Headscratchers / Aliens

Headscratchers for Aliens.

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• Why did Ripley wonder who was laying the eggs when speaking with Bishop, since she herself pointed out in the company meeting that Kane had said there were thousands of eggs in the Derelict? This seems like a flub.
  • Not really. Whether you believe the colonists were all impregnated because they went to the Derelict en masse (very unlikely) or because the aliens can do some kind of biological shift to kickstart their species (ie, the single alien that came out of Newt's dad did something that turned it into a queen) Ripley still doesn't know how those thousands of eggs turned up on the Derelict. All she knows is that facehuggers don't lay the eggs, chestbursters don't lay the eggs, and normal aliens don't lay the eggs... so just what kind of alien does?
• Why did Burke expect any kind of “exclusive rights” to the value of the xenomorph (had his plan worked)? Ripley told the board all about them. Ostensibly, they didn’t believe her, but if it turns out she was right, it seems to me the company would assert they knew about it, hence no bonanza for Burke. And if they DIDN’T assert ownership, then wouldn’t all the rights belong to Ripley?
  • Isn't he planning to kill Ripley by impregnating her with the alien? If she dies then he's the sole survivor and any benefit from the mission goes to him.
  • It's more the old "success has many fathers" chestnut. If Burke goes through proper channels to say "Hey, I think there might be something valuable at this spot, we should check out," it becomes a full expedition with everyone who's anyone wanting a piece of the pie; Burke would probably be squeezed out very early the in planning stages for such an expedition, and in five or six years, when it finally leaves to go investigate this potential goldmine he first brought up, the best he can do is wave to the ship as it leaves. If, on the other hand, some colonists "accidentally" find something valuable he had them look into on a hunch, or the Marines sent to investigate the colony "accidentally" bring something valuable back from their mission, he gets full credit for discovering this thing, even if he's not in a position to make bank from all the research and development that results.
  • More superficially, if television and books are still as big in the future then at least he could probably make a decent buck selling his story that way with no other survivors to back him up.
• The terraforming plant is a huge nuclear reactor, like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima station. With the cooling system ruined, the worst case should have been a meltdown. There were explosions at Fukushima and Chernobyl, but they weren't nuclear explosions, nor was there risk of such. Nuclear bombs have a very different design and means of operation ESPECIALLY a thermonuclear bomb. Granted, the Nostromo exploded due to a similar situation, but it was explicitly a self-destruct mechanism, and considering it blew up in several waves, it’s likely most of explosions were the cargo. Of course, this is The Company we’re dealing with here.
  • Canonically, the atmosphere processors are truly massive structures, the main cone alone having a height of a kilometer and half. The 1 Terawatt fusion reactor is there to power several gigantic plasma coils, which is where the atmosphere gets dissociated into its atomic components. I guess that much pressurized plasma would get very volatile if burning without control, and a big kaboom would be expected.
  • Explosive Overclocking because "meltdown" isn't mentioned once. The nuclear fusion reaction and terraforming on a planetary scale doesn't seem to be sustained through any other method. Problem is, without human intervention, it won't shutdown if the primary heat exchangers or other critical systems get somehow damaged. The automated machinery will commence emergency venting instead. The smaller explosions we see throughout the infrastructure are merely the station's attempts to delay the inevitable big explosion failing. One would assume without this, the time until the nuclear blast would be far shorter, with the size and radius being far greater.
• Where exactly did the Alien Queen come from? Was she the one who spawned all the other aliens, or did she only emerge from one of the drones after the infestation? Are the drones her siblings, or her children?
  • It’s hard to say how many of the Drones are hers and where she came from, but there are theories. Namely, one suggested in the novel and the EU is that xenomorphs can produce royal jelly like insects to create a hive and they would supply it to an individual that would molt into a Queen. So one possible outcome is that the Queen is formed during the infestation and thus they would be a mix of siblings and spawn, since there were a lot of eggs on the Derelict. Another is that one of the eggs on board the Derelict could’ve housed a royal facehugger that appeared in the Assembly Cut of Alien 3 or a regular one which developed a Queen as in the theatrical cut of that film. A final, rare theory is that the egg for a Queen was made via transforming a colonist like the deleted scene from the first film, as the second and third films’ novelizations still referenced the scene as a theory that the xenomorphs may use it for some purpose the Queen and eggs can’t fulfill.
  • If you take Alien 3 and Resurrection as canon, the queen is a special type of egg different from the others. Ants for example lay some eggs specifically to be queens so that they can create new colonies when they hatch. Theoretically each nest of eggs should have at least one containing a queen, and if a worker/drone alien is activated then they likely make it their mission to make sure the queen is hatched next so she can lay more eggs.
• I know the movie was designed in a different era, and Rule of Scary took precedent, but still: autonomous androids, remote controlled space craft... they couldn’t recon the area around the reactor with drones / droids? You could argue the signal would be too weak, but keep in mind, they were able to stream full analogue video from helmet mounted cameras.
  • The whole mission seems to be viewed as routine by the Marines. As a routine mission they didn't bring along expensive drones and droids and didn't bother to take unusual precautions, they just did an aerial recon and then sent in the squad for a look.
  • Lieutenant Gorman was also woefully inexperienced and basically giving orders straight out of the manual. A seasoned CO with good instincts might have sensed something hinky about the colony and ordered more remote recon before declaring the area secure, or even moving the actual Marines in in the first place. Or this particular platoon may not have had that kind of gear available at the time.
  • Contact with the planet is also quite limited, with someone saying it can take weeks for a message and response. They already have reports that there's no indigenous life on the planet, so nothing to watch out for. Ripley is the only living human who's experienced what it's like to face one of the aliens, and even she a civilian survived. They just underestimated the scale of what it could be like if there were multiple aliens against trained soldiers. So a) they assume it's just a faulty transmitter or some mundane thing that needs fixing and they're just checking to make sure, b) they assume it's nothing they can't handle since the only recorded run-in with one of these creatures just resulted in six civilian casualties mainly because they didn't know what they were up against.

• Why does Ripley say that Burke needs to go back to Earth when Hicks snaps and decides to kill him? They've already got a mountain of evidence that Burke and indirectly Weyland-Yutani are responsible for the loss of the colony, so what is the point in keeping the rat bastard alive? Especially after he's already cemented himself as being willing to kill the other survivors.
  • So he can face justice in a court and implicate the company that way. With Burke dead, no public trial would happen. The Company can blame everything on the conveniently deceased Burke and sweep their past actions under the carpet.
  • And if they kill him, what proof do they have that he was intending to kill them? With him dead, the company would be able to try and poke holes in the case. With him alive, they stood a better chance of getting their story believed.
  • And note that at the beginning of the film, Ripley went through the whole business of trying to prove something happened with no evidence. She's likely thinking of the Marines who — if they don't get horribly killed — could be facing all sorts of legal trouble if they don't have proof of what Burke did.
  • There are two possibilities: either Burke is operating under some blanket Company directive to obtain Alien specimens, or he's on his own initiative looking into Ripley's impossible story. If the former, bringing Burke back could expose the Company as Evil, Inc. and put a stop to these shenanigans. If the latter, then showing the damage one loose cannon executive can do in the name of profit could result in tighter scrutiny of corporate workings by whatever governments exist, putting a stop to these shenanigans.
  • And maybe Ripley just isn't the type who'd murder another human. She's not a soldier or used to making those kinds of judgment calls in a war situation, so she might just prefer Burke is punished the legal way.

• You'd think they'd have even a skeleton crew on the Sulaco just in case something happened.
  • And you'd think that the Marines would be better at following orders (Drake and Vasquez notably disobey the chain of command and do their own thing when the aliens attack first). The whole situation is engineered by Burke getting an incompetent lieutenant put in charge so yes it's quite a faux pas in universe too. And with Word of God confirming that Drake and Vasquez at least are serving as an alternative to prison, there's reason to believe other Marines in the unit could be such undesirables. So, Gorman could be afraid of the second crew taking off and leaving them stranded on the planet if something went wrong. Keeping a second dropship as back-up that could be operated from the ground seemed to be his idea of a good compromise.
  • The fact that the troops are explicitly referred to as Colonial MARINES would suggest that the ship should be under the command of, and crewed by, whatever they call their Space Navy, unless we're to assume that the 11 enlisted (mostly infantry) troops, one android, and one officer are qualified in starship operation, interstellar navigation, and all of the administrative and logistical issues associated therewith. Even if that were the case, it still stretches belief that the Sulaco, an armed ship of war, is intended to be left in orbit unattended while ALL of the troops it carries are on the ground, conducting a Search and Rescue op that has a legitimate chance of becoming a COMBAT Search and Rescue, without Mission Control.
  • The Marine Corps higher-ups probably view this sort of mission as low-risk. The planet doesn't have any reported native life and it might just be a broken transmitter. If the Marines are stretched thin in other conflicts then it makes sense to send an available ship with the minimum people necessary — one squad — and a green officer.
  • While most of this is down to Burke pulling the strings to make the mission go as badly as possible, don't forget that there wasn't necessarily a need for someone to be on the Sulaco. The second dropship could normally be summoned down with a transmitter that accidentally got destroyed in a bit of bad luck. Even so, they were still able to bring it down to the planet on remote pilot.

