It’s definitely Burke’s idea to check out the ship on a gamble based on what Ripley reported after being rescued.
He’s a vile snake, all right. I have trouble watching Reiser in anything else and not thinking about this character.
Gauged by 21st-century corporate morality, I’d set the bar at “irresponsible” at least.
What?!? Those two specimens could have been worth millions to the bio-weapons division! If Ripley had been smart, they could have come back as heroes and been set for life!
Of course, Burke would have had to sabotage a few freezers on the way home… but then he could jettison the bodies and make up any story he wanted. Nobody would find out about the embryos they were carrying… Ripley and Newt.
Not quite… remember this exchange over breakfast?
There are obviously other aliens out there that are at least somewhat compatible with humans. The details, however, are left to our imaginations.
Besides, the logo on the side of the marines’ dropship implies that Apone’s men specialize in hunting bugs. If there “are no hostile planets”, then what have they been practicing on?
That exchange doesn’t indicate anything of the sort. You could replace “Arcturian” with “French” or “Japanese” without changing the meaning. It’s just soldiers boasting about their sexual exploits in some pace where the women have a reputation for hotness, with a side order of gross-out humour thrown in.
There’s nothing at all to indicate that the people in question are anything but human colonists.
But we do know that there are other known planets with life. The reaction to Ripley’s story isn’t “We’ve never found life before”. The reaction is “You want us to believe in something never described before in over umpteen thousand ecological surveys”. IOW the skepticism wasn’t that she claimed to have found life, just that sort of life.
The written material is quite clear that no intelligent life is known outside Earth.
GMOs/bioweapons mostly according to the extended cannon. There are several civil wars and separatist movements going on in the colony worlds, and a standard tactic is use of weaponised lifeforms to destroy crops, destroy morale or to make certain areas impassible and unlivable. The clean-up is left to the marines.
That’s not to say that the marines never fought aliens, but “Bug Hunts” weren’t necessarily an indication of alien life.
Hudson: Is this gonna be a standup fight, sir, or another bughunt? Gorman: All we know is that there’s still no contact with the colony, and that a xenomorph may be involved. Frost: Excuse me sir, a-a what? Gorman: A xenomorph. Hicks: It’s a bughunt.
“Alien life” existed in abundance in the Alien universe, just never these kinds of aliens. You don’t have to go to any written material to see that, it’s right there in the movies.
Why does WY not just send a trained and equipped professional crew directly to capture a specimen, instead of this cloak and dagger bullshit that not only costs them BILLIONS in losses but kills people? Isn’t WY openly the owner and operator of all those ships and colonies at least to some extent? So who are they worried will notice and wonder about a ship sent out to capture an alien, so what?
I feel like we are missing a big chunk of backstory here.
Interesting though that apparently the soldiers had never heard the term xenomorph before even though they have been on plenty of bug hunts, which suggests the bugs they were hunting were not alien in origin.
Border and Customs, Patent Office, EPA and PETA. In that approximate order.
Border and Customs won’t let a novel and obviously dangerous lifeform back onto Earth without extensive trials and a period of quarantine.
If the organism is subject to extensive trials and quarantine, it will become known that any weaponisation of it was a discovery and not an invention. Since discoveries can’t be patented, that means that WY basically loses the weaponisation profits.
WY only owns the planet in the same sense that BP owns the Gulf of Mexico. It owns the freehold to the land and mineral rights, but that doesn’t give it the legal right to do whatever it likes to the lifeforms or cultural artifacts. That goes doubly for an endangered species and a unique artifact. The Aliens universe is a corrupt capitalist dystopia but there are still laws that can’t be openly broken.
And finally “environmental” groups that, even if WY does manage to bribe enough people to get the animal back to Earth, are going to raise merry hell about the fact that it has been captured and experimented on.
Consider the situation analagous to what would happen if BP found a Native American temple on an island they were mining for guano. And in that temple they found a species of rat with a venomous bite. There is no way in hell that they are going to be able to take that rat back to their home country, and if they do they won’t be able to patent the venom, and in all probability they will be severely curtailed in their mining activities if not ordered to cease while a full scale environmental and cultural survey is carried out. From a profit POV, the best thing to do is to smuggle couple of rats back to the mainland and hush up the find.
Burke took that a step further. he didn’t want anybody else at all to know about it, especially hsi bosses. That way he could either sell it or give it to a team of private researchers for weaponisation. He then makes all the profit rather than just getting a small salary bonus.
In the novels they do eventually send in a team androids specially built to be implanted. They then freeze them and smuggle the embryos back to Earth that way. Burke of course didn’t have that sort of funding available.
