Fridge / The Thing (2011)

As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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Fridge Brilliance

• The Thing's strategy is more crude in the very beginning, simply attacking humans like a wild animal. When it finally assimilates a human, it starts scheming, getting people alone before attacking, hiding its trail and trying to reason with people. Not only can it now try to replicate people, but it knows how humans behave and has learned that they can kill it. Why? Well, since assimilated humans still have full command of human language, the Thing clearly has access to their knowledge and memories, which would naturally lend it to strategizing against the remaining people.
  • The original film bears this out—it successfully assimilated Palmer and Norris before anyone realized what it was up to. The Dog-Thing gets caught and destroyed, but while the humans are dealing with that and the Bennings-Thing one of the remaining Things has time to sabotage the blood and sow enough mistrust that the humans are doing its work for it. By the time it gets to Blair it's nearly victorious.
• This film is very much an Actionized Sequel to the more psychological-thriller based 1982 film, but it actually makes sense for it to be that way. Firstly, as noted above, The Thing is a case of It Can Think: it can learn more advanced and complex methods, but it needs to learn them first. This means that the Thing encountered in this film simply isn't as savvy as in the John Carpenter film; by the time of the 1982 film, it's gained the knowledge and experience to try a subtle path. Secondly, the Thing's secrecy is inherently flawed in this film; the Norwegians were the ones who dug it up in the first place. So, as soon as it escapes, they'll know it exists and is on the loose. In comparison, the Americans didn't know of the Thing's existence until they examined the ruins of the Norwegian base, so it had the opportunity to start picking off victims and replicating them before they found out it existed.
• The movie happens to, by complete accident, solve at least part of the mystery of the 1982 movie's ending. The Norwegians never come up with the blood test, so the next best thing is checking for tooth fillings, piercings, or anything else artificially implanted that the Thing can't replicate. At the end of the 1982 movie, Childs noticeably still has his earring, meaning he was human.
  • It's surprisingly good at keeping the ending of the original ambiguous. Either A) Mac and Childs are both human (entirely unknown to them, but evidenced by Childs' earring—something which the Thing would probably not notice losing if it assimilated Childs, because that had to have happened outside), or B) the Thing did put the earring back in (and see all the discussion on the WMG page about the whiskey bottle) because now it's really goddamn smart.
    • What makes Childs' earring more Fridge Horror is that if Childs was a Thing, the Thing learned from its mistakes from this film, taking the time to not only find and reinsert the earring, but make sure it was in the right ear—what gives the Carter-Thing away is not only does it not notice it's missing the earring, when Kate points out this out, it checks the wrong ear, showing that the Things in this film hadn't really worked out the whole "perfect memory" thing yet.
• The movie's bleak ending looks more hopeful for Kate when one thinks about it. The Carter-Thing was most likely telling her the truth about the Russian base, because there it would've had access to more victims, and could've assimilated her on the way.
  • But it was driving Kate away from the Russian base and it was blatantly a lie in order to distract her enough to assimilate her.
• There was a major reason why the crew in this film never came up with the blood test, MacCready only thought up the test because he saw the Norris-Thing separate its head and the head wandered around on its own, until the Edvard-Thing's arms separated, none of the Things shown on screen had shown the "each cell is its own animal" trait, all of them using their entire body, so the "blood would defend itself" test wouldn't have been thought of.
• Compared to all the others, the Sander-Thing is much more well put together, being a bipedal creature that doesn't seem to go as much for the whole "Mishmashed Mass of Teeth, Claws and Tendrils" every other Thing goes for, that is because it had time in a quiet place to transform, The reason the others we see were so malformed is that all the other Things were panicking and just going for anything they could use to defend itself and/or infect others. Whereas the Thing in the climax had the time to change into something more combat ready and with familiar proportions to activate the ship.

Fridge Logic

• When the last iteration of the Thing chases Kate, she manages to escape by crawling into a shaft that's too narrow for the hulking creature to chase her. But as shown with the Edvard-Thing, it's fully capable of detaching parts of its body to pursue victims. So why didn't it just send one of its many limbs after her?
  • It lost sight of her and for all it knew, there could have been a trap set up in the shaft waiting for it. It simply became weary and decided to keep itself in one piece rather than risk losing some of its mass for a stupid risk.
  • It is probably more likely that it was just wanting to start up the ship, figuring a tiny human woman would become easier prey once it was up in the air with no real escape.
  • Or, it knew the vent leads somewhere dangerous, like the ship's exhausts, and figured it had her trapped for the time being, or she would die trying to escape.
• As the films show, the ship itself was still fully functional, so after crashing, the Thing made no attempt to start it up again until the climax of this film. Why?
• The timeline for Thing infections really doesn't add up. How did the first person get infected? If the Thing had only just broken out of the ice, and the first person it attacked was Henrik, then how did it get to Juliette and Griggs? The way the scene is presented, it had no time to attack anyone in the shower or even spread its biomass around.
  • The likeliest explanation is that the Thing quickly assimilated Griggs whilst he was outside near the helicopter before it killed Henrik. It probably found Griggs after breaking through the roof, only being caught later when it went for Henrik. Later, Juliette becomes nauseous during the alien autopsy and runs out of the room, where she meets Griggs in the corridor, where she tells him she's fine before running to throw up. Griggs likely followed Juliette to the bathroom where he assimilated her.