• Why do the Weyland-Yutani suits disbelieve Ripley's story about the xenomorphs when the previous movie established that the Company had foreknowledge about them?
  • They were pretending to disbelieve it. They needed to continue to maintain the facade that they didn't know about the xenomorphs, however, they were upset that the colonists hadn't found the aliens yet and used Ripley's testimony to guide Newt's parents to it.
  • Not necessarily. Just because one ship in the company's employ was rerouted to pick up the aliens doesn't mean that everyone in the company's higher ups knew about it. Burke even says he wants to have exclusive rights to the aliens — which precludes the notion that everyone else on the board already knew about them. Most likely, maybe one or two people in the company suspected something about that planet, sent the Nostromo, then when it disappeared off the face of space, they wrote it off and forgot about it without telling anyone.
  • Considering how the attempt to have Ash and the Nostromo bring back an alien led to the destruction of a multi-million credit freighter, its entire human crew (apparently), a valuable synthetic, and the freighter's cargo, whomever originally approved the side-trip to look into that beacon's signal had ample reason to cover it up from his or her W-Y superiors. Failed schemes that cost the Company a fortune are grounds for termination.
  • And a ship disappearing without explanation is better grounds for an insurance claim than one being destroyed on a foray your people had ordered it to undertake. So even if the higher-ups at W-Y did find out what was going on, they'd have a multi-million-credit reason to keep quiet about it.
  • And it was 57 years ago. Everyone who was involved is probably dead, incriminating files were likely destroyed, and the incident long forgotten about, as the creature they wanted never made it back to earth. Hence, they subsequently colonized the planet and no one even knew the Derelict craft was there until Ripley mentioned it.
  • From a thematic basis, it's actually quite ironic that such an evil deed was committed by what was probably a select group of people within the company, and after everything went sideways it was essentially forgotten. But for Me, It Was Tuesday, indeed.
    • Technically, that's not totally true. In the novel Alien: River of Pain, which is considered canon, we find out that Weyland-Yutani secretly backed the colonization with the ulterior motive of discovering the Derelict, and this information was only limited to a few scientists and officials stationed at the colony. They still knew there was some kind of alien presence on the moon, but because anyone who had ever previously discovered the ship either died or disappeared indefinitely, they didn't know exactly where on the planet it was. They were still actively looking for the ship until Ripley came back and finally confirmed its exact coordinates. Additionally, some of the short films for Alien: Covenant reveal that W-Y already had extensive knowledge on the xenomorphs, their physiologies, and their capabilities years before the Derelict's message was even detected because David the android sent out messages to the company's higher ups detailing his studies on the Engineer planet. So, even though more than half a century has passed since then, it's not unreasonable to assume that the information on the xenomorphs is still present but only limited to the company's highest authority.
    • That would be a Retcon then, not something established in the film. Considering only the film, it's reasonable if not probable that the Company forgot the entire incident.
    • If we're only taking the film into account then it still backs up the idea that the company never gave up on finding the alien. Think about it, what other reason would there be for putting a colony on LV-426? They're only terraforming the planet, no mining equipment, no nearby company stations or other colonies. All they're doing is maintaining a company presence there and sending out teams to search the area. What would they be looking for if not the aliens?
    • Liveable space, valuable resources, stuff unknown to human science, and so on. LV-426 may just have gone from "uncharted" to "suitable for colonization" in the 57 years Ripley spent in cryosleep, and a colony was plunked down just because it was next on the list for expanding the human sphere of influence. Basically, the answer can be whichever is personally more satisfying: that the Company is an evil conspiracy whose sole defining goal is to find and study the Aliens, or that they're the uncaring evil of profit and bureaucracy run amok.
• Okay, so the plan from Burke, and other W-Y execs later on, is to get someone "impregnated" with a xenomorph embryo, then halt the embryo's progression with the freezer units. Except, we've seen various xenomorphs function in a hard vacuum, where the temps would be even colder than in the sleep chambers. So, wouldn't a xenomorph embryo still be quite capable of developing and exiting as a chest-burster even while the host was in suspended animation?
  • Space Is Cold
  • We don't know exactly how the hypersleep capsules work. They're called freezers, but that doesn't mean they work only through lowering someone's temperature. Indeed, they can't be just freezers, because sticking someone in a freezer will just kill them, not put them in hibernation. There are probably drugs involved as well, possibly different atmospheric mixes, etc. It might or it might not work on an alien embryo.
  • For what it's worth, the Expanded Universe shows that chestbursters can indeed mature in humans in hypersleep, albeit much more slowly. And those "freezers" were explicitly set "as low as they can go without killing" the humans.
  • And you're forgetting that they don't know the specifics of how the alien gestates. Ripley is the only living person with knowledge of it, and she wasn't the one studying it — Ash was. And also don't forget that Burke was originally going to just bring the facehuggers back to the company labs. But when Ripley busts him, he comes up with the last minute plan to impregnate her with the alien to keep her quiet. So he clearly didn't give it that much thought.
  • ^In the film, Ripley explains what she believes to be Burke's "master plan", but her cold delivery does not really convey how it's really a last-minute desperate plan to cover his ass and make some money. For another issue with it showing how it's not really well thought-out, his plan requires sabotaging the pods of all of the other Marines. How exactly was he supposed to do this at all, much less do it without anyone noticing? As a civilian, he would be one of the first ones put under. If his plan somehow managed to work, wouldn't it be a little bit suspicious that the sleeping pods for *only* the actual Marines strangely all failed? How does he handle Bishop?
    • Burke’s plan isn’t fully clear, but it’s worth noting that when Ripley suggested Burke was going to sabotage the Marines’ freezers, the Marines don’t respond with “pfft, how can he do that, we freeze civies first.” We all know how dominant the Company is in this universe, but that the Marines don’t even question this suggests that Burke is even more in control than is outright stated. He explicitly attempts to control the situation when Ripley suggests nuking the aliens. As for how suspicious it would look for him alone surviving, the Company wouldn’t care now that they have their very valuable samples.
• The Weyland-Yutani execs say the only part of Ripley's story that they're able to confirm through the Nostromo's flight recorder is the stop they made at LV-426. So the Nostromo didn't have any cameras or microphones, on the bridge or elsewhere, that record to the flight recorder, like all modern ships are required to have?
  • The ship was old, maybe all of that malfunctioned at some point. Or W-Y lied in order to put all the blame on Ripley.
  • Ripley also mentions to Dallas that "we're blind on B and C decks" before they lift off LV-426. Dallas declines to have the repair made before they take off, because he just wants to get off the planet (understandably). So we know that at least some of Nostromo's recording gear was nonfunctional for the main events of the film.
  • In Alien: Isolation, the crew of the freighter Aniesadora wipe the flight data recorder to keep the company from getting their hands on the alien. You can find some fragments of its data scattered throughout the game, implying Weyland-Yutani knows somewhat what happened, but not the whole story.
  • Ash spent alot of time "collating" with MU-TH-UR, which Ripley found difficult to believe. While not every android in the Alien franchise has worked against humans, Ash was definitely under directions from the company. As the "medical officer" he could have re-written Kane's cause of death, omitted his analysis of the facehugger, and erased and references to the creature's presence in their records.
• How did Burke manage to release the two live facehuggers from the lab to attack Ripley and Newt, on his own, without being attacked himself?
  • he could just loosen the lid enough that it is able to push the top off by itself while giving him time to run.
• How do those rifles magazines carry 100 10mm rounds?
  • They are caseless rounds. Generally, the case is at least four times the volume of the bullet and is not even close to full of powder. So basically take a present day magazine and multiply its carrying capacity by 4.
  • For what it's worth, the Aliens Colonial Marines Technical Manual says the rounds are 10mm x 24, and that the clip holds the rounds in a "U-band" conveyor. Also that the clips carry only 99 rounds, and are usually loaded to 95 rounds to reduce jams.
  • “Caseless” doesn’t mean “without something behind the projectile.” Modern caseless weapons still use propellant. The only way for the assault rifles to truly work in-story, is they’d need to be rail / coil guns.
    • Yes, but caseless rounds have had a lot of interest from the military — since about the 70s if memory serves — because, if all the kinks can be worked out, they would dramatically decrease the volume and mass of each individual bullet, and thus dramatically increase a soldier's capacity to carry ammunition, either in the gun or in the form of additional magazines. A magazine of caseless ammunition carrying 100 rounds while a similarly-sized magazine of conventional round carries 30 may be a case of Artistic License - Firearms, but not a ridiculous one.
• What does "We're in the pipe. Five by five." mean anyway?
  • In all likelihood "we're in the pipe" means they are on the correct descent trajectory to land safely, which is important given that reentry could very very easily rip their drop ship to pieces if they hit wrong or don't follow the correct path. Five-by-five could mean any one of several different "all good" conditions, including something as simple as comms are clear or as complex as 'there are no adverse crosswinds, weather conditions, interference patterns or anything else that should upset our descent'.
  • 'Five by five' is a communications term. Referring to the bars that represent a signal. Five bars means a full signal.
    • More specifically, "five by five" refers to signal strength and clarity. A strong signal that is not clear, or a clear signal that is very weak, are both equally useless. "Five by five" indicates a signal both strong and clear, thus optimal, so could have evolved into a shorthand for "everything's as good as it can be."
• How is the alien queen able to get aboard the drop ship without crashing it, or at least without arousing suspicion? The ship is hovering in the air, and suddenly it has an extra 500kg of weight hanging off one side? And Bishop doesn't even notice?
  • The exploding atmospheric processing station was throwing a lot of debris around, including at the dropship. There's a quick insert where you can see (and hear) the landing gear straining to retract with lots of garbage on top of the skids before the dropship turns and leaves. Bishop probably thought the extra weight was all debris. Also, it's the landing gear well for the single skid in the back of the ship that the queen crawls into, which is roughly centered. An extra 500kg there wouldn't be as noticeable as on one of the front gear, which are to either side of the bay for the APC.
  • The dropship that went down from the Sulaco was built to carry eleven Marines, two civilians and all their weaponry. The one that's going back up is carrying just four people. So the queen's weight would balance it out probably.
  • Speculation: Bishop - like Ash before him - was ordered to recover an alien if at all possible, no matter the cost. Why not? The Company had a lot more evidence on this trip than they did fifty-seven years ago. He hooked the landing gear on purpose so she could hop up into a landing gear well.
    • There are a few problems with this idea. First of all, if Bishop were ordered to recover an alien he had opportunities to do so long before the flight to the processing station to rescue Newt. He was alone and unobserved by any humans while studying the facehuggers in the medlab and after he left the colony to remote pilot the dropship down. It seems unlikely he would have predicted that his best chance to get an alien was that the queen would follow Ripley up the elevator and jump right in to the offered landing gear well. Secondly, if Bishop had been ordered to obtain samples at all cost, when Ripley told him she wanted the facehuggers destroyed would he have told her Burke's orders to have them preserved? Wouldn't he have just said "of course" and then quietly hidden the samples? Thirdly, Bishop seems as surprised as anyone else that the queen stowed away on the dropship, and if he knew she were there it seems unlikely he would position himself in a perfect position for her to rip him in two (if his primary goal is to obtain a sample, his secondary goal must be to remain functional to ensure that his primary goal is achieved). And, finally, if Bishop is secretly following Company orders to betray Ripley then it ruins the story beats of Ripley learning to trust an android and fully justifies her initial attitude towards him.

• Why so few Marines? There was a problem at the company's billion dollar installation deep into space that was potentially serious, and Ripley's story about the alien must have been partially believed, so why were just a dozen Marines and an android deemed sufficient to handle it?
  • There are a few possible explanations. First of all, the Marines all treat this as strictly routine, so it can't be too unusual to send one undersized platoon to check out a faulty transmitter. Second, it's possible that the Marines are stretched thin, and an undersized platoon is all that can be spared from more important operations. Third, like the crew of the Nostromo in the first movie, the implication is that humans have encountered hostile alien life forms before, but nothing as dangerous as this particular species. The Marines call this a "bug hunt" as if they've been on them before and handled them just fine. Either other lifeforms they've found turned out to not be too dangerous to Marines or they didn't exist at all when reports of them were investigated.
    • It's reasonable to assume that the Marines have definitely met alien species before, not least because the dropship has the name "Bug Stomper" painted on it.
  • There is another possibility: According to the novelization, the company didn't want to front the money for a large scale mission. This means they only afforded enough for a small crew, which is what we see with the Sulaco. By doing so, this cut down the means of the Marines being able to destroy any possible specimens that the company could use. What they didn't expect was Ellen Ripley to get on board (which to them, they considered as a bonus, as they could tie off a loose end), suggesting that they nuke the site from orbit (think about, Vasquez recommended using nerve gas on the nest, which gets shot down because they didn't know if it would work, and Hudson suggested "bugging out and calling it even," which would have been the go-to option if Ripley hadn't been there). Combine the fact that the mission was underfunded with the addition of Burke, a lawyer who had no reason being there, it shows that the company was involved with trying to get another specimen. Having a smaller crew may cut down the risk of not being able to get one. And of course, Ripley threw another wrench into their plans.
  • The simplest answer is that the film likely wouldn't work well if they sent sufficient Marines to match the size of the Sulaco (i.e. hundreds of Marines). The film might have made more sense if the Sulaco was a much smaller transport ship.