I just put that down mostly to the officer’s use of five dollar words. While “xenomorph” was probably the way he was taught to describe them in his reports, it’s not a word the grunts were familiar with, hence the confusion. That fits with Gorman’s portrayal as an inexperienced officer with no rapport with his men.
With all those socio-policitcal restraints in place, I can’t believe the company sent ass-kicking space marines with flamethrowers when they could have come up with some sort of convoluted atavistic VR program in order to win over the xenomorphs internally without violence. Also, there should be a guy in a wheelchair.
Why do they need to take it back to earth though? Just study it on a ship or one of those gigantic space stations like Ripley lived in for a while.
The sense I got from Aliens was that in their future corporations had basically replaced nation/states as the true power in the world(yea yea ) and the US government? was allowed to remain as a figure head. It definitely seemed like while the marines were soldiers, WY was the real power.
And OT but what exactly is the status and capabilities of synthetics like Ash and Bishop? Are they property? Are they straight up programmable machines, or some kind of cyborg with some organic parts? The fact they are filled with a white fluid suggests some kind of organic.
I assume that the quarantine restrictions for an inhabited space station would be much the same as the restrictions for an inhabited planet, if not even stricter.
I also assume the company didn’t have vacant space stations lying around for just such an emergency.
That is true to some extent. Nevertheless even in the movies everyone knows that Burke could never get an alien embryo through quarantine, so obviously the government still exists in a functioning form.
They’re purely machines, but with lots of polymer parts. They aren’t organic in the sense of being living. They are considered property, but there are legal limitations placed on what they are capable of so they don’t become de facto “slaves”. Bishop overstepped those limitations in demonstrating a sense of true self-preservation and an emotional bond with humans. Whether that was an accident or done deliberately is open to speculation.
Well, they’re designed to look human, and humans are squishy and full of fluid. The white gunk could just be to keep the body properly filled out. It might also have additional functions, though, like sealing and repairing breaks in the skin. Bishop stops “bleeding” quickly after cutting himself.
The movies imply that neither the EPA nor PETA would be a major issue for WY if they managed to get an Alien onto Earth on account of all parties being dissolved and eaten.
I’m not sure how much that’s true. Certainly, we’re no match for the Aliens physically, but most of their major victories seem to be due to humans’ extremely limited materiel and terrible tactics (“Hey, we can’t use guns in here for some technobabble reason, and our sensors appear to not be working properly. Oh well, let’s not bother to retreat and come up with a better plan. Onward!”)
I question how useful the aliens would be as a weapon. Their sole ability is to infiltrate a populated center, skulk about, and slowly increase their numbers as they pick off the living occupants for food/breeding vessels. Where would you even deploy such a weapon?
Keep in mind the company already has access to nukes, great for obliterating targets from orbit, and armed assault forces for surgical strikes. Maybe xenomorphs would be good against entrenched targets where you want to avoid collateral damage and human casualties–but after they kill all the humans, then what? You couldn’t use anything they left behind without clearing them out, and as the films demonstrated, eradicating an alien infestation isn’t particularly easy.
… then all this… all this … bull$%&# that you think is so important!?! Well you can just kiss all this good-bye!
If that’s not a rhetorical question, I might pick Mumbai or Kolkata.[ul][]Very large number of hosts – so many, in fact, that it might take a while for anyone to notice what’s going on.[]Unarmed civilians – I don’t know exactly what Earth will be like during the Aliens timeframe, but in the 21st century, strict gun control would make the number of effective anti-xenomorph weapons per capita pretty low in India.[]Plenty of hiding places – Mumbai and Kolkata are both geographically large, and, having been founded millennia ago, are rife with man-made structures in which to hide and develop a nest.[]Bureaucratic government – by the time anyone figured it out, the government might be hindered by its own red tape and unable to respond effectively before it’s too late.[/ul]Of course, if I’m a W-Y exec, I’d have to wonder why I was doing this. What’s the point of my killing off all my customers?
The customer might be the government who you’d want to sell the weaponized alien to and not people living in cities. Though even from the company’s perspective, if a colony was rebelling it might be a nice tool to have. You remove all the annoying citizens and get to start over with all the infrastructure mostly in place. While there might be quicker, safer, and more effective options none would invoke the same level of terror in anyone considering crossing you in the future.
Weaponization might include modifying their DNA or whatever they have so that they all die in X number of days after being deployed so you don’t have to worry about cleaning them up afterwards.
Isn’t WY openly the owner and operator of all those ships and colonies at least to some extent? So who are they worried will notice and wonder about a ship sent out to capture an alien, so what?
) and the US government? was allowed to remain as a figure head. It definitely seemed like while the marines were soldiers, WY was the real power.