Egg on Sulaco

[windebieste]

Bishop just got torn in half.  Relying 100% on a machine that has been torn in half isn't exactly a great idea. 

Spores would be able to grasp the floor grating.  That point I made earlier.

I'm not trying to change anyone's mind.  I'm just throwing my 2c into the hat.  This is an issue that's vexed everyone to date and no one has been able to adequately explain how the egg got there - but those of use that still want to make sense of it will continue to do so.   I believe we are getting there, slowly. 

-Windebieste

[SM]

He not only stopped himself being sucked out, but caught the little girl flying past.

I'd call that pretty reliable.

[Local Trouble]

I just took a look at that scene in Aliens where the Queen is chasing the Newt under the floor grating.  You can see the area under the floor quite clearly.  It looks nothing like the image above.

I felt that the idea of egg goo dripping onto the grating made sense.  Well said Local Trouble.  It would have explained why the egg grew upside-down.  But it is a very different place than is shown.  The egg is not positioned under this same floor.  The gravity idea may work, but it all comes across as a real stretch.

You have to take artistic license into consideration.  Even the cryotubes were different, but they were clearly intended to be the same ones that we saw at the end of the previous movie.

[windebieste]

Lucky he was there, huh.  Coz he  wasn't going to chase her.  That would have been hysterical.    Still, it was a good catch.  Not exactly something you would actually want to rely on, hey.  He could have just as easily have missed.

In the entire 2 minute sequence, yeah, the Queen could easily drop spores and not get noticed.  All that action happening with the Queen beating up on Ripley, flashing lights, grating being pulled up and discarded.  There is a lot going on. 

Not to mention the  fact that no one seems to be concerned about the acid blood that hits the deck when the Queen reveals herself. 
You'd think that 'crap that could eat through the hull' might be a concern to Bishop, too.  Nope.  Never even mentions it. There's so much going on in this scene, you'd miss spores being dropped if it was being viewed for the first time. 

There's plenty of room for leveraging the idea into the scene retroactively.  I understand that some fans would be upset if that was to happen because: 1).  It tampers with the scene the way they have been appreciating it for 30 years. ...and 2). It would go a long way to justify the existence of the third film. 

Oh, what a crime that would be!   

And yes.  Artistic licence is all over these movies in so many ways already.

-Windebieste.

[Perfect-Organism]

I just took a look at that scene in Aliens where the Queen is chasing the Newt under the floor grating.  You can see the area under the floor quite clearly.  It looks nothing like the image above.

I felt that the idea of egg goo dripping onto the grating made sense.  Well said Local Trouble.  It would have explained why the egg grew upside-down.  But it is a very different place than is shown.  The egg is not positioned under this same floor.  The gravity idea may work, but it all comes across as a real stretch.

You have to take artistic license into consideration.  Even the cryotubes were different, but they were clearly intended to be the same ones that we saw at the end of the previous movie.

Yes, that's true.  Lot's of artistic license.  Didn't even notice the different cryotubes.

I prefer the idea of the Queen depositing some eggs.  What I don't like about the idea of larva being deposited which then grow their eggs around them is that it lacks elegance.  It would mean that the larva goes through 2 gestation periods.  Firstly we have the larva which forms and egg around itself (effectively a cocoon).  Then once the egg is fully grown, it hatches and out comes the chestburster which in turn has to impregnate something in order for it to gestate until it bursts out.  That's one too many steps.  Of course the ideas of our terrestrial animal natures doesn't apply to the aliens, but one has to admit that there is a lack of elegance here.

[SM]

Must one?

[Perfect-Organism]

Figure of speech.

Do you think it's elegant to have a larva turn into an egg, then from the egg a facehugger, and then finally a mature alien from a host?  It's overwrought IMO.

[PsyKore]

Figure of speech.

Do you think it's elegant to have a larva turn into an egg, then from the egg a facehugger, and then finally a mature alien from a host?  It's overwrought IMO.

It's nowhere as inelegant as what Prometheus depicted with its cycle. Granted, there was some interference by David, but it's not implausible that Aliens and their DNA (or whatever) can be versatile though.