• Why is Bishop in hypersleep with the rest of the crew? In the first movie, we learn the company places synthetics on various ships without informing the crew of either their true nature, or their orders. Fast forward 57 years to Aliens, and Bishop was in hyper-sleep with the rest of the team. Why? Isn't the point of having a synthetic, sorry artificial person on board, to monitor the ship systems, its sleeping crew, and just keep an eye on things? Everyone knows Bishop is an android (except Ripley) so at some point while in the lifeboat, the practice of stealthily placing synthetics among human crews, was dropped. Yet, Bishop, is seen leaving a freezer as if to reassure everyone he is human. Burke even states the practice of using androids is standard and routine now. The only reason is to give Ripely a chance to flip out in the mess hall later on, when she learns what he is. 'Sleeping' with the rest of the team means he is no position to respond to any unforeseen problems that might arise during the trip to LV-426, which is one the main reasons for having one of his kind of board a starship in the first place. Only in the first movie, do we see the practice of deliberately placing synthetics on spaceships without informing the crew.
  • Originally James Cameron had planned to have a scene of Bishop awake on the Sulaco alone monitoring the ship and crew at faster-than-human speeds. During filming he worked out the knife-game scene with Lance Henriksen and decided he liked that better. In-universe, it might be an attempt to build camaraderie between the humans and their android. It would be much easier to think of Bishop as part of the team if he goes to sleep with the rest of them, instead of creepily staying awake for months watching them sleep.
  • Which leads to a related question. Did Burke deliberately omit to inform Ripley about Bishop, to gauge her reaction when does learn? The off-hand manner in which he apologizes, and then gives the company line about Ash having 'malfunctioned', seems to imply he may? have kept Bishops identity from Ripley intentionally.
    • Burke may in fact have forgotten that Ripley would have a bad reaction to the news that a synthetic was on board, and it does seem to be standard practice to include one (none of the Marines seem to find it unusual in any way). He gives the line about Ash malfunctioning because that's the official Company line, and he's a Company spokesman. No need to go into unpleasant details with the Marines.
  • How do we know Bishop wasn't in his own specially designed cryopod? Ash was in one in the first film.

• The scene with the motion trackers picking up the hamsters is a great early fake-out, but how have those hamsters survived up to this point? The only logical explanation is that Newt has been risking her life on a near-daily basis simply to keep them fed, watered and cleaned out, without bothering to take them back to her hiding place.
  • Or there may be some form of automation in the cage. It is the future.
  • Do we know for sure if the cage is even sealed? Possibly the cage door had been left open by the hamsters' original owner when the xenomorphs attacked, and the little furballs - too tiny for the xenos to bother with - have had the freedom to leave, all along. They could be living off food pellets from a nearby cabinet and water from leaky pipes, using the entire room as a latrine, and only returning to the cage after foraging because it's where they've always lived and feel most at home.

• Why do the xenomorphs just put all the "used" host bodies in a pile to rot rather than eating them? Seems like a huge waste. I've heard the theory that they don't actually kill humans for food but more to guard their territory, however we see the Alien in Alien 3 eating someone so I'm confused.
  • For what it's worth, the latest Alien RPG says that the people put in the walls are somehow slowly dissolved by the hive and provide nutrition for all the aliens occupying it.
    • That would actually make a lot of sense regarding the xenos, they secrete that resin, which in turn would also be mildly acidic, hence why the bodies of the chestburster victims look so messed up, the resin softens them up so their inner mouths can drink up the resulting slurry, kind of hard to eat solid food, when your tongue takes up most of your mouth and also has a mouth.
  • Gauging by how the alien is able to grow in the first film, perhaps they can survive on regular food as well (it's implied that one grew after eating some of the rations the Nostromo crew had). So they might not need the humans for food in the colony. The one in the third film gestates in a prison with limited facilities, so we could assume it had to take whatever it could get.
• So, for 20 whole years, the crashed engineer ship has remained undetected, despite 1) the thing is freaking huge and 2) there have been people there for 20 years, judging by the conversation in the little buggy thing between Newt and her family, they weren't that far out, a few hours at least, maybe a day or so out at most, how exactly did nobody find it before Newts family?
  • Maybe they rarely went outside the safety of the colony, since the majority were families with children. Maybe the way to the ship is a particularly difficult terrain or is through a route that would be inconvenient to use.
  • That the colony was set up so close to the Derelict is interesting because it may be an indication someone at the company wanted them there. But the Derelict's signal had stopped transmitting and given the inhospitable atmosphere (requiring full suits in Nostromo's time) before the terraforming machine created an oxygen atmosphere, there was little interest in exploring what was considered a wasteland.
  • Alien: Isolation reveals that the derelict's signal was deactivated by a group of salvagers who had traced the flight recorder of the Nostromo back to LV-426 about 15 years after the first film. They subsequently awakened another xenomorph themselves, and that was a whole other story that, much like the first film, killed practically everyone who could have possibly relayed all of what happened. But the signal remained deactivated, and aside from that, the ship was shielded from the colony's ground scanners by an enormous mountain range situated between them, while LV-426's thick, debris-laden atmosphere shrouded the ship both from the naked eye and satellite scanning. And, it appears at some point, the ship was damaged by volcanic activity, as when it is seen by the Jordans, the port side that was peaking over the mountain ranges when the crew of the Nostromo first saw it has fallen. Most of the latter information is taken directly from Alan Dean Foster's novelization, and so far, its the only information released that makes any lick of sense.
• Apparently, Amanda Ripley died of cancer, but didn't Peter Weyland find a literal cure for cancer a century and a half ago?
  • Cancer is actually an extremely complex disease that has so many different variations that each require a specific treatment, with additional variables such as the person's own health or genetic history. And since we have no idea how research is going to progress in the next hundred years, all we can do is assume that cancer won't be eradicated like smallpox because it's not that kind of disease. Amanda could simply have been diagnosed too late for the treatment to save her or even died before she knew what she had.
  • Or perhaps she opted not to have treatment. Given her age and the fact that cancer treatment can involve basically poisoning the cells out of you, she might have preferred to die peacefully on her own terms rather than enduring painful treatments.
  • Or perhaps the cure is extremely expensive, and Amanda couldn't afford it?
  • There's another option that people forget: Weyland was the head of an Evil Corporation. To reference another film in regards to the topic, "Treating the disease is more profitable than curing it." Why sell a one-time cure that could help people and be less profitable, when you can sell a treatment and keep getting paid for each use?
    • Because they could charge an enormous amount for the one-time cure and at the same time reap a huge PR benefit, while the potential fallout from someone discovering that they have a cure but are suppressing it is huge. If you have both, why not sell both? Sell the cure for a very large amount, and the treatments at a more affordable level? Also, why go to the expense to develop a cure in the first place if you aren't going to sell it?
    • We're talking about a MegaCorp that's an Evil Corporation, who has gotten lots of people killed trying to get ahold of the xenomorphs. Do you honestly think that they'd share the cure for cancer if they had it? Probably not. Would they sell treatments to force people to constantly treat themselves and get payment for each time they use it? Yes. A one time cure is only a one time sell. Constant treatments is a steady income. The company is focused on costs (just look at the scene with the debriefing scene, with the board focused more on the loss of their ship and cargo. Hell, they literally list the cost of the Nostromo, minus the cost of the payload. No mention of the loss of life, just the lost of ship and cargo that affected their profits). The company doesn't care about making things better, even if they had the ability to. They're focused on profit. That's why, if they had a one time cure for cancer, they wouldn't sell it. They'd sell a treatment, so that they get multiple people paying constantly for it. The company is in no way benevolent, and they would probably even sell treatments to those who could pay the one-time cost, but that's cutting out people they could get more money from (because that means more customers to them). The company is in no way the good guys. They've allowed for people to die trying to get a xenomorph. They wouldn't care about curing people flat out. They'd only think about the cost, and to them, a one time cure to sell to anyone isn't as profitable as constantly treating it is. It's not so different from real life, as companies now design products that are easy to break and harder to repair because it forces customers to buy the same product again (there are even companies right now trying to fight a Rights to Repair bill, in addition to companies using planned obsolescence for their products, because they want the customers to buy again, not one time forever). They think only of their wallet, and selling a one-time cure doesn't pay off in the long run for them.
    • Yes the Company is undoubtedly a villain in the films, but they don't have to be Stupid Evil. An Evil Corporation that consistently does enough stupid things will find itself out-competed by a less stupid (but possibly still evil) corporation.
    • Not to mention that it's never been shown that W-Y's cancer treatment is permanent. So curing someone's cancer once isn't necessarily going to stop them from getting cancer all over again, anyway. Which is more shrewd in the long term: to keep a cancer patient teetering on the brink of death for a couple of years until they completely run out of money and croak, or to sell them the same treatment at intervals for a lifetime, so they have both the time and health in the interim to go back to work and afford the next round of care?

• One thing deliberately left vague is just how far the colony is from Earth? It seems like it needed to be a decent distance away to justify putting everyone into cryopods, but even if it was just a relatively short span of time like a month, that brings up the issue of what exactly the Marines were hoping to accomplish other than cleaning up whatever mess was left behind. When Hicks mentions that it would be 17 days with no response before backup would be sent, how much additional time would be needed for transport there? Perhaps the distance is actually pretty short time-wise but the cryopods are needed for the FTL travel?
  • One of the expanded universe novels (Aliens (Steve Perry Trilogy)) does make mention that hyperspace is not kind to the human mind, and cryosleep helps with that. But the main advantage is in cost: put the crew in suspended animation, and they aren't breathing air, eating food, drinking water, or any of the other things you need to do to stay alive while not in hibernation. Thus, you can save a lot of money by simply not stocking all that many consumables in a ship and keeping the crew in hypersleep for the majority of the trip.
• Why do the aliens require so much food to survive? They aren't that much bigger than humans (about 7 or 8 feet tall), but seem to require a human (or human-size creature) for food every few days to keep from starving. Do they just have really fast metabolisms? That would explain why they move so fast.
  • What? Most of the questions about the Aliens' metabolism is why they never seem to eat at all, not about why they eat so much. And since across all the films, we've really only seen them take a handful of bites in what could be seen as feeding behavior (as opposed to biting as a weapon to kill), it's hard to see where "why do they eat so much" comes from.

• Why would the Weyland-Yutani corporation build atmospheric processing stations so darn close to the off-world colonies? They're mostly reliable, but in the event of catastrophic meltdown if critical systems suffer damage, they'll explode with a blast radius of roughly 30 km.
  • If they go unstable beyond repair, you've only got a measly four hours to evacuate everyone and hope for the best.
  • The temptation is to give the answer "cost", but having already gone to the massive expensive of making this installations light-years from Earth, what is a mere few miles after that?
  • At least build a fallout shelter.
  • It probably makes more sense to put the processing station where someone can get to it and fix it while it's still a small problem, rather than putting it 20+ miles away from everyone. The transit time from the colony to the processing station (by truck, presumably) might make the difference between a small problem and the kind of catastrophic problem seen in the movie.
    • Hadley's Hope was a working colony—the only reason they were there was to help run and maintain the atmosphere processor. So it makes sense to have the living and control areas (the colony) right next door to the place where most of them work. Since it took (probably) some military-grade firepower, plus more military-grade ordnance exploding outside (the dropship) to damage enough systems to cause a meltdown, I'd say the processor was pretty darn safe.
  • Also, this is Weyland-Yutani we're discussing. It's not like they have a long and glorious history of giving much of a shit about the potential risks / harm that their various endeavours might result in.
  • Speculation: it was the other way around. A team goes in and sets up these "fully automated" atmosphere processors. Once they've been running for a while ("it takes decades...") colonists arrive - and they set up shop near the atmosphere processors because the air is better there. That would also explain why no one had explored very far from the colony.

