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From the moment it was announced, Alien: Earth was a bold punt. Ridley Scott’s movie (and James Cameron’s first sequel) painted the xenomorph as a classic baddie. It was unstoppable. It was seemingly unkillable. It was largely seen in flashes, and motivated only by death. Whenever subsequent movies attempted to broaden the alien’s mythology, its impact only diluted. So the thought of subjecting it to an entire television series – one designed to run for several years, no less – risked destroying it completely.
And yet Alien: Earth is a wild success. But this isn’t really to do with the xenomorph at all. Instead, almost every last atom of glory has been stolen by a new alien; one whose smarts, menace and weirdness trump almost anything the franchise has given us so far. Yes, it’s time to give the demon sheep eye its props.
When the show was announced, the broad strokes of the plot – and all the promotional material – hinted at a series where a xenomorph would crash-land on Earth and run around murdering everyone for eight hours. This is partly true, but the show gambled on showing us some of the other extraterrestrial species that were captured in space at the same time.
Key among them was trypanohyncha ocellus, a creature best described as a multi-irised eyeball bunged on to a set of octopus tentacles. Onboard the doomed spacecraft, the ocellus was able to sense danger and free itself from containment, unleashing untold horrors on its crew. In a flashback episode, we saw the ocellus burrow into the eye socket of its first host (a crew member played by Michael Smiley), giving him the intellectual ability to summon xenomorphs and (as seen in a battle where he hopped on to one’s back and bit it) the physical ability to cause them pain.
However, as things stand, the ocellus’s definitive form so far has been the sheep. It has spent the bulk of the first season burrowed deep into the ocular socket of a regular woolly critter, which then became the most terrifying creature ever seen on television. Since being invaded by the ocellus, the sheep has done very little except stand in one fixed position, a parasitic eyeball bulging from the side of its face as it glowers menacingly at everything around it.
But even with something as docile as a sheep for a host, the ocellus has unleashed havoc. It waited for an opportunity to ram the glass walls of its containment cell, distracting a scientist just long enough to be eaten. And, as of last week, we know that it can: a) identify pi to at least four digits; and b) poo when annoyed.
The genius of the ocellus is how it stands in such stark contrast to the xenomorph. That creature is all instinct and reaction; this one waits and watches and coolly observes, figuring out the precise moment in which to cause maximum damage. What’s more, it is unquestionably malicious by design – and this is what makes it so utterly terrifying.
It should be noted that I am writing this before watching Wednesday’s finale. Based on last week’s episode, it seems as though the plan is to remove the ocellus from the sheep’s head and implant it into the head of a “lower IQ” human. We’ve already seen a hint of what it can do when nestled into a person’s skull, but the flashback episode did a fine job of obscuring many of its abilities. We know, at minimum, that it can talk to xenomorphs. But this is an ability shared with Sydney Chandler’s hybrid human, Wendy. How will a xenomorph react to two humanoids fighting for control of it? We should cross our fingers and hope that the finale is the Alien franchise’s Kramer vs Kramer moment.
Beyond that, all bets are off. After all, given the devastation the ocellus has been able to wreak as a sheep, just think of all the horrors it could unleash on the world with a larger brain, communicable language and opposable thumbs.
This is why the ocellus has been Alien: Earth’s secret weapon all along. A long-form television series cannot be sustained by the angry toddler histrionics of a xenomorph. But the ocellus can think. It can plot. It can evolve. It is a masterpiece of design and execution. And, providing nobody squishes it underfoot in the finale (which someone should probably at least try to), it is the alien that Earth most urgently needs to worry about.
