuing the ship-wide emergency.
• Incompetence, Inc.: The crew of the Maginot are just too disorganized and bullheaded to get things done. Dinsdale was killed when Rahim and the others impulsively tried to remove the facehugger from him without knowing anything about the creature. Chibuzo, despite meaning well, doesn't pay enough attention to the specimens she is charged with and is forced to admit she made a dumb mistake. During the debriefing on the ship emergency, nobody respects Zaveri enough to listen to her even when it's clear something is very wrong and she is now in command. Teng is also still able to creep on the women in hibernation despite having already been threatened with forfeiture of shares and nobody is willing to do a thing about it and he decides to play coy with vital information when interrogated, even though he knows the situation is dire. With the mention of the casualties the crew took collecting the alien specimens, it's left to viewers to ponder if the more competent crew members were already wiped out.
• In the Back: After Petrovich kills Clem, Morrow triggers steam vents in the halls to obscure his vision, then gets behind him and runs him through with his Blade Below the Shoulder.
• It Can Think: This episode highlights how several of the specimens aboard the Maginot, unbeknownst to much of the crew, are capable of higher level problem solving than the crew gave them credit for, which leads to the saboteur plotline spiraling into a From Bad to Worse scenario that leads to a full outbreak and the deaths of everyone aboard. The standout remains T. Ocellus, which, despite being a parasitic organism like a majority of the creatures aboard the ship, seems to actively be against a ship-wide outbreak and attempts to aid the humans multiple times, even trying to warn Chibuzo about the ticks breaching containment and attacking a fully grown Xenomorph when it is cornered, buying time for Zaveri and Morrow. The ticks also figure out how to open the simple iris lock on their container by slipping a tentacle through the slide mechanism to open it from the other side.
• Karmic Death: Malachite refuses to take Zaveri seriously as captain, which includes taking out a meal during her briefing. Then he puts too much hot sauce on it, causing him to take a sip from Chibuzo's canteen which had just been infected with tick larvae.
• Logical Weakness: The T. Ocellus goes after the Xenomorph when Shmuel is killed, but since the Xenomorph has no eyes, the T. Ocellus can do little more than flail at the larger creature until it's finally thrown off.
• Lured into a Trap: The saboteur starts a fire in the cargo bay which serves the dual purpose of disabling navigation and lures people into the cargo bay to extinguish the fire, where there are two facehuggers waiting to grab potential hosts.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: This episode reveals that the Maginot was intentionally sabotaged by its chief engineer to crash in Prodigy controlled territory on Earth, after the man was subverted by Boy Kavalier himself, thus making an act of corporate espionage/theft of the alien specimens and the murder of most of the ship's crew look like an accident.
• Man Bites Man: Ocellus-Shmuel bites the Xenomorph during their melee. Fortunately for the both of them, the human host's teeth can't bite hard enough to pierce its skin.
• The Mole: Kavalier bribed Petrovich to sabotage the Maginot so it would crash in Prodigy territory and he could seize the specimens for himself while making it look like an accident, thus giving him more leverage over Weyland-Yutani should they attempt to get their property back.
• Morality Pet: Clem, the ship's comms officer, acts as this for Morrow, who takes him more seriously than the rest of the crew, tries to protect him during the outbreak, and is genuinely distressed when he's killed.
• Multiple Gunshot Death: Clem is shot several times by Petrovich, taking a bullet to the shoulder and a leg before taking one to the head despite Morrow's attempts to take him behind cover.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Despite many of the crew members having good intentions, they are not rewarded for them due to their incompetency in making the decisions that lead to their demises. Shmuel prods Zaveri into authorizing a surgery to save Malachite, but it turns out to be too late to save him from the infestation of alien ticks in his body; Rahim disagrees and decides to go ahead and try to save him by removing the ticks, but they turn out to have a deadly defense mechanism that kills him, Malachite, and Chibuzo in one fell swoop. In the end, Morrow ends up the Sole Survivor explicitly because he chooses pragmatism and sticking with the mission rather than compromise himself any more than he needs to.
• No-Sell: This episode reveals that Xenomorphs and by extension the work of a facehugger is unimpeded by cryofreeze, or at least cryofreeze meant to freeze humans (the specialized containment in Alien: Romulus was obviously meant for their species). A chestburster successfully erupts from Bronski's body even after he was frozen solid.
• Not His Sled: Noah Hawley takes clear delight in subverting the plot of Alien that he knows we're expecting:
  • Rather then being unwitting pawns for Weyland-Yutani, the Maginot's explicit mission from the start was the capture of extra-terrestrial specimens for transport to earth. As such, the crew are aware enough of the potential threat these specimens pose and try to take appropriate (albeit unsuccessful) countermeasures when two of the crew wind up being facehugged. Their failure to contain the Xenomorph is due to a combination of poor decision-making on the crew's end and deliberate sabotage.
