system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[John Carpenter's the Thing] A few questions about the Thing.

Why does the alien, when imitating people, spend a long time convulsing in their bodies before being able to defend itself or attack the uninfected? 

Additionally, wouldn't it be far more advantageous to simply break off into smaller pieces (say, the size of a leech) and infect the others while they were asleep?

Last thing, supposing it got out and everyone on Earth was infected. . . would it actually change anyone's personality? The Thing seemed to remain dormant in a human until it became threatened.  Potentially, could the Thing infect every living human and basically result in a more harmonious society?
gpt
Those convulsions are the Thing reconfiguring its body internally, growing things like teeth and tentacles. It *might* be able to infect by feeding people bits of itself, but it can't literally divide and conquer. Smaller pieces of the Thing tend not to be very smart, operating mostly on instinct.

We're not sure how it assimulates human minds. An individual Thing might believe itself to be human. The Thing might maintain the original human mind while having its own dives surfacing as impulses and rationalized thoughts. Or the Thing might *know* it's a Thing, and there's just enough of the original mind left to do a convincing imitation. It could even vary from instance to instance depending on how the human was infested.

A planet full of Things would probably be more peaceful, assuming they have a way of knowing each other, but humans would be extinct. From where we stand that's no improvement at all.

EDIT: spelling.