Morrow was the chief scientist on the ship? This was his project, or did I misunderstand something?

Also, when they show the ship, I never saw the body of the ship's android. Where was he?

Turns out Teng was not an android after all, just weird.

The eyeball octopus may not actually be entirely hostile, and certainly is not a fan of the xenomorph.

My only real quibble is that they appeared to know enough about the xenomorph's lifecycle to know what was going on, but didn't know it had acid blood. Although at least some of that knowledge was possibly confined to Morrow specifically, with the med team having no reason to know, so it gets a pass.

The rest of that was a nice use of flashback, putting everything in place for the start of the first episode.

The man-in-a-rubber-suit xenomorph. I think it was a great quiet little throw back to the original Alien movie (much like the rest of the episode). Also I liked seeing it move awkwardly around on two legs rather then its preferred and more proficient running/crawling/leaping we normally see from it. And in full light, no less! No carefully placed shadows here, no sir!

The show also gets bonus point from me for showing an explosion from space with no noise! I do love to see quiet space shots.

Agreed on all points.
They certainly added some depth to the eyeball octopus. It's clearly a life form capable of intelligent thought and problem solving. And yes, while maybe not overtly hostile, is still willing and able to subdue and take control of unwilling hosts (i.e - Shemul(?)). It will be interesting to see where they go with it, if it gains some form of reliable communication method, whether it becomes the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" type character or just another enemy alien jerk to deal with on top of the (one has to assume) impending and inevitable xenomorph outbreak.

It did bug me a little (pardon the pun) that the specimen containment breach alarm wasn't louder and y'know... ship wide? You'd think of all things, that'd alarm would be a big blaring klaxxon with flashing red light of doom.

Boy Kavalier is definitely not as obliviously innocent as we might first might have thought.

Loved the other gribblies getting some threatening screen time. The Ticks are horrific, and do lethal farts. Johnny Eyeball is terrifying but super interesting in what might happen with it next.

Very impressed at what was in its essence The Abridged Alien, we still end up with something that feels fresh and original as a result of having more than just the Xenomorph to worry about.

But also the design work. Right at the end, we see some kind of aircraft shuttle thing atop Yutani Tower. And there’s a clear design lineage to the Cheyenne Dropship.

I also like how the Maginot has the rugged tech of the Nostromo evident, and the padded corridors. But juxtaposed to much fancier tech elsewhere. It shows Rugged For A Reason to my mind.

But now, sadly? It’s another bloody week until we got more Win pumped into our eyeballs.

The bit where Morrow kills the engineer guy with the knife through the back, just like a certain creature was *chefs kiss*

I thought the eyeball creature was the one that was supposed to surprise us with its intelligence, but did you see that tick first figure out how to get out of its cage, then surreptitiously spike the lady's water with nymphs, then hide in her sandwich? Devious little buggers.

When the eyeball creature rapped on its container after the tick got loose, I felt a surge of hope and said to my wife, "it's warning her!" Then my wife said, "no, it's distracting her so she won't see it." Oh. Yeah. Duh.

Generally speaking it makes perfect sense that the different alien creatures would go for each other as much as the humans. They've been cherry-picked by Weyland-Yutani because they're all highly deadly predators. I loved the monster mash we got with this episode between the eyeball and the xenomorph, and I hope a few more are coming before this ends.

Rather than stumble around like a zombie, it was interesting to see the eyeball make much better athletic / combat use of the human's body than the old man seemed humanly capable of doing himself. But the fact that the eyeball went for the alien tells me nothing about its potential as an intentional human ally. So far the eyeball seems always to want to trade up, like a hermit crab looking for a better shell, to whatever seems to be the most apex creature on the food pyramid. So it went from the gutted cat to Nibbs, then when possessing the sheep, it stood up like a human to glare back at its captors on equal "footing," and in this last episode, after its human body was bested it even made a play for the xenomorph. Bad luck for Mr. Eyeball, since xenomorphs have no eyes, and even if they did, you'd find out after worming your way in that their blood is acid. Loved the weird base growl that the eyeball-possessed actor came up with (or at least I hope the actor came up with it himself. That'd be cool.) At this point in the franchise, the origin story scares are settled and a bit stale, and including stuff like this isn't jumping the shark, it's good crazy.

One point in favor of the eyeball eventually showing a "common enemy" side, though; when it's not attacking and extending tentacles much farther than it looks like they should go, it's actually kind of cute and unassuming, easy to underestimate. In human films, being cute is often indicative of being good, or at least of being not entirely evil. Great galaxies, you humans are dumb as rocks.

While a xenomorph ran a high-tech rat maze in Jim Woodring's excellent comic Aliens: Labyrinth, the chief scientist presented it with the choice of attacking a delicious, helpless pig or an armed marine, and asked the hero of the series "which will it pick?" It went for the marine because, as the scientist put it, xenomorphs always go for the biggest threat first. I think Mr. Eyeball follows a similar logic, excepting that it wants to take possession of the biggest threat and become it, too.

Anyhow, still loving this series without reservation. It feels like some sort of escapist consolation prize for the real world crap we're all living through, and man, do I need it. Always a pleasure to check in here and see what you folks make of it.

Regarding Nibbs, I'm going to hazard a guess that she hasn't been literally impregnated by it / seeded with eggs / etc., but since part of her trauma is rooted in Mr. Eyeball's attack, and they showed her touching her own eyeball later, I wouldn't be surprised if Nibbs' comes up with some disturbed idea that the Eyeball was the holy spirit bringing her a child, and ends up doing something religiously bizarre and probably catastrophic related to the creature later.

And again speaking of Aliens: Labyrinth, both Nibbs and Wendy are giving me potential "I am the Hive" vibes.

See, I initially had a similar thought, but on thinking about it as the scene went on, it didn't really make sense for the eyeball to make such a stupid error after the level of intelligence it had shown up to that point. So I think it was just trying to take out the xenomorph as a threat, rather than a potential host.

And while that's likely down to self-interest rather than a desire to help the humans (as it's definitely not shy about taking over a human when convenient), it didn't kill Zaverni, just knocked her out of the way.

So I think it's intelligent enough that it's just trying to survive and eliminate obvious threats, rather than going on a 'kill all humans' rampage like the other critters.

This was a really great episode.

Humanizing Morrow as this tired and hard working security officer dealing with the crew's tiny recklessnesses and bits makes him more like Ripley than Ashe which is a really fantastic twist.

The lab scene is fantastically done.

The Eye has, without a single line of its own and only a few scenes, become a fascinating character in its own right.