Surprisingly Good (nerdy analysis within)

I put this on over Netflix just to have some background noise while doing other things, but ended up watching it closely, and enjoyed it quite a bit more than I thought I would.

I see a lot of ideas on this board, guess I might as well blither my own...

I think a key thing is that there isn't just a physical conflict going on here, but also implicitly a memetic conflict, a...battle of operating paradigms, motivations, and also individualism vs. collectivism.

As others have said, The Goo's (TG's) previous encounters were regimented, businesslike, etc., but I think it's also important that it appears TG is a singular organism, and it is treating humans the same. The explicit comparison is between the blood cultures and the physical fights we see on-screen. TG is pitting entire humans against each other just as it did the blood cells, treating them as parts of a whole and trying to 'distill' the most dominant trait of that 'whole'. I would speculate that the level of learning TG is and has been undergoing could stretch down to the very basic... Perhaps not just the actions of the S&R team and Whit (our main players) changed things, but also the consumption of all who came before, down to the very first human, and then also the actions of the researcher who was studying TG and whose work Whit finds.

TG learns from what it 'infects', and the first thing one would find upon nomming on a human is that each human is composed of a vast number of cells of a vast number of types, all individual and with their own dominant traits and actions, but working together for their own collective good. It then applies this paradigm to the humans themselves--from its perspective at this very basic level of knowledge, mashing the humans against each other to see which one wins is the exact same thing as finding a dominant blood cell, brain cell, or gut flora.

It is only as it starts doing this that the memetic factor comes into play. The first traits to come out from the miners, soldiers, and researchers who first implemented Infini are violence, hate, fear, all the easy and nasty ones, but I think also militarism, corporatism, exploitation, expansion, and ruthless pragmatism: when it finds the 'dominant cell' in its first run, it then moves to try to implement what it's learned from us by sending the payload of itself to Earth, expanding without care, exploiting humans as we were intending to exploit it.

However, a key point may have been the consumption of the researcher who studied TG. When it did so, it may have learned some things about itself as seen from an outside perspective--something a singular organism might not even comprehend to that point. Basically, the first steps towards self-awareness. Now...note where the question is asked, "what is life?"...well it's in the med bay, where TG may have first started to consider itself, and perhaps the concept of 'not-itself'.

As our players die off, they repeatedly display several important traits. Choice, independence and individualism, cooperation despite individualism, camaraderie, a care for those not even present (again, awareness of The Other), and of course self-sacrifice. The other more 'meta' trait is in regards to motivation and focus, which I might call multiplicity of motivation. Humans have a hierarchy of needs--yes, we want to survive, to win fights, to dominate, to have enough to eat and drink, warmth and shelter, but deeper than this, once our basic needs are satisfied? We generally don't want to be alone: we want friends and loved ones, we want to reproduce, we want to find emotional happiness and feel fulfilled.

Others here have described TG as 'child-like', and I think that's a good comparison. Infants start out having no sense of The Other, and nothing but the basest of motivations. In the end, as we see the humanoid-forms watching the team's departure, I would say it is fairly certain it has gained knowledge of The Other and some level of self-awareness, and the concept of inter-individual attachment (Whit's love note from his wife). I would also read the fact that there are multiple "Goo Children" as TG at least beginning to develop its own sort of multiplicity and individuality.

I do tend to interpret the ending as TG having revived the players and allowed them to leave...

1) I don't think we would have been shown the Goo Children in such obviously non-human shapes if it was meant to be implied that the players had been replaced.

2) With the level of technology at hand (according to the opening text, Slipstream literally involves digitizing humans for transit), I find myself skeptical that the quarantine clearance scans would have missed anything but perfect physical copies and perfect matches for prior scans in their files.

3) They are also asked rapid-fire questions in a confusing, high-tension environment. This is a good way to test for reactions, and see whether they match each person's existing psychological profile.

4) ...I like happy endings. ;)

Overall, remember: per the opening text there's a danger of 'data corruption' during Slipstream transit, so they would be used to testing for changes in a person's physical and mental state. As a little sub-note, I seem to recall that those who remained calmest during questioning were also those who best-resisted TG's influence...i.e. the most emotionally/psychologically stable. Nice detail.

So, if they are somehow complete reconstructions/replacements instead of partial/healed originals, they are still perfect physical matches, and their reactions match their psychological profiles. But in that case...does it really matter? I would say, only you believe in some sort of 'non-transferable' soul that a replacement might be missing, but personally I find the ending scene of Whit coming home to his wife quite 'soulful'.

The final little question I had was whether TG's current state is in fact deliberate. The most effective method of containment seems to be cold, so TG could not have developed in its current state, and yet is now locked in extreme conditions. Perhaps someone else met TG a long time ago, and decided it was threatening enough for drastic containment measures...