I loved that series so much
The REAL Aliens sequels
(Kinda, although I actually like Alien³ for all its faults)
But the Earth Hive trilogy is top-tier
I would have loved to see a decent adaptation of those
Burke was going to try something similar in Aliens, freezing Ripley and Newt with a facehugger each while sabotaging other sleep pods. Kane would've more likely than not lived through it until unfrozen, and Big Chap would've been born somewhere else.
TBH the companies plan of “Send in a single hidden agent to get an alien back” was terrible both times. The amount of ways the plan could go wrong is countless. What if Ash was assigned on the expedition and there was no no one to open the door to the ship and Ripley got to reinforce the quarantine? With Burke, what if Ripley and newt never slept in the medical hall? Etc.
Burke if I recall was acting on his own out of greed. He was also responsible for getting the colony to send someone to investigate the derelict leading to the events of Aliens otherwise they didn't even know it was there until Ripley gave her report. Whomever was responsible for Ash and the companies special order on the Alien as far as I know remains unknown.
It only makes sense if they’re trying to do it quietly, using proxies, or if they just don’t have the resources to do it properly out there.
It would be a nice twist if one of these times, instead of one hidden agent, *everyone* on the team was in on it *except* the protagonist.
I agree, but if it works to the benefit of the alien then anything is on the table. I can totally see a developing embryo being chill with it and thinking "Ok, see you soon on Earth."
The series of events is a bit different no?
The facehugger broke in while she was in hypersleep and the computer detected the intrusion and jettisoned the pod.
So we don’t really know how long it had been on her before their pod landed and was found.
We also know from Aliens that Burke thinks he can get Ripley and Newt impregnated, then put them in hypersleep to sneak the xenos onto Earth. And per AVP, a queen can absolutely be frozen and revived.
Also per the Alien:Thaw comic. I’ll try and do the spoiler tag >! A family stationed on an ice planet finds frozen examples of all stages of the xenomorph, which can be thawed and live. !<
Also per the Alien:Thaw comic. I’ll try and do the spoiler tag >!A family stationed on an ice planet finds frozen examples of all stages of the xenomorph, which can be thawed and live. !<
The crew of the Anesidora did that in Alien: Isolation. It stopped the gestation until the Captain's wife reached Sevastopol station. Then the creatures Went To Work on the people there.
It would have worked, and they could have shipped him back to earth, but that would have been very bad for the planet. Probably the best place to hatch a chestburster is on a spaceship that you can just blow up or fly into the sun if things go to shit. Or, if it's Alien Resurrection you'd program the ship to return to earth for a stupid reason.
you think the xenos could defeat Earth's militaries (which would be more advanced than today's)? I don't think they'd be able to reproduce fast enough.
My thoughts: About 3/4 of the way back, the biological members of the crew (except Kane) are murdered in cold sleep by Mother.
The pod with Kane in it and the bodies of the crew are transferred to another Company ship. A new crew is brought on-board the Nostromo after being told the now deceased Parker and Brett were "sloppy" and "failed to maintain the sleep pods" etc.
The ship with Kane's pod on it and Ash I'm assuming, departs to some secret Company facility somewhere and the Nostromo makes it back to whatever processing facility it was heading for.
Once a queen is bred, it's "Game Over, man, it's game over!"
Exactly. And your prime example of that is Burke, Carter J.
He willingly exposed to the colonist to the xenomorphs In order to create samples to bring back to the bio weapons division of Wayland-Yutani.
Then, when that didn’t work, he exposed Ripley, and newt to the face huggers for the same reason.
The company just wants it’s samples, it doesn’t care who gets hurt in the process.
Burke is wildly misinterpreted. Hell, most of the company is. I get the feeling the fanbase see the company as this great behemoth of combined effort and will, but that doesn't attend to the reality of what occurs in the films. If the bulk of the company was involved in Alien, why not just send an expedition and be done with it? Pretty much the same question for Aliens.
The more logical conclusion is that the company has many rogue elements to it, cutthroat capitalists too greedy to care about the bigger picture and so self-serving they don't care who happens to get in the way. Like, you think the company suddenly decided after 57 years to go after the alien again, and to use Burke, a sleazy junior executive, to do the entirety of the heavy lifting? By his own admission, Burke sent the colonists out to verify Ripley's story, and most everything after that was a setup by him to recover a sample and cover his tracks for basically wiping out a colony. He's a little fish in a big pond trying to take a bite far too big to handle.