[Vermillion]

[stephen]

All of these explanations are within the realm of possibility and are simply dependent on the writer's choice.  My gripe with the whole thing is that it is a contrivance which led to a story without grandeur.  The end of Aliens suggested that the queen was effectively defeated by Ripley.  To say that an egg was either brought on board by the queen, or somehow she laid a tiny one is realistic without argument, but it is also contrived.  It just doesn't seem like a natural progression to the story.  It seemed like the natural thing to do was to go big and find out where the aliens came from.  That was the approach that Mark Verheiden took with his Aliens comics.  Instead, after the fans were pumped up by the Aliens film and the comics, we went to a story which seems so unimpactful and literally stalls the progression with some of the main characters.  Just take a look at how many pages it is taking for us to come up with an answer to how the egg got on the Sulaco.  It is just such an out-of-left-field direction that was taken, that it literally derailed the progress of the story.

What would be natural, is that these characters might get a few decades of some sort of peace after the events in Aliens.  It would be unnatural that the aliens' homeworld would be found a few weeks after the events of that film.  It would likely take a lot more time before people stumbled onto that planet.  So now we are at that stage where, we could get a proper sequel to Aliens, one which moves in a grand direction instead of the unrewarding one we got in Alien 3.  We could get that with Blomkamp's film.  The key actors are still around, and they are up for it.

This is ridiculous.  It's time to let go of the egg on the Sulaco, because most likely, it was never there and go in a better direction for a sequel to Aliens.

Agree agree agree.

In fact on one of the original Aliens DVD's (yes back when dvd's first came out) there was an interview with James Cameron and the guy asked him something about how he came up with the idea for a sequel and James Cameron basically said something like (and i'm paraphrasing):

"well i could have done something silly like have the ship float back to the planet or something silly but what I wanted is for Ripley to make a concious choice to reengage with the alien - the first film she survived physically but not mentally and by the end of this film she survives both physically and mentally"

If you want an explanation of how the egg got on board the Sulaco, then the simplest is the best.  In this scenario, you just have to link presence of the Queen to the egg on the ceiling; and then just 'join the dots'. 

While I agree the solution is a viable one and answers the biggest problem regarding the egg - it's location - if you want to go with simplest your theory actually adds to and changes the known details.

Would not a simpler theory be one that simply uses established principles of the universe.

1. Queen and a facehugger attached to the queen hop a ride on the dropship.
2.Queen lays egg in drop ship enroute (it can do this without the oviposter because the oviposter simply allows the queen freedom to lay eggs where she wants without having to move around).
3. While queeny is fighting ripley the facehugger moves the egg due to instinct - "don't be where your enemy expects you to be" (which also seems to be in line with the Alien's general nature anyway).
4. Once Queen has been sucked out airlock and Ripley and co have retired to the hypersleep chambers (perhaps even after Ripley gave the dropship landing gear a once over to make sure there were no more nasties) the egg hatches and now there are two facehuggers - one that gets Ripley and one that gets the dog.

Before anyone has a go at me about my earlier statement regarding changing details etc I fully accept that my theory does add in a few things.  Obviously there is ZERO precedence for the facehugger attached to the queen in the dropship and also the facehugger moving the egg.

But there is very little that i have in fact changed regarding the established principles of the universe.

Everyone understands the problem:

1. 1 or 2 facehuggers (if you go with the theory that one face hugger or royal facehugger can implant two hosts)
2. Location of one egg that we see.

[Mustangjeff]

We are putting much more thought into this situation than the writers of ALIEN 3 did.  I agree with Perfect-Organism that the whole setup is terribly contrived when viewed in context with ALIENS.  As a stand alone alternate universe movie its fine, but IMO its awful as a continuation to ALIENS.

[Rankles75]

If the Queen was capable of laying an egg after stowing away, there is only one place she would have been able to lay it. That place would have been immediately checked by anyone with half a brain as soon as the Queen had been defeated. Any talk of facehuggers hitching a ride on the Queen and then moving the egg when no-one was looking is laughable nonsense, frankly. I mean, I applaud anyone who has spent the time and effort to come up with any theory to try and compensate for one of the great movie f**k-ups, but I have yet to see one any more believable than "an alien wizard did it".