• Why it didn't occur to Ripley to fire directly at the Alien Queen? Would have saved them a lot of grief.
  • The queen was the only one who could understand Ripley's threat: Attack me and I fry all your eggs. The warriors would only stop attacking if the queen ordered them to. So Ripley needed the queen. Later on, she didn't have time to shoot the queen because she was fighting off the warriors, and then ran out of ammo.
  • Yeah, but Ripley has time to fire at least three grenades into the Queen's eggsac. One would have done the job of destroying it; if Ripley had just fired one of those grenades at the Queen's body, she would have at least crippled it to the point it couldn't follow her and fight her on the ship.
    • I don't think Ripley had any reason to believe the Queen could easily detach form the eggsac and survive without bleeding out. Even if it wouldn’t kill the Queen quickly, one would think it would be crippled and in too much pain to do anything.
  • I think Ripley wanted for the Queen to see her children being ripped to pieces and her eggs burning. Also, she DID throw a grenade belt into the room while retreating with Newt, most likely with the intention of killing or at least maiming the Queen. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, as otherwise we would have missed the Power Loader fight), that wasn't the case.
  • Maybe Ripley is just too stressed mentally to think rationally.
  • It's stated fairly implicitly in the movies that Ripley has no idea what she's doing. She is, after all, merely a commercial pilot. Whatever access she may have had to guns at home, it's unlikely to have been anything more than a handgun (which explicitly still exist in that universe), let alone a plasma rifle/grenade launcher/flamethrower. Plus, she's also spent 60 years in deep sleep. Imagine handing a civilian from the WWII era a modern, military grade weapon and telling them to have at it. Odds are, their aim would probably suck after only two hours too.
    • It's stated quite a few times by characters in the first two films at least that Ripley is one tough person. She's the type of person that survives dangerous situations by acting instead of breaking down like Lambert does in Alien. Sometimes the things she does aren't brilliant in hindsight, but they sufficed to keep her and others alive. It's not a long scene in the film, but Hicks does make sure to spend the time to show Ripley how to use their weapons. It's not Marine training, but it's enough to allow her to load/reload and shoot the thing. She also asks to be shown EVERY aspect of the pulse rifle's operation after Hicks tries to gloss over showing her the grenade launcher. She knows it might save her life so she makes sure she knows everything she needs to.
    • It's also strongly hinted, especially in the super extra bonus cut of the movie, that she's suffering from severe PTSD and still struggling with the knowledge that she's a mid-30's woman whose daughter died of old age 2 years prior. Thus her irrational connection to Newt, and sheer, all consuming hatred of Xenomorphs and "Synthetics". That scene is framed as as a cathartic freakout than a deliberate attempt to methodically "neutralise the enemy".
  • I figured the risk of acid blood sprayback was too dangerous at that close of a range, especially with Newt behind her. Considering what happened with Drake...

• Why are the Power Loaders, well, just loaders? Put some armor around the pilot, add a smart gun and one or two grenade launchers, and you've got the perfect infantry support vehicle.
  • Maybe they also have weaponised versions of the loaders and they weren't brought on the mission because they didn't anticipate needing them.
  • Why are cranes in real life just cranes? Why not add machine guns to them? Because some things are designed to do what they do and the power loaders...load things. They weren't military versions designed for combat.
  • I'd like to introduce you to Alice from the PC game Aliens vs. Predator 2.
  • Yeah, if I recall correctly that thing was armed with a laser cannon, flamethrower, rocket launchers, and TWIN miniguns. Plus, it ran pretty damn fast.
  • They did make them armored walkers in the comics, but it has the normal mecha problem—the ground pressure of all that armor, smart gun, grenade launchers, etc. on two feet not much bigger than a human footprint.
    • How is that different from the Power Loader carrying heavy equipment?
    • Because it's not in combat.
    • I don't think the ground cares if the pressure on it is enacted during combat or not. If a Power Loader can move around carrying heavy stuff, it can also carry a machinegun attached to it.
    • The combat loader would be expected to operate everywhere a Marine does: swamps, mountains, forests, jungles and tundra. If the combat loader suffers severe issues with difficult terrain, it's close to useless in combat. The power loader on the other hand would only operate in areas with a specific infrastructure to support it; like space ships.
    • Another major issue with a combat loader is speed. From what we saw, the power loader walked at a fraction of the speed that a normal Marine could and there's no reason to believe a combat loader would be any faster. In the time it took the Marines in the movie to disembark the ship, move two-by-two up to the entrance of the colony, and hack their way through the door, the power loader probably would've moved 20 feet, max. It would only be useful if you replaced the legs with wheels or treads. But once you do that it's not a mecha anymore, just a small tank.
    • The aforementioned combat power armor in the AVP 2 game was lighting fast, though. And so were all the instances of similar machines in the comics. I think the easiest explanation is that combat power armor most likely does exist in the Alien universe, but the Sulaco simply wasn't issued one.
    • Or an even easier explanation: Combat power loaders were not originally a part of the movie canon and were added to the comics/games because they were cool.
    • What exactly does a combat loader bring to the table that a properly equipped Marine team doesn't?
    • More Dakka, basically. In the previously mentioned videogame example, the military loader was loaded with a brutal amount of firepower.
    • The only reason Ripley had any chance against the Queen while in the power loader was because it was only the queen. If you add a single drone, Ripley loses. The power loader wasn't nearly agile enough to do anything against multiple foes, particularly ones as quick as the xenomorphs. Adding a machine gun or two might hold them off for a few moments, but as soon as one gets behind you, you're done.
  • From the Colonial Marines Technical Manual:
  "I never EVER take a powerloader over rough terrain with a full load. Each of those feet are only 500 centimeters square, so with a two ton load you've got a downforce of something like three kilos per square centimeter. That's intense. I've seen too many loaders get hauled of the mud to do anything so dumb myself."

• In the special edition of Aliens, the remaining Marines set up 4 automated sentry turrets around their barricade. Each one carries 500 rounds, for a total of 2000. Every single shot is fired at the aliens, with likely very few misses due to the tight corridors + horde of aliens. However, there are only a maximum of 160 (157 from the colonists plus the 2 Marines who we know got taken away as hosts and the co-pilot who could have been) aliens on LV-426 (unless a full-sized alien warrior can come from a hamster) so how was there still enough left over to Zerg Rush the Marines little base of operations? Hmm, maybe thats why they cut the scenes with the sentry turrets from the theatrical release.
  • The novelisation expands on this scene, stating that while dozens of aliens did get blown to pieces, the rest eventually backed off. The only explanation is that the xenomorphs move too fast for a tracking computer designed to shoot human troops to accurately track and most of the shots were misses.
  • I always had the impression that between the first ambush, that sentry guns scene, and the scene where they drop from the ceiling, most of the Xenos WERE killed. Notice that the Queen only had a couple of them as guards, and Ripley didn't run into any more while escaping.
  • This would only be an issue if we assume that each shot kills one Alien. This is apparently not the case: The turrets seem to be set to fire at anything that moves. When Vasquez and Hudson test them, they fire a short salvo, rather than a single shot. Since even an alien that has been shot already may continue to move, it's a fair guess that the turrets fire multiple shots at each.
    • This is the typical behavior of fully automatic fire. Several hits per target, scattered all across the body. Watch a few Deadliest Warrior episodes that feature modern rifles (Yakuza vs Mafia, for instance) for a demonstration. Modern computer-guided weapons also fire in multiple-round salvos: observe the behavior of the modern equivalent, the CIWS.
  • After giving this one some thought it can work out barely. The guns seem to fire at least 5 round bursts could easilry be higher, so 200 rounds -10 for the testing -10 left in gun is 1980 rounds. Assume an average of 20 rounds per alien and that's 99 dead aliens. Actual number may be more or less. Add in the on screen kills by the Marines and Riply you're close to 150. Remember at least one colonist died have his face sucker taken off before implantation. Those two aliens with the queen near the end may actually be the only ones left. The only problem is the ones the colonists hit with small arms fire and explosives before the Marines arrived. I think that fight would make a good movie in and of itself.
    • Oh, it'd be great. Like 300, with the added bonus of women and children also getting killed or impregnated by the end of the film, and again, no survivors bar Newt.
    • Hey, I'd pay to see it!
    • If you really want to see (well, read) it, the fall of Hadley's hope is shown in the novel River of Pain and the comics Fire and Stone and Newt's Tale. Turns out, not everyone died- the first two both have some people making it offworld
  • The Aliens are shown to be smarter than they first appear. They wait until the Marines move into the nest before attacking, they cut the power, they bypass the Marines' barricade, etc. It's possible that after the first group went down, the Aliens figured out a way to bait it into wasting ammo (darting across its field of fire or something).
    • They wouldn't even have to expose their main bodies to the turrets. Just swish their very long, tough and spindly tails across the detection zone.
    • As far as the nest I always interpreted them as going into hibernation since they had harvested all the colonists except for Newt. Then cue some hostiles inside their home burning stuff and they wake up angry as well as hungry.
  • Plus, who says the colonists didn't have pets? A hamster won't do for a host, but an average-sized dog might. And if the colonists were raising cattle/pigs/sheep, that would vastly increase the number of potential Aliens.
    • In the comic book adapatation Newt's Tale, there is specific mention given to "missing livestock". Nowhere in the actual movie, granted, but it was noted. Of course, this gives rise to an entirely different issue as to why the drones were all humanoid...
    • Alien 3 shows that a decently sized dog does in fact work.
    • The ones we see, anyway. Maybe all the xeno-livestock were sent to drain the guns.
  • They're not ray guns. They don't disintegrate the Xenos. They're clearing a hive-mind like species where the survival of the individual is relatively meaningless, all you need is enough motion to keep the guns firing until they're empty, then the survivors in the back push through the corpses of the ones at the front.
  • There's a few ideas that I hold after much thought on this subject over the years. first the camera mounts on the guns seam to show rounds striking the wall (as evident by the white flashes) indicating not every round struck, the guns are set to fire at anything that moves, and in 5 round bursts meaning that they could be striking severed limbs, debris such as wall and ceiling panels falling etc. Also there is no life found in the colony, suggesting that any livestock on the colony was also changed. Meaning there are probably more than 157 aliens. which would account for the aliens killed by the colonists.
    • On that note, who says the sentry guns' targeting systems are all that robust? It's quite possible they are missing far more than they're hitting.
  • Well, the only source on-screen for the 157 person population of the colony is the handpainted sign, which appears never to have been updated for births, deaths, or new arrivals. Given that, while the atmosphere is breathable, the weather outside is completely unpleasant, this makes sense. So, the population could have grown substantially since the sign was put up, from births or new colonists arriving on later ships. Also, the population count might not include Company staff and administrators, who likely get rotated in and out on some schedule and thus wouldn't be considered "part" of the colony (in Alien³, Aaron notes that he's "going home on the next rotation," though we don't know how long a "rotation" is). So the actual population could easily be double what the sign tells us, inflating the xenomorph population commensurately.

• My thing about the Sulaco is why (other than for dramatic effect) would it take so long and so much effort to get it send down a drop ship? Given the damage to the APC is almost a certainty in combat and satellite phones are common in the present, why wouldn't the command officer, his immediate subordinate and anybody else they chose have a portable unit to signal the ship? For that matter,why didn't they leave anyone ON the Sulaco in case something happened and they were cut off or pinned down?

