This article contains spoilers for Alien: Earth through Episode 5, “In Space, No One…”
Back when Alien: Earth premiered on FX and Hulu, all of three weeks ago, IGN’s Clint Gage said in his review of the first two episodes that, “The xenomorph is playing the hits, as it were. But this very purposefully leaves room for the new aliens, however; an inventive bunch of creepy crawlies including an eyeball octopus that, I’m calling it now, is going to be the standout of the show when the dust settles.” Well, the dust hasn’t quite settled, with three more episodes in the season to go, but we’re calling it anyway. The Eye, the horrible octopus monster, isn’t just the standout of the show; he’s the true hero of Alien: Earth.
When first introduced, Trypanohyncha Ocellus, aka T. Ocellus, seems like just another horrible alien monster in a series of horrible alien monsters let loose during the crash of the Weyland-Yutani ship, the Maginot, into New Siam. Essentially a larger-than-human eyeball with multiple irises and pupils, and multiple pink, fleshy tentacles to match, we first encountered the Eye while it was animating the half-destroyed corpse of the Maginot’s cat, Rascal. It wriggled out of the corpse, flung itself into the air, and attempted to attach itself to the hybrid Nibs (Lily Newmark), mentally scarring the synth-with-a-human-consciousness so badly that in recent episodes she’s thought that she was pregnant.
While the scene is a standout and the Eye is awful, it seemed like T-Ossy was a mere monster in a sea of monsters at the outset of Alien: Earth. But unlike in, say, Prometheus, where most of the alien creatures were variations on the designs set out by H.R. Giger back in 1979, the Eye is an outlier. Alien: Earth has already introduced its version of the xenomorph in multiple stages of development, the relatively featureless blood-sucking Tick, and the mysterious carnivorous plant called D. Plumbicare. There’s at least one more to come, the Fly, but even in its early appearances, there’s something more intriguing about the Eye than the others.
The “no duh” reason for that? The eye! Every one of the creatures mentioned above, even the xenomorph, lacks visible eyes, and you may be aware that the eyes are the windows to the soul. The Eye, by contrast, is nuthin’ but eyeball and tentacles; its unblinking stare is impossible to look away from, and given that it doesn’t blink, there’s no refresh, no moment of respite.
While they’re vastly different, there’s a clear parallel you can draw between the Eye and another standout with big eyes on another franchise-extension TV show: Grogu on The Mandalorian. Seriously! When designing Baby Yoda for the Star Wars series, a lot of thought was put into every aspect of the character, but perhaps none moreso than his eyes, which eventually ended up all black with a little white around the edges.
"When they're human eyes, you can see the white color of his eyes, it gets very strange very fast,” designer Doug Chiang said on a panel at Star Wars Celebration Anaheim in 2022, via Collider. "Like a puppy dog, there's just enough white in his eyes visible to make him look adorable. Seeing that tiny bit of white gave his eyes a very charming, sympathetic look, then dressing him in his oversized sack completely captured that 'ugly cute' factor."
The Eye, thanks to the constantly visible whites, is firmly on the other side of that “ugly cute” spectrum (and the Eye vs. Grogu crossover is when?), but there’s still something small and fascinating about him, like a hairless cat: kind of gross, but you still want to take care of it, even if in this case, the pet would very much like to pop out your eyeball and take over your brain.
To take a small step back: What exactly is the Eye? A blink-and-you-miss-it (or go frame by frame or you’ll miss it) screen on the Maginot, via Mashable, explains further:
"A smooth scolex features several ocular irises and a tentacle system that can grow or retract at will. The tentacles carry extraordinary strength and are built to climb into and dislodge the eyes of other living organisms. Once replaced in the eye socket, T. Ocellus takes over the ocular pathways to the brain, overriding the neuro-transmissions throughout the body. More study needed to gauge inherent intelligence, though the Ocellus has shown remarkable problem solving abilities at a near-human measure. A complete surprise."
It’s that last part which elevates the Eye even further in Episodes 4 and 5 of Alien: Earth. In the former episode, while the xenomorph (it’s the titular role!) is mostly off-screen, the Eye takes center stage thanks to experiments from science synth Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant) and childlike trillionaire Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin). Aiming to see how the Eye works, they release it on an unsuspecting sheep. The Eye creeps into the sheep’s enclosure, rips its eyeball out, and crawls into the leftover ocular socket, the sheep’s eye still hanging by its retinal nerve. And then the sheep stands up on its hind legs.
