| 1 | * One thing (geddit) that bothers me about the Thing is how it seemingly defies the laws of thermodynamics. I mean, cells need nutrients and energy, which would be obtained when it would assimilate other living beings. However, to do this, it would need to dismantle the victim and use it's biomass to provide for the already assimilated cells. Logic dictates that, in the end, at half of the prey's biomass would be used to sustain the existing cells, which suffice to say it wouldn't be of much use when trying to create a copy, since at most only some appendages would be left. ''Literature/WhoGoesThere'' somewhat adresses this because the Thing is more like a sophisticated Blob that may or may not be actually a highly sophisticated '''monocellular''' organism. In the 1982 and 2011 remakes, it doesn't have this excuse, and worse yet it is clear that it was in dire need of "feeding", as the dog scene illustrated. So, the only logical explanation is that The Thing is somehow shitting out biomass out of thin air... |
| 2 | ** Well it is an EldritchAbomination, so it's not like it has any reason to follow thermodynamics as we know it. I'd say RuleOfScary is in effect rather than any sense to follow reality. |
| 3 | *** I never assumed the dog scene to be about feeding. A necessity to feed would be a noticeable weakness in the alien since it would have to regularly drop its disguise, something I never assumed would be a necessity for it. I always thought it was simply trying to assimilate the dogs. I also always assumed that the Thing was indeed a monocellular type organism that could essentially reshape itself to mimic other organisms and their constituent parts. So it doesn't really have bone marrow, blood running through its veins and such, it's just a mimic of those things and all the parts are just the original Thing playing pretend. |
| 4 | *** Well, it's definitely multicellular, since the whole blood test is predicated on each individual grouping of cells being it's own complete organism. As for it "feeding," the impression I got from the computer model was the individual cells acted more like a virus, infecting the cells that are already there and transforming them from human cells to Thing cells. It's not consuming the body and replacing it, it's ''converting'' the body. |
| 5 | *** IT'S A FUCKING ALIEN! |
| 6 | *** Aliens have to abide by the same laws of physics as us, man. You could hardly expect there to be planets out there that don't have gravity, for example, so how could you expect their ''inhabitants'' to have different physics? |
| 7 | ** We never see for sure if it's imitating ''every'' victim it assimilates, or only a few of them at a time. We only know of it ''consuming'' all those dogs in the pen, for example, not copying the whole pack of animals at once. Likewise, it may have been chowing down on other animal tissues - meat from the kitchens, the blood in the infirmary - that it never actually intended to mimic at all, purely for energy and to bulk up its mass. |
| 8 | ** It doesn't defy thermodynamics at all. Whenever a Thing utilises extreme shape-shifting it is for defence, such as when the Norris-Thing reacts to being shocked with an attack, or the Palmer-Thing attacking once it's cover was blown and the only other choice was being flamed to death. For the most part the Things are shifting already-existing structures into other forms, such as a head being shifted into a 'mouth' which it then uses to attack, or the dog's body being manipulated into another form such as arms or tooth-flowers. It does take energy to do this, but humans ourselves can strip energy from our own bodies in starvation situatations over time, with it taking a long while to display visible changes in body mass/composition. The Things are obviously able to do this at a very fast rate, but they are essentially doing the same - stripping mass from elsewhere, converting it into something else with the balance being the energy in. Two Palmer-Thing cells for example may be being stripped out of their mimicked form in order to shift them into one new-form cell. Multiply that up and the Things may be incapable of extended manipulation of their forms without sources of food/biomass. |
| 9 | ** Even then, ShapeshifterBaggage is already a trope. |
| 10 | |
| 11 | * Why doesn't the Thing try to communicate with the humans? It's obviously not a dumb animal operating simply on instinct, since it is shown to be able to operate the alien spaceship and attempt to build some spaceship. I always thought what happened in the Norwegian camp was a huge misunderstanding that escalated into shit hitting the proverbial fan, and by the time it reached Outpost 31 it the Thing was as afraid and paranoid as the humans surrounding it. But the prequel shows that it attacked first, without provocation, so it's just doing it ForTheEvulz? |
| 12 | ** The Thing isn't a dumb animal acting on instinct, it's an advanced virus acting on instinct. Whereas humans need intelligence to survive and reproduce, The Thing needs intelligence as a tool for reproduction and the assimilation of biomass/adaptations. Just as a secret agent might use their intelligence to form a disguise to seduce/extract information from someone, The Thing likely sees humans as some sex-food equivalent. The assumption that The Thing's intelligence implies the capacity for compassion or coexistence is like thinking a tree knows about aerodynamics because it makes helicopter-seeds to spread its genes further. For The Thing, building a spaceship is like a virus becoming airborne via an evolved protein casing - the spaceship is simply a container of the pathogen for reaching distant hosts. The idea of Good and Evil come from the social instincts of a social animal so that we can survive better, e.g. Good is beneficial to communities and Evil is detrimental to it... In this case, as a pathogen with pathogenic instincts rather than social ones, it would be likely to see assimilation as fundamentally Good for spreading genetic superiority and regard resistance to assimilation as the Evil waste of adaptability-potential. |
| 13 | *** This is making far too many assumptions. We never know whether the Thing is a virus, just that it behaves like one - we could say for example a bat is a bird simply because it flies and feeds on the wing like many birds. It doesn't make it a bird. Nor does virus-analogue behaviour on the cellular level make the Thing a virus - viruses are not multicellular, nor do they have cells at all. The Thing must have some level of advanced intelligence given its ability to make a spaceship, from scratch, using only the parts and tools it can find at an Antarctic research camp. An entity able to both build and operate a spacecraft - something no human can do (no human can both build and pilot a space shuttle from scratch) would be intelligent on a level an order of magnitude different to our own. |
| 14 | *** But even considering all that, there are multiple kinds of intelligence. Just because it can build a spaceship doesn't necessarily mean it can conceive of ideas like "Make friends with the humans". There's no telling what strange gaps an alien intelligence might have in its thinking. |
| 15 | ** A nice thing about the Thing is that we never really know its level of intelligence. It is truly alien. It might be an intelligent shape-shifter who is play-acting at being human and for whatever reason never attempts to talk to the hostile creatures called humanity, or its imitation of humanity might be only be the camouflage of a dumb animal and it has no thoughts on the level of intelligence of humans, or something in between. |
| 16 | *** Dumb animals cannot build space-ships, or indeed fly them. It has to be intelligent. |
| 17 | *** Not necessarily. Possibly it only possessed intelligence intermittently, when it's imitating an intelligent life form. It can play at being human once it's actually built itself a human brain to think ''with'', or fly a spaceship if it's imitating whatever alien race it hijacked the ship from, but its mental functions degenerate into reactivity and instinct when it goes into attack-mode as a mishmash killing machine. |
| 18 | ** The Thing's intelligence is seriously all over the place. Yes, it does a lot of smart things in the movies, but it also does some pretty dumb stuff than even earth predatory animals would avoid. My personal guess is that the basic Thing isn't intelligent at all, and as it absorbs sapient beings like the aliens in the saucer and the humans, it has much more info it can use (IE how to operate the space craft) but it doesn't necessarily make it smarter. It would be akin to a person memorizing every word on a book, but not understanding the meaning of the whole thing. |
| 19 | ** The book seems to support that, as the Thing from it is merely an imitator who has no knowledge of what the hell it is doing. Mind you, said thing was also considerably different from the movie things, so... |
| 20 | ** Maybe it is just doing it for the sake of killing and maiming. Maybe it's the alien version of a serial killer, and like Hannibal Lecter it keeps slipping away from its captors to kill again. |
| 21 | ** How we do know sampling biomass isn't how it communicates? Maybe we just interpreted its attempts at communications as attacks. |
| 22 | ** It could be that the Thing is like an insect. It has no concept of right and wrong nor an ability to see humans as worthy of life. It's a predator and everything else is prey, plain and simple; it has no ability to think otherwise. |
| 23 | *** If you watch the first movie with the prequel in mind (I know, we try to avoid that but be strong) a lot of its smarter actions seem to be based on things it learned in the last film. It's not intelligent per se but it's like a really smart hunting animal learning how its enemies operate. I think the last poster with the insect comparison is probably more on the nose with its thought patterns with that in mind. |
| 24 | ** On the other hand, maybe it considers itself so far in advance of humans that it feels communication is waste. We don't politely ask cockroaches to leave our domiciles. . . we spray pesticides at them. The Thing won't just politely ask us to let it absorb our knowledge and consciousness. . . it just takes them. |
| 25 | ** Communication is something species employ to convey information between individuals. Things aren't individuals; they're more like conglomerations of cells that operate ''like'' multicellular creatures when joined ''en masse''. The very concept of "communication" may be meaningless to them, because they can probably just clump together into a single gestalt if two separate chunks of Thing need to share information. This would explain why the Things don't seem to really cooperate or back up one another's deceptions: the concept of using verbal communication between separate pieces of Thing is, itself, so bizarre that it never occurs to them to clue one another in on who else ''is'' a Thing, let alone conspire together against the remaining humans. |
