Recap / Film Reroll Aliens

We take on Aliens! Joz kicks a sliding door! Andy takes a nap during a combat drop! Paulo does a knife trick! Scott says his own name!

Episode 101-102 and 110-112 of Film Reroll. Based on the 1986 science-fiction movie.

Aliens is the second sequel campaign in the history of the podcast, being released four years after both its preceding campaign and the first such sequel. Just as promised, it sees Jon Miller taking over the role of DM from Andy Hoover, mirroring the director swap between the actual films.

Starring Jocelyn "Joz" Vammer as Ripley, Andy Hoover as Hicks, Paulo Quiros as Bishop and Rico Frost, Scott Aiello as Lieutenant Gorman (occasionally), Hudson, Vasquez, and Rico Frost (occasionally), and Jon Miller as the Dungeon Master.

Intercepted by Halloween III.

---

Tropes:

• Affectionate Nickname: As in the film, Vasquez calls Ripley ”Snow White”. She had, after all, spent a lengthy amount of time sleeping in a glass casket.
• Air-Vent Passageway: Ripley asks the marines to check the ventilation shafts for dustmarks to see of anybody has crawled through them. However, there doesn’t appear to be enough dust in them to begin with for that.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Played With. As far as Burke is concerned, Bishop is an android who has gone against his orders and developed his own, dangerous agency. However, said agency amounts to ensuring that the marines are rescued, rather than prioritizing the mission over their lives.
• Ambiguously Evil: Burke, who presents himself as Ripley’s ally yet is initially reluctant to accept her story. Ripley herself is uncertain whether or not he’s part of a company coverup or simply a skeptic who doesn’t have the benefit of already knowing exactly what happened. However by the end of the campaign, he’s fallen pretty squarely on the ”evil” side, as he outright sabotages the Marines attempts to leave the colony, even rerouting the dropship to pick up only him while leaving the others to their fate.
• Apocalyptic Log: The marines check out the armory specifically to find these, hoping that they may contain valuable information. Bishop manages to extract some and spends a few hours looking through them.
• A-Team Firing: After inhaling the alien gas, Vasquez and Drake start hallucinating that they are under attack by an army of giant insects. Their attempts at blasting the imaginary monsters naturally result in this. Tragically, this leads to their teammate Crow being killed in a case of Friendly Fire.
• Back for the Dead: Dietrich returns for a second in the final episode only to be immediately taken out by an alien.
• Badass Normal: Frost, who — even after being exposed to toxic gas — manages to hold his own against an alien using judo until Hicks comes and scares it away.
• Blooper: A behind-the-scenes example. While preparing the episode, Jon Miller accidentally sent all the players copies of Aladdin’s character sheet. Thus, it becomes a Running Gag that Ripley is actually Aladdin, (and possibly everyone else too.)
• Bound and Gagged: The Marines find Spunkmeyer in this state, with a facehuggee on his head. Ripley ends up shooting him (and the parasite) dead as a Mercy Kill.
• Butt-Monkey: Even when she's not actually there, Kara gets screwed over by a DM: Jon decided to do a HT roll for Kane's fate following the Alien campaign, but didn't feel comfortable doing the same for Parker... so he calls Kara, on what she claims is her day off (which Scott promptly calls into question, claiming she doesn't have a job), to roll. The end result? Parker is sent to a psychiatric hospital due to claims of seeing ghosts.
• Call-Back:
  • Once it’s pointed out that Scott Aiello’s Hudson voice sounds quite similar to Ted ”Theodore” Logan, he and Joz momentarily reassume their Bill and Ted personas. We even get a brief cameo from Socrates, who nearly gets run over by the APC.
    • Prior to this, Scott himself acknowledges that his Hudson performance is basically a repeat of Verne and Chunk. ("C'mon, man!")
  • As Vasquez is hallucinating violently due to being exposed to the fear gas, it is out right asked if she sees Opus.
  • When our heroes find an improvised crutch for the barely conscious Gorman, Joz declares it a ”cursed crutch.”
• The Cameo: Kara Strait ^note She ended up changing her name during the (significant) gap between episodes, so she's referred to as "Pitr" in the first episode and then name-dropped as "Kara" in the last. gets called in over the phone for one scene to roll for Parker’s fate... and still has time to become the Butt-Monkey, as it turns out that Parker’s delusional fear of ghosts led to an admission into a psychriatic ward.
• Cliffhanger: The fourth episode ends with the marines deciding that they need to head back into the colony, likely facing off against the aliens one more time.
• Cloud Cuckoolander: Lieutenant Gorman, who has been reinterpreted as a Third-Person Person and a borderline Talkative Loon. Ripley even suspects him of being an android, which is not helped by Bishop encouraging said thought.
