| 1 | Works in this franchise with their own pages: |
| 2 | |
| 3 | [[index]] |
| 4 | * ''Headscratchers/{{Aliens}}'' |
| 5 | * ''Headscratchers/Alien3'' |
| 6 | * ''Headscratchers/AlienResurrection'' |
| 7 | * ''Headscratchers/AlienVsPredator'' |
| 8 | * ''Headscratchers/AliensVsPredatorRequiem'' |
| 9 | * ''Headscratchers/{{Prometheus}}'' |
| 10 | * ''Headscratchers/AlienCovenant'' |
| 11 | * ''Headscratchers/AliensColonialMarines'' |
| 12 | * ''Headscratchers/AlienIsolation'' |
| 13 | [[/index]] |
| 14 | |
| 15 | ---- |
| 16 | |
| 17 | [[foldercontrol]] |
| 18 | |
| 19 | [[folder: General Issues for the Whole Series]] |
| 20 | * Did it never occur to ''Weyland-Yutani'' to send a single small ship, manned only with synthetics and a pig, to the moon where the Aliens were discovered? Let's think—small ship (much less costly than, for example the ''Nostromo''), no payload to lose, one potential host (the pig) & if that failed, try with one of the ''synthetics''. The pig had no capacity to object, the synthetics would be programmed to do whatever it takes to achieve the mission & would not have tried to escape, kill the alien, or destroy the craft. And before anybody puts forward the idea 'Maybe the synthetics weren't suitable as hosts'—sure, maybe they weren't, but it was worth a try! |
| 21 | ** Except they didn't know anything about the alien in the first movie. Taking all of those precautions assumes that you know exactly what you're getting into. |
| 22 | ** That would probably have been more expensive than sending the ''Nostromo''. You have to remember the ''Nostromo'' and her crew are roughly the equivalent of space truckers who were called up by their boss and told to make a minor detour and pick something up on the way back. They were entirely expendable to the company and had Ripley died like a good girl their plan would have worked out well within acceptable parameters. |
| 23 | ** They weren't even ordered by the boss. Standing order was to investigate any transmission indicating possible non-human intelligence, under penalty of total forfeiture of shares ("No money"). The Nostromo was in the general area, so it didn't cost much at all to divert it. And as pointed out, the Company had no idea what was actually there, they just figured these idiots would stumble on something that might be worthwhile, then they could send a proper investigation team. Outfitting a full expedition to investigate something that might turn out to be completely worthless is just a waste of time and money, have the crew that's already going past that area check it out first of all. The Company was just cutting costs. And by the time the results of the "''Nostromo'' expedition" were known, whoever gave that order in the first place was probably long dead. |
| 24 | *** But they did have some idea of what was there. Remember, the secret orders were "Investigate life form. Gather specimen... insure return of organism for analysis." They knew it was an alien, and they knew it was dangerous. |
| 25 | *** The secret orders are still just standing orders, I believe. They didn't know in advance that this specific planet had aliens. They just told ''all'' their ships' computers "Hey, if you find anything alien someday, go get a specimen and bring it back. Also, we don't really care if our workers end up dead in the process." |
| 26 | *** The ''Nostromo'' did have standing orders to investigate distress signals and signs of unknown alien life. The secret order for this particular mission was not a regular standing order, however. It was eyes only for the science officer that included diverting the ''Nostromo'' to this particular planet. If "Crew expendable" were a regular standing order for all of the Company ships then it would have been a PR disaster for the Company. |
| 27 | ** If we count ''Film/{{Prometheus}}'' as canon, Weyland-Yutani may have had a very faint clue of what they were looking for, that an effort had been made to contact something decades before and that it had failed miserably, or, if Shaw and David ever came back, that the rate of mortality was extremely high. So yeah, improvising with an ill-prepared crew who are kept out of the loop wouldn't have been a very good idea. |
| 28 | *** Presumably ''Film/AlienCovenant'' will shine some light on the subject. |
| 29 | ** It's quite possible that a robotic probe or synthetic-crewed scout vessel already ''had'' discovered the crashed Engineer ship, and reported back to Weyland-Yutani. Somebody had to have arranged to place Ash on the ''Nostromo'' and issued his secret orders, after all. It's likely that whomever set up Ripley's original crew had seen video of the Space Jockey with its imploded chest, suspected how it may have died, and intentionally sent a crew of expendable and unwitting cargo-haulers to "investigate the signal", ''specifically'' to find out if whatever killed the Jockey was still present, active, and lethal enough ''to humans'' to be marketable as a weapon. |
| 30 | |
| 31 | * [[WordOfGod According to Ridley Scott]], the aliens were designed by the "Space Jockey" race to be the ultimate bioweapons. The derelict spaceship in the first film is a bomber used to carpet a planet with alien eggs, which would then wipe out all life on the planet. We can speculate this was a form of area denial, given the only way to clear a planet of aliens afterwards would be to glass the surface ... or some sort of hidden kill switch for the buggers. |
| 32 | ** No need for either. The Aliens have a limited life span, likely what drives them to be so aggressive. Once they've used up the finite resources all they'd have to do is wait until the aliens died off, which shouldn't take more than a few years. |
| 33 | *** Unlikely. I don't believe it's ever been demonstrated that the xenos have a short lifespan. In fact, other parts of the Alien franchise have demonstrated the opposite; that the xenos are capable of surviving quite a long time and can survive even longer by going into a hibernative state. |
| 34 | *** The alien in the first movie was supposed to be near death when Ripley blew it out the airlock (apparently its colouring changed and was moving much slower than it had before). It's also backed up in Aliens by the Hive going into hibernation, conserving themselves as there was no immediate threat or resources to be found. Perhaps the aliens can last indefinitely in hibernation but when active their lifespan seems limited. Also, the movies have never cared about information added by games, comics or novels. |
| 35 | *** This sounds like an observation from the novel, which are often based on much earlier versions of the script. There isn't any mention of the lifespan of the aliens in the films, and as mentioned above it should be the opposite considering how hardy the creatures are. |
| 36 | *** When left to their own devices, the xenomorphs form an ant-like social structure, with drones devoting all of their energy to servicing a queen and her eggs. Such a life form would have a short lifespan for the drones but a longer one for the queen, and much like insects that can enter hibernation for extended period of time, they still don't live past several months when fully active. Considering how fast xenomorphs grow once birthed, they must have extremely high metabolism and that would force them to aggressively seek out food sources. This would make them ideal biological weapons since they would consume every life form in its vicinity and then die off either by the elements or by running out of things to kill. |
| 37 | *** Also speculation based on generic similarities to social insects. The xenomorphs grow fast, but they also appear to grow fast living on not very much (it's never addressed how the aliens that escape into more enclosed environments, like the Nostromo or the prison colony in Alien[[superscript:3]] put on so much mass in such a short space of time). There is next to nothing known about the lifespan of the aliens - the only real clue we have is the original film, where there is no trace of the alien that killed the space jockey/engineer. It's possible this alien went off and died somewhere in the ship or on the surface of the planet. |
| 38 | ** If the Jockeys designed them, then they already know everything about them they could ever need to know to design a virus, repellent, super weapon or whatever else you could devise to counter the things. Part of the horror presented in the films is that we have no idea how to fight them because they're so... Alien. |
| 39 | *** Alternatively, even the "Jockeys" didn't know enough about what they'd created to effectively control it, as evidenced by one of them having been chestbursted. They created a weapon so deadly it killed ''themselves''. Whatever controls they assumed they had in place before are irrelevant now. |
| 40 | |
| 41 | * Why doesn't Weyland-Yutani just work up some way of killing the xenomorphs and just sell that for more profit. They've got the equivalent of giant cockroaches all over the galaxy. Anyone whose planet is infested with them would be willing to pay any price Weyland-Yutani deems fit for help. The military could just as easily use the threat of Aliens as an excuse for more funds as well. |
| 42 | ** Are the aliens really that far-spread? In the expanded universe they seem to be every six feet, but the General in Resurrection implies that the only known aliens in the galaxy were destroyed with Hadley's Hope. And even they are everywhere to the point of being profitable, the Company still needs live ones to tinker with and figure out how to efficiently kill them. |
| 43 | ** The Company is shown repeatedly in both the movies and EU to be myopic to the point of suicide. They want the Xenos to use as a bioweapon and repeatedly ignore the danger that poses. In the EU they partially explain it with the Queen having some degree of telepathy and mind control. That said, the Xenos are some of the heartiest motherfuckers in fiction. They are strong, fast, breed like crazy, can survive total vacuum, and have acid for blood. Aside from nuking them and calling it a day, there doesn't seem to be much that could actually reclaim a planet from them. |
| 44 | |
| 45 | * The Xenomorphs have no visible eyes (except for the hybrid in ''Resurrection''). How do they find their prey? Listening? Feeling for vibrations? Some sort of weird psychic radar? |
| 46 | ** Alien[[superscript:3]] shows that the Xenomorphs do have eyes, or at the very least something functionally similar to eyes (a close look at the 1979 Alien suit from the first film also shows eye sockets in the front of the head, so there's that too), that allows them to see. |
| 47 | ** They could hunt via smell or sound, or maybe those smooth foreheads they've got are actually giant eyes. |
| 48 | *** This is hinted at for the novelisation for ''Aliens''. There was a scene where Bishop, after coming out of the tube to get to the antenna, encounters an alien. It, however, doesn't acknowledge him, which he presumes may be because it tracks the sound of a heartbeat and he doesn't have one. It also accounts for why the Queen got Bishop in the film: Ripley was standing in front of him when she tries to stab her with it's tail, but due to the fact that she couldn't see Bishop, it instead got him. |
| 49 | ** According the EU, specifically Alien: Rogue it's explained that the xenos somehow see the emotional state of their prey. They basically see fear as delicious and munch on this. The protagonist literally survives one scene because she's so pissed off the xenos simply walk away. It was supposed to tie in with the idea that xenos are some level of telepathic and that they truly are a hive mind. The concept of control the queen, control the hive is a very common theme in the novels and comics. |
| 50 | ** Somehow I just always naturally assumed they worked off of some manner of pure spatial awareness. Like "blindsight" or "tremorsense" in D&D... they comprehend shapes and outlines but don't "see" by taking in light like we do. |
| 51 | ** My guess is that they have eyes inside their 'skull', with the part covering them being like a one-way reflective surface, as if they're looking out through a pair of built-in, heavily armoured sunglasses that blends seamlessly into the rest of their head. |
| 52 | ** Everything else about the Xenos is intentionally as alien as the writers could make them. Why ''wouldn't'' BizarreAlienSenses be a part of the package? Their perceptions might be anything from keen hearing to electroreception to psychic powers, we just don't know. If we ''did'' get to see how they perceive the world, a la the Predator's thermographic POV-shots, it would probably make them ''less'' scary. |
| 53 | *** Film/{{Alien 3}} shows some scenes from the Alien's point of view and yes, it does make them less scary. |
| 54 | |
| 55 | * If xenomorphs have those little mouths, then what's the point of their main mouths? The xenomorphs are never shown using their main mouths in ANY of the films, and then you have the risk of xenomorphs accidentally biting the little mouths, so what's the point? |
| 56 | ** They're called pharynangeal jaws, and there are several fish species that have something very similar, including moray eels. Basically the outer jaws are used to catch prey while the inner jaws do the actual eating. |
| 57 | |
| 58 | * After ''Alien'', they all heard Ripley's testimony about eggs, facehuggers, throat breeding, and aliens ripping out of people's chests, wouldn't it have made ''some'' sense that while these things could be a touch unbelievable, that they would have prepared for these types of things, especially in ''Resurrection''? To prevent the whole facehugger bit, all you'd need is some sort of armored helmet, with a shirt or top that had a stiff metal collar (to prevent strangulation from their long tails). It is true they could try and use acid to burn through that stuff, so you could also have SCUBA-esque breathing equipment that takes in air from the environment. It is true the first person to get a facehugger in ''Alien'' had a helmet, but it was a pure glass astronaut helmet which was easily punctured. Such would not be the case with a metal helmet, especially one that had a breathing apparatus in it, that only had glass for the eyes. |
| 59 | ** Any helmet would have been useless. Every metal we've seen come in contact with alien acid has been dissolved easily, including the cages in the fourth movie that were designed to hold them. |
| 60 | *** Plus the strangulation is only a small part of the problem. By the time a facehugger's attached itself to your face you're already screwed, since so far we've been proven that it's virtually impossible to remove a facehugger from someone's face without killing them. |
| 61 | *** A helmet wouldn't be any good to fight full xenos but a specially designed one to keep a facehugger from choking you and getting its thing down your throat could work. It wouldn't hold up against acid, but the aliens don't shoot acid on command (the facehuggers certainly don't, because OH MY GOD YOUR FACE). As long as it couldn't choke you or clamp to your head, the victim should still be able to pull it off. |
| 62 | *** The facehuggers apparently can release acid as that's how it got through Kane's helmet in the first movie and into Ripley's cryopod in the third, we even see acid splashing onto it in the third. |
| 63 | ** According to certain materials, the "apesuits" seen at the end of ''3'' (or "cubed" if you want to be a pedant) are exactly this: a xenomorph-proof HazmatSuit. |
| 64 | |
| 65 | * Not an issue with the films themselves, but rather fandom/critical response—why do so many people act like Ripley's mistrust of Bishop in ''Aliens'', due to her betrayal by Ash in the first film, is tantamount to racism? Ash didn't betray her because of his own prejudices; he has none, he's just programmed to make him 100% loyal to the company. That's not even the same as a human with strong loyalties—he is literally made that way. It's that programming that makes him betray the crew in favor of bringing the specimen back; he had no choice, or very little. But no human, regardless of their circumstances, is pre-programmed to always, without variance, follow certain orders or behave in a certain manner on the basis of ''anything'', let alone being from a certain ethnic background. Even what we'd recognise as a slavishly loyal human, or a brainwashed human, has at least the slim possibility that in different circumstances they could act differently; Ash never had that (and even people who we'd recognise as sociopaths, who consistently act selfishly and without concern for others, are capable of seeming generosity, or not screwing someone over, for a change or to serve themselves less directly). Ripley's fear of Bishop doing the same thing that Ash did, having pre-programmed priorities to place what Weyland-Yutani wants over the lives of innocents, is perfectly well-founded, and it's why Bishop stating that he's programmed never to harm humans (and his critical actions in the final fight to keep them from coming to harm) is so powerful for her and the viewer. But it's nothing like racism, Ripley isn't just making the association "Synthetic = bad", or even "a Synthetic did a bad thing to me once, so therefore all of them will", like a [[FreudianExcuse human racist who got bullied by a black girl in high school and now thinks that all black people are mean and horrible.]] She shows the same or similar mistrust for humans who are loyal to Weyland-Yutani before their fellow men and women. |
| 66 | ** Androids can be programmed, but they also seem to be fully sentient beings. The idea that they are physically incapable of disobeying their programming is... debatable. I'm not saying Ripley's distrust of Bishop isn't completely rational and justified, but I can see where those fans are probably coming from. |