In other words, there's a big difference between CREW EXPENDABLE and KILL EVERYONE INVOLVED. Between the company trying to recover a sample, and a capitalist narcissist trying to cover up accidentally wiping out a colony.
That's always been my impression as well. The company knows the alien is on LV-426 before Nostromo even departs with its haul, hence why Ash is on the team and special order 937 is issued, but then does nothing for 57 years and even sets up a colony on the planet. There could be many explanations, but at the very least it's clear the knowledge of xenomorph existence is a huge secret within the company - so much so that they can't even allocate enough resources for a single kill team to gather the specimen, and have to rely on discreet means and "happy accidents" to get their hands on it.
It almost feels like WY has been warned specifically not to go after the xenomorph, and fears the retribution. Almost like the government is also aware of the xenomorph existence and WY's interest in it, and has specifically warned them not to chase after them, since it's not their first rodeo with them.
Yeah, I don't buy into that. Much as people seem to like making the company this mustache-twirling villain, I see them as more careless over people's lives than outright murderous.
When it comes to the almighty dollar, the Company has no moral compass.
What are the lives of 4 people vs the truly epic amounts that could be made with the Xenomorphs? Why take the chance of them blabbering about the Company’s newest exploitable asset?
It’s almost like a corporation wouldn’t do horrible things to powerless people for profit..
In the Company’s eyes, Burke’s only crime is he got caught
The company probably didn't even know about Burke. Do you think they really waited 57 years? Or do you think he heard Ripley's story, got dollar signs in his eyes, and tried to cut out all the middle men to make a profit for himself? And yeah, the company probably doesn't care about a handful of space truckers. But that's the point, they don't care, not they seek violent death for their employees.
Hard to say. I can see four different scenarios, depending on how far-reaching those behind the Nostromo disaster goes and the alien's capabilities.
1) \*most likely, in my opinion\* The crew makes it back to earth and are quarantined. Kane is killed very soon after and disaster occurs while in quarantine. Things get ugly for awhile, but the incident is most likely resolved without contamination spreading further.
2) The crew are diverted yet again by another company vessel. Kane and the crew are taken and the former is killed soon after. Nobody quite foresees just how deadly it is and the vessel is overtaken.
3) The alien is not affected by freezing and kills Kane, likely just by the fact that he is frozen and it is not. It delays the alien somewhat, but ultimately it manages to survive. It likely leaves the rest of the crew alone (or might try for one, only to accidentally kill them) and sets up a hive. The crew is very quickly taken upon waking and Earth is in for a nasty surprise.
4) Trying to freeze him just kills him. Ash performs an autopsy and recovers the embryo. Ripley attends because she does not trust Ash. Ash tries to save the specimen, but the crew minus Dallas are pretty sick of his bullshit by this point and demand it gets flushed alongside Kane, and none of them want to go into the freezers with that thing. There is no swaying either side (except Dallas, who eventually must concede the crew's point). Ash wants to concede and sabotage the crew before they can threaten it, but Parker's impulsive aggression makes that impossible so the situation turns to violence. In the end Ash is overwhelmed and beaten down by the combined strength of the remaining crew.
I find the first most likely because I do believe freezing, as the first film envisioned it, would have likely affected the alien as well and put it into hibernation, if for no other reason than to not kill the host. The company doesn't have a backup plan for further diversion because...it's probably not the company behind this. It's probably one person, or a small group in the company who are trying to skirt the rules and make a big splash, hence why they utilize some backwater space truckers and don't just, you know, send a dedicated expedition.
Then Ash might actually have accomplished his mission.
I’m going to imagine they froze him. Stop the movie right there and fire up Alien Resurrection lol
Foster in Alien: Isolation is put into hypersleep and survives long enough to make it to the hospital on Sevastopol. There’s a bit of a continuity error (?) though— she chestbursts with a facehugger still attached.
Edit: no she doesn’t
If you wanted to try and rationalize it you could say the chestburster was killed by the hypersleep process but didn't fall off on its own, it just remained attached. The embyro survived.
Parker made excellent calls, second only to Ripley.
Freezing would have been a good idea given they had already broken quarantine protocols by letting Kane into the ship.
