Headscratchers / The Faculty

• Once infected with alien parasites, there is near constant Glamour Failure going on as the infected humans now need to ingest large amounts of water, as well as there being some minor but very obvious personality changes. The stoners are far more intense, the coach is openly creepy, etc. However, not only is Marybeth not shown to need large amounts of water, she also seems to blend in pretty well, obviously having done her research about small-town America. She even knows to ask "have you been out long?" when she believes Stokely is a lesbian. Surely if she, the Queen, knows all this, she can instruct her "children" on how to behave like actual humans and be more discreet in how much water they drink at once.
  • I'll go ahead and defend this one: Given the aliens were insect-like parasites lead by a queen, it's reasonable to assume the writer(s) were going for the Bee People thing. With this in mind, it is likely that either: a.) she is operating them by "remote", and is only able to control them on a basic level due to range or something, or; b.) they are simply "drones"/"workers", and thus are not as socially capable as the queen herself.
  • I second that. She's spent time studying the humans and how to blend in. The parasites seem to just get used to infect and then have to learn on the spot. Marybeth also is an alien that can disguise itself as a human, whereas the rest are parasites occupying human bodies.
  • Actually, note that Delilah is more effective at hiding her infection than the likes of the Coach and Principal Drake. Miss Burke is also much more aggressive and forceful. So maybe once she got used to infecting more people, she got better at controlling them remotely.
• Why did Stokley change her appearance to pastels at the end of the movie after they defeated the alien menace? Did she do it for her new boyfriend, Stan? Stan isn't a football player anymore and fell in love with her for the way she was when they were fighting the aliens.
  • It's a symbol of her character growth. She wasn't dressing like a goth because she identified with the subculture or the lifestyle. She was doing it to deliberately alienate people - because she was afraid of letting others get close to her in case she was rejected. She was walking around with a big neon sign going "look how different I am!" - and the different choice of clothing is a sign that she no longer cares what anyone thinks of her. I doubt she changed for Stan, as he was never shown to have a problem with her old look and he never comments on the new one.
• The aliens need copious amounts of water to survive, because they dehydrate their host bodies very quickly, to the point a drug can instantly reveal who is infected, there's just one slight minor issue, our planet is mostly salt water, which dehydrates human bodies, so wouldn't our glorious sea filled planet just kill them pretty much as soon as they jumped in?
  • I guess you never heard of the water processing plants.
  • Well maybe that's why they possess humans rather than marine creatures. And since the invasion lasted about a week at most, we'll never know how successful it would have been in the long run.
• How the HELL did Ms. Burke go back to being normal after the Alien Queen was killed like all the rest? Fine I can accept that the parasites just died off in the still living staff and students and were flushed from the body. As far as I can tell, with Burke getting her freaking head chopped off and it going The Thing back to her body to reattach, she was more parasite than human at that point. It was literally keeping her alive through decapitation, that's not something that just "goes back to normal", if anything Burke should have been killed outright considering how much of her body had been converted already.
  • The alien was able to reattach her head and heal just in time before Casey killed the Queen. Note that Principal Drake gets stabbed in the hand and carved up with scissors, but is healthy and unscarred once she's possessed. The aliens are able to heal the injuries of whoever, so Ms Burke would have been healed by the time the Queen dies. There's no evidence that the aliens just hold injuries or wounds at bay; they look like they heal them outright. So by the time the parasite dies, it's a healthy human body that's been healed from anything.
• After Stan got infected by the football team on game night, why didn't he tell the team that his friends were in the school building and that they were trying to stop the alien invasion? If they had known about this, they would have known to stand guard at all the exterior doors of the school building. That way, Casey and Zeke would not have been able to carry out their plan to get the last of the drugs from Zeke's car.
  • Well they already knew where they were because Marybeth is the queen and she's with them, so they know what she knows. She lets Zeke and Casey go to the car so that the drones can attack them and she goes after Stokely now that they're alone and she doesn't have any drugs on her to fight back with.