Contains spoilers for “Alien: Earth” Season 1, Episode 4 — “Observation”

The “Alien” franchise has never been a gentle, sweet-natured thing. No, it’s long been gory, gooey, and dark-natured, filled with stomach-churning violence visited upon innocents. This is driven home with sheer brutality when a sheep is killed in the name of science during “Observation,” the fourth episode of “Alien: Earth.” Animal lovers would be wise to skip this scene, as Prodigy Corporation synthetic Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant) experiments upon the unfortunate sheep while his boss, Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), watches on with interest.

Taking the place of a traditional lab rat, the sheep is intentionally exposed to a many-eyed alien creature with tentacles, which manages to worm its way into the sheep’s body and take over, poking one of its eyeballs out and settling in the socket. It’s a stomach-churning image that’s without a doubt one of the franchise’s most horrifying to date. When the animal rises after the ordeal, it’s a truly unnerving sight — the sheep is now under the control of this highly intelligent alien creature, which regards its captors coolly from its reinforced glass cell.

As we’ve seen in the past with the “Alien” franchise, when alien lifeforms mix with terrestrial ones, mayhem usually follows, and it’s likely that the sheep will be no exception to that rule. By the end of “Observation,” the situation remains volatile. Boy Kavalier is obsessed with the alien cargo that’s fallen into his lap courtesy of a crashed Weyland-Yutani deep space ship, and he has no intention of handing it over to one of his main rivals. When you add the ship’s only survivor, Morrow (Babou Ceesay), to the mix, you have a recipe for disaster: The Weyland-Yutani cyborg has dedicated his life to returning the alien specimens to his bosses, and he’s already shown that he’s willing to follow the company policy of prioritizing this task over human lives.

We wouldn’t be surprised if the sheep factored into future episodes, but why did the writers pick a sheep? Perhaps they simply thought it would be visually striking, but, since “Alien: Earth” blends sharp horror with thought-provoking ideas, there could be more meaning to this choice. After all, sheep have come to represent conformity and a lack of initiative. Kavalier has openly admitted that he pursued the idea of downloading human consciousnesses into synthetic bodies with enhanced brains because he wanted to create beings capable of matching him intellectually. He wants humanity to think outside of the box and stop acting like sheep. As such, it makes sense that he would use a sheep for the experiment — but, as Wendy (Sydney Chandler) and the other hybrids are beginning to prove, there are bound to be unforeseen consequences to the boy genius’ tinkering.