Remind me. In Alien 3 is it two face huggers? or one Royal Facehugger?

[Corporal Hicks]

I really wish the shot of the standard facehugger in the AC's opening credits had been removed. It really shouldn't have been there since it was shot during the reshoots.

[O_Intelligence]

And that they included the FULL 'super facehugger' scene.

This has never been released as a deleted nor extended scene either in any extras, although it's in the (or, rather, a) script, novelisation, audiobook; and photos of what's almost certainly the full scene exist (a few close-ups of Murphy holding the creature by the tail with a 'what is this?' expression).

The quick cut away from the first glimpse of the super facehugger from a distance in the Assembly Cut is clearly intended to make viewers think it's a standard facehugger.

The super facehugger doesn't exist as a concept in the Assembly Cut.  I think there's some confusion about this.

[Corporal Hicks]

That sequence in the abattoir is the only thing that was shot with the super facehugger, unfortunately. ADI never built a mechnical version of the hugger either which is a shame. I'd have liked to have seen it in action, demonstrate it taking two hosts.

And that longer shot used in the AC - it was the one used in the older edit they were reassembling.

[Necronomicon II]

I really wish the shot of the standard facehugger in the AC's opening credits had been removed. It really shouldn't have been there since it was shot during the reshoots.

Yeah I second this, as much as I love the cinematography. Wouldn't mind a second assembly with the 4K release (whenever we get that), I know there's a chap on youtube doing a 4K master, improving the compositing, etc.   

[SiL]

That sequence in the abattoir is the only thing that was shot with the super facehugger, unfortunately. ADI never built a mechnical version of the hugger either which is a shame. I'd have liked to have seen it in action, demonstrate it taking two hosts.

And that longer shot used in the AC - it was the one used in the older edit they were reassembling.

At best there's some more coverage with some closer shots, and that's about it.

[O_Intelligence]

That sequence in the abattoir is the only thing that was shot with the super facehugger, unfortunately. ADI never built a mechnical version of the hugger either which is a shame. I'd have liked to have seen it in action, demonstrate it taking two hosts.

And that longer shot used in the AC - it was the one used in the older edit they were reassembling.

Yes, I think we're saying the same thing, except that there's almost certainly more of the same abbatoir scene out there as detailed in, e.g., the novelisation; where Frank and Murph speculate that the super facehugger (or facehugger in the novelisation, to confuse matters...) is a jellyfish from the beach, and then cast it aside.

The super facehugger in the Assembly Cut is a non-entity: the scene is cut after the long shot to make it look like a standard facehugger.  There is no super facehugger in the narrative of the Assembly Cut.

That sequence in the abattoir is the only thing that was shot with the super facehugger, unfortunately. ADI never built a mechnical version of the hugger either which is a shame. I'd have liked to have seen it in action, demonstrate it taking two hosts.

And that longer shot used in the AC - it was the one used in the older edit they were reassembling.

While I'd (really really) love to see the entire scene (something of an - inexplicable, niche - obsession of mine), I'm actually not certain I'd like to have seen an animatronic of the super facehugger in the film at any point.  When it comes to the Alien franchise, I prefer more the mystery and speculation (the original space jockey comes to mind...), and the loneliness and chance-like nature of the Alien universe, in my interpretation or preference at least.  I also like the idea of Ripley not having encountered the disregarded super facehugger in the abattoir (in the screenplays, at least, although she does encounter the ox carcass and intuit accordingly - 'This is where it started').

For me, in the Assembly Cut, I'd like to have seen the full abattoir scene, and removal of the standard facehugger bits in the opening Sulaco scene to make it all look a bit more as if there's only a super facehugger.  However, I'm not certain this would 'hammer home' what the super facehugger is exactly, and that it can impregnate at least two hosts (and, dangerous thing to say, where it came from...) for the casual viewer in this proposed 'Super Facehugger Assembly Cut'.  For this reason, I can see why they did what they did (no super facehugger existing as a concept in the Assembly Cut).  Perhaps that's the reason why the creature was dismissed originally during the production/filming of the film itself (although who knows precisely what's going on in the end result of that film with one standard facehugger or more, and that Bertrand Russell's Infernal Egg...*).

