In character, because he wasn’t the command type. Too nice. And he maybe suspected he was a Thing. Plus the heart issue wouldn’t be good in a leader.
Okay, something I never understood. How did the “Thing” get to earth in the first place? I researched the plot and couldn’t find a reference to that other than it was from another world, which could mean anything. Was it a vicious predator that somehow stowed away on a spaceship and ended up here, or am I supposed to believe that such a vicious primal species is also so intelligent and scientifically capable that it mastered interstellar space travel?
During the title sequence, which is brief, a spaceship is shown having some sort of technical problem, and heading toward what appears to be an earthly ice sheet. That’s the only clue given until the visit to the crazy Swedes’, I mean Norwegian’s, camp, where they discover the nearby excavation of the spaceship, and presumed dig-up of the Thing from the ice.
It’s left to speculation as to if the Thing was commanding the ship, or had been picked-up somewhere and had taken over the spaceship’s crew. I suspect the latter.
In the original novella “Who Goes There?”, the Thing builds an anti-gravity device, cobbled together from stuff it found in the humans’ toolshed. Predation and intelligence are not antithetical.
On Earth, predators are often highly intelligent.
In the movie, it’s building a craft capable of getting it out of the arctic and to the mainland, so that version is also technologically sophisticated. What’s debatable is whether it’s natively intelligent, or has just eaten enough engineers over the years that its absorbed their skills.
Social skills, too!
It is, however, significantly better than a LOT of the musclemen action films of the day - it’s way better than Commando, or Cobra, or any Chuck Norris movie (Chuck Norris movies were fucking terrible.) Predator has aged fairly well. It’s just much better filmed and edited, and it’s well written. Having the hero have to use his wits to defeat a physically superior foe was a nice touch in those days.
1980s action movies could be pretty stupid, but the best of the bunch rose to the level of greatness; RoboCop, Die Hard, Aliens, those are truly great films.
It’s absolutely true that the Thing, when imitating a creature, can act like that creature. We don’t know if the Thing just knows how to act like the person, or if the person thinks they’re still that person until the Thing needs to take over, or if the person is aware they are a Thing but is being forced to act a certain way, or a combination of these things. So we don’t know the details but we do know the Thing can use a creature’s knowledge. We don’t in fact know of the Thing lifeform is an intelligent, sapient lifeform at all, or if it just appears to be when imitating sapient life forms and it’s just behaving as per their thoughts, the way a parrot imitates human speech but doesn’t really comprehend it. It even knew how to act like a dog. Remembering stuff previous hosts knew doesn’t seem like a stretch.
As to precisely how it works, well, we don’t know, and don’t have to. The movie tells the viewer precisely what you NEED to know to understand the conflict and the motivations of the characters.
Yeah, the ambiguity and fan theories are half the fun!