| 26 | ** I have a theory that the Thing is actually far more intelligent than the humans, but this is hampered by a compulsion to assimilate. At the Norwegian base, being paralysed but alive, with its drive torturing it for millenia, it simply goes berserk, but afterwards discovers that it can be hurt and killed it pauses to attempt a more subtle method. My evidence is the dog-thing takes a few days to watch the humans, stalking like hunters would. But once it was in the kennel it simply couldn't resist such an opportunity. But it (knowingly perhaps) *DIDN'T* infect Clark and made him a decoy. Later it tries to copy the gambit with [=MacReady=]. Blair (who may be infected) also warns about Clark, who is never a Thing. You could argue it was imitating the Humans' assigning blame, but why would it stay as a dog and wait to infect someone? |
| 27 | ** I don't get why everyone here is assuming the Thing is the species that built the spaceship, when it was already ambiguous in the first movie and confirmed to not be the case in the prequel - it assimilated the people that built it. |
| 28 | *** Like any other creature, it wants to feed and reproduce. |
| 29 | ** To quote MacReady: This thing wakes up after thousands of years in the ice... probably not the best of moods... Also, intelligent does not mean peaceful. Let's not make the same assumption than Professor Kessler in Mars Attacks: “We know they're extremely advanced technologically, which suggests - very rightfully so - that they're peaceful. An advanced civilization, by definition, is not barbaric.” The thing, though intelligent, is aggressive and seems to have a compulsion to destroy other life forms. |
| 30 | |
| 31 | * How the fuck does The Thing operate? Just assimilating cells does not grant it the capacity of replicating an entire organism, since it has no way of knowing how the cells are meant to be structured. I've seen suggestions of quantum computing and specialized photo-bionics, but is it even possible to achieve such a level of cell coordination in things (hurr hurr) that seem to not rely on nervous impulses? I know there's simple organisms that show cell plasticity, but they communicate by chemicals, and there's no way something that complex is going to change from a dog into Cthulhu's vagina just by shooting chemicals. |
| 32 | ** Humans use thousands of enzymes to catalyze reactions with less energy than would otherwise be possible. Life stores energy for these reactions in a variety of ways, some more efficient than others. As a being that has absorbed thousands of biospheres, it could be expected to have the MOST efficient equivalent for everything we have. I would argue that the most logical and plausible way The Thing could accomplish this is through genetic computation, dense metabolic energy storage system, and efficient biochemical catalysts primed to issue an inconceivably large number of phenotypical changes on the fly. I imagine that if it's possible, The Thing can do it better - if fungi in Chernobyl can use gamma radiation for energy, the thing could EAT URANIUM. |
| 33 | ** Well if you think about it, what it really does is infect a person and then from there use their body. When it unfolds from its hidden form we never see it go back to its original form. It's only in expanded universe stuff that we see it actually revert into a normal form. As such I tend to view it as it infests someone, turning them into a Thing and then they can essentially toss off their disguise to assume the monster form. It's like it can, at will, turn mass from one thing into another so intestines start shaping into the tentacles, organs get turned into goop to be reshaped into other tentacles or teeth for attacks and so on. |
| 34 | ** The Thing clearly has cellular plasticity that is orders of magnitude different to anything on Earth that has ever evolved. A creature that is multicellular and acts as an individual organism, but whose own cells are capable of independent life and movement (which is why the blood test works). A creature whose entire form is effectively composed of ultra-pluripotent stem cells, which are not only capable of differentiation but also reverse-differentiation into another form of tissue! Via complex enzymatic catalysts, energy storage and manipulation, hormonal signalling and extreme cellular pluripotency, a Thing can literally be anything if it has access to enough biomass. Remember it needed biomass from Gary, Nauls and Blair in order to become the large Thing at the end that gets blown up. |
| 35 | ** The Thing could even have every cell function as both a nerve cell and muscle cell with their shape-changing abilities. It may not even be a biological organism, perhaps it's actually a swarm of nanites that imitate biological matter. |
| 36 | ** Another possibility is that the Thing devours and kills its victims before it starts to build the imitation. During the devouring, most likey a "scanning" process is taking place, so the Thing examines how the cells and the entire body/system is structured, so it can recreate it later. According to this interpretation, the takeover and the imitation does not happen on a cell by cell basis (the Thing is an organism, not a virus), but first the victim is devoured, killed and "scanned", and an imitation is built only after that. With Bennings, for a few seconds we see how the thing is building the Bennings-imitation, when Windows is returning to the room, and later when the Bennings-imitation is running out to the snow, the vocal chords and the hands are not yet formed. So in essence every "cell" of every imitation is a thing-cell, created by the thing during the imitation phase, so they are capable of the radical shapeshifting we see the imitations routinely performing when they are busted (Palmer-Thing) or otherwise disturbed (Norris-Thing). |
| 37 | |
| 38 | * If the Thing's goal is to leave Antarctica and infect the other land masses, why didn't it simply grow wings and fly to where it wanted to go? |
| 39 | ** If it can only imitate life forms it has already encountered then it would need to have encountered something that can fly in Earth's gravity and atmospheric conditions (and in Antarctica's cold) before it could sprout usable wings. |
| 40 | ** Presumably, the Things hadn't assimilated any flying species. Or, for that matter, any species that wouldn't get frozen in Antarctica, until it assimilated the dogs. |
| 41 | ** From the original novel: |
| 42 | --->"Man studied birds for centuries, trying to learn how to make a machine to fly like them. He never did do the trick; his final success came when he broke away entirely and tried new methods. Knowing the general idea, and knowing the detailed structure of wing and bone and nerve-tissue is something far, far different. And as for otherworld birds, perhaps, in fact very probably, the atmospheric conditions here are so vastly different that their birds couldn't fly. Perhaps, even, the being came from a planet like Mars with such a thin atmosphere that there were no birds." |
| 43 | ** Also thought of in the Novel in another way: the team kill an Albatross found on Antarctica so the Thing can't absorb it to grow wings. |
| 44 | ** The simplest explanation for the film is that any form of animal locomotion would have been insufficient to get it out of Antarctica before it froze again. |
| 45 | |
| 46 | * So, if they can't know who's infected, why do they keep going off alone? It's not a perfect solution, but wouldn't staying in one another's company help stave off infection without the Thing revealing itself? |
| 47 | ** Honestly, because it keeps the plot moving. There's no real in-universe explanation that I can think of. In fact, you could ask this same question about pretty much every horror movie made from about the late 70's to the early to mid 90's, and the answer is the same. |
| 48 | ** I actually don't remember anybody going out alone after they find out that they're dealing with an assimilating alien. Blair being an obvious exception, who decided to go off alone since he felt he couldn't trust anybody. |
| 49 | ** IIRC, Alan Dean Foster's novelization explained that hole. The base required a bit of maintenance to stay up in the winter, and there wasn't enough workers to allow for a buddy system. |
| 50 | ** Staying in one big group is actually one of the stupider things they could've done. If they're all in the same room together all the Thing has to do is grow its fingers into tentacles with sharps spikes on the end and stab them each in the chest. Bam. Now everyone's infected. |
| 51 | *** Assimilation isn't instant. If it did this way, they'd have time to burn themselves. |
| 52 | *** Not if the Thing cells are ''inside them''. |
| 53 | *** Even if assimilation isn't instant, there's nothing to say they'd be able to resist. We don't even know what happened to [[spoiler: Fuchs]] exactly, but [[spoiler:Bennings]] is quite obviously incapacitated during assimilation. |
| 54 | *** That the Thing never actually did this, while having the good occasion more than once, is actually one of the best pointers against the "one cell" theory. The Thing doesn't do or even try this, so we can assume that it's not capable of it. The Thing is not a virus in the microbiological sense. |
| 55 | *** Uh, yeah, it pretty much is. We clearly see in Blair's computer simulation that each cell is capable of assimilating and infecting surrounding cells. Honestly it's the only possible explanation for how the Thing's physiology would work. Otherwise there would be no way for Norris' head to detach from his body, sprout legs, and scuttle away on its own. |
| 56 | *** No, it isn't. For a start, viruses AREN'T cells. Each Thing cell does on a microscopic scale what the bigger ones do: they attack and assimilate a target. That doesn't make it a virus any more than a bat flying and eating insects makes it a bird. |
| 57 | *** [[spoiler:Bennings]] was incapacitated during assimilation because the Thing was restraining him like the dogs in the kennel. Without being restrained even infected humans would have enough time to burn the Thing and then themselves. Besides whenever we see the Thing taking its true form it always takes enough time to at least react. And there are no guarantee it would even be able to hit all targets at once. In short, such direct attack would be just plain suicide. Granted, the Thing could probably try that anyway, if it didn't see other way out (there were [[spoiler: several infected people]] after all), but we'll never know. |
| 58 | *** For what it's worth, [[spoiler: the Thing actually ''does'' attempt a stab-and-run approach in the 2011 prequel, and although this lets it kill a number of humans quickly, it also winds up getting attacked by flamethowers every time it does so, before it can actually assimilate the people it kills. Presumably it learned from experience and had already given up on using this tactic by the time it got to the American outpost.]] |
| 59 | ** The novel also explains, that they figured out from previous examples, that the Thing needs around an hour to fully assimilate someone, so they agree to meet every 20 minutes. Who does not show up, will be hunted down and killed on sight. |