• Continuity Lockout: invoked Subverted in the third part. The players decide to not make a recap , and mock the idea of someone starting midway through the campaign... but since said campaign was put on hold in favor of the Halloween III seven-parter, Paulo Quiros decided to go back and add a recap anyway.
• Conveniently Interrupted Document: After returning to the APC, the Marines realize that large chunks of previously gathered logs are missing, the implication being that Burke stole them before ditching the vehicle.
• Convenient Replacement Character: After Hudson is seriously injured by an explosion, Scott Aiello assumes the role of Vasquez.
• Could Say It, But...: When Burke opts to take the APC away from the garage the marines are in, and go towards the atmosphere processor, Bishop rightfully points out that he's acting against the goals of the mission... but can't actually stop him because of Burke being the ranking company officer, and Bishop's programming prevents him from taking direct action. As such, while Burke isn't paying attention, Bishop quietly redirects the APC's waypoints to get them back to the garage, while informing the marines (via a text message on their heads-up displays) to hold tight:
  NEED SILENCE ON THIS. ENCOUNTERED DIFFICULTY. HOLD TIGHT AT ENTRANCE, WE'RE ON OUR WAY.
• Damsel out of Distress: When Vasquez is taken and incapacitated by an alien, it seems like her only hope is somebody (likely Drake) coming to her rescue, but she manages to get her arm free and shoot it dead.
• Designated Hero: invoked DM Jon Miller — himself a father — says that he considers Ripley a pretty poor parent for not asking how her daughter is doing for a whole week after being reawoken.
• Did Not See That Coming: When Frost goes to tackle Burke, Apone shoots his leg off with a plasma rifle! The Rerollers themselves very much agree that this was not something they expected to happen.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Rico manages to use judo to go toe to toe with an alien.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The Rerollers all have a laugh over the term “Big dish energy.”
• Everyone Has Standards: After the hypothetical scenario in Part 5 of Sylvester Stallone promising to ruin Al Matthews (who plays Apone) for making Rico look like an idiot, Scott Aiello (the guy at the forefront of the "Stallone was acting like a diva" meta narrative) walks things back and admits Stallone wouldn't go that far, and that he was just embellishing his work ethic.
• Facial Horror: The delirious Ferro starts repeatedly smacking her own head against the floor. While Bishop manages to tranquilize her and tend to her injuries, it’s said that her face will never again be the same.
• Flash Step: The aliens have this ability, making them very difficult to target.
• Faux Affably Evil: Burke’s slightly stuck-up but professional voice becomes outright Dissonant Serenity when he keeps it up even after being accused of murder and getting guns pointed in his face.
• First Contact: Like his predecessor, DM Jon Miller decides that — while supplementary material may claim otherwise — the society in Aliens has not at large encountered any extraterrestrials larger than bacteria. Notably, he interprets the term ”bug hunt” to just be metaphorical and not some allusion to actual Big Creepy-Crawlies.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: Downplayed, as the players conclude that cultural changes wouldn’t happen very fast in a society heavily reliant on cryosleep.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Downplayed, but Ripley becomes rather handy at fixing up broken equipment, earning some money by selling it back to a pawnbroker.
• Genre Savvy: Having already been exposed to the alien gas in her last encounter, Ripley makes sure to use what money she’s earned to buy a top-of-the-line gas mask. After hearing her story, Hicks decides to bring one as well. They are proven right when Frost — the first marine to encounter an alien — is sprayed with the gas, forcing the troops to retreat to pick up gas masks.
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: Hicks pushes Vasquez down the stairs during her rampage, the shock of which takes her out of her Mushroom Samba.
• Heroic Blue Screen of Death: Ferro — a pilot not trained for combat — suffers a drastic one after a gun fight ensues between the Marines and Burke. This is very bad news, as she was meant to fly everyone to safety. Ripley ends up piloting the dropship instead and makes a successful takeoff.
• Hero with Bad Publicity:
  • Ripley, who is both treated as having gone rogue by her company while she was Just Following Orders from the same, and is risking jail time for destroying the Nostromo when she was only trying to prevent an alien infestation. Worse, she gets accused of faking the destruction of the ship and selling it and its load off to pirates.
  • Things get especially bad after she shoots Spunkmeyer (who was infected by a facehugger and a dead man already) and Burke (who had caused said infection in the first place.)