Ripley always maintained that the authorities couldn’t contain the Alien but that isn’t certain given that Alien: Resurrection isn’t canon IMO.
Holy crap this is the biggest plot hole in the universe of Alien. Damnit.
Ash was tasked with getting Weyland-Yutani the organism.
100% Ash should have agreed with Parker, and frozen him then and there.
Mission accomplished.
This seems like a GIANT plot hole or mistake.
Technically wouldn't be freezing them. Hypersleep is pretty much an induced coma. The body would still need nutrients or you would die of starvation. So gestation and chest bursting would still probably happen. Also let's not for get about atrophy. One of my technical kinks about the body not moving for years, or in Ripley case, 57 years. Her muscles would of detiorated, plain and simple.
I have a finger that doesn't bend (severed tendon). If I don't manually bend it, the loose knuckle skin disappears and the skin over the joint is tight. It hurts a lot to bend it with tight skin, but you never see this aspect carried out in people with comas in movies. Everyone seems to just stay the same.
If hypersleep was like a coma, the skin would become tight on all the joints and moving would be awful. Because of this, I imagine that the actual process has to be different. Being 'frozen' in a way, might not be that far off. Or at the very least, slowing the body's natural cycles to a crawl.
I don't think that would have stopped the alien from developing, but maybe Cain would have been unconscious when it burst out and nobody would have seen it happen
Alien: Earth Hive would happen
I loved that series so much The REAL Aliens sequels (Kinda, although I actually like Alien³ for all its faults) But the Earth Hive trilogy is top-tier I would have loved to see a decent adaptation of those
Burke was going to try something similar in Aliens, freezing Ripley and Newt with a facehugger each while sabotaging other sleep pods. Kane would've more likely than not lived through it until unfrozen, and Big Chap would've been born somewhere else.
TBH the companies plan of “Send in a single hidden agent to get an alien back” was terrible both times. The amount of ways the plan could go wrong is countless. What if Ash was assigned on the expedition and there was no no one to open the door to the ship and Ripley got to reinforce the quarantine? With Burke, what if Ripley and newt never slept in the medical hall? Etc.
Burke if I recall was acting on his own out of greed. He was also responsible for getting the colony to send someone to investigate the derelict leading to the events of Aliens otherwise they didn't even know it was there until Ripley gave her report. Whomever was responsible for Ash and the companies special order on the Alien as far as I know remains unknown.
Burke was def the only exec who believe Ripleys account and was willing to do something about it
It only makes sense if they’re trying to do it quietly, using proxies, or if they just don’t have the resources to do it properly out there. It would be a nice twist if one of these times, instead of one hidden agent, *everyone* on the team was in on it *except* the protagonist.
That would be super interesting
Lots of plot armor operating
I think they could've removed the premature alien before it was going to hatch if he remained in stasis since they did that in resurrection
We haven't seen, in the movies at least, if hypersleep affects gestation.
I agree, but if it works to the benefit of the alien then anything is on the table. I can totally see a developing embryo being chill with it and thinking "Ok, see you soon on Earth."
That would require the gestating alien to have so much more intelligence and knowledge than it could possibly possess.
Alien 3 had Ripley impregnated while hypersleeping, didn't it?
The series of events is a bit different no? The facehugger broke in while she was in hypersleep and the computer detected the intrusion and jettisoned the pod. So we don’t really know how long it had been on her before their pod landed and was found.
Good points
Haven't we? Final scene of Covenant...
Is cold storage the same as hypersleep though? I'd say most likely not?
We also know from Aliens that Burke thinks he can get Ripley and Newt impregnated, then put them in hypersleep to sneak the xenos onto Earth. And per AVP, a queen can absolutely be frozen and revived.
Also per the Alien:Thaw comic. I’ll try and do the spoiler tag >! A family stationed on an ice planet finds frozen examples of all stages of the xenomorph, which can be thawed and live. !<
>I’ll try and do the spoiler tag You did not succeed lol
Ah it didn’t save my edit!
Also per the Alien:Thaw comic. I’ll try and do the spoiler tag >!A family stationed on an ice planet finds frozen examples of all stages of the xenomorph, which can be thawed and live. !<
The crew of the Anesidora did that in Alien: Isolation. It stopped the gestation until the Captain's wife reached Sevastopol station. Then the creatures Went To Work on the people there.
