History Fridge / TheThing1982

* [=MacReady]]'s chess game in the beginning is a good analogy of the final battle. The AI moves in with the queen to move in for the kill. However, [[MacReady]] could have actually captured the queen to both avoid check and actually put the AI in check, but the computer declares checkmate anyway. He bested The Thing's ultimate attack, but he still loses.

** He could just be absolutely out of his mind in sheer terror... people so affect tend to freeze.

** When Childs is standing guard by the door, there's a dark blue parka to his right, hanging with the others. He's wearing a parka that has a lighter shade of blue. Later, when he's missing from the room, so is the dark blue parka. Why did he change parkas? Remember... The Thing can't digest ''cloth.''

** Why does Palmer utterly refuse to be alone with Windows as the group split up into teams, despite the apt opportunity for a clear assimilation? Well, after the stunt Windows try to pull with a shotgun, ''everyone'' became a lot more weary of him, putting him on the bottom of assimilation priorities for the thing, no wonder he wanted to pick anyone else instead.

* [[spoiler: Norris and Palmer]] immediately move in to extinguish the fires on the Dog-Thing after it drops to the floor, and we later learn it needs to burn for a while to make sure every cell is dead. They both turn out to be Things later on, so perhaps they were trying to save as much of their kin as they could without letting it look ''too'' suspicious.
** Why does [[spoiler: Palmer]] utterly refuse to be alone with Windows as the group split up into teams, despite the apt opportunity for a clear assimilation? Well, after the stunt Windows try to pull with a shotgun, ''everyone'' became a lot more weary of him, putting him on the bottom of assimilation priorities for the thing, no wonder he wanted to pick anyone else instead.
* The alien is shown to be [[ItCanThink intelligent]] and only reveals itself when threatened, so it's likely the creature deliberately choses to make itself as [[EvilIsVisceral viscerally]] [[BodyHorror horrifying]] as possible in order to frighten off attackers.

** Luckily, since the last thing arrived 100,000 years ago, they're probably dead, at least near earth.

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** Originally this troper thought Window's lack of action against the Palmer!thing was just Windows being TooDumbToLive -- specifically, as the Thing continues its rampage in front of him, he simply stands there, not using his flamethrower. But then something occurred to me: has he crossed his DespairEventHorizon??

* The Thing lets out a whole assortment of sound, including ones of animals and perhaps extraterrestrial life even when it's a dog or a human. Considering that the Thing [[CruelAndUnusualDeath needs its victims to be alive]] in order to assimilate them, [[AndIMustScream who's to say that it doesn't absorb their victims completely, even when said victim is killed]]?

[[AC:FridgeLogic]]
* Considering brief physical contact is sufficient for infection, if the Thing had opted not to transform (most obviously in the dog pen), it could have taken over everybody in the camp before anyone even realized there was a real and present danger. Of course, that would have been a quite short and relatively dull movie.
** Well they did retrieve the corpse from the Norwegian camp, and Blair was analysing the blood sample. So perhaps the threat wasn't immediate, but Blair would have figured it out before things got that bad.
* The reason the flamethrowers don't work doing the blood test scene is because the Palmer thing tampered with them. He was carrying a flamethrower thoughout the movie up until that point.
** It's a possibility, but it's probably because Mac drops his flamethrower just before Palmer attacks.

** Luckily, since the last thing arrived 100,000 years ago, they're probably dead, at least near earth.

** Well, the common theory is that Things get smarter mostly by assimilating knowledge from their victims, and WordOfGod is that the [[TheThing2011 2011 film]] was originally supposed to prove that the Thing was picked up as a biological specimen by an entirely different alien race. So, only the Things descended from the first Thing to crash on Earth would know how to build spacecraft; it's equally as likely that "Thingworld" has been quarantined -- or sterilized -- to avoid just such an outbreak.