| 67 | *** Her distrust is pretty justifiable given her experiences. Ash was a Company droid, Bishop is a Company droid - as far as Ripley knows, Bishop could've been programmed with/given orders to do exactly the same as Ash. It's fairly logical from a self-preservation POV. We don't actually have much information on the androids in the Alien universe - are they entirely synthetic or more artificial humans (they certainly have circulatory fluid, the function of which is unclear)? |
| 68 | *** Also, even if Bishop was originally programmed to be Three Laws Compliant, who's to say he couldn't be ''re''programmed by somebody who's on the Company payroll, like Burke? Ripley doesn't know much about how androids have developed in recent decades, but she surely knows computers - presumably even computers that walk around and play FiveFingerFillet - can be hacked. |
| 69 | ** Ripley's also pretty obviously in the throes of PTSD all throughout Aliens. Most of this is in regards to the Alien itself, but given how brutally Ash tried to murder her, it's perfectly understandable that androids would be a trigger for her, too. |
| 70 | ** And even though Ripley knows, intellectually, that Ash's actions weren't something he'd taken pleasure in or chosen independently, the fact remains that androids ''look'' human. They were built and programmed to interact with humans on humans' own social terms, so human psyches naturally tend to react to them as if they're people, not mechanisms. ''Emotionally'', she's still going to feel like Ash was a malicious back-stabbing son of a bitch, not a computer carrying out instructions. |
| 71 | |
| 72 | * Why exactly ''does'' the company want those creatures? Using them as a bioweapon seems a bit ridiculous, after the events of the second movie it should be made clear that these things are the biological equivalent of a nuclear weapon. Any enemy they kill could be killed by humans and robots. Any terrain they took for you you'd have to send soldiers to retake from them, there doesn't seem to be any way to tell them not to target a workforce and just one of them getting loose could mean a galactic plague of these things. What exactly did they want to use them for? What could possibly be so problematic that it would ever make sense to use these creatures? |
| 73 | ** The creatures themselves are some of the deadliest ever seen. They are hardy and they are pervasive when allowed to nest. They would make the ultimate area denial weapons, or just slip one into a ship or space station and watch it slaughter the rest. At the very least, studying them and figuring out their biology would be great, and the ability to genetically engineer them in order to tailor them to weapons specifications would open up greater potentials for turning them into weapons. One of the EU novels comes close to realising this: cyborg aliens capable of being controlled by computer, as well as aliens trained to use guns. |
| 74 | ** In Resurrection the military scientist guy said the plan was to train the xenos, presumably for warfare. Weyland-Yutani probably had the same idea. |
| 75 | ** The first time the Company apparently didn't know much about the alien. They sent an available ship with one of their androids to try to pick one up. When the ''Nostromo'' didn't come back they probably wrote the whole thing off and destroyed the records— which is why the Company doesn't believe Ripley in ''Aliens''. The second time it seems to be just Burke deciding he wants the aliens after seeing them in action. He's basically acting independently of the rest of the company, and he's not thinking rationally, he's trying to save his backside by salvaging what he could from a mission he made a couple of big mistakes in setting up. In the third film they certainly want the alien, but what do they really know about how dangerous it is? They've still only got Ripley's testimony to go on. In the fourth film it's an isolated group working off of centuries-old records. Again, they might not know what they're getting into. If the Company ever got a true picture of just how dangerous these lifeforms are they might very well decide not to mess with them. |
| 76 | ** Resurrection also mentions that the scientists intend to use the aliens to develop "new alloys... new vaccines!". Presumably the aliens' weird biology is perceived by them as having numerous uses even when separate from the creatures ''per se''. |
| 77 | *** ^This. One of the novels has a facehugger putting its victim into suspended animation that lets him survive on a ship with minimal life support, and the Company exec notes "That alone is worth a fortune if we can figure out how the hell it did it." The aliens' blood would have countless industrial and possibly even military applications, their exoskeletons could revolutionise materials science, their impossible growth rate could lead to all kinds of medical breakthroughs, etc. Just one alien is a veritable treasure trove of biotech research just waiting to be mined. Leashing them and telling them to attack bad guys is absolutely the ''least'' profitable thing that could be done with them. |
| 78 | ** For all we know the Weyland-Yutani corporation isn't so much looking to weaponise the xenomorph species for their own benefit, as they are trying to figure out a way to effectively combat the species to protect not only the earth, but the various locations in the galaxy the human species might expand to. If you're attempting to colonise a planet that's rich in not only precious minerals by also xenomorph infestations, it would be financially beneficial to know how to neutralise them en masse, in the easiest way possible. A live specimen would allow them to figure out what chemicals are resistant to the acid they bleed, what nerve agents they might be vulnerable to, if phernomenal bombs can be deployed in a hive to drive them into a frenzy and tear each other apart, etc. Granted, the methods utilised to obtain a specimen are heartless, but that's corporations for you. Someone is always going to get screwed. And if the main characters were less likeable, like they are in today's movies, we might find ourselves rooting for Weyland-Yutani to succeed. |
| 79 | ** You answered your own question, surely? "The biological equivalent of a nuclear weapon" is already hugely valuable. The real-world answer would be that the research value of a totally unknown alien species would be incalculably high; things learned from studying it could completely change our understanding of the universe, even aside from any practical considerations - though the practical value of eg. how they produce their acids would be incredibly high, too. And that's before getting to the fact that aliens are out there whether we study them or not; if Space Jockeys could appear from nowhere and carpet-bomb Earth with alien eggs at any time with no warning - which seems 100% possible! - then studying them and finding an answer becomes existentially important. But the movies focus on using them as weapons to make Weyland-Yutani more unsympathetic, because a genuine ForScience rationale would be more complicated in a way that would distract from the plot. |
| 80 | |
| 81 | * Is the Queen Alien really a female? What the first movie seemed to emphasise is that the Aliens didn't really have a definable gender. It's true that it laid eggs, but it was easily capable of detaching from its ovipositor when it wanted to take its revenge on Ripley in the second film. And as it's shown in later sequels, pretty much any alien in the hive can become a Queen if the current one is absent. |
| 82 | ** I don't see how anything in what you said makes the Queen less of a female. It's the reproductive member of the species. Creatures exist in real life that only manifest gender characteristics under selective pressures. You might as well say plants can't be female then. |
| 83 | ** While there are some plants that have unisex features (such as figs), a majority of plants have both male and female reproductive organs in the form of stamens and stigma, with each maturing at different times to prevent self-pollination. It just struck me as odd because other than the FaceFullOfAlienWingWong thing, the aliens are never actually shown mating with anything. In insect colonies like ants and bees there are usually a select number of males that the queen mates with to allow the fertilisation of eggs. Nothing in the [[http://aliens.wikia.com/wiki/Xenomorph_Queen wiki site]] for the franchise suggests the queen does any mating before laying eggs. |
| 84 | ** Well that's just the name they come up with for it. Hudson in the second movie compares them to an ant colony or a beehive. Those species have a Queen or an Alpha that reproduces. They refer to it as a Queen for this reason: because in most animal species, the female is the one that lays the eggs or gives birth. Regardless no one has ever had the chance to study the Queen or how she reproduces (until the fourth film that is). |
| 85 | ** Human sex and gender probably doesn't map perfectly to aliens. The xenomorphs in particular seem to be like insects. We ''can'' (and do) treat treat insect castes as mapping to human sexes, but the structure is so different that it's possible that a sentient race that worked the same way wouldn't divide things the way we do or think of "sexes" the way we do. Either way, Ripley didn't really get a chance to ask the Alien Queen for her pronouns, so whatever the humans call them is just based on rough observations and how alien life-cycle and castes resemble earth biology. |
| 86 | |
| 87 | * Are the xenomorphs ever shown eating anything? One could say their sustenance comes from the hosts, but they're more like incubators than a food source (since the baby xenomorphs just leave the body rather than eating it). And since they have human-like teeth, can they eat plant matter or are they more omnivorous, or even carnivorous? |
| 88 | ** The first movie includes a scene where it's mentioned that the infant raided the food stores. We've only seen one infant xenomorph flee the scene of the body, which was mainly because it found itself surrounded by things that were probably going to kill it. Presumably in a normal hive-birth scenario, they wouldn't just let the dead body go to waste. |
| 89 | ** The original script for ''Prometheus'' describes an infant Xenomorph chowing down on the corpse of a mercenary to facilitate its metamorphosis, so... |
| 90 | ** If I recall correctly, Alien[[superscript:3]] does show a Xenomorph eating a human. |
| 91 | ** The ''Out of Shadows'' trilogy—which was overseen by Fox and acknowledged as canon—reveals that the Xenomorphs do indeed consume the bodies of their dead hosts. |
| 92 | ** In the second film, there are numerous signals from the colonists' tags in the nest area, but as the Marines enter the nest, there are actually few ''bodies'' seen. Makes one wonder what exactly was that stuff the nest was made from... |
| 93 | ** ''TabletopGame/AlienTheRoleplayingGame'' notes that in addition to organic material, the Xenomorphs eat metals. This forms the silicon on in their chitin and as nutrition, with their acid blood acting as a kind of organic battery with the metallic elements adding energy. |
| 94 | |
| 95 | * Can a Facehugger Facehug an Alien? |
| 96 | ** Umm... you got me... |
| 97 | ** Facehuggers don't possess any sort of visible sensory organs, so a fan theory is that they navigate towards any potential host by sensing body heat. If that's the case, it's canon that the Xenomorphs don't show in infrared thermal imaging, so they would be invisible to the facehuggers. |
| 98 | ** What would be the benefit of parasitising one of your own species? The aliens would just be trading a warrior for another warrior. |
| 99 | *** It could be useful if Xenomorphs' social-insect similarities include rival Queens' broods making war on one another for territory. Then they'd be trading an overpowered enemy warrior for one that'd fight on ''their'' side. |
| 100 | *** It could also come in handy if an adult Xeno were too damaged or aged to be combat-worthy, yet still fit enough to harbor a fresh new warrior for the colony. |
| 101 | ** I think they ''could'', but it would be a useless effort. When the cloned Ripley (who had Xenomorph DNA in her body) had a Facehugger attached to her, she was able to wrestle it off without being damaged or paralysed. So I imagine that a facehugger wouldn't be able to do anything to an adult Xenomporph if it wanted to. |
| 102 | |
| 103 | * Why do characters in the second and third movies have such difficulty accepting the existence of Xenomorphs/Aliens until ''after'' they show up and start killing people? This is the distant future where CasualInterstellarTravel and entire terraformed colonies on otherwise hostile worlds are commonplace. Even if Xenomorphs weren't as wide-spread as the expanded universe makes them out to be, the idea of hostile alien species (bestial ''or'' sapient), or at least space-borne parasites, showing up and causing havoc should be a widely-accepted possibility, especially when you're as far out in deep space as "Fury" 161 or LV-426. Otherwise, what the hell would all the Colonial Marines' "bug hunts" be all about? |
| 104 | ** The implication is that the Xenomorphs are more vicious and capable than any other alien species encountered by humanity. So the ''idea'' of hostile alien species, parasites, etc. is not surprising to future humans, it's this ''particular'' species' viciousness and capability which is surprising when compared to other alien lifeforms encountered. None of the marines take the "bug hunt" seriously because past "bug hunts" were minor annoyances at best, easily dealt with. |
| 105 | |
| 106 | * If Facehuggers need a face to latch onto, then why don't people ever try pressing their faces against a wall, or simply ''look away'' from the little monsters when they're scurrying around? |
| 107 | ** The facehugger would probably just scurry up your back while you're keeping your face to a wall and wrap it's tail around your neck until you're unconscious. Or you might find out the hard way that it doesn't actually need your ''face'', just an opening. |
| 108 | ** Those legs of their's may not look like fingers by accident: they probably have the capacity to grapple with a tail-ensnared host's head and tilt it away from an obstructing surface, after which the creature would quickly slide around to the face. |
| 109 | |
| 110 | * Why do Chestbursters kill their hosts? Its possibly the most inefficient nonsensical method of reproduction. Its like taking a single bite out of a apple, then throwing it away without eating the rest. [[http://www.entertainmentearth.com/images/AUTOIMAGES/MF17530lg.jpg If you're a Queen and you're trying to oversee your colony/hive grow]], then you've got to properly manage humans as a resource, otherwise you'll be too wasteful and burn your supply out too quickly to get results, like a killer Ebola virus terminating its prey before it can spread. |
| 111 | ** The Queens ought to instruct their children to escape via regurgitation, its easier, quicker and keeps the hive cleaner too. |
| 112 | ** If a human is cocooned, and is forcibly kept alive to be used multiple times as a host, you could generate hundreds... ''thousands'' of offspring... from one single person over their lifetime alone. You're a ruler of an empire, if your workers capture a whole town of people. |
| 113 | ** Your only threat then, is other Queens, trying to do the same. Possibly the only wars then, when we are totally helpless and subservient, are between rival hives/nests. |
| 114 | ** The real life parasitic wasps that use a very similar reproduction technique also generally grow only one larvae per host. The reason is generally taken to be that multiple larvae would be in competition with each other for the limited resources of a single host. So if it were possible for a facehugger to implant multiple larvae you might have more chestbursters, but each would be individually weaker and less likely to survive. As is, each chestburster has the full resources of a host available to grow it as large as it can. |
| 115 | ** For all we know the creators of the xenomorph species contemplated this idea, before ultimately discounting it on the basis of logistics. Keeping a single person alive to be used as a host for multiple offspring, essentially turning any hapless being into indefinite breeding stock, would require the hive to actually keep the host alive, which would mean making excursions to locate and procure food, water, nutrients and other support goods so the host doesn't die after just a few births. How would xenomorphs even know what a human needs to survive whereas they can survive on just about anything? The xenomorphs may even devour their own dead so no resources go to waste. And while sautéed drone with human blood sauce might be good enough for the hive, it'll likely be poisonous to the hosts they're trying to keep alive. |
| 116 | ** Remember, Xenomorphs were designed as bioweapons; their traits aren't intended to serve ''their own'' agenda, but that of their creators. By limiting their reproduction to one-Xeno-per-victim, their designers ensured that the things will incapacitate and kill their targets in far greater numbers: they're wasteful, because ''wasting'' foes is what they're for. |
| 117 | |
| 118 | * The xenomorphs are talked up to be the ultimate biological weapon. But are they really all that powerful? Against a small group of poorly armed civilians who don't know what they're dealing with, they're very lethal, but so is almost any other weapon. Their effectiveness drops sharply against even mediocre military units, as evidenced by the massive casualties the xenomorphs take trying to kill less than a dozen or so marines in ''Aliens''. They seem like an average weapon at best when they're a surprise to your enemy, and useless except as a terror weapon when they're not. If their target isn't ignorant, isolated and small, they'll need large numbers to successfully kidnap more "incubators" than they'll lose in the attack, but they can't get those large numbers without attacking and probably being wiped out themselves. |
