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The third episode of Season 2 of SYFY’s sci-fi thriller The Ark found the crew trying to hack their way into a working warp drive. Though it seems to have worked, it also set off a deadly mystery that wreaked havoc on the ship.

The episode, titled “Anomaly,” found a mysterious lightning-like energy pulsing through the ship seemingly on its own, shocking and killing crew members unlucky enough to run across it. It turns out the energy is basically an anomaly, moving toward energy sources like a plant would naturally shift toward light.

But was it The Ark’s first alien? Up to this point, the series has focused solely on human survivors as they try to wind their way through the galaxy to find a new planet to call home, as Earth is bordering on uninhabitable.

JP Nickel, the episode’s writer and a co-executive producer on The Ark, explained during the official after show that the episode was a chance to play around with the rules of science and physics while the ship was in that fractured warp bubble. Basically, they wanted to play a little bit in the Star Trek-style sandbox, and this story was the perfect conduit for it.

Was The Ark‘s Electrical Creature an Alien?

Though the energy anomaly was certainly dangerous and mysterious, Nickel maintains the creators were very sure it was not an alien. He explained: “We had a lot of talk on how to be very clear this is not an alien, it’s more like plant life. It’s alive but not sentient.

“It was our one chance at the time to push toward something a bit more space opera rather than science fiction, and push the boundaries –– even though we’re not a show with aliens, we could do our one little ‘maybe there’s life out there’ episode and get away with it,” he said. “Because we’re in an area where the laws of time and space and physics don’t work as we understand it. That was a really exciting opportunity to go, dare I say it, ‘Star Trek‘ for a moment.”

Series co-creator Jonathan Glassner added the writers were working to thread the needle to create a “monster on the ship” type of story without actually introducing an alien into this world.

“Out of space and time, who knows how electricity and other physics work in that world?,” he explained. “Because we wanted to do some kind of creature, but we didn’t want to do an alien, or a monster on board, like the movie Alien. So we started messing around with ‘what could it be?’ And that’s how we came up with the electricity monster.”

How to Watch Season 2 of SYFY’s The Ark

New episodes of The Ark will air on SYFY every Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET. You can also catch new episodes from Season 2 in the SYFY app.