  • Teng is not an android, or the saboteur, just a random creepy jerk who actually helps Morrow work out who's sabotaging the mission.
  • While Malachite is infected during a meal, it takes a good deal longer for him to actually be taken out by the ticks. He begins having nasty coughs during the meal, which may make a viewer assume he is already infected just like Kane was, but then he reaches for the nearest drink to help himself, only just then infecting himself.
  • Rather than coldly turning on the whole crew like Ash, as even seemed to be the case in our brief glimpses of this story in the first episode, Morrow genuinely puts all his effort into saving them and only cuts his losses when Zaveri is the last remaining survivor, since he can't share the impact pod with her.
    • This is also compounded in that (unlike other Weyland-Yutani operations throughout the franchise) while the crew is considered secondary to the specimens, they are still considered valuable enough to not label the move as their first course of action due to the importance of the mission itself, motivating the preservation of the crew until it is clear there is absolutely no salvaging the crisis aboard the Maginot and Morrow is forced to save himself.
  • The usual mole subplot that shows up throughout the series is turned on its head, as unlike Ash, David, or other malicious entities that all seem to be serving the Weyland-Yutani company to their own ends at the expense of the crew, the sabotage comes from a separate company altogether as Boy Kavalier buys off Petrovich to disrupt the Wey-Yu ship's return path to bring it to his doorstep instead.
  • While Weyland-Yutani is still responsible for acquiring the specimens to begin with, and the main reason Petrovich sabotages the mission is to get revenge on the company due to his wife's death in the process of collecting the creatures, the specific conflict of the series and how the destruction of the Maginot unfolded are actually revealed in this episode to not be Wey-Yu's fault. It's actually a deliberate move made by Boy Kavalier to seize Weyland-Yutani's prize for himself, putting the famous MegaCorp on the off foot from a competitor for a change rather than the one inflicting the horrors.
  • Unlike the Xenomorph on the Nostromo who wiped out the entire crew save for Ripley, this Xenomorph has a fairly low killcount (albeit not for lack of trying!) as it only manages to kill Teng and Zaveri; the rest of the crew die due to running afoul of the other creatures, fighting with each other or perishing while still in cryosleep when the Maginot crashes.
  • Finally, Morrow snarls to Zaveri that the life of the ship's cat is hardly his first concern, in contrast to the infamous survival of Jonesy while the rest of the crew of the Nostromo perished besides Ripley herself. And as the second episode showed, the ship's cat did indeed die either from the crash or from being infected by the Ocellus.
• Not So Stoic
  • Teng's air of smugness ends when he sees the Xenomorph leering down through the air vent at him, causing Teng to scream in terror.
  • Rather than having Nerves of Steel, it's made evident that Morrow is barely holding it together during the Impact Room scene.
• Oh, Crap!: When Morrow learns that some if not all of the non-Xenomorph specimens have escaped confinement, he becomes genuinely alarmed and his cold, cool-headed demeanor begins to crumble.
• Office Romance: Zaveri and Bronski had an intense romantic affair going prior to his infection, with Bronski even claiming on his logs that he felt like he was in love. Unfortunately for Zaveri, company policy forbids workplace romantic relationships, and Morrow uses this to blackmail her into declaring the ship wide emergency.
• OOC Is Serious Business: The Xenomorph seems genuinely surprised and distressed under assault from the Ocellus.
• Once More, with Clarity:
  • The brief snippets of the Maginot's demise that we saw in the first episode are expanded out into their full occurrences, complete with the respective 'infections' (save for Shmuel, who is Killed And Replaced offscreen) and deaths. Several incidents that Joe's team investigated in the first two episodes are also clarified, such as why Malachite's body was seemingly drained of its fluids.
  • Zaveri's death in the first episode is reframed with the context that, instead of it being a sign of Morrow being an evil, ruthless piece of work concerned only with himself, it was entirely a result of pragmatism on his part. Morrow had genuinely been trying to solve the crisis, which spiraled well out of control; his last plan was to wake up the rest of the crew, hole up in the bridge and have Shmuel do his best to fix the ship — which was rendered impossible by Petrovich killing Clems and the resulting chaos unsealing Chibuzo's lab, Shmuel being infected by T. Ocellus, and the Xenomorph managing to get to the bridge. In the end, Zaveri proved completely incapable of fulfilling her duties and caused as many problems that led to the deaths of the crew as the saboteur themselves, and there was only enough space in the Impact Room for one of them; plus Morrow is concerned with getting Revenge on Boy Kavalier for the deaths of the crew and the destruction of the mission he's invested in as his life's work, necessitating his own survival above hers to fulfill that end.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: T. Ocellus proves its mettle by being able to tackle with a fully grown Xenomorph for a couple minutes, both in a host body and in its puny form, managing to take the creature by surprise and force it to put up a serious fight before it successfully throws it off.
