Quote from: BonesawT101 on Feb 04, 2011, 09:03:07 AMI forgot to mention the reason why I think we could see the alien in it's ancestral form is because a couple of times Scott has alluded to this - "Yeah, the thing about "Alien vs. Predator" is, I know it's commerce, but what a pity. I think, therefore, I have to design — or redesign — earlier versions of what these elements are that led to the thing you finally see in "Alien," which is the thing that catapults out of the egg, the face-hugger."
so, here's a crazy thought i had.
the big change in
aliens in the reproductive cycle is that it essentially ignores the other haploid phases. instead, it substitutes the insect haplo-diploid cycle (the warriors are haploid males, queens and unseen workers diploid females, like in an ant colony). originally, in
alien, the facehugger was the haploid phase. it would contribute half its genes to the pool, and the other half would come from
the host. essentially, the facehugger
mates with its victims, and the result it produces is a diploid "adult" alien, composed of, on average, 50% genes from each "parent". now, being diploid creatures ourselves, we tend to think of this phase as the most important aspect of our existence. but biologically, we're just here to pass on our genes -- which we do through haploid cells. sperm and ova.
what if the focus is really just on that haploid phase, and the fearsome killing machine we know and love is really just a secondary result of the breeding process for the facehuggers? and they're the evolutionary origin, that just evolved a strange way to produce their eggs?
edit: or, stranger still, if there were a correlating "female" haploid species somewhere in the evolutionary history, and the fact that we ran into the middle of this whole process is just a complete accident.