• Hope Spot: Inverted: when Vasquez is being dragged to her death by one of the Xenomorphs in Part 3, Scott opts to have her try and shoot the tail she's caught in off... and crit fails. Just when it seems like there's nothing to be done, Scott discovers that Jon gave her Luck... and one Luck roll later, Scott goes from a Crit Fail to a Crit Success. The end result is that Vasquez manages to blow up the Xenomorph, and survive with just one HP.
• Kick the Dog: Towards the end of Part 1, right as Ripley and the Marines are about to head off to the colonists' location, Scott calls attention to the fact that Jon's favorite line of the movie^note Ferro's "We're in the pipe, five by five." is about to come up. When it comes time for the line, Scott hijacks Lieutenant Gorman and steals the line:
  Scott: Oh, hey, wait, and then all of a sudden... All of a sudden, Gorman grabs the- the PA away from, uh, Ferro, and goes. (chuckles) "Lieutenant Gorman's in the pipe. Five by five." And he gives it back to her.
  Jon: (pissed) You're not in the same place.
  Scott: Come on! Man! Man...
  Jon: (talking over Scott) She's in- she's in the cockpit, and you're in the APC. And- and by- and when I say "you", I mean this character that is an NPC that is not played by you, that I occasionally let you seize for scene- you do not sa- that's not- and that's not canon, that did not happen, and also, fuck you.
  • The Dog Bites Back: In Part 2, Scott reveals that Jon openly admitted he regretted having Scott be in the campaign instead of Kara.
• Killer Game Master: As the game progresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that Jon's agenda in the campaign was that he was aiming for something to the effect of a Total Party Kill (he even more or less admits such during Part 3, when Hicks manages to shove Vasquez down the stairs in order to stop her hallucination-induced A-Team Firing). This can be seen in how he not only repeatedly denies the players certain advantages they argue for, but how he keeps making them roll on skills he knows they don't have, and even if the rolls succeed, he finds some way to negate them.
  Scott: Even when you succeed, you fail.
  • As such, when the remaining marines manage to make it onto the dropship at the end of the campaign, Jon bitches that this wasn't how he expected the campaign to go.
• I Am Not Shazam: invoked Played With. The word “xenomorph” was actually meant as a generic catch-all term for extraterrestrial creatures and not a species name for the titular aliens specifically, but since they are the only aliens confirmed to still be alive within the setting of the campaign, it makes perfect sense to call them the Xenomorphs.
• Impeded Communication: Upon reaching the communications tower, the Marines discover that the transmitter has been deliberately sabotaged and is impossible to repair.
• Implacable Man: Ripley sees the aliens as such, making the point that once the marines find one in the base, the goal should be to evacuate immediately so that at least some of them will survive.
• Implausible Deniability: It's not outright stated in the episode itself, but it's blatantly clear that Part 3 is two separate recording sessions spliced together, right at the point where Frost is about to open a door^note with the obvious tell being the abrupt change in microphone quality:
  Jon: And you got a couple of seconds. (mic audio is now louder) We have some HT rolls to make, we're at substantial penalties.
  Andy: (deadpan) Look at that, I succeeded, who could've guessed.
  Scott: Oh my gosh, I failed!
  Paulo: Yeah, we're really helping out with the edit here.
• In Spite of a Nail: Despite Kane and Parker being Spared by the Adaptation, they are both deemed unfit for service and quickly written out of the story anyway.
• It Makes Sense in Context:
  • Throughout the first episode, the players keep joking about Scott Aiello pooping in a box. Only after the session is over do they explain that this is in reference to a commercial he did.
  • The players spend The Stinger of the second episode discussing the famous ”buffalo buffalo buffalo” phrase and other confusing sentences.
• I Will Only Slow You Down: After injuring her leg, Vasquez tells her fellow marines to just leave her behind. Rico Frost at first insists that No One Gets Left Behind, but eventually relents after realizing that he won’t be able to reach her in time.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Scott had yet to listen to the first campaign when this one started, and as such didn’t know about the changes Andy had made to the Xenomorph species. He’s also quietly shocked to hear they accidentally killed Jonesy.
• Logical Weakness: The aliens hate the wind, as it nullifies their gas attack. This makes the storm an even more efficient alien defense than in the film.
• Long Runner: Played for laughs: Because the campaign wound up taking up several hours and five parts, everyone starts joking about it being much longer, with it ultimately being "claimed" that they started it immediately after the first Alien campaign.
• Loophole Abuse: In a joking manner: right at the start of the campaign, Scott mentions that since he was unable to print out the character sheet Jon provided him, and (since it was an Excel spreadsheet) he couldn't make any markings on it, this meant he couldn't take any damage and was invincible.
