Quote from: Local Trouble on Nov 01, 2022, 04:35:56 AM@ralfy
Quote from: Local Trouble on Sep 08, 2014, 09:35:50 PMThe way Burke phrased it, it sounded like it was someone else at the company who agreed to pick up Ripley's flight contract. Maybe they did it at Burke's behest with no questions asked. I don't know. I'm not saying that whoever did it was in on it. If anyone was in on it to any degree, I'd say it was someone in the bioweapons division who was expecting a specimen of "something interesting."
The company didn't have free rein over the colony. They owned a lot of the assets there and employed a lot of the settlers, but the colony itself was governed by the ECA.
I think you and the rest of us have different definitions of Burke working alone.
The fact that the ECA sent the USCM means they thought there might be something to Ripley's story after all, so they dispatched a military force and briefed them on the possibility of a "xenomorph" as a precaution. It would have been negligent of them to do otherwise at that point. Burke didn't need to convince them to do this and none of it requires a conspiracy.
That's right. Burke didn't need to convince them because he wasn't acting alone.
Meanwhile, their decision to investigate the matter contradicts their conclusion that Ripley story's can't be proven. For that conclusion to be made, they would not have discussed the location of the alien ship during the hearing (which is the only thing that could have proven Ripley's case) because Ripley only raised it to van Leuwen after the hearing. The reason why we're sure about this is because it's only then that Ripley is informed about the presence of the colony. Had she raised the point of the landing site during the hearing, then she would have known about colony.
Is it possible that Ripley and the board didn't talk about the location of the landing because they had no information about it? Likely not because Burke knew about it. Since there's no other place to get it except from the deposition and/or the hearing, then that meant that Ripley and the rest of the board had the same information, too, but didn't talk about it during the investigation, which is incredibly absurd because that's the only evidence that would proven Ripley's case. Everything else she says during the hearing could only be proven through ship logs which don't exist, except for flight recorder information that, according to van Leuwen, only mentions that the Nostromo landed and then resumed course.
In addition, Ripley would have probably not been surprised later by discovering that Burke had contacted the colony because the main reason why Burke asks for her help is that they've lost communication with the colony. One can argue that Burke was probably referring to something like routine communications from the colony (hence, it might just be a downed transmitter), but the fact that he asks Ripley for help, plans to come with an armed group, and assures Ripley that the penalties against her from the board would be reversed means that that's not the case. Even then, Ripley would have guessed that the colony had been wiped out and that they are mounting an expedition to recover alien artifacts and organisms.
Quote from: SiL on Nov 01, 2022, 05:16:39 AMRalfy seems under the impression that when we say "working alone" we literally mean running the whole bioweapons division or something? I can't work it out.
Burke is working alone trying to get Aliens back to the Company so he can get a big payday from them. Nobody else is in on what he's doing because that would undermine his claim, something he goes to lengths to avoid.
He's small fry looking for his break and he thinks Ripley is it.
"Working alone" means he contacted the colony on his own initiative and was able to get an armed group together without the military asking him why. That also implies that he was the only one who had information about the location of the alien ship because, as the conclusion and Ripley and van Leuwen's discussion after the hearing showed, they never talked about the location during the hearing. But that in turn contradicts the fact that Burke had access to the location info, which he could have gotten only from the hearing. That also meant that Ripley and the board knew the same info.