*I've just decided:
- Celestial Teapot = The person making bold claims for something such as the existence of a god (etc etc) has to provide evidence and explanation for the claims.
- Infernal Egg = In filmmaking, or at least the Alien series, the person (film-maker) making bold claims requires - counter-intuitively - others (the viewing audience) to provide evidence and explanation for the claims.

(Corporal H.: As a small aside, massive thanks for this website.  Long-time lurker.)

[Lark]

In the comics adaptation, we see the queen bursted swim from Newt's dead body to infect Ripley. So only one hugger was needed for the dog burster. The implication was that Newt was infected before Ripley got her out in Aliens.

[SiL]

The implication was she was the one infected on the ship.

[Local Trouble]

SM said it could only be Hicks.

[O_Intelligence]

This takes us down a different avenue.

However, to say that at one point, in something of a fantasy version of Alien3 in my mind, I entertained the idea that the Alien that attacked and ultimately scarred Hicks also barbed him with its tail as a species-survival mechanism in response to the chaotic proceedings at the time.  Due to the altercation, the barb came to remain attached to Hicks as it had been snapped off of the Alien by the elevator door or somesuch reason.  Bishop attempted later to treat this, assuming no damage had been done to Hicks beyond cosmetic (and presumably psychological!).  However, very obviously, I found the overall idea progressively sillier as I mapped it out.  My underlying proposition was that in absence of a Queen, standard Aliens can 'egg-morph' victims (perhaps what was happening in Alien 1979) to produce a super facehugger.  While in stasis, Hicks then egg-morphed.  How egg-morphing would interact with the stasis conditions is yet another consideration...  To explain the runner and Queen in Alien3, I also toyed with the idea of the egg in the opening scene having been laid by the Aliens Queen and serving to produce the runner.

This overall 'fantasy' is a messy one, however, and would require retcon-ing of both films and making some unsatisfying leaps of logic in an attempt to fit the puzzle together.  I don't 'condone' it.

At any rate, I think one lesson may be that we're - forever - generally posed with an unsolvable conundrum in the matter of the egg and facehugger(s) in Alien3, except that 'it is'.  Except for the idea of a dream-like state at the beginning, which means many ideas, and some with less requirement for evidence or Occam's logic immediately post-Aliens, are fair game.

[judge death]

The whole: queen alien embryo escaped newt by her mouth and then crawled inside of ripley is just hilariously bad and cant work.
First: the mebryo cant grow that fast that its able to cut itsd umbilical cord, crawl out and then reimplant itself and keep growing like nothing.
2: We know the embryos grow by having umbilical cord to the host, it wont cut it until its time to chestburst.
3: it cant crawl out of the hosts mouth without breaking the organs of the host, and newt died from drowning not heart, lungs etc bursted open by a chestburster trying to escape in panic.

Could write down more facts but these 3 are enough to debunk that theory.

[SiL]

I mean there's a reason it's only in the comic.

[O_Intelligence]

If it was something that was discovered towards the end of the film by the audience (rather than Ripley) in a 'flash-back' or rewind of sorts, it would make certain sense as a twist (Ripley had the embryo all along when the evidence pointed to Newt being facehugged, and for the final act she's therefore in a new and highly game-changing situation).

Otherwise, the switch of hosts would have added little to the story itself, and therefore needed to have been removed as an extravagance.

Would have been intriguing to see, though, had it been filmed very (very) intelligently - albeit within the confines of the slightly-crazy idea.

Separately: I was intrigued by the comic book adaptation, in that we don't see the egg and facehugger.  Makes the Alien more analagous than before to an communicable infection.  In addition, such a communicable infection would have looked especially bad (or, for W-Y, perhaps good) on Supt. Andrews' report.  :-D

As the film stands, the definitive answer to this thread appears to be that it's one, maybe two standard (only) facehuggers, said with a careless shrug.  Some possibility of it being a dream (which would imply perhaps two standard facehuggers - from somewhere), as David Fincher said in an interview, however there's nothing or little to suggest a dream-like obfuscation or, conversely, representational summarising of more complicated events aboard the Sulaco, in the final product.

[BlueMarsalis79]

Sounds like the comic's best in this department.