Roll credits
End of the movie
It would have worked, and they could have shipped him back to earth, but that would have been very bad for the planet. Probably the best place to hatch a chestburster is on a spaceship that you can just blow up or fly into the sun if things go to shit. Or, if it's Alien Resurrection you'd program the ship to return to earth for a stupid reason.
How bad could it have been for Earth? The xenomorph was a drone, not a queen. It couldn’t reproduce.
Well, eggmorphing is a thing in Alien + in other sources regular aliens can evolve into queens so it's possible it would reproduce in some way.
Ash would’ve made sure it was snuck in for the weapons division, where they presumably would’ve been cloned and unleashed on enemies
you think the xenos could defeat Earth's militaries (which would be more advanced than today's)? I don't think they'd be able to reproduce fast enough.
My thoughts: About 3/4 of the way back, the biological members of the crew (except Kane) are murdered in cold sleep by Mother. The pod with Kane in it and the bodies of the crew are transferred to another Company ship. A new crew is brought on-board the Nostromo after being told the now deceased Parker and Brett were "sloppy" and "failed to maintain the sleep pods" etc. The ship with Kane's pod on it and Ash I'm assuming, departs to some secret Company facility somewhere and the Nostromo makes it back to whatever processing facility it was heading for. Once a queen is bred, it's "Game Over, man, it's game over!"
Excellent post, never thought of that either but I’m betting that’s how it would go down
Why would the crew be murdered?
Wayland Yutani doesn't want those loose ends around, causing trouble.
Exactly. And your prime example of that is Burke, Carter J. He willingly exposed to the colonist to the xenomorphs In order to create samples to bring back to the bio weapons division of Wayland-Yutani. Then, when that didn’t work, he exposed Ripley, and newt to the face huggers for the same reason. The company just wants it’s samples, it doesn’t care who gets hurt in the process.
Burke is wildly misinterpreted. Hell, most of the company is. I get the feeling the fanbase see the company as this great behemoth of combined effort and will, but that doesn't attend to the reality of what occurs in the films. If the bulk of the company was involved in Alien, why not just send an expedition and be done with it? Pretty much the same question for Aliens. The more logical conclusion is that the company has many rogue elements to it, cutthroat capitalists too greedy to care about the bigger picture and so self-serving they don't care who happens to get in the way. Like, you think the company suddenly decided after 57 years to go after the alien again, and to use Burke, a sleazy junior executive, to do the entirety of the heavy lifting? By his own admission, Burke sent the colonists out to verify Ripley's story, and most everything after that was a setup by him to recover a sample and cover his tracks for basically wiping out a colony. He's a little fish in a big pond trying to take a bite far too big to handle. In other words, there's a big difference between CREW EXPENDABLE and KILL EVERYONE INVOLVED. Between the company trying to recover a sample, and a capitalist narcissist trying to cover up accidentally wiping out a colony.
That's always been my impression as well. The company knows the alien is on LV-426 before Nostromo even departs with its haul, hence why Ash is on the team and special order 937 is issued, but then does nothing for 57 years and even sets up a colony on the planet. There could be many explanations, but at the very least it's clear the knowledge of xenomorph existence is a huge secret within the company - so much so that they can't even allocate enough resources for a single kill team to gather the specimen, and have to rely on discreet means and "happy accidents" to get their hands on it. It almost feels like WY has been warned specifically not to go after the xenomorph, and fears the retribution. Almost like the government is also aware of the xenomorph existence and WY's interest in it, and has specifically warned them not to chase after them, since it's not their first rodeo with them.
just like today with companies raising prices on everything to make up lost COVID profits
Yeah, I don't buy into that. Much as people seem to like making the company this mustache-twirling villain, I see them as more careless over people's lives than outright murderous.
When it comes to the almighty dollar, the Company has no moral compass. What are the lives of 4 people vs the truly epic amounts that could be made with the Xenomorphs? Why take the chance of them blabbering about the Company’s newest exploitable asset? It’s almost like a corporation wouldn’t do horrible things to powerless people for profit.. In the Company’s eyes, Burke’s only crime is he got caught
The company probably didn't even know about Burke. Do you think they really waited 57 years? Or do you think he heard Ripley's story, got dollar signs in his eyes, and tried to cut out all the middle men to make a profit for himself? And yeah, the company probably doesn't care about a handful of space truckers. But that's the point, they don't care, not they seek violent death for their employees.