| 119 | ** They aren't the ultimate biological weapon by any means - a disease like Anthrax or a weaponised version of Ebola would be more effective in just killing people while leaving technology and other resources more intact (no acid damage). However that doesn't mean there aren't useful applications in studying the species, such as isolating and synthesizing the acid they use for blood, or finding out how they grow so quickly and possibly applying that in other species. And they ''are'' an effective terror weapon in a civilian area and especially against an unprepared enemy that hasn't encountered them before. I imagine those are the reasons the Company is interested in them. |
| 120 | *** Also, you can defend a population from Anthrax by giving everybody hazmat suits, but that won't work against xenomorphs. Defending against xenomorphs is a whole new challenge that most targets would be ill-equipped to handle. |
| 121 | *** A vaccine would be a more useful defense against Anthrax. Putting your whole population into hazmat suits 24/7 has its own problems. |
| 122 | ** Think about this: Thing is, so far every instance of a xenomorph infestation in the movies have involved circumstances that limited their effectiveness as [=WMDs=]. Think about this: there is a planet that you want to attack, you take a few dozen eggs with you and quietly leave them in some inaccessible jungle area as far away from populated areas as possible. In a few weeks the xenomorphs and their queen will build a hive, start spreading throughout the local fauna, and grow into enough numbers new queens will migrate into new biomes (imagine if they can prosper in the ocean!). Sooner or later they will start coming in contact with urban areas and authorities will become aware of the threat... but by that time, unlike a few dozens (at most) of xenos stuck on the same place, you have millions upon millions of those creatures swarming pretty much everywhere. By then, you'd have to start nuking the hell out of your own planet if you want to have at least a chance to defeat the infestation. |
| 123 | *** Most of the planets in the movies haven't had much in the way of "jungle areas" to plant such an infestation, but assuming there are planets out there with this much native life this is possibly a viable strategy. |
| 124 | |
| 125 | * Why do the aliens have those "pipe" things growing out of their backs? What function do they serve? |
| 126 | ** Various expanded universe sources say that the "pipes" are where the aliens produce the resin they use in ''Aliens'', or webbing to allow them to move about their hives more easily. |
| 127 | |
| 128 | * So, the xenomorphs have very strongly acidic blood that eats through just about anything, so you can't just shoot them dead for fear of getting corrosive fluid that might injure you as well as having parts of your ship/station eaten away and causing a explosive decompression event. In real life, you have containers and work surfaces made out of non-reactive materials to allow you to handle acids safely, so why is there no such surfaces on the various locales throughout the franchise? Also bases/alkalis can neutralise acids. Has no one thought of just spraying a base/alkaline substance onto the xenomorphs or using it to quickly minimise damage done by the acid blood. I refuse to believe such chemicals do not exist in the future. |
| 129 | ** Of course they exist. That doesn't mean that everyone is going to have them available in sufficient quantities that will let them do any of the things suggested here. |
| 130 | *** Maybe not initially, but you'd think at some point someone would think "Let's try neutralising their acidic blood." Also what about the lack of surfaces made out of non-reactive materials? |
| 131 | *** The blood of the aliens (if it is blood) is described as similar in its effects to "molecular acid" by Dallas, whatever that is, but it is never made clear exactly ''what'' it is or what would be non-reactive materials to it. Most of the movies don't take place in an active lab where they would have materials for handling large quantities of acids on-hand either. |
| 132 | *** On that note, it's not even clear that that the "acid" is just a substance. For all we know it's full of living cells that actively strive to eat stuff, in which case the "acid" might actually ''adapt'' to eat whatever material it's in contact with. Xenomorphs are purpose-designed bioweapons after all; there's no telling what weird tricks they might have. |
| 133 | |
| 134 | * How do the aliens grow from chestbursters (which are maybe 2 feet long and snake like) to adults (which are about 7 feet tall) without needing to eat anything (in the first movie, at least, the alien doesn't eat any people until it's an adult)? Wouldn't that basically require them to just gain a bunch of extra mass from nowhere? |
| 135 | ** The various novelisations and expanded universe entries have handwaved this by saying the chestbursters got into food stores (the ''Alien'' novelisation uses that one) or that they can eat just about anything even remotely organic or even silicon-based in order to get the mass needed to grow. The general consensus is that they do go eat ''something'' to supply the mass, that it is generally done off screen in the movies, and that people are reserved to be hosts rather than eaten. |
| 136 | |
| 137 | * After the facehugger detaches, wouldn't there be a way to remove the embryo surgically before the fatal hatching? Could save the Weyland-Yutani some effort and a lot of cash, as they could use two or three batches of hosts over and over again. |
| 138 | ** One of the major themes of the series is that the Company regards human life as cheap and expendable. If the surgery to remove an embryo is expensive or time consuming-enough then no, it would be cheaper for them to get new hosts each time. |
| 139 | *** Even so, you'd think the W-Y bosses would want to find ''some'' way of extracting a chestburster without killing the host, if only as a precaution in case one of '''them''' ever got facehugged. Xeno infestations have a proven track record for getting out of their would-be handlers' control, after all. |
| 140 | *** That assumes the W-Y bosses are far-sighted enough to see that the aliens might get out of control and that they might need such a technique for a victim that they actually want to save. That's not really consistent with their track record. ''Alien Resurrection'' shows that the ''Auriga'' researchers had such a technique by the time of that movie, but that's 200 years after the rest of the movie series, W-Y was dead and gone, and it's implied that it was fairly tricky surgery with many failed attempts. |
| 141 | ** Still, the consensus seems to be - you're facehugged, you're dead. Well, there is some time between the facehugger falling off and the hatching. Get the poor one on the table and cut his/her chest open as soon as the hugger falls off. At least you'll minimise the damage to the human (it seems the direct cause of death is an aortic rupture and/or damage to the lungs and heart during the violent hatching). Or maybe you will be able to extract the embryo and destroy it before it grows to an adult. Worth trying. |
| 142 | ** Some of the newer expanded universe material, like the Free League ''Alien'' RPG, says that it it's not in fact an embryonic chestburster that the facehugger implants, but bacteria that then mutates the host's own internal organs into the chestburster form. Cause of death is said to be "a combination of massive tissue damage, blood loss, and organ transformation." |
| 143 | |
| 144 | * Are the xenos intelligent on their own, or do they inherit some intellectual capabilities from their hosts? The queen was capable to learn how to use an elevator by watching Ripley doing so, but the dog-alien from Fiorina 161 exhibited rather standard animal hunting behavior (sneaking up to an enemy or ambushing him - nothing that say, a wolf wouldn't be capable of). |
| 145 | ** There is also the possibility that the queens are simply much more intelligent than the other xeno forms. The much larger head of the queen suggests she has a larger brain as well. |
| 146 | |
| 147 | * The chestbursters seem to be fairly large, and the human body is rather tightly packed with various tissues, organs and bones. How come neither Kane or Ripley noticed that all of a sudden, they have a freshly-appeared lump in the middle of their chests? |
| 148 | ** Well, Kane was only conscious for about an hour before the chestburster killed him, and he was obviously disoriented, so it's quite possible he didn't notice a lump. Ripley did notice that she had something wrong with her some time before her chestbuster emerged. |
| 149 | |
| 150 | * The first movie takes place in 2122, the last one no earlier than 2379 (depends on how long Ripley & Co. were in hypersleep before crashing on Fiorina 161). Still, the technology in ''Resurrection'' looks no different than that shown in 2122, and for that matter, the base we have in 2022 (the guard on Auriga uses a metal detector that would look slightly dated in an airport nowadays). It's extremely implausible that the utilitarian technology hasn't evolved significantly in a quarter of a ''millennium'' - while it's hard to guess how would it evolve (are there any films from the eighties or so taking place in the early XXI century that predicted the ubiquity of smartphones...?), why didn't they even try? With the exception of the third movie, where the modern technology simply broke down over time in an isolated former penal colony with limited outside contact - which actually was a quite clever way to bypass this problem. |
| 151 | ** The other movies are also implied, to varying degrees, to have technology which has aged, been salvaged and repurposed and recycled etc because the Company is just that cheap and miserly. Such as the Nostromo, and the still-rather-utilitarian vehicles which the Colonial Marines use. |
| 152 | |
| 153 | * If the ''Nostromo'' only found the Space Jockey ship due to picking up the interstellar warning signal, why didn't the colonists ever find it? |
| 154 | ** They did, but didn't have the manpower/resources to investigate (or have directives not to investigate anomalies, wait for backup). So they pass along the signal, some brain at WY sorts it out, tells Carter Burke, who promptly shaves off his Snidely Whiplash mustache so he can convincingly mount a "rescue." |
| 155 | *** They did go and investigate, but that wasn't until Ripley had reported what was found. Burke also brought up the fact that the colonists had been living there for years and hadn't found anything to explain everybody's hesitance to believe her story. |
| 156 | ** Could be a possibility that the ship's power source ran out by the time of colonising LV-426. The Jockey in the pilot's seat had been fossilised, not to mention how long it had been left there after the fact. If it had a nuclear power source, after enough time there would not be enough material for fission or fusion to sustain itself. If it were still transmitting, the colony would have found it sooner and the outbreak probably occur long before anyone would have found Ripley floating in space. |
| 157 | ** According to the script (or so I heard) the unfilmed scene where the colonists visit the ship called for it to have broken in two as a result of an earthquake. Presumably, the ship stopped transmitting as a result of the damage. |
| 158 | *** Something similar was filmed, and appears in the Special Edition. The derelict is found by Newt's family, who were prospectors sent to investigate following Burke's message. The environment is now volcanic and the derelict is badly damaged, with one arm collapsed leaving a big hole through which Newt's parents gain access. Presumably the damage also knocked out the transmitter. Newt's father ends up with a facehugger attached, and hilarity ensues... |
| 159 | *** It wasn't collapsed but was split open, and it's stated in the novel (to the best of my memory) that the ship was behind a ridge of rock thus the signal was blocked from the colony, and without any orbital assets to assist in mapping and exploring the world (a job that would have been left for later colonists) it's basically a needle in a haystack job, unlike the ''Nostromo'' which was in space with an unblocked line of sight between the ship and the derelict (also given the time for radio signals to travel through space they could have intercepted an earlier signal and followed them in). |
| 160 | *** A message beamed into space is, somewhat obviously, not designed to be read from the ground. Think about it, it's much easier to hear someone talking to your face than it is when they're standing with their back turned to you. The ship in Alien landed within 2 kilometers of the crash site and knew what it was looking for. In Aliens, they just landed on a random part of the planet (it's suggested it's quite a great deal further than the original landing) and possibly weren't looking for a signal in the first place. If there was a company conspiracy to infect everyone, it's not entirely unlikely they had an Ash-like infiltrator to cover up the signal until it was too late. |
| 161 | ** A little late to the party, but it's revealed in ''Alien: Isolation'' that [[spoiler: Marlow and his team shut the beacon off when they found the derelict, so that they could claim sole rights to the haul.]] |
| 162 | |
| 163 | * We see a bleached Xenomorph head in the Predator's trophy case in ''Film/Predator2,'' meaning that ''Franchise/AliensVsPredator'' is canon. However, ''Film/{{Prometheus}}'' and ''Film/AlienCovenant'' [[CanonDiscontinuity contradict everything about it]], showing that the Xenomorphs are actually fairly-recently evolved critters in the 2100's. Which one's true? |
| 164 | ** It might not be a Xenomorph head, but just something else that looks a lot like one, or perhaps David really was trying to re-create a pre-existing life form (as was apparently the case in the early scripts of ''Covenant''). |
| 165 | |
| 166 | [[/folder]] |
| 167 | |
| 168 | [[folder: Alien]] |
| 169 | * What causes Ash's breakdown? The only thing close to violence was Ripley pushing him up against the wall in the computer room. This seems to be enough to make him "bleed", so it's not like it's just a hidden program activated by Ripley discovering the secret order. But it's hard to believe he's this fragile considering he would easily be exposed to this level of force in normal space conditions, such as during the landing on the planet which was far more violent than what Ripley did. |
| 170 | ** Just a lucky push that happened to land him on a vulnerable spot, perhaps? Alternately, being discovered as a traitor and forced to actively confront a human, which is against his basic programing, may have caused Ash to basically have an aneurysm. |
| 171 | |
| 172 | * Why does Ripley bother with setting the self destruct when she's the only one left? Or even when it's just her, Lambert and Parker? Surely the ship has a means of transmitting a warning signal and being locked down. The signal could be rather specific about the danger and the warning would likely be taken seriously because a crew's not likely to abandon the ship (and their pay) for flippant reasons. |
| 173 | ** Because she wants the Alien dead. Simple as that. She's past the point of caring about company profit, their protocols or anything else. She wants the Xenomorph to die, and since it's onboard the Nostromo and she has no idea where, blowing the entire ship is the safest solution. |
| 174 | ** There's also an element of "turnabout is fair play." Ripley had just learned the Company ordered "Crew Expendable" to get this thing. If she's expendable for their specimen, their ship is expendable for her survival. |
| 175 | ** If there's ''any'' chance that the alien hops from the Nostromo and kills all the people on whatever other ship is sent to investigate, Ripley doesn't want to take that chance. Considering how the company ''already'' put everyone in mortal danger and officially declared them "expendable", it's quite plausible that the first round of investigators will also be considered "expendable" and the company won't bother giving them enough gear/guns/armour to be properly protected from the alien. Blowing up the ship is the best way to make sure that nobody else will ever get killed by this thing. |
| 176 | |
| 177 | * Dallas is Captain and Kane is supposed to be the Second officer, with Ripley as Third. Who is first officer? It can't be Ash, Ripley says she's the ranking officer when Dallas and Kane are off ship, and she would have mentioned if Lambert was, also. |
| 178 | ** I think the Captain ''is'' the first officer. |
| 179 | *** Captains are Captains. First officer is the second in command on ships. On Star Trek, for example, Spock is first officer. |
| 180 | ** Kane's rank is never mentioned, and the script labels him "Executive Officer", which is another term for First Officer. The MildlyMilitary ranking system for merchant astronauts is obviously structured slightly differently from naval rank, but the chain of command is clear enough: Ripley outranks Brett, Parker & Lambert; Kane outranks Ripley; Dallas outranks everyone. For evidence see: Ripley takes charge after the deaths of Kane & Dallas, specifically pulling rank on Parker & Lambert; & Ripley's comment to Ash that she is ranking officer *when Dallas AND KANE are off the ship*. The real mystery is where the heck Science Officer fits in—when Ripley & Ash clash over Kane's medical treatment it's effectively JurisdictionFriction. |