  • My best guess for this would be, that the only transmitter was on the APC because 1) the size of the unit (which was basically a laptop and satalite uplink to fly the dropship by remote (if you look at the shots of Bishop's console while he's flying down the dropship you can see what looks like a flight simulator)) which would be a bulky load for a Marine to carry into a cramped built up area (given the weight of armour, combat load and weapon, flashlights, trackers, and other gear they had) it would have seemed like superfluous especially since Gorman stayed on the APC for the most part and Ferro remained with the dropship while Spunkmeyer only left it long enough to run some supplies to Bishop so he could study the facehugger. Given the nature of their enemy they were not expecting anti-armour or anti-aircraft weapons so they couldn't foresee the events that led to the dropship crash, let alone the fact it struck the APC, and given that the second in command Apone was one of the first Marines to die in the nest, even if he had the back up transmitter it wouldn't have been much used to them.
  • They explained this in the movie. Bishop himself said that he is "the only one qualified to remotely fly the dropship anyway". I assume Ferro was also qualified, but she was killed before this point in the movie, causing the said need for the second dropship. As to why they didn't leave anyone on the Sulaco: Who would they have left? They got the Pilot (Ferro), Ripley, The CO, the 2nd in command (Apone), Bishop, Hudson (electronics specialist?), and several grunts. They all had their key roles to play in the mission and it could be that there wasn't enough room to bring anyone else. They were all needed down on the surface, in the mission. So, if Bishop was the only guy who could pilot the thing other than Ferro, why would they want/need more than one, maybe two, transmitters when only two people in the whole mission knew how to even use it?
  • However, there is the issue of the fact that the ship the size of the Sulaco had no command staff of its own, and no personnel that didn't deploy in the ONE combat sortie. It's the Mother Ship to a SINGLE Drop Ship—and that's all? This would be like a modern Wasp-class having a crew of a single, deployable squad.
  • The entire mission was a scrub from the start, lead by a junior officer fresh out of training. It's probable the ship was undermanned. Incidentally, the Colonial Marines Technical Manual has the Conestoga-class capable of carrying four dropships in its bays, and up to 90 crew and passengers, with transport capacity for up to two thousand more in cryo in its bays.
  • One has to remember that Burke was conspiring right off the bat, so he probably pulled strings so the rescue mission was small and led by a rookie officer he could influence (he was already along Gorman very early in the film). His plan was to sabotage the hypersleep chambers of whoever wasn't facehugged, which not only would have been difficult if the Sulaco were carrying several dozen people, but also VERY suspicious and hard to justify once they got home.

  • And with the movie hinting that these Marines aren't exactly disciplined - Drake and Vasquez being confirmed by Word of God to be serving as an alternative to prison - perhaps Gorman was afraid of a crew left on the Sulaco abandoning them?
  • The ship is undermanned for some reason. Whether there was simply a shortage of qualified personnel (which the presence of Drake and Vasquez, and possibly Gorman) suggests, or if Burke (possibly supported by the company) was manipulating the situation isn't established. It's also entirely possible all involved (save Ripley) simply drastically underestimated the risk. The grunts talk of a "bug hunt", so pretty much everybody seems to believe they are sending a ridiculous amount of force to begin with. They have the sole survivor of the Nostromo, who they likely believe is just a hysterical woman, who destroyed that ship. Plus, they have indeed had a colony on LV 426 for years without any problems. When they lost contact with the colony, it starts to give credence to Ripley's story, but they still likely believe the Xeno is nowhere near the threat Ripley paints.
  • The RPG adds some detail. A Conestoga-class frigate like the Sulaco can easily deploy two platoons of troops, routinely carry up to 90, and hold up to 2,000 as basically cryofrozen cargo. But the Colonial Marines especially tend to operate by section, which is half a platoon. The APC can carry one section, the dropship is designed to hold one APC, the Conestoga can (normally) carry four dropships and launch one at a time. Given the difficulties getting around in space and current lack of hostilities (though there are tensions) a single section is usually all the marine support a situation requires. Aliens: Fireteam Elite shows this way of thinking has fallen from favor, with Tientsin-class battleships like Endeavor having huge compliments of troops.

• Hudson & Burke are shown in the colony's control room scanning for the colonists' PDTs (Personal Data Transmitters) on the planet. The range is is stated as being 20km. Wouldn't the Marines' landing ship have had the equipment for that? Or for that matter, the Sulaco?
  • Maybe they didn't know the frequencies the PDTs use until they accessed the colony mainframe. Or, alternately, the PDTs might have had to be activated before they transmit—with the code stored in the colony mainframe.
  • And perhaps the PDTs also act as ID tags for each colonist - so when they access the mainframe, they also find out which colonists are where.

• Nobody seems to be worrying too much about weapons sweep as everybody has their fingers on their triggers at all times and they routinely pass the muzzles across their fellow soldiers' bodies.
  • The movie goes to great pains to show that these Marines are cocky, overconfident, and unprofessional. Recklessness with their weapons is perfectly in character. I mean, after Ripley points out the heat exchange thing, two of them openly violate a direct order from their commanding officer (Lieutenant Gorman) and second in command (Sergeant Apone) and reload.
  • There are hints in the movie that this particular platoon of Marines is not the cream of the corps. Apone specifically says he wants a nice clean sweep this time (one wonders what happened last time). Gorman is an obviously untried commander. Vasquez and Drake's backstories are that they are serving in the Marines as an alternative to prison.
  • Apart from the actors playing Hicks, Ripley, Gorman and Burke all the crew actually underwent military training prior to filming, Michael Biehn only missed it because he replaced the previous actor part the way into filming. (Some of the reactor scenes in the finished film had another guy in Hicks' place.) As for Vasquez and Drake, their weapons (according to the USCM: Technical Manual) have computer targeting systems preventing them firing at friendly IFF transponders (which each soldier has based again on information in the tech manual and the fact the APC screens displayed the Marines' locations on the map). Finally, given the information they had from Ripley they were probably expecting trouble so were ready to shoot at anything that moved. As for Gorman, it's hinted in the film and novel that he was hand picked by Burke to lead the mission. (Frost and Hicks' conversation in the mess hall includes "Looks like the new lieutenant is too good to eat with the rest of us grunts.")
  • The actor who played Apone actually served in the military, and helped with the training for the actors. He was rather forceful about not pointing weapons at other people unless you're intending to shoot them. This training was largely ignored in filming, and as mentioned, makes sense given the overall level of discipline this squad seems to have. James Cameron has gone on record as saying that he apologises for this portrayal of Marines; he was thinking "Vietnam": chalk full of people who didn't want to be there, probably didn't pay that much attention in training, and all told, would rather just go home.
  • I've also wondered about them being 'Marines' as we know them. These 'Marines' may not be the future equivalent of the U.S.M.C. They are called 'Colonial Marines' so may be something more like a security force for WY or maybe more of a militia force or some sort of constabulary force used for colonial expeditions rather than part of a full-time, professional, organized military.

• In the extended cut of Aliens, the motion trackers pick up what turn out to be hamsters in a cage. Who's been feeding them to keep them alive all this time? Newt, presumably?
  • One of the colonists is still alive when the Marines reach the reactor station, so it's possible that the "last stand" of the colonists happened within 24 hours of the arrival of the Marines. The hamsters hadn't had time to starve yet.
  • Plus, y'know, hamsters. Fill their dish, come back an hour later, and they've stashed it all under the bedding and will give you dirty looks until you fill their bowl again. If their owner was the least bit gullible, they'd have weeks of food hoarded up.
  • It's the far future; automation is cheap. There may be an automatic feeding and watering system built into the cage.

• In Aliens, what the hell was Spunkmeyer doing outside the dropship, admiring the lightning-blasted scenery? The unit was in the middle of a recon mission with high probability of deadly combat, the area was not secure, and the mobile command center was the APC, not the dropship. And, to top it off, they already knew there was something seriously wrong just from visual inspection in the first recon, AND they had an eyewitness to all that horror, to boot. So why step out of the ship, unarmed, and then keep the loading bay open when in the middle of an unbelievable hostile situation?
  • Overconfidence. Up until the Marines go to the atmosphere processor, nothing's happening and Gorman et. al. still don't quite believe Ripley's story about how lethal and silent the Aliens are. Also, the dropship's out on a landing pad where you'd normally presume it's hard for a seven-foot-tall alien to sneak up and secrete itself on the ship—and to top it all off, the landing field's at the Colony, not at the atmosphere processor which is a good hike away from the station. Ferro and Spunkmeyer also look to be pretty "couldn't care less" types.
  • He was doing what every soldier does when he steps out of his vehicle for a hot minute: puffing a cigarette. Hear that, smokers? You let the aliens in.
  • In Spunkmeyer's defense, Gorman had declared the area secure before going in himself.
  • Or perhaps he had just been loading something into the ship?
  • It's possible he was making pre-flight checks, looking to see that nothing had bent or dropped off, particularly after the bumpy ride they'd had on the way down. Then again, maybe he just went for a pee...
  • Another possibility, he was still unloading equipment and some supplies into the Colony facility where they've set up base of operations, as we saw him delivered some unloaded items to Bishop before the Marines located the PD Ts. Before they realised what the threat really was, no one could be sure how long they were going to be on LV-426, let alone how many survivors that may have been injured, so there may have been a stock of medical supplies that was brought to set up (they may have had a standard procedure for possible emergencies and the supplies they brought were meant to be set up at a base of operations as a field medical station. This was before they discovered what they were truly dealing with). He may have finished moving the last of the items inside when Ferro tells him to come on, so he double-timed back as quick as he could.

• In Aliens, an alien grabs Frost, and then pulls him up... with what? Do they have grappling hooks or something? Are they Batman?
  • With its hands? Aliens are good at climbing. All it had to do was get above and pull.
  • With its tail, obviously.
    • It was Dietrich that was grabbed by the alien, not Frost. Frost was the unfortunate victim of her flamethrower.

• Hopefully some engineering-types can help me out with this one: What exactly is the advantage of a Power Loader over, say, a forklift? We don't see Power Loaders doing anything a modern-day forklift couldn't do just as well or better (the fight with the Queen doesn't count) and it's (probably) far easier to train someone to drive a forklift than a PL.
  • Because you can't have a finale fight scene with a forklift. If you're looking for an in-universe explanation, the power loader doesn't seem to have a fuel source or at least does not take up much fuel to do what it does. Its ability to "move" is based on the pilot physically lifting the thing with their legs rather than relying on an engine to rotate its wheels. In a future with a severe fuel shortage, any machine that can cut costs that way would be an asset, regardless of any other practicality concerns.
    • You can't have a finale fight scene with a forklift?
    • Wanna bet?
  • The power loader can probably get into areas a forklift would have trouble maneuvering into. Stairs, for instance, wouldn't be a barrier. Because it's humanoid it would be more intuitive to control, so a Marine wouldn't have to spend as much time learning how to operate it. Also it seems to have functions besides moving cargo—it's got a blow torch attachment for instance. It might be more effective at repairing things than a forklift would.
  • The powerloader is likely also not only for use within the loading bay of the Sulaco. A walking loader would work far better than a forklift in an unimproved bivouac site, where the Marines might still need to lift heavy crates of ammo or reload the Dropship.
  • The artificial gravity in the loading bay may normally be switched off when especially heavy cargo is being moved around, to make the work easier. A forklift's wheels would lose traction in zero-G, but big stompy feet will work just fine on a steel floor if they're got electromagnets built in.

