Nor does he make any move to defend himself against the casual abuse of his boss, Shilling (Koenig), a cold, cruel man who loathes him and relishes every opportunity to make him miserable.

Then, one day, old friend Andreas (Gary Graham), who's aware that Eric is up on all this science stuff, arrives to show him an oddity found in the desert. It's a strange polished stone that appears to have been part of a meteor strike the previous evening. Eric accepts the gift, stows it away and promptly forgets all about it, too distracted by the sudden belated impulse to finally follow up on Amanda's months of invitations.

One thing leads to another, a catch-all observation that in this case includes not only sex with and passionate love for his attractive young co-worker but also some less pleasant symptoms that include excruciating pain and a throbbing bulge in his abdomen.

After a battery of tests, fellow researcher Dr. Poway (Alan Ruck) gives Eric the bad news: Some kind of unknown parasite has lodged inside him and forged connections to all his internal organs. It cannot be removed without killing him, and it's growing.

Eric tells Amanda about his condition, adding that he doesn't think he ever really loved her: The spore, or whatever it was, in the object from space gave him those feelings, to prompt the sexual act it used to hijack his sperm for its own procreative purposes.

Amanda takes this one-two whammy about as well as you would expect from any young woman in love, but she remains loyal to her conflicted man, even going on the lam with him when Shilling, motivated less by scientific interest than by the opportunity to screw with his despised employee some more, contacts the FBI about the dangerous alien creature in Eric's belly.

You think you know where this is going. The creature in Eric's belly must be a dangerous monster, bent on taking him over and transforming him into a lumbering predator who jumps on people and eats their brains. Right? But that's not where this is going, as Amanda discovers when she ends up aiding in the delivery of a half-human, half-alien baby, complete with coos and tentacles.

Eric's instinctive parental affection for the tyke, whom he calls Benjamin, is fierce indeed. The government claims it, of course. Shilling, who's still motivated by his longstanding grudge against Eric, assumes command and takes special pleasure in separating parent and offspring. (He really is a nasty boss.) But when footage of the fast-growing baby gets posted on YouTube, the existence of the hybrid becomes public knowledge and a distraught Eric takes the feds to court over his violated parental rights.

Alien meets Kramer vs. Kramer

The first thing to note about this film, scripted by the man who played Star Trek's Chekov and Babylon 5's Bester, is that it was clearly cast with geek cred in mind. In addition to Koenig himself, the players include veterans of the original Battlestar Galactica (Hatch), Heroes (Erick Avari), Star Trek: The Next Generation (Sirtis), Alien Nation (Graham), Star Trek: Voyager (Tim Russ) and Babylon 5 (Patricia Tallman). This is true even of some players better known for other roles. Ruck, for instance, is easiest to recognize as the sidekick of Ferris Bueller, but he also played Harriman, the unfortunate Starfleet captain who will always be known as the guy who got Capt. James T. Kirk ejected into vacuum on his ship's shakedown cruise. (Poor guy.)

The second is that it was clearly filmed on a pretty low budget. Eric's lab consists of a few cages with rhesus monkeys, few of the personal spaces look authentically lived-in, the alien-baby costume is least effective in closeup, and the angry mobs of protesters reacting to what should be the most divisive controversy of the day never number more than the same couple of dozen people.

The third is that while Hatch really is too old for his part, the script does have the grace to acknowledge that, if only in passing, early on.

The fourth is something that these elements might keep you from noticing for a while: that the story does sneak up on you. The first act may initially lead you to expect a standard-issue monster movie, and the second may reek of any number of prior films where a sympathetic alien visitor leads cold-hearted government scientists to stupidly salivate at the thought of doing experiments on it, but both are played with substantial attention to the emotional wringer Eric's being put through. And both lead to a third act that plays out in a courtroom over issues that include habeus corpus, parental rights, the definition of humanity and the very real possibility that Benjamin might still pose a threat to the world at large. Even the antipathy Shilling feels for Eric is addressed. His motivation doesn't come as a big surprise, but it's there, it's persuasive and it's handled with significant emotional depth. As unpromising as the film's early direction seems to be, it astonishes by how much better it gets as it goes along.

Combine this with strong performances on the part of just about everybody involved. Koenig makes the most of the late-career epiphany that he gives good unsympathetic bastard. Avari is charming and eccentric as Eric's lawyer, Ellis. Sirtis is just as good as opposing counsel. And Hatch, the center of the whole thing, is—forgive the backhanded compliment, but it happens to be true—better than we ever imagined he could be. He sells his character's deep anguish over his hybrid child, bringing conviction to moments that must have been difficult not to play as camp.