Headscratchers / Alien³

• Why does the water getting on the alien shatter it at the end. Was it just so badly damaged by the molten metal the slightest force would shatter it?
  • It's the effect of rapid heating and cooling. Try it at home by tipping away your coffee & replacing it in the mug with ice-cold water! Or don't.
  • Also works in reverse—drop an ice cube into scalding hot soup and it'll crack almost instantly.
  • Foreshadowed after the first attempt to capture the alien. When the fires get out of control and the sprinklers are triggered, one of the buckets on the floor cracks wide open. Heat causes matter to expand (and the molecules to vibrate faster, which is what heat is), while cooling causes matter to contract and the molecules to move slower. Rapidly heating or cooling something causes the expansion/contraction and molecular motion to occur at different rates, resulting in things cracking or even exploding.
  • Also known as thermal shock.
• I'm glad that the bull was cut from the final film, because it doesn't make any sense. For example, wouldn't a Xenomorph born from a bull inherit the bull's mass, not to mention its horns? Why did the writers think it was a good idea in the first place?
  • For what it's worth, the dog-alien isn't very doglike either. Aside from walking on all fours more often it looks pretty much like the xenomorph from Alien, especially when it's a guy in a suit instead of a rod puppet.
  • The "rule" that the Alien inherits characteristics from its host is introduced for the first time in this movie, and strictly speaking the only new detail we learn is "If the host was a quadruped, the Alien is a quadruped". It was only later Expanded Universe stories that would invent the idea that the specific species could have a greater influence on the Alien's shape. They couldn't follow a rule that hadn't been invented yet.
  • Also, while bull horns have a small bone core, the horn itself is made of keratin. And one thing Xenomorphs notably never inherit from hosts? Hair.

• Never mind why Ripley put herself into cold sleep. How in the world could there be an egg on the Sulaco at the end of Aliens anyway? And even if there was some way that could possibly have happened, we're supposed to believe that Ripley didn't give the ship a thorough going-over before bedding down? The entire premise of the third movie is stupid given the ending of the second movie.
  • Assuming the queen grabbed an undamaged egg and lugged it along with her when she stowed away on the dropship. When they reached the Sulaco the queen jumped off, hid the egg somewhere, then ran back and jumped back onto the dropship again for some reason. All of this in between the time when the dropship arrived on the mothership but before Ripley and the others disembarked.
  • Or she stuck the eggs to the dropship itself. Apparently the dropship had enough room to hide an entire alien queen stowaway! Room for two or more eggs isn't unbelievable.
    • Except IIRC the opening scene just before the Sulaco dumps Ripley onto the prison planet clearly shows a hatched alien egg hidden somewhere on the mothership, not on the dropship.
    • It could have been attached somewhere on the dropship out of view of Ripley, also what's to say the queen didn't lay it when she was stowed away, this could explain why it wasn't seen and if laid on the outside of the dropship it would explain the scene from the third movie where the word "Sulaco" is visible (unless "Sulaco" is written inside the dropship to indicate what ship it was attached to). At least in my opinion.
    • The fact that she ripped off her egg sack says that she didn't lay it on the dropship. Bring it with her? Maybe. Lay it there? Not really possible.
    • The egg sack seems more like an actual insect ovipositor, which is what was shown in the movie. Quite capable of holding and depositing dozens, if not hundreds of eggs. Who's to say that the Queen wasn't still capable of laying eggs elsewhere, in the right conditions...? It is plausible, even without the ovipositor.
  • The problem with the egg scenario is twofold. One, we know that the egg wasn't laid on the dropship, as the establishing shot shows that the egg has been stuck upside-down under (what looks like) a row of seats with the word "Sulaco" in the background. Two, from the time that the Queen exits the dropship, at least one person is looking at her at all times. When she exits, it's Ripley and Newt, then (when she's snooping around trying to pull up the floorgrates) Newt and Bishop, then it's Ripley and Bishop during the fight, and then the Queen goes into the airlock. There's no conceivable way that the Queen deposited an egg (even in the landing bay) when someone was watching her at all times.
    • My interpretation is that Bishop grabbed the eggs. Remember that he was under company orders to return a live alien specimen, or at least the company via Burke. He also had plenty of time to go egg-hunting between the time when he dropped Ripley off to find Newt and the time when he returned to pick her up; maybe the platform wasn't unstable, he was just lying to cover himself. He could have made the trip from the colony to the derelict in time, especially since he was travelling by air. Even taking the three laws into account, it still works if we assume that Bishop didn't see any danger to the survivors; maybe he didn't think the eggs would hatch while they were in hypersleep. In fact, given that he was under Burke's orders, then if this scenario is true, he was simply obeying the second law like a good android. (And that's assuming that the whole three-laws thing is even true; we only have Bishop's word on it, after all, and it's not like Burke would have corrected him.) Of course, this turns Bishop from a good guy into a total rat bastard, but it's not like it's without precedent; remember that Ash had basically the same orders, he just went haywire before he could carry them out.
    • Bishop is bound not to harm a human, or to allow one to come to harm through inaction. That's hardcoded into him. Bringing live eggs onto a ship would violate both of those clauses. When Bishop first mentions it and Burke confirms it, nobody else at the table (including people not in on "the plan") questions it, so it's likely common knowledge. The rest of the marines know Bishop personally; remember the thing about Ash was that he was a new guy, who the rest of the crew didn't know. And if he had brought them on without intending harm, he would have frozen them or sealed them up to eliminate even the possibility of them hatching and infecting the crew.
      
