I'm pretty much on the same page as you on those being the big question for the show in terms of the strategy from the virus. I hope it has a satisfying answer and think Vince Gilligan et all deserve our trust enough to be interested.
My current thought for the answer to "Why are these aliens so peaceful, even to the own obvious detriment of the sentient species?"
1. In the alien enslavement scenario, ingraining peace into the species minimizes the chance of them going to war to satisfy their other imperatives before the aliens show up, and reduces the chance of them being disruptive afterward. The aliens probably don't want whatever food crop the humans cultivated anyway and would rather not have a civilization with billion of chickens. They also likely don't need 8 billion humans to do whatever they need. It's also possible they want basically zero humans and just need to cuck the sentient race to create a basic garden planet whenever they show up in the next millenia. They could be sitting there with a giant antenna blasting out Cuck Rays in sequence to every star near them indefinitely, and Earth has been getting blasted for thousands of years and we finally paid attention.
2. In the Mass Effect forced peace scenario, even if it results in an immediate mass death scenario where all but 10 million people die, a planet where the sentient race just kinda has a big ass garden with at most a billion people on it is probably ideal. Certainly is a better end result than total extermination except now they have a giant human skeleton spaceship to fly around in.
3. Or they ramped up pesticides en-masse and are growing absurd amounts of corn, potatoes, rice etc to make soylent amber. And their peaceful bullshit is just an unreliable narrator who deceived the independent humans. This is the least interesting option.
So yeah, I think after the last episode focusing on logistics, in this season we'll almost certainly see Carol discover how many humans are expected to starve to death in the next year.
Yeah I agree, I just don't buy the unreliable narrator angle. You don't establish the rules of your universe, have your protagonist waste multiple episodes to painstakingly bumble through to test and verify those rules, just to turn around later on go "aha, we could lie the whole time, we just chose not to until we wrote ourselves into a corner in which we needed to lie to get out of!" Establishing expectations just to immediately subvert them is hack writing, this isn't season 8 Game of Thrones or the last jedi, vince isn't a hack.
it's probably more important to work out the rules, that should lead to being able to figure out the who. Like the prime directives the hive has, there seems to be a priority to them.
So they established that self preservation is not #1, their desire to make others happy takes precedence (giving carol a grenade then almost sacrificing zoshia to save her when she immediately pulled the pin)
Do no harm seems to be higher than self preservation as well, they won't harm animals even if it means they would die. Surely releasing lions and shit ends up killing some of the hive, as well as allowing mosquitos to bite you instead of killing them...mosquitos are the deadliest creature on earth to humans.
But, do no harm is not the same as "preserving life". They went ahead and activated their plan for mass take over of the earth despite the fact that it killed almost 1 billion people. They have self preservation, but it seems its only applies to preventing the extinction of the hive itself. They seem willing to sacrifice individual members of the hive at whim.
preserving life is there but it's not that high, they were still treating hive people who were sick at the hospital but (unless it was just a bad shot/editing) there was only a small handful evacuated from the hospital, doubtful that most died during the joining, it seems that they may have stopped putting resources to (ie sacrificed) the weakest already.
It seems their #1 priority other than preventing total eradication of the hive, is to figuring out how to convert the remaining immunes. This is more than just an academic exercise, if they had ulterior motives they could just let the immunes die and autopsy them, or at the very least, if they could, they would have just killed carol since the other 11 immunes seem perfectly happy living with the hive, would consent to tests and seem willing to join once they figure out why they didnt take initially.
But after carol drugged zoshia to try and figure out how to reverse the process, they decided to no longer interact with her in person. They still have the instinct to make her happy, but they are now showing self preservation (since its a threat against the hive).
So it seems to me:
#1 prevent extinction of the hive
#2 ensure 100% conversion rate to the hive
#3 keep all non converted happy until they are joined to the hive
#3 do no harm
#4 preserve life
They are more concerned in converting the 12 remaining immunes than they were with killing a billion people, or allowing millions to die at a time by allowing carol to roam free and scream at them. So it isn't about total numbers (for slave labor or whatever), but it is about total conquest (either to eradicate life or keep it docile and unwilling to hinder the aliens)
But once she was a threat to just discovering information about how to reverse it, they backed away. I think if she actually has any breakthrough here and actually figures out how to stop the hive, then they would be allowed to kill her. idk i guess that seems obvious, just spelling it out for my own benefit i suppose.
edit: I also think that means that she isn't going to have any breakthroughs any time soon, it'll be several seasons of finding or converting immune to her "cause', trickle feeding new lore and bits for her to figure out, etc. The moment she knows how to cure them this turns into the walking dead and the whole show changes
