For many tuning in to Alien: Earth when it premiered last month, the main draw was another opportunity to see the terrifying oblong-headed creature that we’ve been watching terrorize spaceships and defeat Predators since it was introduced in the original 1979 film. But as the show winds to a close, there is another alien threatening to steal the show right out from under its nose. Do Xenomorphs even have noses? Well, then it’s being stolen right out from under its retracting proboscis, which is actually just another drooling head that lives in its mouth.
Yes, I’m talking about the Eyeball, the seventh-grade horror fan’s notebook doodle come to CGI life, which is being held on Boy Kavalier’s island with the rest of Weyland-Yutani’s intergalactic spoils. While there are many new creatures that crashed to Earth aboard the specimen-filled Maginot, a ship on a biological-research mission, there is only one with the kind of shit-talking (and shit-taking) main-character energy to ensure it will be haunting our nightmares even longer than the original Xenomorph. Sorry to that weird hanging plant with a tongue, the acid-spewing flies, and the creepy-crawly super-ticks, but that monster is the Eyeball.
Part of what makes it so scary is its method of survival. Outside a host, it looks like an eyeball with a dozen irises nested above a baby octopus’s worth of super-elastic tentacles it can use to crawl, stick to surfaces, walk upside down, and catapult itself long distances. (Science officer Chibuzo calls it “she” at one point, but we’re going with “it” because the Eyeball is above such puny Earth constructs as gender.) When it finds a host, the Eyeball skitters to the host’s head and uses its arms to scratch the host’s face, pry out the host’s own eyeball, and then plant itself in the host’s skull, using its tentacles to replace the optic nerve and take over the host’s brain and body. It ends up in total command, and the body doesn’t even have to be alive. (Maybe that’s why it’s the only creature to attack the synthetic hybrids?) So far, we’ve seen it nestle into Shmuel, the grizzled engineer on the Maginot; a mutilated cat that was also living on the ship; and a sheep provided by Boy Kavalier and his lackey, Kirsh.
The body horror of the Xenomorph in its various forms is that the face-hugger is first going to latch on to your skull, impregnating your unconscious husk with a chest-buster that will then pop out of you when you least expect it, leaving you lifeless and semi-digested on a starship floor. What the Eyeball offers is something else. It’s not only going to kill you — it’s then going to use your body for its own nefarious purposes. The only thing worse than being dead is being dead but also having the body you fed, bathed, occasionally masturbated, and nurtured for a lifetime used to do a space monster’s bidding. I didn’t floss every day just so my very healthy teeth could bite the neck out of some animal at a parasite’s behest. While the Xenomorph is here to destroy you, the Eyeball is here to use you.
While the Eyeball’s means of getting into a host may be violent, so far its most destructive acts have come in the form of a nudge. Aboard the Maginot while in a containment unit on Chibuzo’s desk, it saw one of the aforementioned super-ticks escape its own containment. The Eyeball then tapped on the glass of its bottle, distracting Chibuzo enough for her to put it back into the containment wall, then it nudged the bottle on reentry so that it didn’t click into place. That’s two nudges: one allowing the super-tick to lay its larvae in Chibuzo’s water bottle and another allowing it to dislodge its container and scuttle to freedom as soon as she left the room. And she took the water bottle with the super-tick larvae with her, leading a thirsty engineer to drink from it, the ticks to take over his body, and the utter chaos that caused the Maginot to crash-land on Earth. All that with just two taps. Badass!
It may be smaller than a face-hugger, but the Eyeball packs a bigger punch because it’s not just an external alien-impregnating machine. Where Xenomorphs operate on instinct to propagate the species, we don’t yet know what motivates the Eyeball, making the possibilities for destruction endless. What if the Eyeball gets into a Synth, ensuring immortality; takes over all of Earth; sends humans to do its bidding throughout space; and eventually takes over the galaxy? The uncertainty is what makes it awesome — and what makes it terrifying. All we really know about it is that it’s always watching (duh, it’s a giant fucking eyeball), looking for the inflection point where it can nudge events in its direction.
If the Eyeball has a primary pop-culture predecessor, it is not the Xenomorph but rather Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish from Game of Thrones, who always said that “chaos is a ladder,” one he would build and climb to his own benefit. That seems to be what the Eyeball did when it came for Isaac, the hybrid formerly known as Tootles. The Eyeball saw that Isaac entered the container housing the acid-spewing flies and knew that if it butted the sheep’s head in just the right place, it would startle him enough that he would fall, the door would close behind him, and the flies would use their venom to digest his body. How is that going to free it? We don’t know, and the Eyeball may not either, but it knows it will provide more opportunities, more chances to just tap the glass a little and send the situation careening in a whole different direction it can take advantage of.
That’s why, and I hate to admit it, I’m kind of rooting for the Eyeball. First of all, outside of Wendy and cyborg Morrow, it’s the only thing we’ve seen attack a Xenomorph. When it inhabited Shmuel’s body aboard the Maginot, it wasted no time jumping on the Xenomorph’s back and trying to attack it. Even once it was dislodged from that host, it continued to attack the Xenomorph, and the killer alien seemed, I don’t know, afraid? What if the Weyland-Yutani biologists took these creatures from the same planet, one where the Eyeball was one of the Xenomorph’s few natural predators? What if the key to defeating them lies not in brute strength but in the intelligence possessed by the small but savvy Eyeball?
If nothing else, I’m ready for the Eyeball to give the careless and arrogant Boy Kavalier his comeuppance. The Eyeball’s best moment so far this season was when the twerpy CEO was quizzing it on the next three numbers of pi. After stomping the sheep’s hoof once to indicate the first number, then stomping five times for the next one, when pressed by Boy Kavalier for a third number, instead of responding, it let out a giant turd on the floor of its container. It is not playing this guy’s reindeer games. (Would the Eyeball want to be inside a reindeer? Probably.) Boy Kavalier’s plan is to talk the Eyeball into a host so he can control it, but this thing knows no control; it knows no alliance. It knows nothing except taking advantage of the situation and nudging it in the right direction.
Boy Kavalier’s plan will almost certainly end very badly for everyone involved — except probably the Eyeball, who would be my pick for the winner for the whole season. Alien: Earth is set two years before the events of the original film, and since humans and Earth still exist in that movie, it would stand to reason that the two Xenomorphs set loose on the planet (so far!) have been eradicated. But as we approach the finale with Boy Kavalier preparing to implant the Eyeball into someone, it very easily could survive and even become quite influential. What if it gets into Boy Kavalier himself or one of Earth’s other captains of industry? What if Ripley’s entire destiny was set in motion by one gross little critter that dared to dream?
Even if the Eyeball doesn’t win the season plotwise, it has already won in the fans’ imagination. Not only is the silly-looking, unpredictable, totally killer Eyeball the best character to come out of the franchise’s first foray into TV, but it’s also the most memorable. It’s the Eve Harrington of 2120, coming in as an unknown and taking over the Xenomorph’s spot to achieve biological and cultural dominance. No matter which host Boy Kavalier chooses for it, I’m going to be cheering as it achieves its final goal — which we still don’t know, but I can only assume, like Pinky and the Brain combined, it’s nothing short of taking over the world. After all these years, we’ve seen so many ways to defeat a Xenomorph, but the only way to beat the Eyeball may be to join it.