• Made of Explodium: After being grabbed by an alien, Vasquez manages to Attack Its Weak Point, causing it to blow up. Justified as these aliens are confirmed to have a large amount of gas stored in their bodies.
• Mexican Standoff: Happens in the APP, where Ripley and Farrah end up facing each other with guns drawn. Things don’t exactly get any less tense once Burke enters the scene...
• Narm: invoked In-universe, Paulo having Rico say "Welcome to Judo. Human style." causes the rest of the virtual table^note outside of Jon, who was unable to hear both halves the first time to laugh, with Andy in particular calling it "wonderfully dumb". This line, on top of both of Rico's successful brawls with Xenomorphs, winds up giving birth to the meta narrative of Sylvester Stallone "submarining" the film.
• Never Found the Body: Wozinsky is seperated from the rest of the group during their first encounter with the aliens and presumed dead.
• Never My Fault: A cross-character variant: at the start of Part 3, Hudson openly asks why Lieutenant Gorman keeps talking in the third person. Everyone helpfully reminds Scott Aiello that he caused that in the first place.
• No Body Left Behind: Subverted. At first it appears as though the aliens disappear upon death, but this turns out to be an illusion. The alien in question is both still present and very much still alive.
• Non-Action Guy: Bishop has no weapon skills whatsoever, being brought onto the mission purely as a science officer. DM Jon Miller mentions that he would have allowed him to do his knife party trick on an alien’s face if a marine managed to keep their hand there during that time, though.
• No-Sell: Hudson tries to reprogram Bishop just to Troll him, with little success.
• Oddly Named Sequel 2: Electric Boogaloo: After the "Welcome to Judo" line, Paulo argues for the in-universe name of Aliens to be changed to Alien: Welcome 2 Judo^note the "2" being Andy's suggested modification.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Farrah is apparently an experienced pilot, but Hudson keeps treating her like a Captain Crash because of her rough landing (which granted, was under quite difficult weather conditions) at the start of the mission.
• Plagued by Nightmares: Ripley’s past experiences have given her nightmares about being attacked and graphically mutilated by the aliens.
• Plucky Comic Relief: Much like in the film, Hudson aims to be the ”class clown” of the marines, constantly trying to Lichtenstein the mood with zingers and roasts directed at his teammates.
• Post-Apocalyptic Gas Mask: Well, only a single colony has been destroyed, but the spirit of the trope remains. In the absense of a proper gas mask, an expensive cloth napkin might do the trick.
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: invoked In Part 4, right before Rico Frost has his second judo fight with a Xenomorph, Jon states that the "movie's" camera proceeds to do a close-up on his face, so that Paulo can have a one-liner. The line he goes with?
  Rico Frost: Welcome to Judo. Human style.
• Race Lift: An unintentional example. Paulo Quiros only learned that Rico Frost wasn’t Latino after already playing him as such for a few episodes, but decided to just run with it anyway.
• Reckless Gun Usage: Ripley gets told off for being a bit too attached to ”her” flame thrower, a weapon she’s not authorized to use.
• Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: Ripley learns that she, Kane and Parker were all declared dead in their absence.
• Revision: Jon Miller is taking this approach to the Xenomorphs, building on what we saw of them in Andy Hoover’s campaign, but applying Death of the Author toward his additional Word of God tidbits about their biology in order to do his own thing.
• Role Reprise: Joz Vammer returns to the role of Ellen Ripley.
• Sanity Slippage: As in the previous Alien campaign, the Xenomorphs can induce this in their prey using hallucinatory gas. Tragically, this leads to the deaths of both Crow and Apone.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Ripley and Bishop personally take the initiative to move the APC closer to the colony to aid the marines, with only meek complaints from their nominal commanding officer, Gorman.
• Send in the Search Team: As in the film, the campaign focuses a group of marines sent to investigate what caused the destruction of a space colony. It takes a fair amount of time before they run into the murderous aliens responsible for the incident.
• Sequel Hook: The campaign closes out with the still hallucinating Gorman locking Ripley and Hicks in a room while he fiddles with the shop controls, activating some kind of unknown sequence. The End.
• Shout-Out:
  • Parodied when a skeptical comitee member tells Ripley that she’s ”full of beans”, which is apparently a Catchphrase from a then-classic comedy show from 2044.
  • When the marines question how Ripley could be about ninety years old and still look so young, somebody quips that she might have Numenor blood.
