I watched Aliens for the nth time recently when it occurred to me: how would Kirk, Picard and the rest deal with them? None of the ST series that I know of have dealt with a nonsentient race with the same kind of bloodthirsty instincts of the Aliens. They’d be totally unprepared for the steps they would have to take to combat such a race. How do you think they would react?
[From the ship] Picard: “We should try to communicate with them.”
[On the planet ] Ensign Deadmeat: “Good idea, sir!” (To the Alien) “Hello, we’re from the ARRRGH!!”
Picard: “Dammit! Send down another ensign to see what happened to him!”
Ensign Deadmeat’s dumber brother: “Good idea, sir! Do I need a phaser?”
Picard: “No, we don’t know what happened. But stay alert!”
Actually, if you could get a good fix on an alien (even if that required slapping a communicator pin on one) with a transporter, the battle is over. Energize, and then scatter the atoms throughout the system.
The Star Trek crew (post Kirk) seems pretty ineffectual when it comes to down-and-dirty combat. Blame it on touchy-feely 1980s won’t-someone-please-think-of-the-children values.
The Trek creature most closely resembling the Aliens may be “Species 8472” from Voyager, but even they seem kinda wussy, relatively speaking. The whole comparison is like dropping Godzilla into Barney’s world. Different audiences, different focus.
Yeah, I suppose the ideas are so dissimilar that it would be too much of a clash. I just enjoyed the thought of the Enterprise gang (specifially Picard) listening with horror to an explanation of the Alien’s life cycle.
More likely he’d make sweet love to it and make it one of the many females out there pining for his return. You can’t be evil when you are too busy swooning.
KXL is correct that Federation technology seems to be quite superior to Alien technology.
I would imagine that Picard et al would try to persuade the Aliens to breed special nonsentient beings for the purposes of Alien reproduction.
Although one would expect that if the Aliens had mastered space travel, that they could have figured out how to dispense with the bother of finding soft sentient mammals to lay their eggs in. Unless our Alien was perhaps a marooned creature of sorts. In which case our TNG pals could think up an appropriately humanitarian solution. :chuckle:
Actually, is there any evidence that the Aliens ARE sentient? I’d thought that they were just animals. The Queen was slighly more intelligent, perhaps, but not much.
Well there’s also the scene in blech ALIEN: RESSURECTION where the two captive aliens kill the third in order to use it’s acidic blood to escape confinement. But I tend to discount anything that happend in that film as purely speculative. The trilogy ended with the third movie. The fourth was poorly-written dreck by a hack writer and some nameless French schmoe.
I’m not big fan of Star Trek and I would love nothing better than to see a bunch of Alien chestbursters bust through a third of the Voyager crew, grow up, cocoon another third and then have all the adult aliens run around the ship chasing the last third, ripping them limb from limb and bust their domes with those double jaws. But I digress.
Unfortuately, I don’t think that would happen to more than one or two 'red shirts". Aliens are clever, yes, but in the movies, its always a handfull of poorly armed humans against one alien or a handfull of moderately armed humans against hundreds of aliens. Star Trek crews all have phazors and shields and sensors and so on. I imagine it wouldn’t be hard for them to kill a bunch of aliens. After all, how many aliens did they kill in Aliens jst using machineguns and grenades?
I’m of the opinion that the ones that humans have encountered are intelligent, but feral. I think the dead alien they find in the spaceship with the eggs in the first movie looked quite a bit like the Queen alien. I think they were intelligent and technologically advanced creatures that had several castes and life stages. The dead alien was the fully mature ‘leader’ type, and after some accident that caused them to be marooned their young took over in a sort of ‘Lord of the Flies’ situation. Before dying the remaining responsible adult started the warning signal that was mistaken for a distress beacon, basically saying ‘Our young are dangerous and out of control, stay away for your own good’.
I’m of the opinion that the ones that humans have encountered are intelligent, but feral. I think the dead alien they find in the spaceship with the eggs in the first movie looked quite a bit like the Queen alien. I think they were intelligent and technologically advanced creatures that had several castes and life stages. The dead alien was the fully mature ‘leader’ type, and after some accident that caused them to be marooned their young took over in a sort of ‘Lord of the Flies’ situation. Before dying the remaining responsible adult started the warning signal that was mistaken for a distress beacon, basically saying ‘Our young are dangerous and out of control, stay away for your own good’.
It’s the bad one that fulfills the promise of a Trilogy. To sum up, without going into a lot of detail, the theory goes that a true film Trilogy (Capital “T”) must contain:
Re: Star Trek vs Aliens:[ul]
[li]Kirk would try to pork the queen.[/li][li]Picard would try to establish a dialogue with their culture.[/li][li]Sisko would slaughter them and hope it got him a promotion off that stinking station.[/li][li]Janeway would try to study the efficiency with which they devour her entire crew.[/li][li]And Archer would capture them and leave them all on Vulcan![/li][/ul]
I thought the dead alien from the 1st movie was from another alien race. IIRC, weren’t its insides blown out a la chestburster style? Presumably the guys on the ship were infected by the Aliens, crash landed, and sent out a warning.
Why that message would have been understood by humans as anything other than noise has never been explained to my satisfaction. Kind of like S T Voyager: “Hey were lost in a completely new section of space. No problem! The translators understand everything! Even languages never heard before!”