| 60 | ** To put it simply, they didn't trust one another. Initially they did try to stick together after they found the UFO in the Norwegian camp, but that changed after they killed Bennings-Thing and realized someone else had been assimilated. Suddenly Blair goes batshit and destroys the helicopter, radio equipment and kills the rest of the dogs, Clark gets despondent, and Childs is suspicious of [=MacReady=]. They ''could'' have stayed together, it's just that everyone thought one another was infected, and they knew they couldn't let themselves be rescued when one of them could be assimilated. Note that they ''do'' eventually decide to stick together once they've confirmed who was really infected and had dealt with them. |
| 61 | ** Because it gives the ending more of a hook. Is one or the other assimilated? Also, the Blair-Thing got more biomass from assimilating Garry, and possibly the still-living remains of other Things joined with it as well - what tries to come out of it at the end is a mangled dog. |
| 62 | ** Actually, a buddy system would be the ''absolute'' stupidest thing they could do. Pair everyone up, if you happen to get paired up with someone who is the Thing, then it has all the time alone it needs to assimilate you. If two people are the Thing, then two more people are assimilated, and so on. You don't even have the dubious benefit of the {{Film/Clue}} buddy system, knowing that if Person A turns up dead than person B must be the killer, because both Person A and Person B come back, although now they're both The Thing. Complete isolation was actually pretty smart. It's even stated that, if only one cell of the Thing can completely assimilate a person, everyone should prepare their own meals and only eat out of sealed containers, because anyone could tamper with the food otherwise. |
| 63 | ** The only people who go off alone are Fuchs about halfway through, Childs just before the climax, and Garry and Nauls at the very end. Fuchs was working in the lab on his own, but even then he was probably fairly close to the others and would have been fine if he hadn't tried to follow Blair, probably in a mad rush to see who it was before they vanished. Childs is actually relatively safe at the end, since he's armed and he knows there's only one Thing left, Blair. It makes sense that the majority would go out to test Blair since they weren't expecting him to have escaped, even if he was a thing. With Nauls and Garry, both were under serious time restraints to get the explosives set up before the Thing attacked and didn't have time to keep each other company. |
| 64 | ** I have the impression that while on the surface, the movie is about "Don't trust anybody", the true message is that "people should trust and connect to one another". The Thing could be ousted more easily were the characters to actually cooperate instead of losing themselves to paranoia and infighting throughout. By staying close, one man with a flamethrower could deal with a Thing quite easily, thus minimizing casualties (these creatures do not seem to be good fighters, the main threat is when they are hidden). By acting alone too much, more secrecy ensues, sowing more distrust amongst the men, allowing the Thing to take over more easily. |
| 65 | |
| 66 | * This troper has always loved this film. But one thing has always bugged me: The radios. Wouldn't there have been multiple transmitters around the compound and wouldn't there have been a strict radio contact schedule in place in case of emergencies. Even if you were able to destroy all of the radio (and in a manner where they couldn't be repaired) how do you handle the contact schedule? |
| 67 | ** Didn't the incoming storm prevent them from radioing out? |
| 68 | *** Yes it did. Windows mentions during the beginning that they can't get a signal in the snow. |
| 69 | ** Blair was either insane or assimilated at that point. If he was insane, he was being overly paranoid and didn't want them to be able to call anyone, who would come in and risk those people getting infected or transporting a Thing to populated areas. If he was assimilated, he didn't want the humans to be able to warn anyone on the outside about the Things. |
| 70 | *** Blair definitely wasn't assimilated at that point. Even if it was trying to destroy the radios to stop the outside world being warned about the Things, it makes no sense to destroy all of the means of transportation when it later goes to such lengths to BUILD a means of transportation. It also made no sense to go on a rampage when it could result in it being killed. Blair was definitely human, and crazy with fear over the fate of the world if the Things got back to civilisation. |
| 71 | *** Not all means of transport are the same. The Thing may have decided that helicopters suck (the range is too short, vulnerable in bad weather, etc.) and so it repurposed the helicopter parts to build a superior craft. |
| 72 | *** It's possible that Blair was infected with a single cell that was taking him over. If the Thing-cells were replacing his brain, it could have caused him to behave more erratically. Blair's making decisions, but perhaps it's ideas the Thing agrees with. It wants time to take over. If the humans can't escape it or call for help it can slowly assimilate, then either wait or construct a new escape vehicle. |
| 73 | |
| 74 | * So, what was The Thing planning to do? What was the point of taking over the Earth by assimilating into every living being? Is there an advantage to it being everywhere or is The Thing's goals not logically sound? |
| 75 | ** We don't know anything about The Thing's backstory, so really it's impossible to say what it was actually thinking the whole time, or what it was doing on Earth in the first place (did it end up on Earth by accident or pure chance, or was an invasion planned from the beginning? Was The Thing acting on its own initiative, or was it a sort of biological weapon sent by another alien species - there are many theories out there). It is likewise unclear whether the assimilation process is necessary in order for The Thing to sustain itself (ie: providing it with nutrition), a purely defensive tactic used to conceal itself and eliminate potential enemies, or simply a means of reproduction. Since the events are shown almost entirely from the perspective of the human crew, and the audience shares in their ignorance the whole time, the finer details are irrelevant for the purposes of the story - all we know is that the thing is a very real and immediate threat which must be safeguarded against at all times. |
| 76 | ** What's the point of a viral pandemic? |
| 77 | ** Viruses' whole purpose for existsance is to make new viruses. The Thing is a very virulent, very complex, even intelligent virus. |
| 78 | *** The Thing is not a virus. More like an a bacteria or amoeba. Each one is a highly complex cell. At the very least, they're acting like any invasive organism does when introduced to an environment with no natural predators. Essentially assimilation is a combination of feeding (eating the dead cells from the organism) and reproduction (turning the live cells into more Things). So, global assimilation would simply be a means of them doing what any other life form would do. |
| 79 | *** The Thing is clearly a virus. Cells cannot absorb genes or alter DNA without using viruses or plasmids and since it's obviously pathogenic it must be a virus. If it weren't a virus then it would be eating and replacing cells which would not allow it to assimilate genes or retain the memories of its victims. It's clear that The Thing infects a host with its DNA using viruses generated from infected cells while (like many real viruses) preserving and altering the function of those cells to increase its longevity and pathogenicity. It's not out of the question that some portion of the genetically altered (by The Thing's viral DNA) change into some specialized "bacteria or amoeba" Thing-Cell to facilitate viral proliferation in the host however. |
| 80 | *** Something is not a virus simply by having what we would call 'viral' traits. Viruses don't build and fly spaceships. It is not shown at all that Thing cells (and remember, viruses don't HAVE cells) are infecting with DNA, it's shown on an Atari screen that one Thing cell converts (not infects) a cell. Blair's program only calls it an 'infection' because it has no other frame of reference. What people who claim the Thing is a virus are doing is assigning biological classification based on observable traits, which was soundly disproved as credible many decades ago by molecular techniques. Essentially, it's like saying a bat can fly, makes sounds, has wings, two feet, a head and eats insects - therefore it's a bird. That kind of 'science' worked in the 19th Century, but is nonsense today. |
| 81 | *** What's more, ''it's a freaking StarfishAlien''. Trying to determine whether it as an extraterrestrial is a viral organism or a cellular one would be like trying to determine whether a tree is black or caucasian; and I use that analogy ''taking into account'' the fact that ethnicity isn't valid as a biological concept. |
| 82 | ** We don't know that the Things ''would'' assimilate the entire world. That's solely based on Blair's ideas. It could be that they don't like Earth and just want to get the hell off the planet... |
| 83 | *** That doesn't follow logically. While it's still possible the Thing's motive was something other than total assimilation the evidence points heavily in that direction. After all, if it just wanted to go home then why bother assimilating the dogs, which drew attention to it? Analysis of the movie indicates that Palmer or Norris was assimilated ''before'' the kennel scene, which would mean there was no tangible benefit to assimilating the dogs beyond a predatory instinct. |
| 84 | ** The ship in the opening sequence seems to be in distress. It's flying erratically and sounds like it's having trouble. Granted, this is a completely alien ship, so that could just be how it sounds and flies normally. But given that it landed in the most in hospitable place on the planet, it would appear that it was not deliberate. It's really only dumb luck that the Thing was ever excavated. Once it was, it set about consuming everything it could, apparently for no other reason than "that's what it does." That having been said, this troper was always under the impression that Blair!Thing was building a mini-spaceship to travel away from Earth, but the last few times I've watched it, I've come to believe it was building just a travel vehicle to get it to a more hospitable climate so it could replicate, not that it was trying to leave Earth. |
| 85 | *** Another popular theory among fans is that the crash was very deliberate, the crew of the spaceship having experienced a similar situation on board as what ensues in the rest of the movie, and an alien [=MacReady=] type crash landed in the coldest place it could find to keep the nightmare trapped. |
| 86 | |