Alien 3 was just a confused mess from the moment it was conceived. I don't deny that some of those involved did themselves justice with their performances, but they were screwed from the start. I don't have any issue with anyone liking Alien 3, everyone is obviously entitled to their opinion, but I utterly reject any notion that it would have been a satisfactory ending for Ripley...

[FiorinaFury161]

... I don't have any issue with anyone liking Alien 3, everyone is obviously entitled to their opinion, but I utterly reject any notion that it would have been a satisfactory ending for Ripley...

Interesting. Sigourney Weaver was satisfied with ending when it debuted, as she wanted, nay, demanded Ripley meet her final doom in the film.

PS. I say the mods lock out this thread at page 100. Just to save more pointless repeating.

[Perfect-Organism]

If the Queen was capable of laying an egg after stowing away, there is only one place she would have been able to lay it. That place would have been immediately checked by anyone with half a brain as soon as the Queen had been defeated. Any talk of facehuggers hitching a ride on the Queen and then moving the egg when no-one was looking is laughable nonsense, frankly. I mean, I applaud anyone who has spent the time and effort to come up with any theory to try and compensate for one of the great movie f**k-ups, but I have yet to see one any more believable than "an alien wizard did it".

Alien 3 was just a confused mess from the moment it was conceived. I don't deny that some of those involved did themselves justice with their performances, but they were screwed from the start. I don't have any issue with anyone liking Alien 3, everyone is obviously entitled to their opinion, but I utterly reject any notion that it would have been a satisfactory ending for Ripley...

Well said.  I mean we are down to people coming up with things like "spores" which may have been dropped by the queen and then grown into eggs.  The theory isn't bad per se, but the problem is that the audience has to imagine that key piece of information which naturally impacts the story.  There is no primer on what the Alien really is capable of, so we are asked to suspend our beliefs or disbeliefs about what we already know about the aliens.  The film Aliens, told us that the queen creates a massive egg sac from which she creates eggs that are deposited over time.  Now the audience is asked to accept something different biologically that happens off screen (much in the same way as the death of 2 key characters from the previous film but I digress).

That is really just a problem with how the alien got on the ship, not even taking into account the other problems of the film.  To really enjoy Aliens 3, just let it go.  Forget about how the egg got there or it will ruin the film for you.  It just got there, end of story.

I really do like Alien 3.  It had amazing sets that are rare for sci-fi in the sense that they are so far from the 2001 aesthetic that they are utterly original.  The acting.  Those great soul searching moments.  The music!  Good heavens, the music was nothing short of amazing.

But I agree, it was not a good arc end for Ripley.  It is not a film that should have been made as an official sequel to Aliens.  It is a film that definitely can be enjoyed on its own merits, but it actually works better I think to see this film without seeing the previous 2, and that is just pointless.  There are a few people on here who've seen Alien 3 as their intro to the world of Aliens, and their admiration for the film shows.  For many other people, who've seen the films in sequence, this film is jarring in it's way of handling the previously established premises.  It was intended to end the series of Ripley's tales.  Sigourney Weaver wanted Ripley to come to a fitting end, saying that any one person can only have so much bad luck.  True.  But then she came back for more in Alien: Resurrection which did even worse things for her character arc.

Bottom line is, Alien 3 is an amazing piece of work that deserves to be admired on its own merits independently of anything that came before or after it.  But when it is considered in the context of the Aliens series as a whole, it is the train that went off the tracks.

... I don't have any issue with anyone liking Alien 3, everyone is obviously entitled to their opinion, but I utterly reject any notion that it would have been a satisfactory ending for Ripley...

Interesting. Sigourney Weaver was satisfied with ending when it debuted, as she wanted, nay, demanded Ripley meet her final doom in the film.

PS. I say the mods lock out this thread at page 100. Just to save more pointless repeating.

It is now legendary how many pages have been spent by fans trying to figure out how the egg go there.  It just goes to show how little thought was put into the exposition of the alien getting onto the Sulaco, and belies just how contrived the premise of Alien 3 really was.  Still love the film on its own though.  (Pssst.  Retcon it)

[Nostromo]