The Colonial Marines Technical Manual—which, while officially licensed, wasn’t written by Cameron or Scott, and would be overwritten by higher levels of canon, anyway—goes into this a bit in the later chapters, which consist of the “transcripts” of W-Y execs/operatives trying to piece together what happened in the wake of Aliens/Alien 3.
It’s neat stuff; one relevant section:
There’s also speculation about Burke’s strategy, alien biochemistry, and company efforts to profit/backstab one another over the discoveries. Fine cyberpunk stuff, all—find a copy of the book for yourself, if you can.
It’s never made entirely clear how long it takes to go from egg to chestburstser. In the first movie from the time the victim is attacked to the time he dies the crew has time to carry him back to the ship, do some tests, then the facehugger dies some time later, then he wakes up some time after that then he dies some time after that. The whole process takes at least 24 hours. According to the novel it varies from person to person and nest to nest. Sometimes it’s as little as 6 hours, sometimes over a week.
Even if we go with 24 hours, if we assume it took 3 days of careful driving 10 hours a day to get to the crash site, in an emergency driving 24 hours non-stop at full speed would be more then enough to make it back to the colony.
And of course we are never told *how *the colony became infected. The victim may have been dead for any amount of time when the tractor made it back to the colony, with the alien hiding aboard. It then left the tractor and proceeded to wreak havok.
But all this is rather irrelevant, since the colony would presumably have had air support in the form of those helicopter thingies that James Cameron puts in all his movies. So in an emergency the victim would have been back at base within a few hours.
IOW, the distance from the base to the crashed spaceship is more or less irrelevant. the only relevance to this thread is that it wasn’t miraculously located right beside the colony. The relevance in the novels is that, being on the far side of a major mountain range, the ship was completely unaffected by reactor explosion. The company then goes back and collects more eggs. Hilarity ensues.
According tot he novels, the Aliens are like some termites and wasps in this regard. If a worker isn’t exposed to a queen for more than a few days, it starts to lay eggs. It doesn’t become a queen, it remains a worker but its starts to lay unfertilised eggs, and it can only produce a handful. Any eggs raised outside the presence of a queen will develop into a queen.
So a single individual can re-establish the colony, but workers don’t transform into queens. Queens are born.
That’s a clever idea, but it’s not consistent with the first movie. There are no other Aliens of any kind on the Nostromo, so we should have seen a queen, right?
Good point. I seem to recall Newt’s mom calling for help on the radio when she brings her dad back to the vehicle. If they call in air support, then the first one doesn’t necessarily have to be a queen, either. They may well have sent another team into the derelict ship to try to figure out what they were dealing with.
For all we know, that might have been an immature queen that Ripley blasted out of the airlock. We don’t know that it had finished growing by the end of the movie. Alternatively, mature drones might have the capability of mutating into a queen if they’re in a queenless environment. Not a bad adaptation: if something happens to a hive’s queen, any surviving drones could replace her, ensuring the hive’s survival.
AvP is officially non-canon now. Only the four current movies, Prometheus, and the not-yet-released video game Aliens: Colonial Marines are official Alien canon.
I understand with a property like Star Wars, which is basically owned by one man, he can declare what’s canon and not. How does that work with Alien(s) which as far as I can tell has its rights spread around the place.
Not that I want AvP or AvP2 to be canon, as both where utter tripe, but just curious who has the power in the Alien(s) universe to declare things canon or not.
Nope - the corporation absolutely knew about the Alien and put Ash on the Nostromo specifically to bring it back alive. It’s straight from Ash after they broke his head off - here.
IIRC, the novel goes into a little more detail - another ship had recorded the distress call, and the company had already decoded it and realized it was a “Stay away, evil monster on this planet!” message. They put Ash on the ship with orders to bring it back. That’s why Ash opened the airlock doors when Ripley wanted to keep Kane outside the ship for quarantine.
This is why I thought it was brilliant to have Weyland along on the expedition in AvP. I thought it set up future events well without actually bashing our heads in with it.