| 87 | * My one and only beef with the movie: The Norwegians could have shot the dog pretty easily if the pilot had flown his helicopter ''like a helicopter'', and not like an airplane that can't, you know, ''hover''. |
| 88 | ** Sure, I bet it'd be easy to shoot a target of that size from a machine several metres above, struggling against Antarctic winds. |
| 89 | ** The dog was assimilated. Shooting him honestly wouldn't do anything more than either piss him off, or slow him down a little. Originally, they had a scene with Clark mending a bullet wound and mentioning how lucky it was that he survived being shot. It was cut out for pacing reasons. Presumably, they were hoping to incapacitate him so they could thrown kerosene and Thermite grenades on him. |
| 90 | ** They weren't exactly thinking straight at that point, and the prequel shows the actual pilot of the helicopter had no real idea why the hell Lars wanted to kill that dog so badly. |
| 91 | |
| 92 | * My brother and I were watching the movie today and we both have one major beef with one part in this movie: When you see some Norwegians in a helicopter going after a dog with guns, kerosene and grenades, wouldn't you figure that there was something wrong with this 'dog' and just end its life? |
| 93 | ** You're in the street and a dog runs up to you. From around a corner a man wielding an axe appears, shouts at you in Norwegian, and then runs towards you and the dog. If your first response to that situation is 'that man is chasing the dog - I must kill it!' then your mental processes are extremely suspect. |
| 94 | ** They probably figured the Norwegians (who had up to that point shot at a dog, blew themselves up with grenades, and shot at the Americans, accidentally or otherwise) were deranged and that they needed to be stopped before they do anymore harm. |
| 95 | ** The dog was behaving perfectly innocently at the time. Its first reaction, upon seeing the American crew, was to run up to them and start licking them. The Norwegians, on the other hand, seemed completely crazy and out of control. I can see why the latter would come off as the ones who had something "wrong" with them. |
| 96 | ** Note that the Norwegian who blew up the helicopter was actually planning on blowing up the guys standing around the dog. That is not behavior that screams "the dog is sick or something and we're trying to save you!". It screams "we're sick or something and trying to kill you!". |
| 97 | ** A ranting lunatic just shows up and starts shooting up your base with an assault rifle: you're probably not going to weigh the context very carefully before you act. |
| 98 | ** Yes, but they had ample time between the inital attack and the "dog" being put in the kennel to give it some thought. Honestly suprised that they didn't consider rabies as being a reason for the Norwegians having "gone crazy". It would have lined up with the dog's behaviour, rabies can present as docility in certain stages. |
| 99 | *** Even in the extremely unlikely event that the crew came to the conclusion after the fact that there was something wrong with the dog instead of the Norwegians being completely deranged, what would happen is that Clark would test the dog and find absolutely nothing wrong with it. Because the Thing is clearly capable of imitating lifeforms to near-perfection, so unless said dog already had rabies when it was assimilated, it would simply display itself to be a normal dog without any issues that the resident animal handler would be able to find from a typical examination. |
| 100 | |
| 101 | * At one point Norris was left alone and in charge of three of the cast (Copper, Garry and Clark) who were tied up, doped up and helpless to resist. A few minutes later, Norris was revealed as a Thing. The rest of the movie shows that none of the three was secretly a Thing. Why didn't Norris just take advantage of the situation and inject them with some of his Thing cells (using the hypodermic that he used to give them the morphine) and turn them into Things? |
| 102 | ** There isn't actually any evidence that the 'one-cell' theory is actually true. It's just a theory proposed by one scientifically-minded person. Also with the blood test: the more 'scientific' one of mixing blood possibly wouldn't have worked, but the trick of sticking a hot needle into a blood sample worked very well. |
| 103 | ** He would have been the only non-tied-down person there at what the others would conclude was the only time in which they could have been infected. It would have exposed him. |
| 104 | ** The same reason that dog was alone with Clark and didn't assimilate him: The Things can probably tell who's a high-risk target. The men were already under suspicion. And Clark was the most obvious candidate for assimilation, even to the humans. |
| 105 | ** It's possible that he ''did'' do exactly that when he injected them, it's just that events came to a climax and all three of them died before any of them had time to be transformed to a significant degree. |
| 106 | |
| 107 | * This is one that [[WebVideo/TheSpoonyExperiment Spoony]] brought up, and it's a good one: While it's cool that Blair is building his own flying saucer in the basement, what would it have run on? Gasoline? |
| 108 | ** In the Campbell short story, the Thing has used its leisure time to whip up not only an anti-gravity machine but a pocket-sized atomic generator to power it. |
| 109 | *** Spoony is wrong and that short story is unrealistic (where did he get the nuclear material required for the generator? To say nothing about the exotic tech required to ''cancel gravity'') fact is, they never once use the word ''space ship'' - all they say is that it's a flying machine cannibalized with parts from the helicopter. Best guess it was designed to fly him to an inhabited country - nothing more nothing less. So yes, he probably could power it on gasoline. |
| 110 | *** If the saucer was just a flying vehicle and not a spaceship... well, why would the Blair-Thing take parts from the helicopter to make another flying vehicle? why not just use the helicopter and fly out of Antartica once the weather got better? |
| 111 | *** Because helicopters don't have that kind of range! You'd run out of fuel and crash long before you reached South America or whatever. The Thing needed some sort of airplane, which the base didn't have, so it decided to make one itself. |
| 112 | *** Blair was definitely still human when he destroyed the helicopter. It makes no sense if a Blair-Thing destroyed the vehicles - it was human Blair trying to stop the Thing reaching civilisation. |
| 113 | ** I've always pictured the mini-ship as more along the lines of a high-speed sled. Just something to either get to the ocean, or outside of the range where the humans could safely travel. The humans no longer have any dogs, or a working helicopter. All they have is the snow cat, which would be slower than walking. And they can't really walk very far in the Antarctic winter. Also, they were using kerosene, not gasoline to power the generator, snow cat, and chopper. The back of the rocket sled looks very much as one would expect the back of a rocket sled to look: Like that's where the flames come out of. They don't need to get into space with it, or even to another country. Just far away enough that the humans can't follow, and then shift back into a dog and jump into the ocean, from which it can assimilate all life on Earth. |
| 114 | *** That wouldn't work, the Thing is quite susceptible to getting frozen. |
| 115 | *** Underwater temperatures wouldn't be cold enough to freeze stuff solid, else the seawater itself would freeze. So long as it can snag a few cold-water fishes or grow itself some blubber, the Thing would be fine. |
| 116 | *** Seawater doesn't freeze because salt in water reduces its freezing point, not because it isn't cold enough. It's also because in conjunction with a lower temperature, the ocean is constantly moving. It only gets cold enough to freeze the ocean at the extreme poles. Also, sea ice exists. None of this would stop ice crystals from forming in an organism. |
| 117 | ** Who says the Blair-thing was necessarily building a means to travel? Perhaps it was building a device to excavate and repair the original crashed ship. |
| 118 | |
| 119 | * Now, I'm no expert, and I've only seen pictures of Antarctica, but are there even mountains made of visible rock there? I was under the impression the everything above sea level was nothing but solid ice, but at the start of the film there are sweeping shots of mountains. So, am I wrong, or did the filmmakers muck up? |
| 120 | ** There certainly are mountains in Antarctica. Indeed, one of the reasons the base existed is for geological research, so naturally it was established near exposed rock. |
| 121 | ** There are some parts of the movie that were necessary goof-ups, too. They couldn't fly everyone down to Antarctica and film down there, so they flew them to Alaska and filmed there. They had enough problems with filming in the cold in Alaska. Antarctica is much colder, more inhospitable, and further away. Plus, if something broke down or someone got hurt, they'd be in big trouble down there. It's routine for those stationed in Antarctica to completely lose contact with the outside world for up to a month or so at a time. Other minor goofs included the time of day. Most fans of the movie don't know enough about Antarctica to pick up on these goofs. Just the nitpickers. |
| 122 | ** This is not a mistake. Transantarctic Mountains are not entirely covered with snow and ice. Rock can also be visible. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transantarctic_Mountains |
| 123 | |
| 124 | * If each individual Thing acts independently of each other, and another Thing is just as likely to kill a previous Thing as a human, then why do they bother to infect more people and turn them into Things? What does it gain from this? |
| 125 | ** The Things are in it for their own survival. It's similar to why villains team up: because they stand more of a chance to survive by cooperating, most of the time. If another Thing (or Thing colony) is screwing up their chances of survival, or just getting in the way, they'll kill them. Individually, each Thing cell may only be as smart as an ant. But they have the ability to form hive minds to become smarter. The general perception is that the bigger a Thing colony (body) is, the smarter they can be. Note that the Norris Head Thing acts rather stupid, compared to the other Things. It just runs out into the open. Palmer Thing, seeing a chance to make itself look more human, points out the stupid Norris Head Thing, thus ensuring his own survival for longer and lowering any suspicions the others may have about him. Really, it's one of the ways that they're not so different from humans. |
| 126 | *** It's a big assumption that they are colonies that grow smarter the bigger they are. All we know for sure is that when part of them is cut off, like a head or a blood sample, it will try to survive on its own because it's cells are capable of it. |