| 181 | *** Judging by the events of the film, Ash's role as science officer places him outside the chain of command proper, but the specialisation gives him some weight in arguments related to it. He also, rather covertly, looks after W-Y's interests aboard ship, and insofar as he's able to, ensures that the crew doesn't act against them; in this way, his relationship with the crew resembles that between a political commissar and the military unit to which he's assigned. |
| 182 | *** Dallas tells Ripley that "Anything that has do with the Science division, Ash has the final word... because that's what the Company wants to happen." It's probable that W-Y is involved in all kinds of unsavory things, having a Bioweapons division, and the science division is covertly mixed up with it. |
| 183 | *** Ash also seems to be the closest thing to a medical doctor on board, so if he's acting in that capacity he'd be accorded more authority over patient-care decisions than his nominal rank might entail, same as a Navy physician might instruct an obviously-exhausted Captain to hand over command to his First Officer and go get some sleep. |
| 184 | *** On a related note, what exactly is Ripley's role on the ship. Dallas is the Captain, responsible for the ship as a whole, and I guess probably a qualified pilot. Kane seems to me to be a pilot, from where he sits on the flight deck. Lambert is the navigator, and calculates the position and course of the ship, and fuel expenditure etc. Ash is science officer/ship's surgeon. Ripley is described in other materials as "Warrant Officer", but what role does a Warrant Officer play on a civilian ship? |
| 185 | *** She seems to act as a liaison between the white-collar officer class (Dallas, Kane, Ash) and the blue-collar workers (Lambert, Parker, Brett). |
| 186 | *** She's basically a futuristic merchant-marine [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boatswain bosun]]. |
| 187 | *** Considering her skills with shipboard equipment and systems, she might be on par with a chief engineer. |
| 188 | ** Perhaps also worth remembering that this is the ranking system of a fictional space-fleet two hundred years in our future being discussed. It's possible that at some point between the present day and the future the films are set in, someone somewhere decided that "First Officer" as a rank was redundant and that it would skip from Captain to Second Officer instead. |
| 189 | |
| 190 | * Why did it seemingly not occur to anyone to try killing the creature by just gathering everybody into one room and taking all the air out of the rest of the ship, or otherwise adjusting the life support to make conditions in the rest of the ship lethal? Even if we assume the creature doesn't need air it's clearly wet inside, so unless it has some sort of biological heat pump turning up the heat past 100°C should kill it eventually. Yes, the alien in ''Alien[[superscript:3]]'' survived immersion in molten metal, but it was only in there for a few seconds and judging by the way it jumped out it didn't exactly seem to like it (plus the chestbuster in ''Aliens'' shrieked in pain when it got hit with a flamethrower). The easiest explanation is that the exoskeleton is a good insulator, so there's every reason to think ''sustained'' excess heat will kill it eventually. Even if it wouldn't have worked it would have been nice to see "we control the life support system, why don't we use ''that'' against it" brought up and shot down so we wouldn't get the impression the movie might have been dependent on an absurd plot. |
| 191 | ** Maybe they could have blown out all the air of the ship but that would leave them with one room full of breathable air to last them the long trip home. The ship itself is shielded to protect it from temperature changes so anything that would affect the Alien would affect them too. That was the whole point of the situation, they had almost no viable options to fight it. They could have shot it but they would have melted a hole through the ship, which is why they created the jerry-rigged weaponary. |
| 192 | *** You may also want to consider that in a deleted scene, the crew were thinking about decompressing certain areas of the ship, however they couldn't know exactly where the damn thing was because the landing procedure on the planet disabled all of their camera systems. And that's the same scene when Brett thought up the cattle prod idea, but also called Ash out in the process for letting it on board. |
| 193 | *** They go into it more in the novel, but even in the movie they mention that the planet had a very thin atmosphere, so they thought that it might need very little to breathe. Turns out it doesn't need to breathe at all. |
| 194 | *** Also in the novel it's suggested by Brett that they go into hypersleep and decompress the entire ship (as the ship doesn't have enough air for them to decompress the ship and stay awake) but this is met with distaste as the rest of the crew are unsure if this will work and feel that being in hypersleep would leave them trapped and at the mercy of the alien so wanted it off the ship before they went into hypersleep. |
| 195 | *** Besides, who's to say that they even have the ability to empty whatever ship sections they want? Also, original poster... why would anyone create a life support system for humans that reaches 100°C? That would be pointless, useless, and dangerously stupid. |
| 196 | *** Even if it were possible, creating such conditions on board would involve serious tampering with the life support system to turn the environment hot/cold enough to both endanger life and cause damage to the internal systems (too far either way and you start damaging ducting, electronics, pipework... everything you need to keep the interior of the ship inhabitable). Attacking the alien in such a manner would likely destroy irreplaceable systems across the interior of the ship, without even guaranteeing that it would die. |
| 197 | *** In O'Bannon's original script, THE STAR BEAST, alien acid eats a tiny hole in the hull and one of the crew members is sucked out into space (in little bits, like they did with the baby alien in the last movie), leaving very little atmosphere in that section of the ship. Evidently they've ShownTheirWork and decided it was impossible to suck a human body through a little hole. |
| 198 | ** Also, remember that most of the suggestions for dealing with the alien are either filtered through or outright suggested by Ash, who is TheMole and protecting the alien. He carefully steered the crew away from anything that might actually be successful at killing the alien. |
| 199 | |
| 200 | * What was the purpose of the shuttle-like craft in ''Alien''? If it was a lifeboat why didn't it have enough cryotubes for the entire crew, and if it was a shuttle why did it have cryotubes at all? |
| 201 | ** The Narcissus was most likely Dallas's personal shuttle. The two cryotubes are there because there's no light speed system in the series, and it was most likely a design feature for any craft going into deep space. |
| 202 | ** Actually there would HAVE to be light speed capable ships to make interstellar HUMAN space travel a realistic proposition. It would be simpler (and cheaper from a legal standpoint) to use robotic ships, especially for cargo runs like the ''Nostromo'' was doing. In fact, until light speed or FTL ships are invented, it would take unnecessarily large and expensive generational ships to make any extra-solar excursions. Ships sailing on the oceans today are required by law to carry enough lifeboats for the entire crew and passenger complement. It's doubtful that those regulations would be eased in the future. |
| 203 | *** Actually, while modern ocean ships require sufficient lifeboats for all hands, modern spacecraft do not because the costs and technology are prohibitive. While the technology and cost issues don't look like limitations with the Nostromo, it's quite possible the laws are still relaxed regarding a compliment of lifeboats, especially for ore hauling non-passenger carrying ships. |
| 204 | *** In the Alien universe there ''is'' no FTL. It's an unwarranted assumption that FTL will be "invented" sometime. The society is a corporate dystopia where the biggest, most rapacious monster is the Company itself, and laws are framed for the Company's benefit, not the individual. The ''Nostromo'' essentially is a robotic ship, with the crew along for contingencies outside Mother's parameters. Why humans rather than mech robots under Mother's control? Humans are more adaptable. Why humans rather than Artificial Persons? Humans are probably cheaper. |
| 205 | *** There is FTL travel, it's just slow. Lambert quotes a travel time of 10 months from Zeta Reticuli to Earth. That's impossible without FTL. |
| 206 | *** Personally, I wouldn't call covering 39 light-years in 10 months "slow". |
| 207 | *** It's far slower than the faster than light travel depicted in almost every other series that features it. |
| 208 | *** It's 46.83c. Almost 50 times faster than light. 1.404×10^7 km/s. Tachyonic speed. |
| 209 | *** For the record, until Prometheus it's been both heavily implied and widely regarded as true by the fans that some form of undescribed FTL travel exists in the universe, for the simple reason that many plot points make no sense otherwise. Later on, {{Prometheus}} (which is a prologue to the series and explicitly canon) specifically pointed out that FTL travel exists, sealing the discussion for good (in fact, Prometheus itself is humanity's second FTL capable ship, not including the unmanned and manned prototypes). |
| 210 | *** FTL is NOT required for extra-solar excursions to be realistic, nor is a generational ship required. Due to relativistic length contraction, the distance a ship has to cross to reach a destination decreases. If the ship is accelerated to high enough speed, 99.999999...9 percent the speed of light, the subjective distance the ship has to travel could be reduced from light years to miles. The ship could make the trip in seconds, never violating the speed of light. There is a cost in time in a sense, because while the ship could travel 10 light years and back in seconds aboard the ship, on Earth, roughly 10 years would have passed. The other cost is how much energy would be required to attain such speeds, which is staggeringly high. However, it’s likely to be more realistic than attaining FTL. Also, I made an extreme example. There could be realistic missions, like ore runs, that would be less extreme, but still practical. |
| 211 | *** FTL travel is not strictly required for ''Alien'' but it ''is'' required for the events in ''Aliens'' and later sequels to make any sense. Ripley says in a deleted scene in ''Aliens'' that she promised to be back to Earth for her daughter's eleventh birthday. The ''Sulacco'' is dispatched from Earth to LV-426/Acheron only after they lose radio contact with the colony, but Newt does not spend years or decades on LV-426 alone, only a few weeks. When they discuss the minimum time before they are declared overdue and a rescue of their own mission is launched, they quote a figure of "seventeen days". In ''Alien[[superscript:3]]'' a company ship responds to a distress signal sent by the prison colony within a matter of days at most. None of this is possible with STL ships, even if they travel close enough to light speed for the crew to benefit from significant time dilation aboard the ship. |
| 212 | *** Well, FWIW, I actually was just rewatching Aliens and when Ripley is debriefed, the Nostromo crew biographies shown on the monitor specifically mention FTL. Parker's is very easy to read. So, definitely FTL does exist in this franchise. |
| 213 | ** The ''Nostromo'' carried two shuttles (in fact there are two on the model). It's just that only one was working at the time of the movie (see the DVD extras). The two shuttles together carry enough hypersleep chambers for the whole crew. |
| 214 | ** I believe (from memory of reading the novel) that the shuttle was used only as an in-system transport and only as a life boat in a dire emergency. As for FTL etc it's stated in the novel that the ''Nostromo'' can reach near light speeds and is mostly automated with limited life support for the crew whose only job it is to wake up in order to park the ship, respond to emergencies that Mother can not handle and other such tasks. |
| 215 | *** The novelisation says that the Nostromo travels through hyperspace. It's [=FTL=] but slow enough that it takes years. |
| 216 | |
| 217 | * The Space Jockeys send a transmission to warn people away from their ship, and make the transmission powerful enough that it can apparently be picked up over interstellar distances. But this would make their ship ''highly conspicuous'' and ''more likely to be found''. The ship might have avoided discovery for a lot longer if they just relied on the sheer vastness of the galaxy to keep hapless explorers from stumbling into it. Why don't they make the transmission just strong enough to be picked up in the immediate vicinity of the planet, so that the only people who pick it up would have been exploring the system anyway? And then there are the problems of trying to come up with a warning that could be transmitted by radio that would be decipherable to alien beings they know nothing about. It might also have been a good idea to surround the crashed ship with rock carvings of xenomorphs and their life cycle and habits. That would probably be pretty universally understandable since almost any imaginable intelligence would need to be able to perceive basic shapes in order to navigate its surroundings, and it would have the bonus of not relying on having [[RagnarokProofing a transmitter continuing to work for thousands of years]]. |
| 218 | ** The previous point assumes that the Space Jockeys had time to think it through, but maybe things went to shit really fast on their ship, just like on the ''Nostromo''—no time to carve warnings or stuff. Yeah, the powerful signal wasn't necessarily a good idea, but still. Maybe the last survivor had prepared it as he felt a xenomorph was digging its way through his chest. Considering the situation, they did a decent effort of trying to save the asses of other space travellers. |
| 219 | ** For all we know, the Jockey's warning could've simply been meant to warn other Jockeys. It might not've given a damn if pitiful hoo-mans stumbled across its cargo full of alien eggs. |
| 220 | ** Based on all the associated fiction in the expanded universe, the Jockeys were massive tools. They might have ''intended'' for their ship to be conspicuous. Either to lure their enemies to their deaths, or to alert their allies that a ship full of extremely valuable weaponry was sitting there unused. |
| 221 | ** The novel states that the signal was picked up as the ''Nostromo'' flew close to the system and given the length of time the signal had been broadcasting it could probably be picked up many thousands of light years away. Also it's stated in the novel (and I believe in the original script) that the jockeys left simple hieroglyphs around the ship (H.R. Giger drew the design) displaying a jockey being attacked by a facehugger, then collapsing and a facehugger bursting forth before the images are repeated, it's taken by the crew to indicate a virus which they believe has died out given the time that has passed. |
| 222 | ** What's got me stumped is why the Space Jockey pilot didn't simply aim its ship ''at the nearest sun'' when it woke up and realised it'd been infested. Destroy the ship, and there's no need for a warning signal, comprehensible or not. |
| 223 | *** Who says the Space Jockey was infested first? Maybe the ship was forced down for completely unrelated reasons, and while the pilot was assessing the damage he screwed up and got himself face-hugged. Then he set up the beacon to warn other ships away and resigned himself to death. |
| 224 | ** Perhaps the recurrent [[CannotSelfTerminate inability to commit suicide]] shown in hosts throughout the franchise is a biological defense mechanism built into the Chestbursters. Once they get inside you, you can't do anything to engineer the destruction of your parasite. Beyond begging for a mercy kill, of course. |
| 225 | *** The alien itself wouldn't harm her, however there has never been anything to suggest those who have been impregnated can't kill themselves. Indeed Ripley does exactly that at the end of Alien[[superscript:3]]. |
| 226 | ** Sorry, but do you know when that comes up? I don't remember anything like that. Unless it's in ''[[FanonDiscontinuity Resurrection]]''. |
| 227 | *** It actually comes up in Alien[[superscript:3]]. When Ripley is impregnated with the Queen, she keeps putting herself in dangerous circumstances and basically has to beg Dillon to kill her. I think at some point she says that she can't do it herself. |
| 228 | *** She asks Dillon to kill her (as he's already a convicted murderer) after deliberately confronting the alien in an attempt to get it to kill her. The alien however knows full well she is incubating another one and won't lay a finger on her (later on it gets extremely aggressive and agitated when it believes Ripley is being attacked). There's nothing in Alien[[superscript:3]] that suggests she can't do it herself - she's understandably reluctant to. So she goes to someone she thinks won't have a problem with killing, but even putting aside Dillon's post-conviction faith, he correctly guesses that having someone the alien won't kill is actually a usable advantage. He eventually agrees to kill her IF they kill the alien first, to spare her dying the way Kane did. |
| 229 | ** The Space Jockey's ship was filled with xenomorph eggs. More than likely he was transporting them somewhere and landed the ship hoping another Space Jockey would come along and use the eggs for their intended purpose. |
