History Fridge / Alien

* The self-destruct refusing to abort in the first film after Ripley tries turning the coolant back on may seem like shoddy ship design and a bit of AIIsACrapshoot on Mother's part, but a close examination of the instructions on the lid of the console shows an important piece of information that Ripley completely fails to notice: that the abort sequence will only work if the safety interlocks (the two levers that Ripley has to pull to open the lid) are engaged ''prior'' to inputting the abort code, not after, meaning the cut-off system was never going to work even if Ripley still had plenty of time left, simply because she performed the abort sequence in the wrong order.

* The self-destruct override refusing to activate in the first film after Ripley tries aborting the sequence may seem like shoddy ship design and a bit of AIIsACrapshoot on Mother's part, but a close examination of the instructions on the lid of the self-destruct console shows an important piece of information that Ripley completely fails to notice: that the abort code will not work if the safety interlocks (the two levers that Ripley has to pull to open the console) are disengaged, meaning the self-destruct was never going to be stopped even if Ripley had plenty of time left, simply because she did the abort sequence in the wrong order.

* There’s something about the [[UncannyValley oddly-human mouth]] of the Xenomorph that’s very troubling. That “something” probably being its usual expression before it strikes: it looks ''angry.'' Let that sink in a little. Not only does this monster want to kill you/use you for breeding stock, '''[[OhCrap it absolutely fucking hates you.]]'''

* '''Crew Expendable'''. The order is so simple, banal and comes across as a bit of an afterthought. You, your hopes dreams, aspirations and life boiled down to quantifiable asset to be disposed of to increase the companies sales figures.

** And, for another example of Fridgey Ash's equipment choices: the scanner he provides for the search is designed to detect air movement, rather than heat, sound, odors, or other subtle hints of life. Of course it does, because any other type of sensor he might've come up with would probably also discern that ''Ash himself'' doesn't register the same as the human crew members, thus exposing him as an android ringer.

** And, for another example of Fridgey Ash's equipment choices: the scanner he provides for the search is designed to detect air movement, rather than heat, sound, odors, or other subtle hints of life. Of course it does, because any other type of sensor he might've come up with, would probably also discern that ''Ash himself'' doesn't register the same as the human crew members, thus exposing him as an android ringer.

* Robots are difficult to build and expensive AF in the Alien Franchise... If ''Film/{{Prometheus}}'' is canon, robots were already a thing some 30 years before the first ''Alien'' film. But David seems to be a novelty and works as some sort of personal assistant for millionaire Peter Weyland. Then, in ''Alien'', Ash doesn't come across as a more advanced robot than David. Moreover, howcome humans are still necessary to man the ''Nostromo'' ship instead of just putting there a couple of robots to run the whole operation? If Ash can pass for a science officer, why not some other robot(s) as a navigator or ship engineer? Then in ''Aliens'', again only Bishop is a robot. I can sort of understand that robots may not be trusted to function as colonial marines, but why isn't there any mention of robots as colonists? Instead of sending dozens of humans to colonize, why not send a handful of robots as an avantgarde? Centuries later, in ''Resurrection'', Call is again the only robot in the film, not only that, but the models seem to be getting worse and worse, since by now they question orders. But the real people don't even seem to keep any Ash, David or Bishop models (Bishop being so far the only seemingly trust-worthy model in the entire franchise universe). This implies that the field of robotics is more difficult than thought, and also that robots are super-expensive despite decades of progress between the films, so much so, that they still haven't really replaced humans in menial/dangerous jobs.
* As noted on the page for the first film, the Nostromo's systems start venting excess heat into the crew spaces when they shut off the cooling system as part of the self-destruct, noting that it's poor design for venting heat. Except it's ''not''- since self-destructing the Nostromo requires putting the reactor into a thermally-induced death spiral, venting the heat back into the ship is going to speed the process up by heating up the air around it.

** If you're fighting a stand-up war, sure. But Xenomorphs clearly aren't a weapon of war, they're a weapon of terror. They're designed to be as frighteningly efficient at killing as possible, and even if you can defend yourself against them, their acid blood will do a good job at damaging or destroying nearby infrastructure. They may make an easy target clustered in hives, but first you have to find the hive, and Xenomorphs are sneaky above all else. Adding all this up means that, while Xenomorphs might not win you a war, they'll certainly distract and disrupt your enemy, giving you the advantage.

** Because you contaminate everything between the airlock and the medbay just getting them there. And there's no guarantee that they'd be able to neutralise any dangerous contaminate even if they managed to restrict it to the medbay.
** Also, Ash wasn't known to be an android initially. He was a last-second replacement by the Company (because they wanted TheMole to help them get the Alien). Just keeping the potentially infected crewmember outside the ship for 24 hours while you run every decontamination protocol known to man is far more effective.

** Development on androids was probably slowed due to a lot of red tape -- their predecessors, the Replicants, caused a lot of problems when they rebelled and nobody wanted a repeat of the Roy Batty incident.