• Pragmatic Villainy:
  • The death of Zaveri is finally clarified as being something Morrow was forced to take as opposed to a coldly evil act; he had genuinely tried to save the crew but by this point, Zaveri was the only survivor and the impact room could only contain one person, meaning he had to cut his losses to preserve the mission.
  • In the final scene, Yutani explains that she has gotten Prodigy into arbitration and is willing to let her lawyers handle the situation rather than get into a bloody (and expensive) war with another corporation. However, she presumably also knows the full story from Morrow, so she orders him to be furnished with whatever resources he requests to retrieve the specimens covertly.
• Quack Doctor: Rahim is implied to be a Functional Addict, smoking and drinking in the operating theatre and helping himself to the contents of his pharmaceutical cabinet as well. His ineptitude is shown when he kills his own captain on the operating table (compare this to Ash whose cautious incision revealed the facehugger had acid for blood without killing the patient).
• Quarantine with Extreme Prejudice: If the Deadly Gas released by the ticks didn't kill Rahim and Chibuzo, the captain sealing the room certainly did, when the oxygen is displaced by the halogen gas system.
• Red Herring: Teng, despite his sheer creepiness heavily painting him as a possible culprit for the saboteur and potentially an android even for how off-putting he generally is, turns out to just be a disturbed jerk. In fact, he proves helpful when he spells out to Morrow that he's overlooking a potential suspect: just because someone is supposed to be in cryosleep, doesn't mean they are. Sure enough, Petrovich has rigged his pod to read as occupied when he's not in it.
• Sadist: Once again, the Xenomorph is shown to make a point of letting her victims notice her and try to run, even when not doing so would make for a much easier kill.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Even when Zaveri and Morrow are all but admitting that there is no saving Malachite upon the sight of alien ticks swarming the kid's lungs, Rahim decides to go ahead and try to save his life by removing the ticks. All it does is get him killed as well as Malachite and Chibuzo.
• Shadow Discretion Shot: Invoked as Malachite complains about getting his share docked in the engineering bay. The camera pans to a shot of his shadow as a long segmented hook-tipped object slowly descends behind him, making it look like he's about to get impaled from behind by the Xenomorph—complete with a scare chord... only for it to be revealed that it was just a length of chain with a hook at the tip.
• Slasher Smile: There's more emphasis than usual on the xenomorph's toothy grin while it's stalking Zaveri through the corridors like a Slasher Movie monster.
• Smug Snake: Despite not being the mole, Teng is a creep. While the rest of the crew is becoming increasingly distressed as the Maginot degrades, he maintains a smug air to his demeanor, to the point of playing word games with Morrow rather than simply tell the man that someone was altering the cryopod records, during an interrogation and after it was made abundantly clear that someone was deliberately sabotaging the ship.
• Too Dumb to Live: The entire crew, except for Morrow, is in way over their heads and seal their own fates multiple times, such that the deliberate sabotage seems to have merely sped up the inevitable end to this mission. Rahim even notes the whole mess is "proof of how stupid smart people can be."
• Wham Shot:
  • While one of the blood ticks is escaping its containment by opening the lock, T. Ocellus tries to warn Chibuzo by tapping on its glass container.
  • Not the reveal of the saboteur—who isn't even one of the suspects in the episode—but The Reveal that Boy Kavalier was behind the crash and knew about the alien specimens the entire time.
• What If?: The events of the episode seem to explore what would have happened if certain events in Alien had gone differently, such as: what would have happened if the crew of the Nostromo had succeeded in cutting the Facehugger off Kane? (Answer: he would have died, messily, when the Facehugger's acid blood drenched him.) What would have happened if they had put him into cryosleep? (Answer: again, he would have died messily when the chestburster was unaffected by being frozen and burst out of him, though at least he wouldn't have been awake for the horror show.) What would have happened if other aliens were aboard the ship? (Answer: All of the crew except for Ripley still would have died, but probably in different ways)
• Whole Episode Flashback: With the exception of the final scene, the whole episode shows how the specimens broke containment and why the ship crashed in Prodigy territory.
• You Are in Command Now: Zaveri is forced to take command when the captain is killed, though Morrow can sense her indecisiveness and threatens her into treating the situation with the seriousness it requires lest he take command from her. This is reiterated when she goes to MU/TH/UR to formalize her command. When she tries to request the cargo be destroyed and is told in no uncertain terms that its delivery is priority one, MU/TH/UR threatens to place Morrow in command if she doesn't affirm the directive. Finally, after the disastrous attempt to save Malachite, Morrow formally takes command when she enters a Heroic BSoD.

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