| 230 | *** Indeed, the fact that the Jockey was transporting a freakin' ''bioweapon'' en masse rather implies that the Jockey in question was involved in a war of some kind. In which case, it might've ''deliberately'' set up a distress signal that its allies would recognise as a veiled "Watch out, Xenos got loose!" warning, but its ''enemies'' might unwittingly investigate and thus get themselves killed. |
| 231 | ** I always thought it was a sort of an emergency locator transmitter - it activated (possibly automatically) when the ship crash-landed, and when the xenos got out and all hell broke loose, the Jockeys had no time (or were unable to) turn it off. |
| 232 | ** According to ''Prometheus,'' the Space Jockeys are trying to xenocide humanity. They WANTED it found. |
| 233 | |
| 234 | * How was Mother even able to (even partially) translate the message? You'd need some Rosetta Stone or something, but since this alien ship has been there for quite some time (as evidenced by the Space Jockey being fossilised), I don't think that this exists. |
| 235 | ** We don't know much about the universe of the Alien franchise. Perhaps there was some ancient civilisation that cast a very long cultural shadow across the galaxy, like the Roman Empire. There's obviously not an exact Rosetta Stone, which would make translating trivial, but there might be all sorts of snippets that could gradually put a partial translation together. |
| 236 | ** Weyland-Yutani (somehow) knew the ship was there. I assume that they knew some details about the ship beforehand. |
| 237 | ** Depending on which non-movies source you adhere to, the Jockeys were "good guys" and really wanted to warn people. It wouldn't be hard to convey danger through simple maths and auditory tones (Transmit, in a regular sequence several times, NOTHING, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 then transmit 6 / 3 = 2 (division), 6 / 2 = 3, 4 / 2 = 2 (to reinforce / is division, = is equals), then repeat 6 / NOTHING, 5 / NOTHING, 4 / NOTHING, and repeat the whole series several times to emphasise. In simple arithmetic dividing by zero is very bad, so the idea would get across). Once you emphasise the danger, you can get around to the more abstract discussion of the danger. |
| 238 | *** I'm sorry, what? |
| 239 | *** In mathematics, there are certain equations that are either inelegant, unwieldy, or impossible. The mathematical troper above was suggesting using one of these equations as a metaphor for an unsavory (or in this case, dangerous) situation. One of the most basic unwieldy equations is dividing by zero, because dividing by zero yields no meaningful expression. The sequence above is a basic primer to establish universally translatable numerals and symbols, and then to communicate the dangerous situation by repeating division by zero equations to indicate bad conditions. It would be a very vague warning, but a conspicuous one as long as you have a mathematician or a semi-intelligent supercomputer on board. |
| 240 | *** [[FirstContactMath Mathematics is universal]]. In particular, any race which knows enough physics to build a starship must also be pretty good at math. The above troper is suggesting that information be transmitted that can be identified as numbers, then use the numbers to identify another specific bit of information as the operation of division, and then sending a bunch of divisions by zero to convey the idea that something very, very wrong is going on. I'm not sure it would work, though... I can easily imagine an intended recipient interpreting the message as implying that something impossible is happening rather than something horrible and becoming curious to investigate it rather than scared away. Still, it's a decent effort at cross species communication. |
| 241 | *** Until you realise that none of the ''Nostromo'''s human crew would've interpreted that. They're the future equivalent of truck drivers or sailors. Sure, there must be a lot of truck drivers or sailors who get your idea, but I'm guessing the average blue-collar worker doesn't. I know I don't get the idea that dividing by 0 is a way to communicate something is bad, and I presume we're both the same species... I don't see the average alien understanding you either, much less an alien without an above average education in mathematics. |
| 242 | *** Space truckers need maths to do their job, and Ripley had the help of a sophisticated computer. |
| 243 | *** This. Your average Earth-bound blue-collar worker doesn't need much more than high school math, but remember that at least one of these blue-collar workers [[RecycledInSpace IN SPACE]] is a ''navigator'' dealing with orbital mechanics, a very difficult, very precise branch of physics and mathematics. If you want to get to where you're going in space, you need to know about Kepler, Newton and Einstein or you're toast. Just look at what they had to do around that ship; they act more like a commercial or military aircraft crew than truckers. They'd have to be better educated, especially if you're going to trust seven people with an expensive, gigantic spaceship. Then there's the supercomputer, one that is apparently programmed to deal with possible encounters with alien signals, since they have to investigate any they encounter. Plus, the Company is trying to keep the crew in the dark about the true nature of the mission—Ripley may have had to do some prodding to get Mother to admit that the signal looked like a warning, since she had to prod it into admitting that the Company didn't care whether they lived or died. |
| 244 | *** This makes the massive assumptions that a) the space jockey that set up the original warning thought of the suggestion; b) that the space jockey race uses the same kind of mathematics in the exact same way as we do, using the same base 10 number system (even some human cultures don't use base 10, or at least didn't in different periods in history); c) that their own mathematical concepts weren't part of the original warning, which is what Mother was actually deciphering. It's a well-known problem that warnings across divisions of culture/language/time are a big issue. If they weren't, we wouldn't be worrying about how to warn future generations of humans from opening nuclear waste containment areas. |
| 245 | *** Base counting systems wouldn't be an issue if the message introduced each number by actually signalling a sequence that counted off each number paired with a unique associated signal (three beeps and the signal for 3, four beeps and the signal for 4, etc). No matter how different their own mathematical notation might be, ''counting'' still works the same; indeed, they could use a simplified system for the message that ''only'' addresses numbers 0-6 (or whatever) plus a few very basic arithmetical functions. |
| 246 | *** Maybe Mother actually has a Rosetta Stone of some kind. The company has plenty of ships, right? So maybe some previous ship found the remnants of some other wrecked Space Jockey ship (without any xenomorphs onboard) and the company spent a few years researching it and they parsed together some of the language. And then they programmed all their ships' computers to understand it in case they ever found some more Space Jockey stuff. |
| 247 | ** Also at least one of the crew could and probably did interpret that accurately—the RoboticPsychopath who was after the creature in the first place. |
| 248 | |
| 249 | * Parker and Brett can repair SPACE SHIPS and they are the lowest paid members of the crew? Really? |
| 250 | ** Repairing "SPACE SHIPS" is made out to be a blue-collar job in this version of the future. They're analogous to auto mechanics, not rocket scientists. |
| 251 | ** I can see where they might be considered that way. But if you own a ship worth millions (as they state in Aliens) wouldn't you put the best people you can on it to keep it running? And pay them well. Space isn't like the ocean. Being adrift would not be a "good thing." |
| 252 | ** And what's wrong with being an "auto mechanic?" |
| 253 | *** Nothing wrong with it; they just don't get paid as much as the scientists and such on board. |
| 254 | ** How highly paid are maintenance personnel in modern day freighters? |
| 255 | ** "Lowest paid" doesn't necessarily mean "badly paid", it just means that the other crew members get paid even ''more''. Given that serving on a space freighter entails spending long periods in hypersleep while life goes on back home, living in confined vessels not designed for comfort with lousy food and little privacy, and a fair amount of danger, it's unlikely that ''any'' of them are paid peanuts: we just don't get to see them enjoying the fruits of their labour, because they don't have anything to splurge on until they get home again. |
| 256 | ** The crew mentions getting paid "shares"—this suggests that the entire crew isn't salaried, but they take a cut of whatever haul they make. |
| 257 | ** We're not exactly talking about the USS ''Enterprise'' NC-1701 here. Everything we see suggests that, in this world, the ''Nostromo'' is the spaceship equivalent of a shoddy low-rent commercial freighter. The kind of ship where you want someone who can make everything work but who isn't going to be ''too'' expensive. The Best Of The Best Of The Best guys are going to be working on the naval flagships and such. |
| 258 | |
| 259 | * How did the company know that the Xenomorphs were on the planet? I read the novelisation right after the film came out, but it's been 30 years... |
| 260 | ** The ship was sending out a signal; possibly, another company ship heard it, but for whatever reason couldn't investigate on its own, so they sent the next available ship full of expendables to check it out. |
| 261 | ** Ok. But that doesn't explain the orders that Mother had nor does it explain Ash and his actions. Was the company just waiting for an opportunity to kill a crew and potentially lose a ship? If they had shown that other humans had been to the planet or that company had sent a robotic probe earlier, then I could believe it. |
| 262 | *** There's a standing order about reporting scientific discoveries, that's not so odd. Ash was posted on the ''Nostromo'' not long ago, so presumably the company had some suspicions about what could be found out there. He just took his orders to the extreme. |
| 263 | ** Ash was specifically placed on the ship for this trip— Dallas mentions that he had a different science officer on his last run. The Company apparently placed him to make sure they got a sample of whatever was on LV-426. |
| 264 | ** A popular theory among fans is that the whole thing was concocted by some Company higher-up acting on his own, much like Burke does in the sequel. This person came up with the info concerning the alien signal, saw the opportunity for profit and to advance within the Company, most likely succesfully hid said info from others, and arranged for the reprogrammed Ash to board a vessel that would be rerouted to LV-426. |
| 265 | ** Information garnered from other films seems to offer clues to a possible reason. If we are even taking the AVP films into account (which I in no way fault someone for not doing so. I know the films are pretty bad), the Company and its earlier iterations had some knowledge on the Xenomorphs and their capabilities. As for how they assumed that there would be Xenomorphs on the planet just from intercepting the transmission can actually be answered by looking into the short films for ''Film/AlienCovenant''. We find out in those shorts that while David was on the ''Covenant'', he forwarded messages to Weyland-Yutani containing very detailed information about the Xenomorphs, the Engineers, and their capabilities after he spent ten years studying them. The company even sent a team to Planet 4 where they found actual samples of the aliens from David's workshop. From this, we can assume that Weyland-Yutani learned enough about both the Engineers and the aliens that they were able to recognise the transmission on LV-426 as being Engineer in origin, and organised for the ''Nostromo'' to investigate it hoping there would be Xenomorphs there since the two races are so heavily linked. So even if there was the chance of there being no Xenomorphs there at all, the company still would have implemented within Ash information regarding them. |
| 266 | |
| 267 | * If Ash is an android, wouldn't the fact that he isn't human be apparent by the fact he's not breathing? And why would he have needed to consume food? Or liquids? |
| 268 | ** He must have been a deep-cover operative. Ash was only recently transferred to the ''Nostromo'', so presumably the company expected trouble. |
| 269 | ** It appears that, according to Mother and Ash's later actions, the company knew about the Xenomorphs in advance somehow and maneuvered the ''Nostromo'' into position to receive the distress signal. But that still doesn't explain how they didn't notice him not breathing. |
| 270 | *** He faked it? For whatever reason he's supposed to appear human, so that's what he did. |
| 271 | ** How much time do you spend watching other people breathe? That's not exactly on top of most "pay close attention to" lists. Plus they spent most of their trip sleeping, and he's the science guy who spends his time off in his lab... as for eating, he wouldn't need to survival-wise, but if he's meant to be human, he could just flush his system after "eating". Ironic, consider what the food is made of... |
| 272 | ** Perhaps him being an android designed specifically to pass for a human his creators would have thought of something as obvious as "humans breathe" and "humans eat" and made sure he could at least simulate those rather obvious and crucial behaviours? Just a thought. |
| 273 | ** Maybe he does breathe. His components look at least partially organic. He might have to eat too, though we don't see him eating very much in the dinner scene. |
| 274 | ** Well, put it this way—Ian Holm is human, so therefore he can probably be seen breathing on-screen, which would indicate that androids are equipped with a fake breathing function (not too hard—just make the chest inflate every couple of seconds). However, on the off chance Ian Holm was so dedicated he decided not to breathe on-screen, it only indicates how unnoticeable such a thing is, since none of us picked it up. |
| 275 | ** We actually ''do'' see him drink what looks like milk after one of his arguments with Ripley. As she's no longer in the room when he does so, it's not just something he did for appearances' sake, so it's likely that his android body has some use for ingested organic materials, even if they're processed very differently from human digestion. |
| 276 | ** In the ''VideoGame/AliensColonialMarines'' DLC ''Stasis Interrupted'', a supposedly human character is revealed as an android since he doesn't breathe. However, given the many conflicts with established continuity in that game, feel free to disregard that detail. |
| 277 | ** Ash was designed to appear human. That's why he has human eyes, mouth, breathes, eats, etc. In a deleted scene, Ripley becomes suspicious of Ash and asks Lambert if she has had sex with him. It seems pretty clear from this exact situation why the company does this: they like to have undetectable (or very-hard-to-detect) moles. |
| 278 | |
| 279 | * Why didn't somebody from Weyland-Yutani disable the self-destruct mechanism(s) on the ship? Didn't they think that the crew might utilise it, thus costing them both the Xenomorph AND the ''Nostromo''? For that matter, why would there be a self-destruct mechanism on a civilian cargo ship, anyway? Other than the plot? |
| 280 | ** It's not a mechanism specifically designed for self-destruct and no other purpose, like the scuttle charges you might find installed aboard a modern warship, which could probably be made unusable with relative ease. Instead, the self-destruct procedure involves disabling the coolant systems of the ship's reactor, which will cause it eventually to destroy itself and take the ship with it, and which can't really be prevented short of totally automating the ship and entirely removing the crew (while the procedure was performed with Mother's assistance in the film, there's no reason to assume the crew couldn't have manually wrecked the cooling system if such assistance weren't forthcoming).\ |
| 281 | This is plainly inspired by the workings of modern power-generating fission reactors, which can also, if deprived of coolant and otherwise abused, be coerced into self-destruction, as seen most emphatically in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. While the operating principle of ''Nostromo'''s power generator isn't detailed at any length in canon, presumably it's more like a fission reactor than not, albeit on a much larger scale. |
| 282 | ** Actually, having a self-destruct mechanism on a ''space'' ship makes a fair bit of sense: a vessel like the ''Nostromo'' could inflict one hell of a ColonyDrop attack on some unsuspecting planet or space station if it went out of control and crashed at interstellar speed, so blowing it to flinders could offer a last-ditch way to disperse the impact energy if it can't be diverted off-target. |
| 283 | |
| 284 | * A more prosaic question: The self-destruct mechanism makes a certain amount of sense. And it also makes sense that triggering it would be a very complex procedure. But why make the crew reverse the *ENTIRE* procedure to override the self-destruct, under a tight countdown? That's almost like no override at all. A single button push, or at least a simple code entered on that control pad, should have been sufficient. Really dumb planning there. |
