It felt like the second film in an eventual trilogy. Essentially the world has already been saved, so it would have been nice to see the first film show our heroes saving the world, then this film uniting the world against a common outside/space enemy.

I think part of the problem is that the saved world feels doomed, pun intended. So The Thing having a sort of relationship with Natasha Lyonne’s character feels pointless because it was so brief in this film, and it doesn’t feel like it’s going to continue in a future film.