• Speaking of the Dropship, since when do low-rank NCOs (Corporal Ferro) qualify for pilot status? At the very least, she should have been wearing Warrant Officer bars.
  • Oddly enough, Ferro was supposed to be a Sergeant in the film's first treatment that Cameron wrote, but for whatever reason (there is no explanation whatsoever in the director's commentary) he decided to change her rank.
  • In-universe; the explanation is that the Marines of that era are not the same as the Marines of this one, and it is obviously possibly to pilot a dropship without needing to be the same ranks. Out of universe; probably she is a corporal to make Apone stand out more as the lead NCO, so that we care about him more when he is taken.
  • And I believe that once Apone is taken out, that puts Hicks in charge as the next in command. If Ferro was a sergeant too, she would be second in command after Apone? Or do pilots not get to command?
    • The short answer is that pilots don't get to command. The long answer is that rank isn't the only way command assignments are handled in the real world. Your specialty is also important. Since Ferro's isn't infantry, she can't really command an infantry unit with the same level of competence, lacking that training, than, say, Hicks.

• Around the midpoint of Aliens, when Ripley and Newt are trapped in the medlab with the facehuggers, Ripley glances through the window and sees her gun lying on the counter on the other side. The problem is, when she first arrives there, she explicitly lays the gun on top of the bed before crawling under it. How did the gun manage to teleport itself through a window? Did Burke grab it before releasing the facehuggers? If he did, did he leave it there for Ripley to see, just to be even more of a bastard than he was already? If so, why bother, since the plan was obviously for Newt and Ripley to get impregnated in their sleep? For that matter, how did he manage to sneak into the medlab without Ripley or Newt—both undoubtedly high-strung, even if they were fatigued—noticing?
  • Ripley and Newt were exhausted. IIRC, Hicks asks Ripley when she last slept just before this. Newt was comforted by Ripley, and Ripley relaxed a bit, believing they were protected. Plus, they were under the bed, which might have muffled sounds Burke made. And, Ripley WAS awakened, just not fast enough.
  • It was Burke who moved the rifle, just in case Ripley woke up. He put the gun down outside because he didn't want to explain to the Marines where he'd got it. He snuck into the medlab by being very quiet; as high-strung as they were, Ripley and Newt were still asleep.
  • I doubt he put the rifle there just to dick with them. He probably didn't even think about where he put it so long as it was somewhere Ripley couldn't get to it. The only reason it's in Ripley's line of sight is so the audience knows where it went.
  • Still an amateur move, of course—a real pro would have simply replaced the magazine with an empty one. Nothing like a false sense of security until you notice that the weight is wrong and the ammo counter reads "00" instead of "99"...and much easier for the Marines to explain it to themselves as "rookie civilian mistake, empty gun" than "went to bed with her only means of self defense out of reach in the next room".
    • Well then it's a shame Burke isn't a pro, isn't it? He's just a pencil pusher who's drastically out of his element.
    • I fail to see how switching Ripley's magazine for an empty one would have been any better than just moving the gun. It's not like Ripley would be any more helpless that way. And even an unloaded gun is still useful. If nothing else, Ripley could have used the rifle to smash the facehugger into a gooey smear on the floor (sure the gun would have melted but the facehugger would still be dead). Taking the rifle out of the room left Ripley and Newt completely defenseless.
    • It's also quieter to just take the gun rather than reload it with an empty clip, and leaving the gun right outside the door is still an excusable rookie mistake. Arguably more so, we saw Hicks teaching Ripley how to use the pulse rifle, and Hicks seems a no-nonsense, career military man. He probably drilled "check the ammo counter" into her pretty effectively (and in fact, we see Ripley doing exactly that the first time she actually shoots the thing.) One could easily imagine Hicks smelling something fishy if Ripley had supposedly been caught with an empty gun, whereas her leaving it outside the room would make more sense (her not wanting a deadly weapon within reach of a traumatised child with bad nightmares, for instance.)
  • And after Ripley and Newt were facehugged, there would obviously be suspicions about how it happened. Ripley had been given the gun by Hicks, so if he found her attacked then he would wonder where the gun was - and why she hadn't used it. Leaving the gun outside the room therefore looks like 'she put it down and forgot', and was just unlucky. Ripley only suspected Burke because she had already busted him for the situation.
    • Possibly Burke wanted it to look like Ripley'd left the gun in the next room just in case Newt woke up before her and got curious about the weapon, same as the girl had gotten curious about Hicks's grenades earlier.

• Same troper as above: How did Burke manage to sneak two hatched facehuggers into the medlab in the first place? As strong and aggressive as they are, there's no way he could have avoided being impregnated himself.
  • In their containment tubes. He carried them in then opened the tubes as he closed the door.
  • It also looks like the containment tubes were shattered on the floor. I think the sound of them breaking and the huggers escaping is what woke Ripley. She seems to startle awake.
    • Actually, they're not broken, as they look to be made as of material that looks to be Plexiglas. Maybe what woke her up was the impact of them hitting the floor. By the way it seems, Burke may have lightly pulled the lids off to make them unsealed enough for the Facehuggers to crawl out on their own while closing the door, and due to having to force the lids farther out to get out of them, they caused the tubes to fall (as one of the tubes are still seen moving, showing that it had to have happened within the past minute).
  • On this line of thought, how was he able to stay gone for so long and no one questioned his whereabouts or even noticed he was missing?
    • While the Colonial Marines are a unit (check out their almost-excessive levels of inter-personal banter before the mission begins), Burke is just some faceless Company asshole to them. He doesn't have any useful knowledge (unlike Ripley) & can't hold his own alongside them (unlike Ripley). Ripley herself even points out that he doesn't outrank Hicks, who is a lowly Corporal. He doesn't have authority, can't give any orders, can't give out any information worth listening to, & is continually pompous & obstructive when he does open his mouth. Likely the Marines were glad to have him out of their hair if they did notice his absence, & they might well not—when he switches the CCTV monitor off during the Facehugger attack, Hicks is right next to him & doesn't notice.
    • In addition to above, they're still probably a bit raw on the fact that Burke tried to pull a power move after they escaped the processing plant by saying he wouldn't authorise the nuking from orbit plan. So, it's safe to say there's some minor bad blood, and the Marines wouldn't give a crap about where he was as long as he wasn't causing a problem for them (little did they know what he had planned).
  • There's one part of the film where he's shown helping find food with Newt. So they must assume he's off doing that somewhere.
    • Heck, they're probably just glad he's not hanging around getting in the way. To them, he's just an annoying dead-weight civilian.

• How long after the Colony's "last stand" did Ripley and the Marines arrive? Ripley says that Newt survived longer than "seventeen days" by herself, and her "nest" certainly looks like she's been there for a while, and it must have taken some time after the loss of contact with the colony for the Sulaco to get there (it would have taken the Nostromo 10 months, according to Lambert, but the Sulaco is probably faster). On the other hand, though, when the Marines arrive at the processing station they find a live colonist just in time to watch the chestburster emerge. According to Ripley's testimony the alien in Alien wiped out her whole crew within 24 hours, which means the chestbursters don't take anywhere near 17 days to gestate. In the Special Edition the Marines also find live hamsters in a cage in the colony. Hamsters can't last 17 days on their own either.
  • Not all of the colonists need have been taken all at once. There's pretty fresh evidence of a firefight when the Marines arrive, so it might be that the one they find chestbursting was taken just before they arrived.
    • That raises the Fridge Horror issue of how long the poor woman was cocooned—knowing what was coming—before the aliens had an egg ready for her.
  • And Newt's parents were the first to discover the aliens. So it makes sense that she'd hide as soon as they were killed.
  • Newt's own remarks about how the xenomorphs "mostly come at night ... mostly" tend to imply that the creatures have returned to scour the colony for victims repeatedly. They probably wouldn't go to such extremes just to chase Newt - if they were that relentlessly determined to nab one little girl, they'd have broken into her ventilation tunnels by brute force and caught her long ago - but may have been rooting out scattered survivors for some time.
  • We actually know the dates from River of Pain (which derives them from some dates given in Aliens) - it was a little over a month (though the dates vary by a couple of days depending on whether you go by the book or the audio adaptation - the audio sets events slightly later). Russ Jorden is infected on June 21/24, by June 26/29 Hadley's Hope is virtually wiped out and Newt escapes into the vents. On July 27, the Sulaco arrives.

• The heroes are trapped in a tight spot. Bishop is sent to get the ship and crawls through some tube to evade aliens. What prevented everyone else or at least civilians Ripley and Newt from leaving the same way?
  • Sure, crawling single-file through a long, dark, and narrow pipeline for a couple hours straight sounds like a very physically and mentally healthy thing for a human (especially a little girl) to do. The only reason Bishop went through was because he was synthetic and didn't have to worry about stuff like fear, discomfort, or boredom when doing monotonous mind-numbing tasks like that. And he was the only one qualified for the task, so anyone coming with him, military or civilian, would've been unnecessary baggage.
  • In the novelisation Bishop is briefly attacked while in the pipe through one of the acid holes melted in it during the earlier battle with the colonists, but the alien doing it loses interest when it seems to sense that he's not potential prey. If any of the others had been in the pipe with Bishop things probably would have gotten much worse.

• What use is a Three Laws-Compliant military android in the event of an exclusively human conflict? How would Bishop resolve watching humans shooting at and killing each other? More applicably, what would he have done if he was there when the Marines opted to waste Burke?
  • For any number of things that are required to be done in a military operation that doesn't involve killing or combat.
  • He's there as a science officer isn't he? They're explicitly looking for the aliens, so isn't it Bishop's job to examine them? And on a more cynical note, if they need to send someone into a danger zone to do something then they can send the android instead of sacrificing a human—which they did.
  • The Technical Manual states that androids are attached to combat squads as advisors and specialists, bringing skills the Marines themselves don't have. Bishop is basically a super science-tech-engineering geek assigned to support the Marines when they aren't actually shooting things. Standard procedure likely would be to keep the android well away from any actual fighting, both because it's a valuable piece of equipment and to keep that "through inaction allow a human to be harmed" thing from screwing with the squad's mission.
  • And perhaps Bishop was put in charge of working with the facehuggers in the med lab because if they attack him, there's no real loss.

• Why put an ammo counter in the side of the pulse rifle, instead of placing it in the carrying handle? Such a feature would be useful in the middle of an engagement, but less so if you have to pause and take a look at the side of the gun.
  • Possibly it's placed there so that each Marine can see when his or her wing man's ammo is running low, and give them covering fire while they step back to reload? The one doing the firing can probably feel the weapon getting lighter as it empties and will be keeping a rough track of shots expended in any case, but the soldier to the left is too busy keeping count of his or her own fire and could genuinely benefit from the readout's information.
  • Doylist reason- we the audience wouldn't be able to see the rounds counting down as Ripley shoots up the Queen's lair if the counter was mounted in the carry handle. Watsonian reason- the counter is right next to the magazine and must be keyed to something in the mag to be able to tell how many rounds are left. Firearms can be very hard on electronic devices, what with heavy recoil and vibration, exposure to rain, snow, heat, cold, getting dropped in and covered in dirt and mud, getting slammed into the ground, floors and walls when the operator dives to cover. Weapons in real life take special hardened attachments, even just a flashlight has to be specially durable to survive the recoil of even a handgun. Considering all this, you would want the simplest design for something like the ammo counter, not wiring running through the frame. Even then it's likely that they break down a lot in use and are a pain in the butt to maintain. So the simplest design is mounting the counter right there on the magazine housing.

