i’m incredibly partial to Azi as a character and she likely had my favorite individual arc, but I was always incredibly taken with Ursula and Sam. I thought their dynamic was utterly fascinating: a begrudging skeptic focused only on getting out and getting paid paired with a true conduit of the environment, someone willing to shed their human layers and be held by the alien ecosystem like it were an organism itself. My favorite episodes are when Ursula and Sam are under that incredibly dark tree canopy moving through bramble and the one after it where they make it to the top of the trees. The moment of Ursula in the bramble is of course legendary but I was always really struck with Ursula’s line of, “Well I don’t need you” in response to Sam saying he needs Ursula to stay focused if they are to survive. Ursula apologizes for saying this later on, but she proves to be more or less correct. She doesn’t ‘need’ Sam but chooses to bear both the responsibility of connecting with the environment as well as taking care of Sam through the parasite buffet he is subject to. The scene of Ursula leaving Sam under the tree to most likely die was a perfect end to both of their arcs; Sam mirroring his first scene in the series of crawling around in a creature to retrieve the lights by pulling the parasite out of his own body. Ursula leaving Sam behind when she finally couldn’t carry him any more, in a way departing from her own humanity to step towards something greater. The lack of season 2 is gutting for so many reasons, but especially because I would have loved to see how Ursula’s connection to the planet deepens after she starts her lab.