| 285 | ** See previous answer. Since the self-destruct method doesn't involve a purpose-built mechanism (i.e. scuttle charges), but rather relies on driving the ship's power generator far enough outside normal operating parameters that it goes boom, it makes sense that there'd be a "point of no return" past which there'd be no effective way to prevent the destruct.\ |
| 286 | Again, this makes sense given the inspiration; not only will depriving a modern fission reactor of coolant eventually result in meltdown, there'll be a point past which restoring the coolant flow won't avert disaster, and can even make things ''worse'' by inducing a so-called "cold-water accident". |
| 287 | ** If you look for the good quality shot of the instruction plate for the self-destruct mechanism there's a warning at the bottom saying that one should "reengage safety interlocks prior to abort code input". The safety interlocks are the big switches on the wall. Ripley replicates the procedure exactly in the inverse order and so those switches are reengaged in the very end, after the abort code input. So the whole abort was done wrong! As operations with nuclear bolts had no effect it may even be assumed that they were unnecessary. In that case the abort procedure is rather simple - reengage interlocks first and enter the abort code next. Ripley in panic simply wasted the time. |
| 288 | ** Considering the ColonyDrop scenario proposed above, maybe you don't ''want'' the self-destruct to be easily aborted. If the ship is out of control and careening towards a planet, there's every chance that parts of the ship are already exploding for whatever reason. In that scenario, a self-destruct might be ''unintentionally'' aborted by some random piece of ceiling falling on the button. Having a deliberately complex abort sequence helps ensure that there are actual humans still onboard who have actually decided to abort the self-destruct (hopefully because the ship has been steered out of the way so it won't hit anything). |
| 289 | |
| 290 | * Was the Alien smart enough to know hiding in the escape ship would save it? |
| 291 | ** It was asleep when Ripley found it and accidentally woke it up. The entire ''Nostromo'' save the escape ship was full of blaring klaxons, flashing strobe lights, and billowing smoke. It's up to interpretation, but when you think about it, if you're a creature looking for a place to sleep, the escape ship was the only quiet place left. |
| 292 | *** I think the Xenomoprh definitely was aware something bad was about to happen, and that following Ripley and being quiet for a while was the way to survive. I mean, why would he just leave the cat untouched? |
| 293 | *** The cat is probably too small to serve as a host, so after giving it a once over the alien decided it had no interest in the cat. |
| 294 | *** It's clear in the movie that the Xenomorph doesn't only attack to get new hosts. It just murders Parker, forgets about him, and goes to do... something to Lambert. |
| 295 | *** Parker was probably killed simply because he was trying to attack it. The Alien was interested in Lambert to begin with, then Parker attacked it so it killed him. Having dealt with the interruption it then got back to what it was doing. |
| 296 | |
| 297 | * If Mother's singular order is to return the Alien species, why wouldn't it stop its own self-destruct sequence? In fact, it does the opposite— it doesn't allow Ripley to reverse it. Why? |
| 298 | ** Ripley is actually just manually shutting off the engines' access to coolant, essentially overloading them. Ripley can't undo it because by then the damage was irreparable. |
| 299 | ** There is no indication that Mother is a sufficiently sentient AI capable of making decisions on its own. All it really ever did was transmit orders and answer questions. |
| 300 | ** Even if it was fully sentient, Mother can't really do any of that, the computer was simply describing what was going on with the self destruct process. As others have mentioned elsewhere, the self destruct involves manually disabling the coolant of the ship's reactor, a physical procedure the computer quite evidently has no way to influence. |
| 301 | |
| 302 | * Teeny tiny headscratcher: Were the little drinking birds in the ''Nostromo'''s mess hall supposed to be antiques, or is it a given that someone would still be making them decades from now? |
| 303 | ** Maybe it's the same company that makes the '80s-vintage kinetic sculptures seen in ''Aliens'' on the empty ''Sulaco''? |
| 304 | |
| 305 | * Why ''didn't'' they just freeze Kane? Ash's job was basically a delivery, and that Facehugger made Kane the perfect container. The crew wouldn't object to keeping him under stasis until they could get him to better trained medical personnel. It really seems like the more logical course of action than letting the thing pop out of the guy's chest, kill off more crew members, and risking exposure of the whole damn operation (which is exactly what happened). Come to think of it, that's almost as a dumb as a mapping guy getting lost in the area he ''just'' charted... I'm beginning to think that Ridley Scott sacrifices common sense just to make a plot. |
| 306 | ** I doubt Ash actually knew how the alien was coming out or exactly what hibernation would do to it. Afterwards... he was probably going to let it kill off the rest of the crew... and hope it'd leave him alone? Mr "Perfect Lifeform" isn't exactly the sanest of all robots. |
| 307 | ** According to musings in the prior folder, xenomorphs do indeed know how to distinguish between humans and androids, albeit it's not clear whether Ash would know that fact or not. |
| 308 | *** He seemed to know enough about the alien before hand. The most logical course of action would be the one that contains the lifeform and keeps the crew unaware of the true nature of the mission. Allowing the thing to become a threat to their lives will lead them to take an obstructive course of action. |
| 309 | ** I rather like the explanation offered by SF Debris. As an android, Ash was programmed never to harm humans or allow humans to become harmed. But he was also given secret orders by Weyland-Yutani to retrieve the Xenomorph, an act which had already allowed Kane to become infected and would almost certainly lead to countless human deaths in the future. These two contradictory orders ("don't harm humans" vs. "retrieve this highly dangerous alien at any cost") were causing Ash to malfunction. This also explains some of his other bizarre behaviours, like why he tried to kill Ripley by shoving a rolled up magazine down her throat instead of just strangling her, and why he went into that weird fit before Parker knocked his head off. |
| 310 | ** The magazine was also meant to show that he was attracted to her, but not having genitalia, he couldn't do anything more ''direct'' about it. |
| 311 | *** The sequel does establish that Ash's model of synthetics was known to be ''a bit twitchy''. |
| 312 | *** However, in ''Out Of The Shadows,'' Ash straight up murders somebody—possibly the result of spending [[AndIMustScream 15 years adrift in space with no body?]] |
| 313 | ** Presumably Ash doesn't want to risk the alien not surviving the freezing process. It's his top priority to bring it back alive and he can't be sure what would happen to an embryo in an artificially-hibernating human host. |
| 314 | ** Even worse, expanded universe materials demonstrate that chestbursters can still mature inside a hibernating host, albeit much more slowly. ''If'' Ash knew or suspected that the alien was now incubating inside Kane, he may not have wanted to risk the creature hatching into an empty ship devoid of atmosphere and dying. |
| 315 | |
| 316 | * Jones the cat. |
| 317 | ** What's he doing on the ship in the first place? Does the Company (the same Company that's willing to sacrifice them all in order to investigate a new alien) really care enough about its employees to let them keep a pet? There can't be a rat problem on a ship that has the life support turned off while the crew is in hypersleep, can there? |
| 318 | *** W-Y is a ''big'' company. It probably doesn't know, and almost certainly wouldn't care one way or the other if it did. Compared to the operating expenses of a ship the size of ''Nostromo'', even the cost of supporting the ''crew'' doesn't add up to much, to say nothing of the cost of supporting a cat; it's almost certain to be literally true that it'd cost more to have someone figure up what the bill should be, than it does to let the odd ship's cat slide. |
| 319 | *** But if you make one exception... then soon ''all'' of the Company's ships are carrying pets and the life support and fuel for all of those cats and dogs and parakeets and whatever starts adding up to considerably more than one bill. Perhaps the explanation is that the crew (or possibly just the part of the crew that are genuinely attached to the cat, like Ripley) were paying W-Y for the privilege of bringing Jones along as a mascot. |
| 320 | *** It's still such an utterly minuscule "cost" to the life support and fuel that the company just plain would not even notice it. |
| 321 | *** Minuscule but measurable. Moving anything into space is enormously expensive today (roughly $10,000 per pound). They are probably much more efficient in the future of the film, of course, but taking along a 10-pound cat and the life support he consumes probably still runs into thousands of dollars per trip. I guess the answer depends on how much the bottom line matters to the Company, and whether they believe the psychological benefit to the crew of having a pet is worth the expenditure in life support and fuel costs. |
| 322 | *** There's no way that the life support of a 10 pound cat is comparable to the life support necessary for seven 150-250 lb human passengers, and no way that it'd cost "thousands of dollars per trip" on its own. You're seriously overselling how hard it is to keep a tiny creature alive when you're already keeping alive a half-dozen creatures that are each at least 15 times that tiny creature's size. It's like saying that you have to seriously consider how much fuel you're burning extra because a mouse happened to be in your car on a long trip. |
| 323 | *** No, the expense of a cat is not comparable to the costs of bringing along the crew (they're not passengers), but the crew are a necessary expense for running the ship. Jones is not. Sure he's only a 10-pound cat, but it's also all the air the cat is going to breathe and all the food the cat is going to eat and the water he's going to drink over all the period he's awake, all being boosted to orbit every time the ''Nostromo'' takes off from a planet. Plus the costs of dealing with his wastes and its mass. Plus the extra power it takes to keep the cat in hypersleep and the extra mass of Jones and his food and water and air and kitty litter being added to what the FTL drive has to push through space. For more than two years. A couple thousand dollars per round trip from Earth to Thedus and back again is probably not exaggerating. Knowing what we know about the Company, it seems likely that it would want to cut or recoup that expense. |
| 324 | *** The air, water and food that cat is going to consume over the lifetime of the trip really is negligible. Remember, in the Alien universe you go into hypersleep at the beginning of the trip and wake up right at the end. There is no real discernible difference when you're talking about very small life forms. It's even shown that the cat goes into the same chamber as one of the crew. Plus, the Nostromo is pulling an entire refinery behind it, literally millions of tons - how is the addition or subtraction of a cat going to alter the thrust needed by more than an infinitesimal amount? It's likely that if the Company know about the ship pets, they allow one per crew as the psychological benefits most likely outweigh other considerations. Knowing the Company, they might even dock some pay in order to balance the books. |
| 325 | *** But the crew is supposed to be awake only in case of emergency and in very few other occasions. Would they be awake for periods long enough to want to have a pet around? And wouldn't the expense of keeping him around really inflate if Jones was kept in hibernation along with the rest of the crew? Because who's going to feed him and clean after him if everyone else is sleeping? |
| 326 | *** I would assume it's just captain's discretion, and he (Dallas) certainly doesn't seem to mind much of anything. He might if it became 8 cats, 5 dogs and an emotional support pig. As for cost of getting to orbit, who knows, maybe the crew pays the cost of transporting their own luggage. Maybe the cat was never even on a planet before. As for costs in transit, they are moving ore, so no way that's an issue. As for life support costs, they really would be trivial, especially considering vast amounts of the ship are pressurised. If they were concerned about costs, they would address that long before they worried about the cat. And don't underestimate the ability of pests to survive. |
| 327 | ** There is a rather long tradition of ships having cats aboard, at first simply to keep the rodent population under control. The British Navy as recently as World War II had official ship cats who were given a rank and official billet. There are even stories of sailors risking their lives to save the ship's cat. Maybe in the future it's considered good luck or possibly even for morale. |
| 328 | ** Turning off life support isn't the same as depressurising the ship. The air won't get replenished and the temperature will drop in places where the ''Nostromo'''s own mechanisms aren't generating heat, but there'll still be enough warmth and oxygen for cockroaches if not rodents to survive. Water isn't hard to come by considering how moist some of the compartments were, and food stores or waste bins aren't impregnable to vermin, so yes: there'd be pests for Jones to prey upon. |
| 329 | ** Keeping cats might be a tradition that dates back to before hypersleep was developed. One-man vessels traversing months-long routes within Earth's own solar system may have carried small pets to keep their pilots from going nuts out of loneliness. Having an animal to pet and talk to would also help compensate for being apart from nature for months on end: a problem that RealLife astronauts regularly suffer on long missions. By the time FTL and hypersleep made larger crews and manned interstellar travel feasible, veteran spacers were too fond of their pets ''not'' to insist that the privilege continue. |
| 330 | ** The Company is cutthroat, yes, but it's also ''cheap.'' If having a cat on a ship is shown to have any positive effect on crew morale (which it's very likely to), then the company will allow ships to have cats so long as that is cheaper than including a psychiatric officer on the crew. Which is almost certainly the case. A psychiatric officer needs a stasis pod, a full person's worth of food, and pay, at the very least, and uses up more fuel. A cat can sleep in a crew member's stasis pod, eats far less than a human, doesn't require pay, and uses up, essentially, a rounding error of fuel. So, if it's a choice between "provide the crew with actual mental health treatment" and "let them have a cat and ''say'' that it has mental health benefits", The Company does the thing that costs them less money, i.e. let ships have cats. |
| 331 | ** Even assuming that allowing a cat onboard was a bad idea, that can easily be explained: The Company is ''extremely stupid''. They decided to retrieve a friggin' Xenomorph and bring it back to Earth so they could use it in a weapons program. They decided to do this via a small crew of space truckers who had absolutely no idea what they were getting into. The one guy who knew the plan was Ash, and even Ash didn't really have a clue as to how they might actually subdue the Alien so it could be studied, trained or weaponised. This entire thing was ''very poorly thought-out''. The presence of a cat is a tiny mistake by comparison. |
| 332 | *** The Company appears much less stupid about the whole thing if you assume they know very little about the Alien before the movie. Some mid-level executive picked up the Space Jockey's distress signal, decoded it enough to see it was a warning about hostile life forms, found a ship that would be going by that system, and put an android on board with orders to get a sample of anything that might be useful. The reason they sent the space truckers instead of a dedicated exploration ship is that it was a) much less expensive to send a ship already out there and b) gave a certain amount of plausible deniability if it all went wrong (as it did). It was a calculated risk, and it cost them a ship and its crew and cargo. The executive probably burned the records of diverting the ship and placing Ash on the crew and then never thought about it again, and the Company didn't remember anything about it when Ripley showed up 57 years later. |
| 333 | ** The ''Aliens Colonial Marines Technical Manual'' has a section that's basically a bunch of Company people discussing the events of the first two films, and how to proceed upon getting an Alien. They note that Jones is aboard ship for "pest control," and everyone laughs. At one point, they're looking at Ripley's testimony about how fast and how big the Alien grew, and can't understand how it did it. There just aren't enough calories on the ship to allow it. Someone suggests it was eating the pests Jones was there for, and the retort is that the ship is depressurised and basically frozen while the crew's asleep, there were no pests to hunt, the cat was decoration. This leads them to conclude that Ripley was mistaken or exaggerating, and the thing she blew out the shuttle's hatch was no bigger than a Rottweiler... |