• Why was Burke so insistent that Ripley come along? Her outburst at the hearing made it very clear that she was the very last person who would be okay with helping to smuggle them out. She was one of the few people who knew Burke had been informed about the nature and general location of the xenomorph ship, and would thus understand what it meant that Burke ordered the colonists to look for "something" in that area. And she knows exactly how the xenomorphs reproduce, and would therefor warn the marines not to load any facehugged people into the cryopods, making the smuggling job that much harder. And if he'd infected her, as he tried, she'd undoubtedly try to kill herself once she regained consciousness, meaning Burke would've had to get extremely lucky to get her into the pod after the facehugger died and fell off (not much point in smuggling otherwise) but before she woke up. All in all, bringing Ripley along made Burke's job ten times harder even if she hadn't surprised everyone with Took a Level in Badass, and accomplished nothing that couldn't have been done by giving a (deliberately incomplete) briefing to the marines, and perhaps not manipulate events to get quite such an incompetent groups assigned. And if his whole plan was for Ripley to die because she knew too much: She was a disgraced former pilot with no surviving family or friend who he knew was suffering from serious mental trauma. No one would be surprised or even care all that much if she died in a seeming suicide attempt.
  • I think Burke didn't believe the aliens existed. The last attempt of the Company to get the alien was fifty-seven years ago, and they likely didn't know what they were after - they just picked up a signal and wanted a sample, and cobbled together a mission to get one by re-routing a convenient ship. When the Nostromo didn't come back, whoever was responsible burned the files and never looked back. The Company has in fact completely forgotten about the whole thing. So Burke plays nice with Ripley, but only believes her story enough to tell the colonists to go have a look at a set of coordinates. He doesn't warn them what they're looking for because he doesn't believe they'll actually find anything - after all, they've been there for decades without having found anything and Ripley is obviously not rational on the subject. Then when the colony goes dead, he starts to think maybe there's something to Ripley's story after all, though he probably still doesn't believe the more outrageous aspects of it, but to cover his backside he wants her along as an expert. He deliberately underplays the whole thing and gets only a small unit of marines (with an easily-manipulable lieutenant) because it could still be just a technical problem, and he doesn't want to look foolish if it is. It's only after Burke sees how deadly the aliens really are, and how likely he is to get some of the blame for losing a productive colony to them, that he gets the idea of taking some aliens back and selling them to the bioweapons division (telling Bishop to bring the facehuggers along), and it's possible he only thinks of using Ripley (and Newt) as incubators after she confronts him with his role and makes it clear she's not going to allow any samples along. So it's a desperate move by an executive trying to salvage something for himself from the situation.
  • I think it's the opposite. With Ripley being there as an advisor, it lets the Marines know that the aliens are real and to be taken seriously. Ripley can also verify the eggs, facehuggers, chestbursters and anything else. There were no pictures or visual evidence of what the aliens looked like - so it's easier to bring along the woman who's seen them. It's established that communication takes time - so if Ripley isn't there then the Marines have to take a picture of what they've found, send it to her and wait two weeks for her to verify what it is.
  • And if the xenos do exist, having Ripley become host to a salvaged specimen will conveniently eliminate one of the very few people aware of the creatures. A secret bioweapons breakthrough is worth more if it's secret, after all.
  • I doubt Burke was thinking all that far ahead. The first two films make the most sense assuming the Company knew little to nothing about what was out there, and the first film happened because of someone's horrible personal initiative. Whatever reason Burke had for having the Derelict checked out, once the colony went dark, he had to know just how the pile of shit he'd stepped in is. To double-check his measurements, he needs Ripley. As mentioned above, she can verify everything they find as being what she encountered before, thus Burke can spin losing the entire colony as "Yes, but, we have all this stuff to look into now!"

• The Weyland-Yutani execs say the only part of Ripley's story that they're able to confirm through the Nostromo's flight recorder is the stop they made at LV-426. So the Nostromo didn't have any cameras or microphones, on the bridge or elsewhere, that record to the flight recorder, like all modern ships are required to have?
  • The landing on LV-426 was very rough, and the Nostromo required substantial repairs just to get spaceborne again. Ripley notes to Dallas that "we're blind on B and C decks," among other things before they lift off. Whatever systems would have definitively corroborated the presence of the Alien were likely among those damaged that Dallas did not elect to have fixed before they lifted off, the Alien burst out of Kane, and all hell broke loose. Sure, Dallas would probably get fined for improper maintenance of his ship, but at that point he really didn't seem to give a shit.

• We discover in the Special Edition that Ripley had a daughter named Amanda (who became a protagonist in her own xenomorph encounter story). But what about the rest of the crew of the Nostromo other than Ash? Didn't Dallas, Brett, Parker, Caine or Lambert have any family? And wouldn't they come seeking answers from Ripley if they were still alive? Wouldn't Amanda have gotten in contact with them prior to heading off to Sevestapol Station, letting them know that the Nostromo's flight recorder was found and that it may have some information about what happened to their loved ones?
  • It depends on how likely you think it would be for people who are away from home for years at a time to have a family that they leave behind. Some of the supplementary material implies that Ripley is very unusual for having a daughter while working as a space trucker. Its entirely possible that the others didn't have any family (children) that would still be around 57 years later when Ripley is found.

• Um, who designed that APC? It has an extremely low floor, very low ground clearance and moves on freaking wheels. Anywhere except an urban warfare, it would be useless: unable to clear obstacles and susceptible to sinking into soft ground under its own weight. Modern-day Hummers would be a lot better than this.
  • The full-size prop vehicle used in the movie is actually an airplane tug dressed up with stuff like false turrets and a sliding side door to make it look like an APC. They have to be low in order to fit under the nose and wings of aircraft and of course they're only ever used on pavement. On the plus side they have a lot of power to be able to pull airliners around. In universe, maybe this is the urban version of the APC, which would be another example of how the marines were equipped for the wrong type of mission. That said, during the escape from the processing station Ripley runs it over pretty rough terrain for a good distance before she breaks an axle, so maybe it's just that tough.

• What happened to the alien ship's signal? In the first movie, the Nostromo picked that up while in deep space, yet a whole colony of people can settle on the planet and not pick it up at all? I know 57 years passed between movies, but seeing as the signal had been going off continually for however many centuries it took that one alien to fossilise, it seems unlikely it would have just suddenly broken down.
  • It's explained in Alien: Isolation. Marlowe and his crew shut down the signal upon finding the Derelict so they could have exclusive access to the wreckage.
  • The Aliens novelisation implies that an earthquake damaged the ship enough that the transmitter stopped working. The Special Edition includes scenes of the ship with a hole in the side that it didn't have before, as well.

• "How could they cut the power?! They're animals!" A good question - xenomorphs do show intelligence, but noticing "this thing gets pressed, the box rides up" is one thing - figuring out that humans need natural or artificial light to operate can be chalked up to intelligence, figuring out that the lights are electrically powered and cutting off lights for a particular section of the colony (not the entire complex - after all the elevator was still operating) before attack definitely requires knowledge, a very different skill.
  • It has been suggested in some expanded universe material that the xenos can perceive electrical fields similar to how some sharks do, and that they may even "charge" themselves by resting near strong electrical flows (like in the sub-levels of a fusion-powered atmospheric reprocessing plant, or in the engineering spaces of the Nostromo). If that is the case, then a queen might be able to direct her warriors to cut power (which they can "see" running through the wires) to an area where prey is hiding either as an attempt to deprive the prey of "food" or to remove a potential distraction for her own warriors. It would not require understanding that humans need light and that cutting the power will remove that light.
  • Maybe it could make sense that they could reason that out, then. If they can "see" electricity, then maybe they have noted that areas containing humans exhibit higher power draw, and that much of that power is focused in fixtures on walls and ceilings, and that humans in areas without that power draw in those fixtures are a lot less effective at defending themselves and easier to sneak up on. Thus, they now have the knowledge that cutting the power to an area that contains humans they want to attack will put the humans at a disadvantage.

• When Bishop goes out to get the second dropship, Vasquez is seen welding the pipe behind him. Why? A somewhat slim-built Bishop fit in that pipe well and could crawl inside, but a Xeno was significantly larger, so it couldn't get in the pipe follow Bishop and stop him. Plus it is said he needs 40 minutes to crawl 180 meters to the transmitter. Why so long? That's surprisingly slow crawl for an android that does not get claustrophobic and does not get tired.
  • The pipe is perhaps too large for a full-grown xenomorph, but not too large for a juvenile or for facehuggers. Welding it shut is probably therefore a good idea.
  • 180 meters at 40 minutes translates to a crawl of 4.5 meters per minute, or about 8 cm/s. That's not really too bad for "commando crawling" on knees, belly, and elbows through what looks to be about a 1m wide pipe. It's not wide enough for Bishop to extend his arms or legs at all. Also, Bishop's estimates on how long it would take were apparently on the conservative side, since he tells Ripley they still have 26 minutes after he lands the dropship.

• Why do the motion trackers operate only in two dimensions? A three-dimensional tracker would instantly show that an attack will come from above...
  • One of the themes of the movie is that the technology of the Marines makes them overconfident, so of course the motion trackers have a flaw that nobody suspected would be important before encountering the aliens. In-universe, the people who designed the trackers probably didn't think a 3D capability would useful enough to be worth the extra cost.

• Why bother trying to Terraform LV-426? I can understand there maybe valuable ores or mineral deposits beneath the surface that could be worth mining, but from what we see above ground, it's nothing but a barren wasteland consisting of rock and very little else, and very little in the way of natural light. Granted, it's taken less than 57 years for its atmosphere to have been transformed from one that required a spacesuit into one that is breathable by humans and a climate comfortable enough temperature-wise that normal clothes can be worn outside, but the ground still seems as rocky and infertile in "Aliens" as it did when the crew of the Nostromo first set foot on it nearly six decades prior. Unless soil (or other fertile media) can be brought in from elsewhere, or humans have developed a way to turn hard rock into material suitable for growing vegetation, which in turn can be used to grow crops and raise livestock, there doesn't look like much you can do with the place above ground. Whereas the planet in "Alien: Covenant" at least already had a temperate climate and vegetation seemingly identical to Earth growing on it (indicating fertile ground and enough water and natural light for photosynthesis to take place), apart from the possibility of underground resources that could be exploited LV-426 appears to have not much going for it that would be attractive for human colonization. If there were to be plenty of resources to be extracted from beneath the surface, rather than terraform the entire atmosphere to be breathable using a giant machine that probably cost huge amounts of money and requires plenty of maintenance, would it not have been more cost-effective to have something similar on a smaller scale that could provide enough breathable air for a sealed habitat/production facility should mining take place? Or, rather than try and support a mining colony (or colonies spread around the planet's surface), would an automated system or one at least staffed by specialist mining androids that don't require a breathable atmosphere or get depressed about being stuck on some god-forsaken rock be an easier proposition than sending humans to barren, lifeless planets like LV-426?
  • The original novelization of Alien makes it clear that this is a small planet, practically a planetoid, but with a near (86%) earth gravity and an atmosphere. The implication is that a great deal of the crust and possibly what's beneath is potentially valuable heavy metals. Evidently someone's done their sums and calculated that it's cheaper to terraform the planet to no-suit-required levels than to run an eventual mining operation in spacesuits.
  • We don't know how common earthlike planets are in this universe. We do know, from what Van Leuwen says after the disciplinary hearing for Ripley, that the Company establishes these terraforming colonies often enough to have a slang term for them - "shake 'n bake colonies". It is therefore not a particularly unusual project for them. That indicates that earthlike worlds are rare enough in this universe to make "decades"-long terraforming projects to create more economically feasible. Van Leuwen also indicates they've been at it for only about 20 years, so it's actually a bit surprising that the atmosphere is already breathable and the temperature has risen enough to allow humans to survive without suits (Ash said in Alien that it had "deep cold. Way below the line" i.e. the temperature line at which humans could survive the cold without a full spacesuit).