| 127 | ** As for why they keep trying to eliminate humans and turn them into Things, the key phrase there is ''eliminate humans''. All of the human-guise Things have a common goal of whittling away the humans' numbers, because they're all equally vulnerable to getting burned to death if the surviving humans catch on to them. Replacing the men they eliminate lets them keep their remaining human enemies confused, suspicious of one another, and increasingly outnumbered. The moderate risk that one such Thing might end up having to kill a fellow-Thing is one they're willing to accept if it means they'll eventually have no real opposition left. |
| 128 | |
| 129 | * So... Is there any hints as to who the Thing is or isn't at the end? |
| 130 | ** Neither of them are. There's no reason for either of them to be. But Carpenter deliberately said in interviews that there are no answers to these questions. There's no answer to 'who was assimilated first: Norris or Palmer?' because they deliberately, consciously wanted it to be ambiguous. |
| 131 | ** [[http://thethingfan.11.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?t=39 The debate rages on.]] Some say yes, others say no. |
| 132 | *** Which is irrelevant when Carpenter himself says that we aren't MEANT to know. He filmed it ambiguously, and intentionally so. |
| 133 | ** Carpenter states that originally, Mac was supposed to survive and prove that he was human with another blood test. But that ending was too upbeat, so they scrapped it in favor of the ambiguous ending. |
| 134 | *** There's also the infamous alternate ending, which makes it a moot point. Dog Thing lives... |
| 135 | *** Here's my reasoning. If both were Things, then why would they need to have that little chat? Mission accomplished, just wait for the rescue party. If one of them was the Thing, then wouldn't it try to assimilate the other, since neither had any weapons to defend themselves with? That only leaves the "both are human" variant.' |
| 136 | *** Things don't necessarily recognize each other instantly. They could both be Things wondering if the other guy is also a Thing or if he's still a human, so they sit around for awhile trying to figure it out. And if one is a Thing and the other isn't, the Thing might just be cautious, waiting for the human to get distracted before making a move. Also they're outside and we know that Things can freeze, so the Thing might be in a weakened state and less capable of transforming itself quickly in these conditions, so it needs to wait for the right moment to attack. |
| 137 | *** Neither had weapons? Did you miss the flamethrower Childs was packing? |
| 138 | *** The 2002 video game sequel (which actually IS canon) reveals that [[spoiler: Childs died and [=MacReady=] mysteriously vanished.]] |
| 139 | *** Mac actually shows up at the end of the game in a helicopter, to assist you in fighting the final boss. Also, most people who watch the movie think it should stand on its own, independent of the other media. |
| 140 | ** This troper thinks that at the very least, it's exceedingly unlikely that Mac is a Thing, since only a few minutes at most could have passed between him blowing up Blair-Thing and reuniting with Childs, especially since the last thing we saw him do was run away from Blair-Thing. |
| 141 | ** The [[Film/TheThing2011 prequel]] revealed that the Thing can't copy inorganic material. Childs still has his metal ear stud in the final scene, suggesting that he at least is still human. |
| 142 | *** Except that movie also shows that the Thing is able to replace earrings. Carter does it, just with the wrong ear. Maybe it wasn't holding the IdiotBall this time. |
| 143 | *** No he doesn't, Carter-Thing doesn't have an earring at the end which is what makes Kate suspicious. Carter-Thing indicating the wrong ear for where the earring should be is what confirms her suspicions. |
| 144 | ** Here's some FridgeHorror for you. Earlier in the movie, [=MacReady=] was warned that it was possible for just one cell of The Thing to infect an entire person, and everyone should prepare their own meals and only eat out of cans. At the end, [=MacReady=] hands Childs a bottle of whisky. When Childs takes a drink, [=MacReady=] chuckles. . . |
| 145 | ** Or maybe he's just laughing over Childs accepting the drink at all since Childs had been acting very antagonistic towards him during the film. That doesn't necessarily indicate he could be the Thing. |
| 146 | ** What about Childs' lack of visible breath? [=MacReady=] is puffing like a steam engine, but Childs isn't at all. |
| 147 | *** You can see his breath, it's the way the scene is lit. Even if he was a Thing, his breath would obey the laws of physics just fine. |
| 148 | |
| 149 | * When [=MacReady=] goes to check on Blair, there is a noose hanging in the shack. Yet Blair tells [=MacReady=] that he's fine and wants to return back [[spoiler:and he's also infected by the alien]]. So what the hell? |
| 150 | ** This was role-playing by Blair thing, in the original script Blair says that he will hang himself before the monster breaks in to absorb him. |
| 151 | ** For all we know, Blair actually ''did'' hang himself, and the Thing just ate the body and left the noose where it was. |
| 152 | ** Unlikely. The Thing doesn't seem to try and imitate dead corpses, which implies it can only do it to living beings. It's likely either Blair was assimilated before he could hang himself or the Thing put it up for the role play mentioned above. Besides, since the others are under the impression Blair is crazy, it doesn't seem to out of the question for them to not comment on there being a noose. |
| 153 | |
| 154 | * In the "blood test" scene how the hell did the Thing!blood ''scream'' when stabbed with a needle? |
| 155 | ** The scene was generated with a monster puppet(which you can see if you look really closely). Presumably, upon being burned, the blood briefly took on a more animal shape in order to escape. |
| 156 | *** Yes, but even so it didn't look more complex than an amoeba. Did it even have anything to scream with? |
| 157 | ** It could have been vibrating. It looked to me like some sort of cup or bladder, which could have affected a plain hum and turned it into something resembling an unearthly shriek. |
| 158 | *** And considering it was tiny and surrounded by hostile humans, some with flamethrowers, screeching may have been the only means its feeble tiny-scrap-of-Thing intellect could come up with to startle its enemies long enough for it to slip away. So it spent all that time the other samples were getting tested preparing itself to do so. |
| 159 | |
| 160 | * Up until [=MacReady=] tested his own blood with the hot wire, it seemed like everyone was treated him as practically above suspicion for being infected, as though the suspicion that he was insane (and human) overpowered the suspicion that he was an alien. What little I saw of "generic suspicion that could be alien-suspicion" was pretty subtle, if it even was there. This is especially highlighted when nobody challenges his statement that he knows he's not a Thing (because obviously, that's exactly what an infectee would say). Did I miss something completely obvious? |
| 161 | ** Er, did you miss the bit where Nauls abandons him in a storm after finding a tattered jacket with [=MacReady=]'s name on it? Which then causes everyone else to think he's been infected and lock him outside? The only reason they let him back inside and start going along with what he's saying is because he's got a flare in one hand and dynamite in the other and is threatening to blow up the whole base if they don't. |
| 162 | ** Even if they didn't actually believe he wasn't a Thing, letting him play out his blood-tests (even if bogus) meant he kept untying people as they were exonerated. Why ''wouldn't'' they humor him/it for as long as possible? |
| 163 | |
| 164 | * What's the practical applications of flamethrowers in the Antarctic? Do they use them to melt paths or thaw machinery or something? |
| 165 | ** Pretty much. Mostly thawing machinery and pipes out. |
| 166 | |
| 167 | * How did they obtain the blood from Palmer without getting a reaction from the Thing? |
| 168 | ** Because the intelligence of the Thing depends on its size: Palmer-Thing was clever enough not to react, the blood-thing wasn't. |
| 169 | ** Also, purely physical injuries like getting shot, hit or cut don't really damage a Thing, so Palmer-Thing's survival drive wouldn't kick in from being cut. It's the ''heat'' of the wire that can destroy Thing cells and provoke a response from Thing blood. |
| 170 | |
| 171 | * Could the Thing have come up with a way to withstand fire? There are plenty of single-celled organisms that are able to survive the harshest environments, including volcanoes. If the thing were to assimilate those organisms, would it have been able to tolerate the heat? |
| 172 | ** I don't think so. The thing is a imitator of function and looks mainly, it copies biological structures but it's flesh remains "Thing". Let's say an alien creature developed skin that would allow it to survive inside a volcano. The Thing imitating it would have skin that looks exactly like that creature, but ultimately the skin would be composed of the same Thing-flesh that is vulnerable to heat. |
| 173 | ** Tolerating environmental temperatures up to the boiling point is a far cry from tolerating actual combustion in action. Bizarre though it is, the Thing's structure is clearly made up partially of water, like ours; if it wasn't, it wouldn't have thawed out or frozen solid at the same temperatures that would freeze or thaw normal tissue. Get it hot enough, its cellular fluids are going to vaporize faster than its shape-shifting can heal the damage. |
| 174 | |
| 175 | * What happens if the thing were to assimilate a flamingo? The flamingo gets its pink color by eating algae and crustaceans containing carotenoids that break down into pink and orange pigments that are distributed across its body. Would the Thing-flamingo also assimilate those pigments and become pink itself? Additionally, the second movie pointed out that the Thing is incapable of absorbing non-organic matter (such as metal tooth fillings), but there is an animal called an ''Crysomallon squamiferum'' whose shell is covered in an additional layer of iron sulfides greigite and pyrite, which no animal in nature has been known to use. It's "foot" is also covered in iron-mineral scales to provide further protection against predators. Basically its a snail covered in metal. So if the thing were to absorb that would it expel the iron and spit out a regular non-iron covered ''Crysomallon squamiferum'', or would the complete integration of metal and flesh confuse the Thing so much that it wouldn't be able to make anything at all? Remember the victim's fillings were put in with surgery at some point in his life, so they're not a part of the individual, but the snail developed the armor naturally by absorbing it from the sulfide and metal rich waters near the hydrothermal vents deep beneath the ocean. |
