The casualness of the security in the bio lab bothers me much more here than in the Alien universe. There it fit with the commentary on corporate culture and stupidity. Here? Not the theme. This is a genetic code from an alien entity and security is a guard at the front door with no clear protocol and automatic means to seal the entire place down with any possible breach of the material or exposure? Just too dumb.
Hive minds in fiction generally annoy me. The intelligence of a hive is not transmitted with awareness to its individuals. The individual ant does not absorb the intelligence (and awareness if any exists) of the whole colony nor is the whole mind controlled by its queen, but the colony can solve complex problems anyway. An individual neuron is still just a cell doing basic integration of inputs to produce an output; it does not possess the intelligence … or sentience … of the resulting mind. Fictional hive minds rarely recognize that the consciousness that would result is at an incomprehensible level. The only one that got it that I am aware of again is The Overmind in Childhood’s End. Maybe this will get to that point?
Meanwhile I’m seeing this as an infectious thing. The “virus” has a very very good means of spreading itself across the galaxy. Any infected individual stays alive and works obsessively hard to infect more individuals who work collectively obsessively to infect others of the local ecosystem until all are infected and then to create technology to spread the virus to other species in the galaxy or beyond, likely leaving a husk of a planet left behind in the process. Creating a blissful sense of oneness serves that purpose. Making enough food doesn’t matter as long as it can spread to other planetary species capable of spreading itself before the current host is killed by the infection. The same model as terrestrial viruses.
But negative emotion does not serve the purpose. So when a negative emotion occurs its connections release.