| 334 | ** Am I the only one who's ever considered the idea that Jones' presence could be explained as him being contraband? Why does everyone assume he's on the ''Nostromo'' because of Company permission. People have a habit of breaking rules whenever they can get away with it, especially if the break is perceived as minor, insignificant, and not hurting anyone. |
| 335 | *** A possibility. The novelisations of the first two movies say that the Company was aware he was onboard and were willing to allow it, but of course the novelisations differ from the movies on many points. The review board during ''Aliens'' doesn't mention charging Ripley with bringing a contraband animal onboard the ''Nostromo'', but considering they already threw the book at her they might have considered it unnecessary to also fine her for Jones. |
| 336 | *** And that's assuming Jones was Ripley's cat in the first place. If he was originally taken on board by one of the other crew members, they can't blame ''her'' for merely liking the animal and adopting him after they escape, can they? |
| 337 | ** How did he get into the locker that Ripley, Parker, and Brett find him in? |
| 338 | *** Cats tend to get into things. Anyone who has lived with one can attest that if you open a closet, cabinet, suitcase or shipping box in a cat's presence, there is a very good chance that said feline will attempt to go inside. It's possible that one of the crew had opened that locker recently and Jones slipped in. |
| 339 | |
| 340 | * Minor one, but in the film's trailer and cover art, the Egg is a lot different than the one we see in the movie and later mediums adapting the franchise. Why is that? |
| 341 | ** I would guess to make it more obvious that it is an egg. |
| 342 | ** Because the film's test shots used chicken eggs for that scene. Once it showed up in the trailer, well... |
| 343 | |
| 344 | * Between the creature's emergence from Kane, and its attack on Brett, the creature grew at least human-sized, and strong enough to carry Brett. Even admitting the creature's "structural perfection," what did the little chestburster eat to acquire so much mass? |
| 345 | ** IIRC, the chestburster got into ship's rations. |
| 346 | ** That's what it said in the novelisation. There's a scene where the crew find that all their rations have been eaten, making the situation even more desperate. |
| 347 | ** Which would beg the question, even considering their limited staffing and ability to fashion weapons, why wouldn't they make guarding the food stores one of their top priorities? A simple and justifiable assumption for them to would be that this newborn lifeform is going to go hunting for food, and that dead food stores are even easier prey than live humans and a cat. |
| 348 | *** They spend the time between when the chestburster emerges and when the adult form gets Brett cleaning up the dining room, giving Kane his funeral, and putting together the motion trackers, cattle prods, and nets that they then use to go after the creature. Since the movie never brings up the alien eating the food supplies it's an open question whether that is where the alien got the mass to grow. |
| 349 | |
| 350 | * It's pretty much accepted that the Space Jockey himself got infected and "gave birth" to a chestburster. Whatever happened to that Xenomorph? |
| 351 | ** It died. The Space Jockey is so old it looks like it's nearly fossilised, and the xenomorphs don't live forever. |
| 352 | ** More specifically, it probably searched the Jockey ship, found the eggs, and went outside to try to find more potential hosts for the eggs to infest. As the planet had no life suitable for incubation, it eventually died of mishap, exposure, or starvation out there. |
| 353 | ** Maybe it's still alive, and it's just wandering around somewhere on the surface of the planet. It could be a thousand miles away by the time the Nostromo arrives, so it's never aware of the Nostromo and it doesn't affect the plot. |
| 354 | |
| 355 | * After the Alien gets Dallas, the four remaining crew members have a meeting; in it Lambert suggests cutting their losses by having everyone flee on the ''Narcissus'' shuttle and abandon the ''Nostromo'' to the Alien. Ripley notes that the shuttle can't sustain all four of them, so Lambert then says that they could draw straws to see who stays. Ash is quiet throughout the discussion. ''But why didn't Ash seize the chance right there and then to volunteer to stay?'' It was a golden opportunity to get rid of the pesky humans practically for free, and have the field clear to take the ''Nostromo'' back to Weyland-Yutani and deliver the Alien. |
| 356 | ** Volunteering to stay before Lambert's plan to abandon ship was accepted would probably lead Ripley or Parker to ask him awkward questions of why he was willing to sacrifice himself for the others. If they ''had'' adopted Lambert's plan and went on to actually drawing straws he could either volunteer at that point or cheat to be the one staying behind. Unfortunately for Ash, Ripley chose to go and ask Mother inconvenient questions about why he hadn't come up with useful information about the alien instead. |
| 357 | ** But by then, if Ash volunteered, the other three, even if suspecting something, would probably accept his offer to stay behind, considering that they were scared and the fact that Ash wasn't much liked by the rest of the crew. Even if Ash was revealed to be a robot, it would only make it even [[WhatMeasureIsANonHuman easier to leave him behind]]. At any rate, when Ripley takes over control of Mother away from Ash, he still had another chance to volunteer and maybe even tell her the truth since Ripley was about to blow his cover anyway. By then, no one had a better alternative to save themselves. And yet ''once again'' Ash blows a last chance to volunteer to stay once Ripley discovers Weyland-Yutani's plan, instead he opts to [[VillainBall try to kill Ripley]]: if he had volunteered on this last opportunity, the other survivors would still not have much choice but to accept his offer, since as it happened, after Ash was defeated, Ripley agrees with Lambert's plan to leave on the ''Narcissus'' anyway. |
| 358 | ** Ripley agrees to leave only after there are only three of the crew left, which the shuttle can support. Despite not personally liking Ash much, Ripley doesn't seem willing to leave ''anyone'' behind (not even the ''cat''). Parker might not agree to let Ash stay behind either, and loudly proclaims he isn't going to draw any straws. In short, Lambert's plan was rejected by Ripley and Parker until the circumstances changed, and since they never got as far as discussing who would stay behind Ash really had no chance to volunteer. He does try to talk to Ripley when she first discovers the special directive, but her emotional reaction to being betrayed seems to confuse him and he changes his mind to just killing her. |
| 359 | *** Also, she's in command of the ship by this point and it's her duty to protect Ash and the others whether she likes them or not. The shuttle couldn't support four, so it simply wasn't an option. |
| 360 | ** Note also that the final version of the plan that Ripley agrees to isn't just "abandon the ship", it's "set the ship to self-destruct, and ''then'' abandon it". It wouldn't have done Ash much good to stay behind with that plan. |
| 361 | ** Simple self preservation could be a factor. Just because Ash has been ordered to bring back the alien doesn't mean he's ready to be stuck alone on the ship with it (later movies will show the xenomorphs will ignore synthetics who aren't a threat, but Ash doesn't know that). Note that Ash doesn't volunteer to investigate the alien derelict, even to ensure that a specimen is recovered. |
| 362 | ** Ash is malfunctioning at this point (likely due to the conflict between his inherent programming not to kill humans and his orders to bring back the alien at any cost.) Therefore, the actions he takes are irrational. |
| 363 | |
| 364 | * Instead of splitting up and letting themselves get picked off one by one, why don't the crew members all just sit in a secured room with their flamethrowers, wait for the Alien to show up, and then blast the ever-loving crap out of it once it does so? |
| 365 | ** Suppose you barricade yourselves in a room and the alien ''doesn't'' show up? What then? Sleep and eat in shifts? How long does life support and food last on a ship that is supposed to run with its crew in hypersleep most of the time? It's going to take 10 months to reach Earth. What else might the alien be off doing in the meantime? It might damage the ship enough to kill everyone, or even reproduce. Maybe abandoning ship as quickly as possible is the better plan after all. |
| 366 | ** There's no safety in numbers anyway. After Ash is dealt with it's Parker and Lambert together that are attacked, not Ripley who's off by herself. And it's precisely because they're both there that Parker's flamethrower proves useless, because he's not willing to kill Lambert along with the alien. If Ripley had gone with them would it have turned out any differently? Only if she had been willing to burn Lambert alive to try to save her and Parker. |
| 367 | *** Except that Lambert didn't have a flamethrower. Only Parker did. If all of them had weapons, or the ones that didn't stayed a safe distance from any entrance the Alien might use, then the ones that ''did'' have weapons might be able to blast it without worrying about friendly fire. |
| 368 | *** Trusting Lambert with a flamethrower is probably not a good idea. They're not exactly precision weapons. |
| 369 | |
| 370 | * Why, exactly, does the Xenomorph rate as such a "perfect organism" in Ash's opinion? There's nothing innately ''special'' or "perfect" about being a deadly predator - even Jones the cat can manage that - and a lack of moral compass doesn't make it any different than the RealLife ichneumon wasps its life cycle was based upon. At that point there's no evidence that it's intelligent, so he can't be impressed by such traits' appearance in a thinking creature. Heck, the creature's status as a parasitoid actually limits its potential, by barring it from reproducing in the absence of suitably-sized prey. By his own professed chain of logic, Ash should be gushing about ''malaria'' as much as about the Xeno: they're both fine-tuned for killing people and using them as "hosts" without a shred of remorse. |
| 371 | ** Ash says, "Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility", and only then says he admires (or envies) it's lack of morals. Ash seems to call it "perfect" in that it does what it does extremely well, to the point that he says the crew are incapable of killing it. This is all coming from an android that has obviously failed its mission, and that might feel it failed that mission because of in-built morals he had no part in choosing. It doesn't have to be a logical assessment. |
| 372 | ** Well, there's a few other facts to consider. The eggs remained viable on a completely inhospitable planet for who knows how long, and were still able to hatch and deliver their facehuggers. The facehugger adapted instantly to a host organism it had never encountered before, instantly figuring out what kind of breathing gasses it required and how to supply them, keeping Kane alive and unconscious in both the totally inhospitable environment of the planet and the much more comfortable environment of the ''Nostromo'', and implanted its embryo with no outward sign or rejection by the host. The chestburster grew to a full larval stage in mere hours, and its birth was... dramatic, to say the least. Then, in the time it took the crew to prepare to hunt something the size of your average snake, it grew to be larger than an adult human and proceeded to laugh in the face of every attempt to subdue and eliminate it. Any one of these feats should be scientifically impossible, and the Alien can do all of them and more. That's pretty damn impressive any way you slice it. |
| 373 | ** There might be unstated assumptions like perhaps Ash meant "perfect HUMANOID organism". Ash's statements might be a very personal perspective. As an android, he's aware he's not a human and he also has explicit "morality" subroutines. He seems to be a very intelligent AI and is likely well aware of the contradiction between his programming and what the company ordered him to do. His statements here are not as abstract as they may initially sound-- he's talking about this specific situation. |
| 374 | ** Where is it ever said that Ash doesn't ''also'' respect malaria or ichneumon wasps? The fact that he considers the Xenomorph as a perfect example of an unfettered and ruthlessly efficient killing machine doesn't rule out the possibility that he also respects others that share similar attributes. It just doesn't come up because, well, everyone has bigger fish to fry at that particular moment than constructing an itemised list of all the other things Ash considers to be perfect. |
| 375 | ** We also have to remember the source here. The whole point of Ash's speech is to emphasise how creepy, malevolent and inhuman he is. His admiration of the Xenomorph is not intended to be a logical and objective appraisal of the creature that stands up to rigorous scrutiny, but representative of the fact that his thought processes and ethics are ultimately just as unknowable and alien to the humans as the Xenomorph. |
| 376 | |
| 377 | * How did Dallas and Lambert manage to retrieve the unconscious Kane without also being attacked by facehuggers? There were hundreds of eggs nearby. |
| 378 | ** Apparently those eggs didn't hatch. |
| 379 | ** Kane was still attached to the line he got down there on. They just reeled him up without going down into the egg chamber, and so were not in danger. The novelisation makes this clear. |
| 380 | |
| 381 | * In the scene where the Alien attacks Brett, it comes down from an open air duct from above and drags Brett’s body back into it. However, in both the normal and extended sequence of the film, the Alien doesn’t seem to be holding onto anything as it slowly and silently descends to the ground. Even when it is carrying Brett back up with it, it’s grabbing him by the head with both hands. Even its tail is just hanging loosely during the whole scene. So what, exactly, was keeping the Alien suspended during that whole sequence? |
| 382 | ** In the expanded universe material, the "tubes" on the alien's back serve as anchor points for a sort of webbing that allows them to move about in their lairs. The alien in this scene may have been suspended by webbing from its tubes. Part of the scariness of the movie, of course, is that no one is quite sure what the alien is capable of or how it is doing what it's doing. |
| 383 | |
| 384 | * The facehugger's main method of dissuading removal is to tighten its tail around its host's neck. So why didn't they pry the tail off Kane's neck and hold onto it ''first'', and then try to peel its fingers off? Granted, it likely wouldn't have worked, and they certainly still couldn't have cut the fingers, but it's a logical thing to try. |
| 385 | ** In the film, Dallas states "It's not going to come off without tearing his face off." The novelisation expands on this; instead of trying to pry off a "finger," Ash just grabs the facehugger and tries to yank it off, stopping when blood starts trickling down Kane's face. The facehugger has suction cups or something that lets it adhere to the victim, removing the facehugger will take the victim's face with it. The tightening tail around his neck is more of a warning... "keep trying, and this is going to go badly". They may not have exhausted all possibilities to try and remove it, but going through all Of them would result in an overly-long sequence, and Ash was trying to preserve the specimen at all costs. Once he was satisfied it wasn't going to come off without endangering Kane (and thus, likely the alien itself) he convinced the crew there was nothing more to be done. |
| 386 | ** The tail was encircling Kane's neck more than once. Prying up the outer loop of tail wouldn't prevent it from tightening the ''inner'' loop to choke Kane out. |
| 387 | |
| 388 | * Why did Wetland Yutani secretly reroute a cargo ship? Surely sending another ''Film/{{Prometheus}}'' type ship would make more sense. Making FirstContact or looting a derelict for alien technology would be worth the cost. |
| 389 | ** PlausibleDeniability. If the company went public with the interception of an alien signal and sent a full survey team then, quoting Burke in the next movie: "(...then) everybody steps in. Administration steps in, and there are no exclusive rights for anybody; nobody wins." If an alien life form is discovered by a bunch of space truckers "by accident" then they have a much better chance of getting that alien through customs and keeping exclusive rights to this discovery. Also, if it goes badly wrong (which it did), the Company can claim they had nothing to do with sending a ship there. The Company was no doubt able to claim the full insurance value for the ''Nostromo'' and it's cargo after it was lost. They would have had a harder time getting insurance for a survey team that they sent deliberately after an alien signal. |
| 390 | |
| 391 | * If the alien had acidic blood why didn't the spear Ripley shot it with at the end of the film melt? |
| 392 | ** It's entirely possible the acidic qualities of their blood requires exposure to oxygen to be triggered and activated. The spearing event happened in a zero-atmosphere setting when the ship's door was open to the vacuum of space. |
| 393 | ** Or the acid, being a liquid, boiled away in the vacuum before it could do enough damage to the spear's surface. |
| 394 | |
| 395 | * In the EstablishingShot inside the ''Nostromo'' before the crew is awaken, we can see two drinking birdies in the mess hall table. One of them is inert but the other is ''still dunking''. For how long was the crew supposed to be hibernating up till that moment? How long can a drinking bird be in motion like that? |