| 176 | ** Crysomallon isn't 'covered in metal' - it incorporates iron sulphide into its shell and the sclerides at the sides of the foot. It's not even confirmed for what purpose the sclerides evolved. A Thing would likely excrete the excess iron sulphide unless its alien biology could metabolise it. |
| 177 | ** I would think it could imitate the organic material, but who knows. Considering the Thing never left Antarctica, [[BellisariosMaxim I'd suggest not thinking too much about it.]] |
| 178 | *** No reason it couldn't mimic a flamingo's secondhand pigments, as it's hard to think why the ''original'' source of the pigments would matter. It just duplicates what's present in the assimilated creature, which would include pink and orange carotenoid-derivatives in a flamingo's case. |
| 179 | ** It didn't have any trouble mimicking bone or teeth, so it presumably has ''some'' ability to work with mineral compounds. Pure metals might be beyond its range, else you'd think it would have armored up for protection when people were firing flamethrowers at it. |
| 180 | ** If the Thing couldn't use iron at all, you'd think the humans could ''smell'' its blood wasn't real human blood rather than having to use heat to test it. Iron is an essential component of hemoglobin, after all. |
| 181 | |
| 182 | * Near the end, before Nauls wanders off to his death, why didn't he say anything to [=MacReady=] first? |
| 183 | ** This was probably the relic of the cut scene where Nauls is ambushed by a jack-in-the-box monster, or this could simply be blamed on being a TooDumbToLive moment out of fear. |
| 184 | ** Watching it again, he would have (in theory) never been out of [=MacReady's=] direct line-of-sight down there. Sure, he ''should'' have told [=MacReady=] he was heading in that direction, but it's only through horror-movie BehindTheBlack logic he disappears anyway. Mac should probably have seen him get caught. |
| 185 | |
| 186 | * Why did the Thing turn into a giant monster near the end when it could have more easily ran up to [=MacReady=] and do the thing he did to Garry? |
| 187 | ** While there was nothing official, theories posted in some fanfics range from the monster form was the Thing attempting different ways of communication and approaches (disguising myself didn't work, I'll try being horrifying) to a distraction while one of the Things escape ("I'll make what they expect: a monster for them to fight. It will buy me time to bury myself in the snow"). |
| 188 | ** The snarling growth that emerges from one side of the Thing's "giant monster" form looks like a deformed dog, so it's possible it was caught in the process of calving off dog-copies when [=MacReady=] approached it. It grew so big in order to make ''several'' faux-huskies that could disperse and search for other Antarctic stations, thus giving itself multiple chances to spread rather than pinning all its hopes on just one option. Producing multiple dog-bodies meant it couldn't stay humanoid, so it turned into a big tube full of proto-dogs, but was disturbed before it could finish. To fight off [=MacReady=], it added a giant mouth and tentacles, while sprouting out the most complete of its half-finished doggie copies for an additional bite attack. |
| 189 | |
| 190 | * Quick hypothetical; Can the Thing assimilate viruses and cellular material outside the cell? We know it assimilates whole cells from tissue, but we've never seen it absorb more basic life then even a cell. If it can assimilate viruses and cellular material, how does that work? And if it can't, can a virus kill The Thing? |
| 191 | ** Only if it was a virus from its environment of origin, specifically adapted to infect Things. Viruses have to interact with specific cellular gateways and protein components to operate, and if the Thing's cells lack those components (which tend to be taxon-specific), then the virus has no way to affect them. |
| 192 | |
| 193 | * If [=MacReady=] and Childs in the end admit the possibility that one of them could be infected, isn't the obvious solution to burn themselves? I understand that's a tall order, but they were resigned to dying anyway, and if they just freeze, and one of them IS infected, then it was all for naught, and the world is still in mortal danger. |
| 194 | ** What would be the point? Either they are both human, and both get a painful burning death, or one of them is the Thing, in which case it isn't going to sit by and let itself get burned. |
| 195 | |
| 196 | * So if both Garry and Cooper weren't infected, then how '''did''' the Thing get into the blood supply? |
| 197 | ** If you listen closely in the scene where Windows walks in on Bennings getting assimilated, you can hear him drop the keys. The most popular theory is that Norris, Palmer or Blair picked them up at this time. Blair had apparently locked himself in his room at this time, so it would have been the perfect opportunity to sabotage the blood, before going on to killing the dogs and destroying the vehicles. |
| 198 | *** Blair was human at that point. A Blair-Thing has no reason to destroy the means of transport only to build another means of transport later, it makes no sense. But it makes sense if he was only assimilated later, but one of the others. |
| 199 | *** Blair!Thing '''could''' have had two very good reasons for destroying communications and transportation. One, it's what Human!Blair would do given the information he had about the Thing. Two, it enforces the ClosedCircle setting. The Thing is vulnerable so long as there's one human around who knows what it is and can expose and burn it. Trapping everyone in the confines of the base and preventing them from explaining what they've learned means the Thing has all winter to assimilate everyone. Eventually, someone will come to check on the outpost, bringing their own transportation. The Things can make up any story they like about what happened and get a free ride back to civilization. |
| 200 | *** A Thing knows what its host knew. Blair was a microbiologist, not a helicopter pilot; thus, the Thing used parts from "thing I have learned '''can''' fly" to build "thing I already know '''how''' to fly." |
| 201 | |
| 202 | * Couldn't they have used a variation of Copper's blood test even without the uncontaminated blood? For example, they could have taken a sample of each person's blood, then mixed them with each other, one by one, and find the Thing through process of elimination. Eventually they'd find that Palmer and Norris's blood samples are the only ones that react strangely with other blood samples (except for when Palmer's is mixed with Norris's blood). That would single them out as the odd ones out. |
| 203 | ** They wanted the stored blood because it was the only blood they could be 100% certain wasn't already infected. Mixing two blood samples and seeing no reaction wouldn't necessarily exonerate someone if both sources' identity was in doubt: it would only indicate they were both human ''or'' both Things. |
| 204 | ** If the test were to work as they theorized though, then they would be able to conclude that 2 of the men (Palmer and Norris, assuming Blair is still human) are the odd ones out. As in, they are either the only two humans among Things, or they are two Things surrounded by humans. Since as Mac concludes "if you were all Things, you'd just attack me by now" (in other words, if the Things were the majority, they'd kill the minority) the logical thing to do would be to lock up Palmer and Norris until they can come up with a final test. Hypothetically, Gary and Copper (prime suspects) would match up with the rest of the humans, which might cast doubt on them to an outside observer. But the humans ''know'' they are human (Mac: "I know I'm human") and they are in control. |
| 205 | *** I doubt his test would've worked either way. Mixing Thing-copy-blood and real blood would produce no visible reaction - it was a gradual process. It would have been difficult to observe without a high powered microscope. |
| 206 | |
| 207 | * Another thing: If the Thing's blood actually takes over other blood, which in turn takes over other blood, then it would be trivial to find out who's the Thing. |
| 208 | ** Would you want to just let the possibility of an alien imitating and killing people running around slide? I think not. Besides, there's nothing preventing doing the blood test that Mac came up with. |
| 209 | |
| 210 | * When Blair is dissecting the Dog Thing. He cuts it open ''somewhere'' and pulls... ''something'' out. The thing he pulls out causes him to say "Oh my God". What exactly did he pull out? What are we supposed to be looking at in that scene? Also, how many dogs were there in that Thing body, in addition to the original dog? |
| 211 | ** Watching that scene, he was pulling out a dog that wasn't fully absorbed due to the teeth and nose and he actually says "Oh my God" as he's cutting. On the topic of the dogs, there were 6 before the Thing got inside while two got out and the rest were absorbed and their remains can be seen during Blair's discussion. |
| 212 | |
| 213 | * Why wasn't Clarke assimilated? I've heard fans of the movie say that he wasn't chosen because he would be under a lot of suspicion. But that doesn't make any sense. Even if Clarke was under a lot of suspicion, why wouldn't the Thing take him over anyway? The Thing doesn't lose anything from assimilating someone. So what does it matter to Dog Thing if Clarke Thing would be a high risk target? At best, Team-Thing will have another ally who could possibly assimilate even more; if he gets caught, Team Human will lose an ally. Either way Dog Thing wins. |
| 214 | ** The suspicion thing is pretty self-explanatory. Why take over someone who is a prime suspect? Clarke is a high risk target and it would probably be too much risk and danger taking over someone who is likely to be killed. It would merely make it a waster of time for the Thing to take over someone they'd suspect first. Note how the people the Thing takes, Bennings, Norris, and Palmer, are pretty low-key characters throughout the movie. If anything, the Thing stands the best chance taking over people that are the last ones you'd suspect because no one expects them to secretly be murderous aliens and look how it ended up for Doc in particular. |
| 215 | ** (OP here) This would apply '''if''' the Thing had anything to lose from assimilating someone. The Thing has absolutely nothing to lose from taking someone over. Besides possibly getting caught in the process, which was not an issue with Clarke. If it takes over Clark, and now Clarke is a suspect, so what? The humans can't do anything about it. The most they will do is tie him up and be cautious around him; they wouldn't burn him unless they could ''prove'' he was the Thing. And by the time they ''do'' have a way to determine who is the Thing, it doesn't make a lick of difference whether they are a low-key or a high-risk target at all; they are going to get caught, as seen with Palmer. The only thing it loses is that since it is being watched, it won't be able to go around camp assimilating or framing people (which is not a problem, it can use Blair, Palmer and Norris to do that). |
