Quote from: Pvt. Hicks on Sep 20, 2009, 07:42:27 AM
From what though? Yeah it's "alien" but from what? It's a living organism.
The same way as the chestburster comes into being: It's implanted in some sort of embryonic stage and develops.
It's no different to them being created inside the Queen, it's just that they'd be using/transforming the raw material of a dead or living body for mass. It would be rewriting/absorbing DNA, liquidising internal organs and so on, over a very prolonged space of time.
It's particularly horrific, because there's no indication as to whether a living host would truly die or just... Be kept in some sort of eternal state of agony, until the egg hatches and, therefore, 'dies'. Imagine if they really are capable of remaining dormant for hundreds or even thousands of years. Now imagine, as the original film attempted to imply, that
every single one of the eggs inside the derelict, were actually the ship's crew.
It brings a whole new level of the obscene to what the creature's capable of. It makes it a truly alien parasitical concept for something as large as them.
And then there's the mystery of whether the resulting facehugger would look the same as the rest or be somehow larger, because of the eventual eggs being so.
I
do like the Queen. That role allows them to make a more efficient use of available resources. But I also think that egg transformation - as a natural emergency, Queen-
creating countermeasure - is just too iconic, if handled right, to simply throw away. It truly gives us the idea that, as in '
Aliens', to even let a single one of them loose on a planet, would immediately lead to mass, viral infection of the entire population.
And yes, there is biological precedent for this. Caterpillars cocoon themselves. They then undergo a genetic hormonal storm and the entire contents of it are liquidised, reformed and, eventually, transformed into a completely different creature. The original creature basically 'dies', gets reduced to fluidic paste and another one is created to emerge.