The sequence is horrifying, but like the clearly delighted Boy Kavalier, it’s hard as a viewer to look away. We get shocking hints of the xenomorph’s own intelligence in the same episode, but it’s the Eye’s sheep invasion that’s really of interest. On that, show creator Noah Hawley was going for pure horror, and with very specific inspiration from the Alien series itself.
“To me, there’s a relentlessness to this that is similar to the facehugger,” Hawley told THR. “Certainly in James Cameron’s movie [Aliens] where Ripley [Sigourney Weaver] and Newt [Carrie Henn] are trying to get away from these things, and they just keep coming, and they’re fast, and they’re scrambling, and they’re spider like a crab. [The suckers] was a really great upgrade for the original conceit where before, it just had to run as fast as it could at you. Now it can fly. And here in Austin, we have the Palmetto bugs fly. A giant roach that flies is always worse than a giant roach that doesn’t. So the fact that it can propel itself, that it can stick to you, and you’re basically trying to fight it off, and it has all these arms and it’s relentlessly trying to get in.”
Continued Hawley, “Plus, it enters your face. The facehugger literally goes into your mouth, and there’s something really disturbing about that. But everyone has issues with eyeballs. It just felt like it’s designed just to play into that genetic revulsion.”
If Episode 4 was designed to push the revulsion buttons, Episode 5 goes in another direction entirely. Flashing back in time to show us how the Maginot crashed, we get to see just how the Eye escaped, and it wasn’t during the crash itself; it was much earlier.
In a key scene, science officer Chibuzo (Karen Aldridge) is studying Species 19, aka the blood-sucking Ticks, with the Eye in a glass tube next to her on the table. Looking over at the Eye, she quips, “Take a picture, it’ll last longer.” And while this is a funny moment, it also succeeds in anthropomorphizing the Eye in a way that we wouldn’t for The Ticks or D. Plumbicare. But the jaw-dropper is what happens next. Species 19 manages to push open its containment unit, sneak out, and lay eggs in Chibuzo’s thermos while she looks the other way, and the Eye – get this! – knocks on the glass to get her attention. Sure, its motivations are unclear. Perhaps it was warning Species 19 that it only has a moment to spew larva, but it sure seems like it’s trying to tell Chibuzo there’s a problem, which she ignores.
The bigger moment, though? Once all hell has broken loose on the ship and the Eye has escaped its own containment unit due to a harried Chibuzo not properly locking it in place, the Eye creeps up on poor senior engineer Shmuel (Michael Smiley) and takes over his body off-screen. That’s a bummer, and should turn us against our good buddy, the Eye, but what happens next absolutely rules instead! A full-grown xenomorph enters, and the Eye in Shmuel’s body loses it, going full Alien vs. Predator by fighting it mano a mano (alieno a alieno?), jumping on the xenomorph’s back, trying to bite it, and ultimately even trying to take it over. Points against the Eye there because A), the xenomorph doesn’t have eyes, only eye sockets, and B), if the Eye did manage to jam its tentacles through, it would likely melt because of the acid blood. Dumb, the Eye! Bad!
The implication before this episode was that all the alien species are predators, or as the show calls them, monsters. The takeaway after Episode 5, for the Eye at least, is that there’s a sense of self-preservation going on, but it also seems to be, shocker of shockers, a natural predator for the xenomorph. There’s no language that we can understand exchanged between the two, but Shmu-Eye-L seems to instantly recognize the xenomorph for what it is and doesn’t hesitate to attack it. That indicates a species rivalry that we haven’t really seen in any of the movies other than the Yautja in the Alien vs. Predator films.
In the midst of murky loyalties like cyborg Morrow’s (Babou Ceesay) razor focus on returning the xenomorph eggs to Yutani (Sandra Yi Sencindiver), Wendy’s (Sydney Chandler) increasing bond with the xenomorph, or Boy Kavalier’s behind-the-scenes manipulation of the Maginot’s crash, the Eye is the only character who has clear motivations…even if they do boil down to self-preservation first, a willingness to help protect humans (or at least warn them about present danger) second, and knowing that the xenomorph is bad news third. But on that last point, if anyone is going to save Neverland from the incoming xenomorph invasion, it’s the Eye.
So all hail the Eye, the true hero of Alien: Earth. To quote a little guy known as Grogu, “this is the way.”
