DROSERA PLUMBICARE

   We'll start with the one I'm most "mixed" about. This plantlike organism was first shown dangling quietly and passively from a ceiling, resembling a closed-up green flower bud. It took until the final episode for the audience to see what this big bean pod is capable of, and with build-up like that, you might expect something exceptionally bizarre, horrifying, or both. Some commenters anticipated a Body Snatchers homage, in which the plant might be capable of imitating or cloning its prey. Others suggested that it may just be the immature state of some other space monster. Neither of these would be especially inspired, no, but it turns out to basically just eat people.

   It looks really cool, and it's up there with any of my favorite carnivorous plant designs, flaring open like the webbed tentacles of a deep-sea Cephalopod, but it's functionally the same as any other run-of-the-mill plant monster. As one of the deadliest ever alien creatures, sharing a "top five" with the "xeno," I'd expect at least a little more pizzazz. Unless it's capable of growing or multiplying far, far beyond what we've seen, it doesn't feel especially more menacing than any similarly sized Earthly predator.

THE "TICKS"

   These actually combine aspects of both ticks and leeches, two of my favorite sanguivores! They begin life as tadpole-like aquatic larvae, so tiny you might accidentally drink them, which goes exactly as well as you imagine. The adult stage is only a few inches in length, but its body can stretch and swell until just a single specimen has drained an entire human body completely, and if anyone attempts to remove it prematurely, it can release a killer toxic gas into the surrounding air. That's more like it! It's simple, but water contamination, total exsanguination and lethal defensive gas make a pretty nasty combination, and you can see how these would qualify as a top-level alien biohazard.

  The design is pretty good, too, because it really doesn't look like it belongs to any single Earthly phylum. It's superficially arthropod-like at a glance, but it technically only has four limbs at maturity, with the front pair forking at the first joint, while most of the gelatinous body is more wormlike or sluglike. The overall silhouette even gives a bit of a squid impression, and I love the larvae looking so much like tadpoles - a larval shape that's cropped up more than once on our own planet across wholly unrelated creatures. If "animals" as we know them exist on other planets, I find this a pretty believable degree of convergence with some of our own ectoparasites.

THE "FLIES"

   These I find a little less believable. Exactly six insect-like legs, an insect-like abdomen, and wings directly lifted from beetles? That's an awful lot of evolutionary coincidences in one place! But these little fellas do deviate from insects with their soft, fleshy, tubular mouths, the surrounding skin of which can inflate into a bulging, veiny sac that looks so familiar, I'm not even sure I should be showing the concept art uncensored like this, but hey, the animated CG version was on netflix or hulu or whichever one of those this show was on, so I guess it doesn't matter. Giger would be proud!

  Interestingly, these creatures aren't shown posing any particular danger to their fellow biological life, but they spurt an acid that melts anything inorganic, even working minerals and metals into gooey nests similar to how a paper wasp uses wood pulp. They dissolve materials rapidly enough that they could easily wreak havoc on human infrastructure world-wide, and that's formidable enough, but you may remember that this franchise takes place in a future were people can also be made out of technology, from cyborgs to full blown sapient androids.

I love the idea of giving the "synths" their own body-horror monster, and the flies do seem to exhibit active predatory behavior towards inorganic entities, which has some fascinating implications for the kind of ecosystem they originally evolved around.

TRYPANOHYNCHA OCELLUS

   The breakout star! The beautiful babygirl! It's everyone's new favorite little space-bastard, and for once my tastes align exactly with the mainstream consensus, which includes the fan name "Eyelene." I love any instance of a naked eyeball with tentacles, but they haven't had a starring role I can think of since the terrible 90's movie The Killer Eye, and their last major screen role before that was just The Crawling Eye in the 1950's. That's a thirty to forty year gap every time! Ouch!!

  T. Ocellus is intelligent enough to be a major "villain" of Alien Earth, kind of. I mean, she's dangerous, and antagonistic, but we don't necessarily know her goals or motivations. All we know is that she's capable of puppeteering a body by plugging her little tendrils into its brain, and replaces one of the host's eyes with her own, or I guess with herself, not having much of anything else in the way of anatomy.

And while a disembodied eyeball is by far not a new concept, Ocellus or "Eyelene" as some have called her (and I've decided I will too) still achieves her own distinct visual style once her pupil begins to multiply, eventually expressing a radiating symmetry with a ring of irises encircling her sclera. A body-jacker that becomes your new eyeball is also a concept I'm pretty sure I've seen at least once or twice before, and thought about myself, but the life cycle of "the" Alien wasn't technically new either...it was just new to most audiences back in 1979, and nothing quite like Eyelene has featured in any media quite this mainstream, so I'm gonna say her grisly biology is a worthy enough rival to the chest-burster.

  I might have still pushed many of these creatures just a little further, personally, and I'd have loved to see more than just four new species to this franchise, but perhaps I'm being greedy. I technically waited my entire life to find out what else "bug hunts" might entail, after all, and with so much Alien media centering exclusively on the Classic Flavor for so, so long, we're probably lucky anyone greenlit the addition of even one fresh face.

I will say one thing strongly disappoints me, however, which is the fact that Eyelene went quasi-viral by late 2025, but did not inspire a surge of knockoff eyeball creatures by 2026's Halloween season, nor any official merchandise other than (ugh) Funko pops. How hard is it to make a tentacled eyeball out of plastic or rubber in time for the Spirit Halloween market?!