| 396 | ** The motion of those desk toys are driven by temperature changes, so it was probably the warming of the ship to receive the crew from hibernation that set it in motion. |
| 397 | |
| 398 | * So re-watching the movie and at the end I noticed something. When Ripley ducks into the closet with the space suits to get away from the xenomorph hiding in the wall, hanging up on the wall right next to her are three carpenter hatchets, likely of Estwig manufacture going by their appearance. Can anyone explain why a spaceship would have something like this on board since wood isn't something you're likely to find in outer space? |
| 399 | ** They do occasionally land, but a hatchet could be useful against something other than wood too. That scene is moments before Ripley uses a harpoon gun on the alien, and then the cable gets caught in the door and keeps the alien from being flung away from the ship. A hatchet could have been very useful in cutting that line at that point, for instance. |
| 400 | ** Assuming they're not just there [[RuleOfCool because they look good]] as CowTools, it makes sense for a lifeboat to have emergency tools for landing on a planet. If the lifeboat crashes they may need to cut their way through the hull if the airlock is jammed, and they can also be used to construct a shelter. |
| 401 | ** Fun Fact: Modern airliners do carry (concealed and secured, obviously) hatchets - in case a fire develops in some enclosed space and one has to get through to it to put it out. |
| 402 | ** Or the hatchets could be intended for breaking open stubborn supply crates that don't yield to a prybar. |
| 403 | |
| 404 | * Assuming what the director's commentary says about Ash's programming is canon, why would they program Ash with a sex drive when he doesn't have any sex organs? It doesn't help his cover. |
| 405 | ** The director's commentary may not be canon. It doesn't make much sense to try to create an android that can perfectly pass for human and then not include any sex organs, even if they are strictly-speaking non-functional. Considering how little clothing the crew wears into hypersleep it is bound that someone would notice that something is... missing. For what it's worth, the illustration in the ''Colonial Marines Technical Manual'' makes it clear that androids of their era are "fully equipped". |
| 406 | ** Also, Ash would need to have some understanding of human sexuality in order to convincingly imitate a human. |
| 407 | ** I haven't listened to the director's commentary, but I do remember there's a deleted scene where Ripley and some other crew member mention that Ash hasn't had sex with anyone and it's odd that he's never shown any interest in sex. |
| 408 | ** That crew member would be Lambert, and ''to be fair'' therefore the women can only truly vouch for if he's had sex with them, but it's also unlikely he's had sex with any of the men, either (putting aside assumptions about their sexuality, Ash is a newish member of the crew). |
| 409 | ** Also, because Ash's base Three Laws Compliant programming was overwritten by the commands to retrieve the alien, his "psychology" may have been corrupted in some fashion, which resulted in the abberant behaviour of being (albeit covertly, until the end of his life) attracted to a woman. |
| 410 | |
| 411 | * When the rocket engines fries the alien, what's that liquid hitting the camera? |
| 412 | ** Exhaust products from the shuttle. The engines are supposed to be plasma engines, so the brightly lit water is standing in for plasma. |
| 413 | |
| 414 | * Special Order 937. Ripley goes for a session with Mother to figure out how to destroy the alien, and Mother refuses to answer due to a secret special order, for the science officer only. If that order was a secret, why does Mother just casually mention it to someone other than Ash? |
| 415 | ** After Dallas's death Ripley asks Ash if he has any advice, and when he says he's "still collating," she says, "I've got access to Mother now and I'll get my own answers thank you." Cut to her entering the Mother interface chamber. She then asks Mother: "REQUEST CLARIFICATION ON SCIENCE INABILITY TO NEUTRALISE ALIEN". Mother answers "UNABLE TO CLARIFY". Ripley then types in "REQUEST ENHANCEMENT" Mother answers: "NO FURTHER ENHANCEMENT; SPECIAL ORDER 937; SCIENCE OFFICER EYES ONLY". Ripley types in "EMERGENCY COMMAND OVERRIDE 100375; WHAT IS SPECIAL ORDER 937?". She has to type more, presumably another security code, before Mother finally reveals the text of the order. In other words, Mother isn't "casually mentioning it", it is responding to a direct request by the current commanding officer of the ship, after Ripley uses emergency command codes. If Dallas had asked Mother such a direct question and used an emergency command override earlier he would presumably have gotten the same answers. |
| 416 | ** The point still remains. ''Any'' commanding officer worth their salt would get majorly pissed off when encountering a secret directive stating that both they and the crew are completely expendable (not to mention how heavily pissed would the ''crew'' be). First, why the Order 937 was even programmed into Mother? It would be enough for Ash to know its content. As a science officer, he could then subtly sabotage Mother's efforts to find how to neutralise a xenomorph (by inputting contradictory data, for example). Second: at this stage, no one has any firm suspicion that some deeper conspiracy is going on. Ripley personally queries Mother more because she thinks that Ash is incompetent or overwhelmed by the circumstances. There are some subtle hints beforehand (Ash letting Kane on board in violation of quarantine, plus him replacing the regular science officer shortly before the mission) but it does look more like JustFollowingOrders from a commander on first viewing. Then, on prodding, Mother suddenly reveals that there is some secret directive and boom. The point is, the directive and its content should not be (or even their ''existence'') revealed to ''anyone'' except Ash if the conspiracy was to succeed in the first place, and since he is an android, it could be simply programmed into him. |
| 417 | *** Why was Order 937 even programmed into Mother? Presumably to allow Ash "back door" access to Mother. He could for instance cite Order 937 to Mother to allow him to silently enter the computer interface chamber while Ripley was already in there without her permission. Or he might have been putting information he discovered about the alien into secure files that only he or the Company bio-warfare scientists could retrieve, in case something happened to him, citing Order 937 to Mother to secure them from the rest of the crew. |
| 418 | *** Why would Mother still allow the acting captain to view Order 937 then? I would guess that the basic architecture of the system is designed to give the commanding officer full access to everything. The Company programmers who put in Special Order 937 figured it was good enough to hide it essentially in plain sight, with Mother only revealing it's existence in response to a direct question, rather than going to the considerable effort of programming whole new routines to keep it securely hidden from the captain's command codes. This fits the popular fan theory that sending the ''Nostromo'' was kind of a spur-of-the-moment plan by a low-level executive rather than the entire Company throwing all of its resources behind the effort to acquire the alien. |
| 419 | |
| 420 | * When Dallas and Lambert return from the derelict with facehugged Kane, Ripley says they have to undergo a mandatory quarantine for 24 hours. Dallas protests that they have to be let in or Kane could die. This implies that there is no (or extremely basic) medical help to him available at all during the quarantine. How is such thing possible? Given that all sorts of things can occur during an [=EVA=] on an unknown planet (moon, asteroid etc.) and they had a proper [=EVA=] equipment - suits, radios, cameras, ropes, lights etc. - so they were expected to do such activity once in a while, they should have at least some emergency and diagnostic equipment available in the airlock. |
| 421 | ** Dallas probably thinks that the available medical equipment in the airlock won't be up to the task of saving Kane. Plus he probably doesn't like the idea of having to spend a whole 24 hours in the airlock with Lambert, an unconscious Kane, and an unknown alien life form, watching his friend and XO slowly die while all the time there's a full medical bay on the other side of the airlock door. It's a rare movie where following the book was the right choice and the maverick captain who bucks regulations causes a disaster, but this is one of them. |
| 422 | ** Which could be circumvented nicely during the design stage of the ''Nostromo'': just build a direct access from the airlock to the medlab. Anyone injured outside could be carried directly inside without exposing the rest of the ship, the medlab is a much better place for a 24 hours of confinement than an airlock and the science officer could make any sort of medical procedures from an external console (or in the worst case, enter the medlab via the airlock - that is one more person exposed to potential threat, still better than the entire ship). Clearly that ship was NoOSHACompliance in action from the start (are there no spaceworthiness checks in the future?) As for the second part, Dallas is clearly downtrodden during Kane's funeral and later, when Brett is attacked. The loss of his subordinates weighs heavily on him because he knows it happened because of him violating the procedures (plus, due to human loss on a mission, there's likely going to be an investigation if they manage to return home; when the word that he violated the quarantine procedures leaks out, there goes his career). His decision to go hunting for the xeno in the ducts was clearly an attempt at getting some redemption - sadly, in this case RedemptionEqualsDeath. |
| 423 | ** The ''Nostromo'' is not an exploration vessel, it's basically a big tug. The designers obviously didn't think it worth the expense to create a direct access tunnel from the airlock to the medbay that was sealed off from the rest of the ship on the off-chance that these freight haulers might one day be dealing with a contamination issue. The Company apparently wasn't required to make sure the ship had a full-time medical officer either. |
| 424 | ** Dallas obviously does feel responsible for the deaths in his crew, yes. I don't get the impression that he was worried about his own career and a possible investigation so much as guilty that he let his crew down. He makes two big mistakes that doom the crew: breaking quarantine, and taking off before the surveillance systems on the ship have been repaired. Then he also panics while in the air ducts, which dooms himself. |
| 425 | * Does Ash poke the dead face hugger so that it falls onto Ripley? The way it's edited this is strongly implied but there's no reason for him to intentionally frighten her. |
| 426 | |
| 427 | * Several times in this headscratcher, tropers make the point that Ash had basic programming that would not allow him to harm a human, that the Company would have had to override this programming with Special Order 937, and that this caused programming conflicts in Ash that lead to his erratic behavior, and so forth. But does Ash really have such programming? It's never talked about in the movie, because the crew only knows he's a robot after he has already attacked them and after that it's kind of pointless to discuss whether he should have been able to or not. Bishop in the sequel says he has Asimov-style programming that does not allow him to harm humans, and that the "old A2s always were a bit twitchy", but Bishop doesn't really know anything about the incident other than Burke saying that this was Ash's model. Is Burke telling the truth about Ash being a stock model with basic inhibitions programmed in, or was he some super-secret infiltration model that didn't have the basic "cannot harm humans" programming? |
| 428 | ** It's a common theory, as it handily explains a lot of Ash's erratic behavior once he's outed as an android following a nefarious agenda. It's not canon one way or the other, but it makes sense that Ash had some kind of behavioral inhibitors, as humans designing robots and androids without such a thing would be deeply stupid, and because the programming conflicts to neatly explain his behavior. Bishop's line about being "a bit twitchy" could just as easily mean Ash's model had behavior inhibitors, they just weren't as good as Bishop's, as to mean he didn't have them at all. |
| 429 | * Why are the Xenomorph queens' head crests shaped so much different than the normal Xenomorphs'? Is it meant to be symbolic of a crown, since she's the queen? |
| 430 | ** Maybe not strictly symbolism, but it's not out of the question for the queen of a eusocial species (like bees, ants, etc.) to have decorative structures as part of the mating process, especially as the queen's much larger than all the other Xenos. Also, it could be partially dependent on other factors—the Xenos in ''Aliens'' have a more armored and angular head carapace compared to the glassy, smooth one in the first film. Maybe it's a feature that develops over time, like an molting insect that retains chunks of its old exoskeleton for defensive/tertiary sexual characteristics and such. |
| 431 | * Just what is Ash's plan? He has to bring the alien on board and have it wipe out the crew. Then confine it to an area of the ship it can't get out of and deliver this massive star-freighter to a location close to Earth for the company to pick it up. That's an awful lot of variables for one android to handle. |
| 432 | ** That the plan to obtain a sample of the alien is so slipshod is why many fans believe it was all thrown together at the last minute by middle-management in the Company. Under this scenario, all they had was a signal that they translated as a warning about hostile life forms, so they put an android with orders to collect a sample on a convenient freighter and diverted the ship to check it out. It was entirely up to Ash to find out if there was any alien to obtain and if so how to bring it back to Earth. This required getting it onto the ship by letting Dallas, Lambert, and Kane in the airlock against orders. It required not making any attempts to remove the facehugger that could have succeeded. I suspect the reason they don't freeze Kane is that Ash didn't know if the alien would survive being put in artificial hibernation and so advised Dallas against it. Once the adult form is loose on the ship he is simply as unhelpful as he can be and still preserve his cover. At that point the ship is already on its way back to Earth, so all Ash really needs to do to complete his mission is prevent the crew from destroying the alien or changing the ship's course. I don't think Ash's plan required the elimination of the crew - it just required that they not interfere. He only acts to eliminate Ripley after she finds Special Order 937 and seems likely to adopt Lambert's plan of blowing up the ''Nostromo'' to kill the alien. |
| 433 | [[/folder]] |
| 434 | |
| 435 | [[folder: Blomkamp's Unmade Film]] |
| 436 | * Regarding Blomkamp's new film... his Twitter comments reveal that "[Fox] didn't really even know I was working on it" and that he started it because "Fox never said no." If he didn't even ask for permission before writing the script, how set-in-stone are his statements regarding rendering the last two films non-canon? Especially given that just last year, 20th Century Fox didn't let the author of the ''Alien: Sea of Sorrows'' novel—which they practically co-wrote and recognized as not only canon but part of a ContinuityReboot—decanonise ''3'' and ''Resurrection''. |
| 437 | ** Never mind: [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9ihfeibtCQ Blomkamp himself]] debunked the rumours of Alien 5 decanonising the last two films, although [[WordOfDante Sigourney Weaver has stated that]] it's going to be set in an AlternateTimeline where the events of ''[=Alien3=]'' and ''Resurrection'' never happened. |
| 438 | ** As for him working on it without Fox's knowledge. . . he can totally do that, Fox can't police people's creative ideas, only prevent them from actually making something using one of their intellectual properties without permission. He could have been brainstorming or working out a thought experiment. . . "what I'd do if I got to make an ''Alien'' film". . . and then present it to Fox when he had enough material to make a convincing pitch. Kind of like Rick Jaffa working on a script idea suggested by genetic engineering and retroviral drug research combined with people keeping chimps as pets only to have them go berserk, realise he's writing a ''[[Film/RiseOfThePlanetOfTheApes Planet of the Apes]]'' film, then calling Fox to see if they were interested in reviving the series. As for retconning ''Film/Alien3'' and ''Film/AlienResurrection'', that's tougher. Fox seems unwilling to remove them from canon, possibly because a lot of the fan backlash against remakes and reboots is "they're destroying the movies already made!" Never mind that most of the ''Alien'' fandom would probably love a new canon that ignores everything after ''{{Film/Aliens}}'', that point of view isn't vocal enough to get the attention of the Fox executives. And with Ridely Scott intending to keep creative control of the series, ''Film/{{Prometheus}}'' and ''Film/AlienCovenant'' being highly divisive, and now Disney buying Fox outright, it's very uncertain what the future of the ''Alien'' and ''Predator'' franchises will be. |
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/context.php
FollowingContext Headscratchers / Alien
Go To
- Show Spoilers
- Night Vision
- Sticky Header
- Wide Load