  • When the players joke about Bishop singing opera while driving the APC, Andy Hoover suggests that he might be singing Car-Man.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: It takes an episode and a half before the eponymous aliens show up, time which is spent establishing what happened during the lengthy Time Skip and introducing a mostly brand new cast of characters.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: Attempted: The meta narrative of the campaign sees Sylvester Stallone repeatedly meddling with the movie in order to make Rico Frost the star, and even goes as far as firing his agent in Part 5 when Rico is denied taking charge. As soon as he fires his agent, however, Rico starts being made into a fool, and ultimately loses a leg.
• Staircase Tumble: After Vasquez gets drugged by the gas and starts shooting wildly at imaginary aliens (causing Crow's death in the process), Andy decides to have Hicks shove her down the stairs, much to Joz's horror:
  Andy: I would like to shove Vasquez down the stairs!
  Joz: Oh my God!
• Stupid Evil: Hicks sees Burke as such, asking why he doesn’t — after discovering a previously unknown hive full of hostile xenomorphs at the colony — simply evacuate, return with an army capable of neutralizing the threat, and then complete his company mission.
• Survival Mantra: Variation: After he gets his leg blasted off, Rico Frost’s dialogue for the rest of the scene boils down to a woozy “Bleeding out...”
• Tap on the Head: How Dietrich renders the grievously burned Hudson unconsious for his treatment.
• Take That!: When Joz demands to know how a Third-Person Person like Gorman could hold any form of power, Andy bluntly comments "Bob Dole did pretty well."
• Technology Marches On: In-Universe. It’s mentioned that com reception has gotten better in the years since the previous campaign.
• Took a Level in Badass: Ripley, thanks to some rudimentary instructions in how to use military-grade weaponry.
• Troubled Production: invoked As a result of how Paulo was playing Rico Frost (to the point where he managed to judo fight two Xenomorphs), everyone pauses for a minute to discuss the in-universe implications. The meta narrative that soon develops is that, due to the wonky production of the (in-universe) first Alien film, they could only really fund the sequel by getting a famous actor involved (with Scott Aiello deciding it was Sylvester Stallone). As such, he wound up "submarining this production": He rewrote all of his lines, kept meddling in the script to make himself the star, and kept abusing the crew (and even his agent) to the point where everyone got fed up, resulting in Rico Frost losing a leg and almost bleeding out during the climax. Not only does the movie become a Cult Classic because of his terrible lines, but Paulo openly states the real movie to be made would be on this movie's production.
• Unreliable Narrator: It’s pointed out that Ripley — the only survivor to actually see a full-grown Xenomorph — would not be considered a reliable witness, as she had been exposed to a hallucinogenic gas at the time.
• Vasquez Always Dies: Seemingly Played Straight with the Trope Namer, who elects to go down in a Last Stand, blasting aliens to bits alongside the now slightly less insane Drake. Double Subverted when it’s revealed that they actually survived until the climax, but never caught the attention of the other marines or made it off the colony.
• Vehicular Sabotage: Burke eventually gets so desperate that he sabotages the wheel of the APC to make it unable to leave, before going off into the night on his own. Fortunately, Ripley manages to fix the damage relatively quickly.
• Wag the Director: In-Universe. The Rerollers decide that in this version of the film, Rico Frost was played by Sylvester Stallone, who added his own one-liners as well as a whole judo fight against an Alien to the script, which basically sound up changing the whole tone of the project. This was apparently a mild Take That! from Scott Aiello, who felt that Stallone had acted anything but personable while meeting him during a social gathering. He still admits that his portrayal was probably a case of Character Exaggeration, though.
• Writer Revolt: invoked By Part 5, the meta narrative of Sylvester Stallone mangling the production of the film reaches a point where it becomes agreed upon that everyone involved in the production wanted to get back at him: the actors began sandbagging his ad-libs, the film editor began making Rico look like an idiot, and the scene where Rico gets his leg shot off is immediately agreed to be the result of Stallone firing his agent, and losing his protection.
• We Just Need to Wait for Rescue: As the dropship is damaged, the decided solution is to send down a second one, a process which will take a few hours.
• You Bastard!: Ripley chews out Burke hard for throwing away numerous lives and planning to bring a dangerous alien back to civilization, all to eran some profit. When he grabs Frost’s pistol, Ripley doesn’t hesitate to blow his head open.
• You Have to Believe Me!: Basically Ripley’s tactic while trying to convince the company that their colony lies on top of an alien nest, not helped by the fact that her friends actually have suffered psychological breakdowns.

---