| 216 | *** While I do agree with you OP, I always kind of thought that the point was the Thing was trying to make it seem like nothing was going on beyond paranoia. If the most obvious person in the group turns out to be a normal human and is eventually killed by other humans it could pretend this whole mess was just a bunch of paranoia getting the best of people. Then it could waltz back to civilization with the rest of them eventually. |
| 217 | *** Good point, I didn't think of that before. The only thing is, we ''know'' they know the Thing exists, because of the scene with the dogs, and more importantly the scene where Bennings is assimilated. Although at that point they don't have any good evidence that the Thing can perfectly assimilate a human being, so that theory can still fly. |
| 218 | *** Clark spends the time with the dog at the start of the movie; by the time the men are completely sure something's going on, the Thing's lost its chance to get Clark alone. |
| 219 | |
| 220 | * The way the men reacted to the Thing always bugged me. When Doc Copper sees the Norwegian Thing, all he says is "Is that a man in there...?" with a confused expression on his face, as if he can't see the horrific monstrosity right in front of him. And when the Norwegian Thing is brought back to the Outpost, and everyone gets a good look at it, they all seem a bit ''too'' comfortable standing right next to it, even breathing in the smoke fumes that it emits. If someone in real life saw that, you'd expect them to at least back away, if not run straight out of the room, and/or start vomiting on the spot. |
| 221 | ** Granted, there are some people reacting badly to the smell and people have different limits on what makes them actually puke, considering I for one didn't throw up throughout the movie, but found it disgusting. |
| 222 | ** The Norwegian Thing was completely inert at the time. Possibly Copper's nonplussed reaction was because it was shiny enough from ice that it didn't even look real to him, but like some sort of bizarre, Lovecraftian plastic sculpture. As for him not being all that grossed out, it's logical that the outpost's physician would have a strong stomach for grisly sights, as it's hard to finish medical school if you're squeamish. |
| 223 | |
| 224 | * Why does the Norris-Thing have two heads? The one that is the head on the top of the torso and one that appears from the chest mouth. Is the chest mouth head the original Norris' that the Thing simply didn't digest or something? |
| 225 | ** If you watch the scene carefully, the thing that comes out of Norris's torso actually seems to be a separate Thing, detaching itself from the original body and latching itself on the ceiling, similar to how the Norris-Head is its own organism. The separate creature could have formed the head as a central brain along with eyes, and just reused the Norris head formula because it was more familiar with it/could easily access it. If it hadn't have digested the head then presumably it wouldn't have been able to imitate it. |
| 226 | *** There's also nothing saying that each individual Thing entity is only one creature. With how active the Thing's blood itself is when separated it's always led me to think that the Thing could, in a pinch, break up into dozens of pieces if it wanted to. So I assumed that this was just the Thing splitting up so it could maximize the chances of surviving after outing itself. |
| 227 | ** Taking on a form with a human face may also have helped it in selecting a place to hide, as it could use copies of Norris's eyes to quickly scan its surroundings from a human's visual perspective. Therefore, it can tell where the shadows are too dark for its pursuers to spot it, where their line-of-sight would be obstructed, and so forth, which might not be apparent if it assumed a wholly-unearthly shape that detects its environment through BizarreAlienSenses. |
| 228 | |
| 229 | * Would a Thing version of someone weigh differently to the original? It's implied that the method of assimilation is that the Thing eats humans, then converts their cells into Thing cells. But there's also the scene where the Norwegian Thing "jumps" into Bennings's body. Even if he looked the same, it seems likely that his body would be denser and weigh more because it's the Thing cells added onto the human cells. |
| 230 | ** I don't think it would matter too much as cells are literally microscopic and considering Bennings was caught before it was finished, it can be noticed it has deformed and extra long arms. I think it's likely as a big collection of cells that can operate on their own the Thing could distribute its weight and any size differentiation would be minuscule as humans have cells die and get replaced constantly so it should be no worry. |
| 231 | *** ''The whole human body'' consists of the cells and there are trillions of them - so a change in weight of one cell would make a ton of a difference if all the cells were affected the same way. So we could only assume that the change is minuscule even on the level of the single cell. |
| 232 | |
| 233 | * Here's one I'm surprised no-one's asked before; what's with all the guns (and explosives, for that matter)? I've heard explanations for the flamethrower that sound semi-plausible, but why are there so many firearms in a research facility? Not just the American camp - the Norwegian one as well, they're loaded with guns. Why? (I'm hoping for a Watsonian answer, here - I get the Doylist explanation was that it served the purposes of furthering the plot.) |
| 234 | ** Under the Antarctic Treaty, Antarctic research stations are to be used for peaceful scientific purposes only. But the stations were established during the height of the Cold War, so it's not inconceivable that they would have weapons on hand just in case the Soviets decided to start something. |
| 235 | ** The long guns from the cabinet may have been for the collection of seabird specimens during helicopter forays to the coastline. Shooting non-endangered birds for purposes of approved scientific research is treaty-permitted in Antarctica, so long as it's on a small scale and the right permits have been issued. The pistols are harder to account for, although one might've been kept on hand in case a sled dog got badly injured and needed to be put down in the field. |
| 236 | |
| 237 | * How does the assimilation of Bennings work? Windows walks in and sees him being assimilated and we know this is the original Bennings because he's sitting on a chair and has his original pants on. He leaves and returns with Mac and Fuchs in what can't be more than 5 minutes, and Bennings-Thing has escaped, is fully clothed and almost fully assimilated at that point. How did the Thing assimilate him so fast? Did Norwegian-Thing absorb chair-Bennings then spit out an assimilation in less than 5 minutes? Also, did it pull up a chair for him before doing so? |
| 238 | ** Windows had left the room to get the keys from Garry while the Thing had started to move before he left. Since Garry is likely in the Rec Room or asleep at this time, Windows could have easily taken 5 minutes or more trying to find him and get his keys while Bennings gets attacked. Additionally, Bennings is sitting in the corner besides the table holding the carcass when he is assimilated, which is not heavily shown prior to the attack, so it's not unlikely to think it would've been easier for him to be sitting all tied up so the Thing could eat him more easily and remain covert. Plus, Bennings is standing on a chair before he is attacked, which is covered in blood when Windows enters and now suddenly in the center of the room, which he could've put back as got down from moving stuff before getting attacked. As for the assimilation, the emphasis is on it being incomplete, as Bennings' arms were deformed and he roared instead of talking while seeming to have trouble walking, so it's likely that while his appearance was being worked on, his animalistic behavior implied it needed more time to fully complete the imitation. And in terms of clothes, he is only seen with the parka and pants on, so who knows if he would've looked the same underneath or was wearing more clothes? Seems like a reasonable time frame given Windows is getting the keys before getting the others. |
| 239 | |
| 240 | * Why does it seem to be {{Fanon}} that the smaller a Thing is, the lesser its intelligence? The only "stupid" action by a small thing in the 1982 movie is the Blood-Thing jumping and screaming after being stabbed by a red hot needle. That's not necessarily stupidity, it could equally have been done out of fear or a selfish desire to protect itself; possibly no different to how Norris-Thing gave itself away after being defibrillated. If you count the 2011 movie than the human sized Things are even stupider, giving themselves away inside a helicopter and putting an ear ring in the wrong ear. |
| 241 | ** Possibly the idea comes from both the actions of the Blood-Thing and from how, after separating from the Norris-Thing's body, the Head/Crab-Thing didn't flee or attack or even sprout any weapons to defend itself, it just scuttled into another room and hid under a desk like a four-year-old playing Hide And Seek ''really'' ineptly. Plus, those googly crab eye-stalks just make it ''look'' like it's dumb. |
| 242 | ** Regarding the 2011 movie and the earring, the issue isn't that the earring is in the wrong ear, it's that there's no earring at all and on top of that Carter-Thing didn't know (somehow) which ear it was supposed to be in. Carter wasn't there for the fillings scene and Kate is never shown telling him about it afterward (and it's reasonable to assume she didn't get a chance to because things are escalating so quickly at that point). So maybe the Thing version of him didn't realize this would blow his cover. The only explanation I can offer for the helicopter reveal is that maybe the Thing thought Kate was flagging them down because its cover had already been blown (which is somewhat true) and the Thing reacted like a cornered animal, much like the blood did. |
| 243 | |
| 244 | * So here's a completely crazy idea: Why ''don't'' they just let the Thing assimilate with everyone? There's no sign that doing so would deprive them of their memories/personalities. If anything, doing so would just make them into stronger beings: regenerate lost limbs, grow wings to fly, gills to breathe underwater. And since everything assimilated by the Thing is essentially the same being, they'd have no real reason to fight each other, since the only people/animals it attacks is whoever/whatever ''isn't'' already assimilated with it. |
| 245 | ** It's not transformation, it's replacement. Your mind doesn't stay intact - It gets your memories, but your identity, personality and desires are completely replaced. |
| 246 | ** Even if it '''were''' beneficial (it's not - you are gone, replaced by a monster using your memories to imitate you), would you let yourself be eaten by a violent, gory, HellIsThatNoise tentacle ''thing'' that is attacking you? |