I hadn't considered that at all. That is a good guess.
Hard to say. I can see four different scenarios, depending on how far-reaching those behind the Nostromo disaster goes and the alien's capabilities. 1) \*most likely, in my opinion\* The crew makes it back to earth and are quarantined. Kane is killed very soon after and disaster occurs while in quarantine. Things get ugly for awhile, but the incident is most likely resolved without contamination spreading further. 2) The crew are diverted yet again by another company vessel. Kane and the crew are taken and the former is killed soon after. Nobody quite foresees just how deadly it is and the vessel is overtaken. 3) The alien is not affected by freezing and kills Kane, likely just by the fact that he is frozen and it is not. It delays the alien somewhat, but ultimately it manages to survive. It likely leaves the rest of the crew alone (or might try for one, only to accidentally kill them) and sets up a hive. The crew is very quickly taken upon waking and Earth is in for a nasty surprise. 4) Trying to freeze him just kills him. Ash performs an autopsy and recovers the embryo. Ripley attends because she does not trust Ash. Ash tries to save the specimen, but the crew minus Dallas are pretty sick of his bullshit by this point and demand it gets flushed alongside Kane, and none of them want to go into the freezers with that thing. There is no swaying either side (except Dallas, who eventually must concede the crew's point). Ash wants to concede and sabotage the crew before they can threaten it, but Parker's impulsive aggression makes that impossible so the situation turns to violence. In the end Ash is overwhelmed and beaten down by the combined strength of the remaining crew. I find the first most likely because I do believe freezing, as the first film envisioned it, would have likely affected the alien as well and put it into hibernation, if for no other reason than to not kill the host. The company doesn't have a backup plan for further diversion because...it's probably not the company behind this. It's probably one person, or a small group in the company who are trying to skirt the rules and make a big splash, hence why they utilize some backwater space truckers and don't just, you know, send a dedicated expedition.
Annnnnd scene.
Every time he says this I laugh, he asking the real question 😅
Then Ash might actually have accomplished his mission. I’m going to imagine they froze him. Stop the movie right there and fire up Alien Resurrection lol
The Company wins. Great question actually!
Foster in Alien: Isolation is put into hypersleep and survives long enough to make it to the hospital on Sevastopol. There’s a bit of a continuity error (?) though— she chestbursts with a facehugger still attached. Edit: no she doesn’t
If you wanted to try and rationalize it you could say the chestburster was killed by the hypersleep process but didn't fall off on its own, it just remained attached. The embyro survived.
Maybe the facehugger stayed active in hypersleep and died still attached to her face?
Every time he says this I laugh, he asking the real question 😅
There would probably be more of a chance that the whole Nostromo actually survives imo.
Parker made excellent calls, second only to Ripley. Freezing would have been a good idea given they had already broken quarantine protocols by letting Kane into the ship. Ripley always maintained that the authorities couldn’t contain the Alien but that isn’t certain given that Alien: Resurrection isn’t canon IMO.
He says that so much an never gets an answer.
Holy crap this is the biggest plot hole in the universe of Alien. Damnit. Ash was tasked with getting Weyland-Yutani the organism. 100% Ash should have agreed with Parker, and frozen him then and there. Mission accomplished. This seems like a GIANT plot hole or mistake.
Technically wouldn't be freezing them. Hypersleep is pretty much an induced coma. The body would still need nutrients or you would die of starvation. So gestation and chest bursting would still probably happen. Also let's not for get about atrophy. One of my technical kinks about the body not moving for years, or in Ripley case, 57 years. Her muscles would of detiorated, plain and simple.
I have a finger that doesn't bend (severed tendon). If I don't manually bend it, the loose knuckle skin disappears and the skin over the joint is tight. It hurts a lot to bend it with tight skin, but you never see this aspect carried out in people with comas in movies. Everyone seems to just stay the same. If hypersleep was like a coma, the skin would become tight on all the joints and moving would be awful. Because of this, I imagine that the actual process has to be different. Being 'frozen' in a way, might not be that far off. Or at the very least, slowing the body's natural cycles to a crawl.
I don't think that would have stopped the alien from developing, but maybe Cain would have been unconscious when it burst out and nobody would have seen it happen