What's Up With the Eyeball Octopus in <em>Alien: Earth</em>?

I've seen some gnarly shit. One morning in the third grade, a crush threw up her breakfast all over me. Cut to regurgitated milk and Eggo waffles soaked into my uniform. About a year later, a stapler fell on my big toe, after which I bled profusely as the nail slowly fell off. I've pissed in fraternity house toilets and flipped over mattresses to discover bedbug larvae. Just before the pandemic, I watched a guy stand up and shit his pants on the 2 train in the New York City subway. To say nothing of the unspeakable things no adolescent boy should ever see and I did anyway in a lawless early-aughts internet.

That's all to say: After all that, I remain grossed out by Alien: Earth this week.

In the show's fourth episode, "Observation," the sinister mega-corporation Prodigy conducts an observational study of a yet-unnamed, unidentified alien creature, dubbed "Species 64," per an onscreen terminal. As a reminder, this show is all about five creatures who crash-land on Earth, among them the iconic Xenomorph. With the (presumptively) one Xenomorph well and dead, it's the other aliens who are going to matter in a big way until the end of the season.

Species 64 is an especially gross entity, what I can only describe as an eyeball with multiple irises that walks around on octopus tentacles. Apparently parasitic in nature, Species 64 violently latches onto another being by ripping out its eye and embedding into the socket, essentially becoming its "new" eye while usurping absolute control of its host's faculties.

Species 64 first appeared in episode 2, where it emerged out of the pet cat of the fallen USCSS Maginot and failed to latch onto Nibs. (Though Nibs is unharmed by the encounter, she didn't walk away unscathed.) It emerged again in episode 4, when Prodigy studied it against a sheep where... well, it does its thing, in all its gruesome, bloody glory. During their observation, Kirsh points out the sheep—or rather, the thing that used to be a sheep—displays extremely high levels of intelligence. It even watches them. Carefully.

Recently, a user on Reddit, in r/LV426, took a screenshot and upscaled the image to legibly read the show's own information (albeit incomplete) about the creature. It states simply:

"Can grow or retract at will. The tentacles carry extraordinary strength and are built to climb into and dislodge the eyes of other living ... Once replaced in the eye socket, T. Ocellus takes over the ocular pathways to the brain, overwriting the neurotransissens. More study needed to gauge inherent intelligence."

Species 64 has only had a few appearances so far in Alien: Earth, but you'd be hard-pressed to forget any of them. It's a nightmarish creature as icky as the original Xenomorph—itself a monstrosity born from the biomechanical imagination of H.R. Geiger—with stray nods to H.P. Lovecraft and Guillermo del Toro. But we know little else about it.

We know it's intelligent, possibly to the point of sentience. (It even has a personality, based on its telling body language.) We know how it operates as a parasite. But we don't know how it feeds, how it breathes, and how it breeds. We don't yet have a name for it; for all we know, it has a name for itself. We also don't know what its role in the story is, other than to present the unknown terrors that await in deep space.

Are we looking at the true villain of Alien: Earth? While Boy Kavalier is an obvious antagonist with some ickiness of his own—does he walk around barefoot in public bathrooms?—the Alien series is full of installments where the "villain" is not actually the rich asshole with insatiable greed. There's always a bigger fish, so to speak, and though this eyeball-octopi is about the size of a coffee cup, who knows what it's capable of when it takes control of something much bigger than itself. No one put this thing in front of a Predator.