| 247 | ** Even setting aside the above, humans just value their individuality that much. There's a short story by Asimov named "Anarchy", If I recall correctly, which features a LighterAndSofter version of The Thing - the HiveMind, that unites all beings of an alien planet, feels genuinely sorry for the human explorers and sees integrating them in the collective (by psychically impregnating all the females down to microbes with altered offspring) as a great gift. The moment the expedition leader realises what's happening he has the ship and everything in it ''nuked''. |
| 248 | ** No sign that it would deprive them of their personalities?? Dude, the Thing-people decide to ''murder'' the non-Thing people. Seeing as the people on this base weren't murdering each other ''before'' the Thing arrived, I think it's safe to say that assimilation alters your personality. Or rather, it ''kills'' you and then constructs a copy that looks like you and acts like you ''for the purpose of camouflage'' and then goes back to its actual Thing personality as soon as it has the chance. |
| 249 | ** On top of everything else said in this thread, assimilation looks to be extremely painful. At best, you're looking at a very violent "surgery" to become a Thing. Even "slow" transformations like the radio guy required extended exposure to the organism's biomass. |
| 250 | |
| 251 | * Why is [=MacReady=] carrying a bottle of spirits at the end of the movie, or even managed to find one? The answer is that he isn't. It's a kerosene molotov left over from burning the base. When he hands it to Childs who takes a drink from it, [=MacReady=] laughs because Childs!Thing has just outed itself, but is also holding the last flamethrower. |
| 252 | ** Two problems with that answer and why it's more WMG than an answer. |
| 253 | *** 1. There's nothing to indicate that it's kerosene and not alcohol. He could easily have been keeping it safe in his coat pocket since he likes his booze. |
| 254 | *** 2. Even if it were kerosene, given how the Thing is a perfect imitation presumably it would also have imitated Childs's taste buds and memories of what beer tastes like - a human, or a perfect imitation of a human would have spat it out. |
| 255 | ** They were using bottles of alcohol to make Molotov cocktails. He likely just had one or two extras stashed at the end. |
| 256 | |
| 257 | * Why does the Palmer-Thing just sit there in the blood test scene? It knows its about to be outed so why does it allow itself to be tied down and wait until the last minute instead of escaping or trying a surprise attack? |
| 258 | ** Mac didn't explain his theory until they were tied up, so he could have have decided to wait until the brief panic and confusion caused by his blood reacting to attack. Alternatively, he might have been unaware he was The Thing (and then reacted instinctively), or not known if the test would work, or not known if anyone else was infected and been waiting for a chance to attack as a group. |
| 259 | ** Or it didn't know if it was the only Thing or not, and was planning to attack by surprise if somebody ''else'' was exposed. Once the Palmer sample's turn came up, it may have been hoping that the Blood-Thing would be disciplined enough to ride out the pain without reacting rather than give itself away. |
| 260 | |
| 261 | * I can understand Norris-Thing using the chest maw to efficiently kill one of the men, but what was it thinking with that weird think it shot out? It has weird stuff hanging out of it, tiny little baby-legs sticking out of it and a whole warped imitation of Norris's head. And it just stands there (on the ceiling) roaring. What was the point of it? It may as well have just splattered the room with Thing pieces and hope it got on all the men. |
| 262 | ** Instinct, I guess, the same that forced it to bite off the hands. It had no reason to do that - it could've just played possum. But being electrocuted sent it into frenzy. |
| 263 | ** It was basically a distraction to cover for the Norris head-Thing's escape. It knew it is surrounded and will most likely be burned, so it sprouted another "head" to allow for the original "head" to escape. |
| 264 | |
| 265 | * What about dust mites, spores, or other microscopic airborne ways of infecting people? How come the Thing never used that? |
| 266 | ** Not many spores in Antarctica, and it presumably has to consciously catch and assimilate organisms before it can copy them. If its senses aren't keen enough to ''notice'' microscopic life, then it probably can't single them out to be copied rather than just digested on contact. |
| 267 | ** And even if it could, it cannot control them, and they're too simple to actively seek further prey and too tiny to convert it before they're killed by the immune system. |
| 268 | ** It might only be able to assimilate fauna, not flora. |
| 269 | ** I had this thought just today, and I think the very idea that a Thing can infect you with a slight touch is nonsense. If that were true, MacReady would've become a thing during the blood test. I think it's more like Muzan Kibutsuji from ''Demon Slayer'': There is no accidental infection, The Thing has to be fully willing to inject enough biomass into a person to take them over. And it requires more than a single cell to take something over. Of course, this also begs the question of the difference between an imitation and an infection. |
| 270 | |
| 271 | * One thing I am not clear on is the plot at the end. Why do [=MacReady=] and the rest decide to destroy the camp? I get that they would rather destroy the base and set things on fire than let the Thing kill them, but why destroy everything else? They mention something about raising the temperature around the camp and preventing the Thing from freezing itself and sleeping, but the Thing can just walk out of the camp and wait there if it wants to freeze, right? Why destroy themselves when they don't know if it will work and they have a working group that knows its not infected? |
| 272 | ** Freezing and sleeping is just part one of it's presumed plan, it needs to be found by a rescue team so it can reach civilization. Presumably The Thing would not want to freeze outside the camp, as it would likely be buried in the snow and never found (it took 100,000 years for its ''massive'' spaceship to be found). As far as destroying themselves goes, they were already as good as dead. With the generator gone, even the interior of the camp would eventually become lethally cold. The only thing they could hope to do was deny The Thing a safe place to impersonate a frozen corpse. |
| 273 | ** Plus they wanted to elimenate any trace of the thing, since they belived that every inch of it was a living thing capable. |
| 274 | |
| 275 | * Why do they put the dog in with the others? Even if they didn't know it was an intelligent alien pathogen it's still a very bad idea to just put a strange dog in with an already established pack. |
| 276 | ** Where else would Clark have put it? |
| 277 | ** Leave it outside on a chain lead, confine it in a dog crate, put it in Blair's shed, keep it in a storage room, house it in his own bedroom. Plenty of options that ''don't'' involve risking a nasty dogfight. |
| 278 | ** A quarantine area is standard practice when you have multiple animals in the same place, incase one gets sick or injured. |
| 279 | *** They clearly didn't put the dog in there right away, maybe they did some tests and figured that there wasn't anything wrong with the dog. |
| 280 | |
| 281 | * Why the hell does Palmer point out the fleeing head when he's a Thing? Nobody else saw it, until he pointed out, ultimately later exposing himself to [=MacReady=] by noticing it. |
| 282 | ** Windows also noticed it as well. Palmer would've had to say something to keep from looking suspicious. |
| 283 | *** It also made noise as it crawled, which the others couldn't possibly have missed hearing once the racket from the fire and extinguishers died down. |
| 284 | ** Another interpretation somewhere on this site is that Palmer!Thing was ''genuinely astounded'' at the fleeing head's stupidly-obvious escape attempt. |
| 285 | ** Because that's what Palmer would have said. Palmer is shown to be a wisecracker, and the Thing perfectly imitates personalities. It's also shown to be selfish and uncaring about other Things. |
| 286 | |
| 287 | * Are explosives the way to go when dealing with this creature? It seems like the troll in D&D: as long as the damage isn't done by fire, it'll regenerate, no matter how catastrophic the damage was. When Macready blew up Palmer-thing, he may have actually saved it: by blowing it apart, the fire is instantly extinguished, and doubtlessly several fragments got separated from the burning flesh, and would recombine and rebuild. |
| 288 | |
| 289 | * The Norwegians discover the alien ship and dig it up. We can see they use dynamite to uncover it. But would a normal scientific expedition to Antarctica have the resources to dig up with such thorough neatness an enormous spaceship as shown in the film? And wouldn't such an extraordinary discovery prompt them to radio back home what they found? How long would they take to remove all the ice from the ship? In that case wouldn't that take enough time for the excavation to become some sort of priority for the Norwegian Government enough to prevent the Norwegian camp from becoming isolated at all? |
| 290 | ** The Amricans radio wasn't working for weeks because of the weather, persumably the Norwegian base was having similar isues |
| 291 | |
| 292 | * So who ''did'' have the keys? Windows asks Bennings for them, and Bennings replied with, "Get them from Garry, there's some stuff I want to get from here." Which implies he ''does'' have the keys and wants to keep hold of them. Then Windows returns later after Bennings has been assimilated with another set of keys- but where did he get this set from without Garry noticing? My only explanation is that Bennings has his own set of keys (see my WMG that Bennings was Garry's deputy) which he keeps in his room or something and Windows was asking him to fetch them, but the existence of a third set of keys seems like a pretty big thing to gloss over. |
| 293 | ** Rewatch the scene of Windows finding Bennings being turned by the Thing and listen very closely. Right before Windows leaves in fright, you can hear the distinct sound of something metallic dropping on the floor. The implication that Windows grabbed the keys from Garry, went back to Bennings and dropped them when he saw what was happening. From there, the Thing could easily have grabbed them, done what needed to be done and returned them to Garry, with the lie that Windows gave them the keys after using them. That's probably why Windows panicked and went for a rifle during the argument later when the blood was found. He figured that they would realize he had the keys last and suspect him, which caused him to want something to defend himself. |
| 294 |
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/context.php
FollowingContext Headscratchers / TheThing1982
Go To
- Show Spoilers
- Night Vision
- Sticky Header
- Wide Load