• In the Extended Edition we see a big gate open to let a vehicle out, and then the gate closes. Why? Gates are there to keep undesirables out. But the colonists are the only living things on the planet!
  • Perhaps the gate and the walls around the colony act as windbreaks? LV-426 has plenty of wind.

• What kind of economic calamity occurred in the thirty-odd years between Prometheus and Alien? The Prometheus mission ran Weyland a cool trillion dollars; the Nostromo is valued a a mere forty-two million "adjusted" dollars. In other words, and ignoring the "adjusted" part, the cost of the Prometheus was twenty thousand times that of Nostromo.
  • It might just be an inflation adjustment from between when the Nostromo was lost and the inquiry, since the inquiry happened 57 years later. It's probably also worth noting that the Nostromo was an unremarkable common commercial vessel, rather than an experimental prototype, so it probably cost a lot less to develop than Prometheus. Also, that's "minus payload, of course". The "20 million tons" of ore and automated refinery the Nostromo was towing was probably worth much more than the ship.
  • Hard to tell who is who in that meeting, but an insurance rep was said to be present. Speculation: the Nostromo was insured, and after she went missing insurance covered the loss. But now that it's known that Ripley blew the ship up on purpose, the insurance company wants their "adjusted" payment back. So that might have been a company rep growling that Ripley's re-appearance just cost them forty-two million.

• You would think that finding someone who has been in cryo-sleep for fifty-seven years - and survived - with her cat - would be kind of a big deal. Apparently not... no press, no visitors, no interaction at all outside The Company.
  • Burke says it's "an unusually long hypersleep" but there's no indication in the movie how often such an event makes the news, or whether other people have survived much longer periods. Perhaps Ripley was a minor press sensation for a news cycle or two, it just isn't shown in the movie. As for visitors, who would visit her? Her daughter is dead. Any surviving relations of her Nostromo crewmates are 57 years older and quite possibly dead as well, or not on Earth where they could visit.
• Was Apone bad at his job? After Gorman tells him to collect all the magazines Drake and Vasquez are still seen hauling their BFG around, aiming them at things, all the while in the tight confines of the Hive ... which only makes sense if the guns are still loaded. Clearly they're terrible at taking orders but Apone is suppose to be a seasoned officer whose job is to make sure that his grunts don't do anything stupid. This is stupid to the point of hilarity. Even before the aliens attack, Vasquez's weapon is so cumbersome that it takes up the entire catwalk, slowing everyone behind her down (including Apone himself). Did he think that the reason they insisted on not abandoning their weapons was so that they could yell, "bang! bang!" if they got attacked? I understand war is messy and chaotic, but this oversight on Apone's part seemed odd.
  • Vazquez and Drake clearly didn't unload the magazines from their weapons - they merely unplugged a battery pack of some kind to temporarily disable them (and then plugged a spare in as soon as the Sarge's back was turned). There is no reason to discard an expensive piece of military equipment when it can be re-armed again in a matter of seconds. I can also see several reasons they might have continued to aim the weapons even if they were disabled: 1) Their enemy doesn't know the weapon has been disarmed, and might be intimidated; 2) There may be sensors in each gun that were still functional even with the battery pack unplugged; 3) The marines continued to operate as they had trained and drilled, even though their guns are unloaded.
  • The Smartguns Drake and Vazquez are carrying have infrared tracking sensors that provide both an automated aim assist function and enhanced imaging through the eyepiece. It's why they are "smart guns" instead of just "guns".
  • It's also entirely possible that Apone, who obviously didn't like the order to disarm, new very well that Drake and Vasquez were disobeying it, but he trusted them to not open fire unnecessarily. In the end the fact that those two still had working weapons is probably the only reason Hicks, Hudson, and Vasquez were able to escape.
• Why does the dropship literally 'drop' from the hangar bay? If the Sulaco was in orbit then the dropship would have to perform a deorbiting maneuvre of some kind to enter the atmosphere. Otherwise it would just float there. Unless the Sulaco is not in fact in orbit, but somehow hovering under its own power like a big balloon- but that would be about the least efficient way to handle the problem of 'get dropship onto planet'. Then again, I guess it would solve the problem of how to decelerate a fairly flimsy-looking aircraft from orbital velocity without cooking it, as well as the need to accelerate it back up to ca. Mach 25 to get back onboard.
  • De-orbiting to the point that a dropship will literally drop out of the hanger might be useful to shorten the time the dropship is in transit from the mothership to the surface, which would be useful if they expect someone to be shooting at the dropship but not the mothership. Not exactly necessary on this mission, but it might be standard procedure into an un-known situation. The fact that they start to experience turbulence as soon as they exit the bay would indicate that they are in fact already in the atmosphere when the drop is initiated.
• One platoon of Marines for a colony is alright, but what isn't alright is just having them being the entire crew of the huge ship they work on; there should be support personnel that stay behind on the ship while the Marines are conducting search and rescue on the surface! Also, having the entire crew be the platoon means that everyone goes to the planet and no one stays on board the warship in orbit! This becomes a plot point later on when everything goes to hell, the dropship gets destroyed, the transmitter to call the ship on the APC is mentioned as "wasted," and they need to use the colony transmitter to get the backup drop ship remotely flown down from the Sulaco. So that means if the colony transmitter was destroyed/unusable too, the Marines would have been stuck on the surface of the planet awaiting the explosion from the overheated atmosphere re-processors as well as leaving empty a valuable US Colonial Marine starship in orbit over a planet!
  • This whole situation can be explained by the fact that the company is footing the bill for the trip. Since we know they've still been trying to get a xenomorph for study, they may have purposely set up the Marines going in by having restrictions such as only being able to send one crew instead of two (considering the size of the Sulaco, it would make sense that there was more than one group of people maintaining and controlling the ship), as well as selecting who would be leading the crew (this explains why Gorman, who only had one previous combat drop performed, was with the group. The company wanted someone who couldn't make the decisions and could easily be manipulated by Burke if the situation called for it). If Ripley hadn't been there, all of the Marine group would have been wiped out in the nest, and the processor of LV-426 wouldn't have been destroyed either (as it was Ripley's idea to nuke the site from orbit that Hicks agreed with, leading for the dropship to be called). They underfunded the mission, forcing the USCM to send one crew on the Sulaco, with the intention of controlling the situation and increase the chances of getting an alien, as well as being able to see how well the xenos stand up against trained Marines.
    • By underfunding the mission and making all those other decisions that disadvantaged it, they were actually increasing the chances of the entire mission team ending up dead and not bringing an alien back.
    • However, even if the entire mission team gets killed, the colony and the xenomorphs would still be there and allow for the company to get their hands on a specimen. The entire team not reporting in could be enough of a clue for the company that xenos are there (rememeber, Ripley gave them the planet AND grid co-ordinates to the Derelict, and the mission team disappearing would confirm the possibility of the xenos being there). That means that the company could send a science ship out to get a specimen, all the while the USCM are scratching their heads and wondering what the hell happened and get another ship prepped to find out why they haven't received any word from the Sulaco. In fact, this explains the ship in Alien³ and how they just so happen to be within range of Fiorina-161 with Michael Bishop on board. They were on their way to LV-426 well before the 17 days passed for the crew to be declared overdue. They could have suspected everyone was dead and the colony was still intact before they received the message from the prison planet.
  • There are a few possible alternate explanations for why the Marines would send one platoon in a nearly empty ship:
    • The Marines may be committed to other conflicts, and only able to spare one platoon and an empty ship to go check out what might be only a malfunctioning transmitter.
    • The Company may not actually believe there are any hostile life forms on the planet, and is only willing to pay for a small expedition to investigate the loss of contact. This would fit the "diverting the Nostromo was done by a mid-level executive who burned all the files when it didn't come back," theory popular with fans.
    • Or a mix of all of the above; the "mid-level executive" theory above, plus Marines who are short on available forces, plus Burke. In this scenario Burke initially didn't believe Ripley's story, but told the colony to go check the coordinates anyway. Once contact was lost Burke realized there might be some truth to Ripley's story after all, but because he saw he could be held responsible for the loss of a productive colony for having ordered the colonists to investigate without telling them what they were looking for, he downplayed the whole thing to his bosses and got the short-handed Marines to assign only a single platoon with a green officer he felt (rightly) he could easily manipulate. He brought along Ripley both because he thought she really might be useful and as another potential scapegoat - or possibly he was forced to bring her along by his bosses since she is the expert on these lifeforms. Once the marines are slaughtered and Ripley proves a loose cannon Burke decides to try to use her and Newt to get a xenomorph sample so he can salvage something from this train wreck his bosses will eventually realize he caused, but he's improvising at that point - it wasn't always his plan. With this theory Burke is the real bad guy of the movie rather than the Company as a whole.
  • Note also that the ship spends most of its time with the crew and passengers in hypersleep anyways, so operating with no conscious crew onboard is pretty standard procedure.
• The facehugger attacking Ripley in the medlab neatly illustrates part of the genius of its attack mode. Since it implants embryos through the victim's mouth, which could be fairly easily foiled by just keeping one's mouth shut, the tail also wraps around the victim's neck; not just as a means to hold on but also to choke the prey, since an instinctive reaction, which we see from Ripley, is to begin gasping and open your mouth. This gives the hugger the opportunity to give a Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong and then it's all over bar the chestbursting.
• Burke trying to screw the others and escape on his own actually saves Ripley, Newt, and Hicks. If he hadn't fled and locked the doors behind him, the whole group would have retreated to the medical wing, only to get surrounded on both sides and wiped out. If they had not had to flee down the tunnels, the story would have ended in Medical with the Marines being overwhelmed.
• The whole mission to LV-426 makes no sense, at least from Weyland-Yutani's perspective. I can understand the United Americas, the Company, or both, sending a Colonial Marine team out to investigate a colony that's fallen silent, but if the Company's plan was to bring back Xenomorph specimens, then why would they dispatch a unit of heavily-armed Marines with enough firepower to kill all of the Aliens ten times over, and a consultant who will warn them exactly what they'll be up against? Why would they not just send some unarmed mechanics, a Red Cross-type humanitarian aid unit, and maybe 1-4 lightly-armed Marines for security, since that sort of force would be easier to get impregnated with minimal risk of Xenomorph casualties?
  • The company is not the only powerblock in their universe. They are a powerful one, with the ability to access the government and put their thumb on the scales, but they are not yet the whole of the government. A colony that goes silent is big news, the actual government has to do something and the military is traditionally independent and territorial regarding their own forces, so the best the company can do is attach their own man to it to undermine and "advise" on it.
  • There's also the possibility that the Company honestly didn't remember about the Nostromo being diverted and really didn't believe Ripley's unbelievable story, and were honestly attempting to take the best measures they could to investigate the loss of their valuable colony. It's only when Burke sees the aliens in action and knows that he's going to eventually be blamed for the loss of the colony that he decides to take desperate actions to try to secure a sample (and eliminate Ripley at the same time) so he can salvage something out of this mess he created.