Missed Opportunity at the End

There'd be no talking to it; the thing is insane.

Agreed.

Poorly Lived and Poorly Died, Poorly Buried and No One Cried

How do you explain its interstellar spaceship?

Wow!

I hadn't thought of that! Interesting take.

So then, similar to Alien, Resurrection, the original aliens used this animal/cargo as a weapon. Maybe the saucer pilots' plan was to take over life on Earth with this dangerous life form and only they had some way of eradicating it when their goal was achieved? Maybe some bacterium?

Only "thing," that doesn't hold with the premise of the original "Thing from Another World" and the short story "Who Goes There."

Plus in those, the Thing was more vegetable than animal OR insect.

So it depends on where one draws facts for the canon.

That scenario may exist in the book(s) or other film tie-in material, but it is not even implicit in the film. If the Thing was only a caged "sample", what could have been its interest in getting back to the ship...and then starting it up for flight? A caged sample should not have that knowledge, unless it absorbed it from one or another of the alien crew that it absorbed. But if it had absorbed such knowlege, what was the point in it going through all the adventure and misadventure with Earthlings, when it didn't need to leave the ship to start with? With its purported knowledge of how the ship worked, it could have killed the crew and flown away without any involvement with humans. Or, if the premise is that the ship was disabled and the Thing could not escape for that reason, then why does it "steal" the vehicle and head back to the ship; and further, why does it start the ship back up? This latter premise supports the idea that the Thing knew how to fly that spaceship, so again: why did it leave the saucer at all after it killed the crew?

Where did you get that from?