      So basically this theory requires disregarding everything we know about Bishop to work.
    • Not necessarily. The whole three-laws thing could be a massive lie by the company; maybe synthetics ("I prefer the term 'artificial person,' myself") aren't Three Laws Compliant, the company just says they are to help their "product" gain people's trust. In other words, maybe Burke doesn't know the truth either. Or he does, but the Marines don't. Also, as I said, maybe Bishop assumed (wrongly) that the eggs wouldn't hatch while the crew were in hypersleep, or he simply didn't have time to seal them away before he had to return to pick up Ripley (and subsequently got ripped in two by the queen).
    • Bishop is a robot, and the science officer. He wouldn't make an "assumption" like that, because he's literally made to analyse data and make decisions based off that. If he had time to go flying all over the place, pick them up, and hide them on the ship so that Ripley wouldn't notice, he had time to seal them away. As I said, the whole theory depends on disregarding everything Bishop said and his characterisation in the whole movie.
    • We're gonna have to agree to disagree on this one, methinks.
    • "Remember that he was under company orders to return a live alien specimen". No I don't. Last I checked Bishop belonged to the USCM, not the company.
    • He says that Burke ordered the two facehuggers they found in the medlab returned alive. He may be USCM property, but he doesn't seem to have any qualms with following company orders, especially since IIRC the military is essentially a tool of Weyland-Yutani anyway.
    • The problem is that the script as written leaves it open to implication. Discussions about the two facehuggers after Bishop had analysed them amounted to the following.
      Ripley: Bishop, I want these two samples destroyed when you're finished with them, you got that straight?
      Bishop: Mr Burke gave instructions they were to be returned alive to the company labs. (beat) He was very specific about it.
    • After that scene, it cuts straight to Ripley confronting Burke over it, and no other mention of the facehuggers is made. Bishop also isn't present during the discussion about whose jurisdiction the mission is under, and he might not be programmed to make a decision about jurisdiction (thus his uncertainty and reasserting that Burke was very specific about it—that's a machine's way of reading out an error result and going back to a command prompt). On the other hand, I don't think it's clear exactly whether he's Weyland-Y property or USCM property: when Ripley confronts Burke about Bishop's presence on the Sulaco, Burke responds "Well, it's common practice. We always have a synthetic on board." Alan Dean Foster's novelisation goes one step further in that Ripley asks Bishop to come with her to confront Burke, then cancels that instruction, which she takes as reassurance that Bishop is not fully under Burke's sway.
    • Just on the subject of whether Bishop was WY property or the USCM property, the Marines all clearly know and are familiar with Bishop, indicating that he's been with these Marines specifically for a considerable amount of time.
    • Bishop's relationship with the Marines seems very akin to RoboCop's relationship with the Detroit Police Department - he works with them, but ultimately he's the property of, and beholden to, the company who made him.
    • In regards to Bishop taking the eggs theory, you are trying to explain the actions in the film based on a premise of its sequel, from a different director no less. A sequel has to follow the logic and structure of the preceding film, not the other way around. The simple answer is that Alien³ disregards the original continuity in order to exist, they couldn't come up with a better way to create another plot hook.
    • True enough. I guess it's because, despite all its faults, I don't think Alien³ is that bad a movie; it's at least more compelling than Alien Resurrection was.
    • Bishop taking the eggs on the orders or Burke and the company doesn't make any sense. If he was following secret objectives than after he'd obtained the alien eggs (eggs which had only been found near the Queen which was only discovered by Ripley trying to save Newt) than he'd have just left Ripley and Newt behind after obtaining them. Company orders state all employees are expendable if it obtains a specimen and Ripley was the biggest threat to that objective so leaving her behind would have been the wisest course of action. Not to mention the fact that it would completely destroy Bishop's character, and make his saving Newt from being blown out the airlock make no sense.
    • To lay all this to rest: whether Bishop had the impetus or directives to grab an egg and stow it is irrelevant: it was physically impossible for him to do it anyway. When he explains his plan to retrieve the second dropship, he estimates a timeline for each step, up to "fifty-minute flight time" from the Sulaco to the colony. Fifty minutes. He couldn't have grabbed an egg during Ripley's rescue mission because she wasn't gone for an hour and forty minutes. He couldn't have grabbed one en route to the transmitter dish or while operating said transmitter because he already had his hands full with repairs and remote-controlling the Sulaco and the dropship. And there were no eggs outside the nest (to speculate otherwise would violate Occam's Razor and smash suspension of disbelief to bits) and "[he] may be synthetic, but [he's] not stupid." He's not going to risk his own existence going into an alien nest unarmed, much less in the extremely tight schedule he has before the colony blows sky high.
  • I think there must have been a few adult aliens following the Queen as she chased Ripley and they were carrying eggs. We never saw behind the Queen as she was too big and they could have taken off to hide the eggs while the Queen attacked Ripley, Bishop and Newt. This would explain both how the eggs got onboard, how they were hidden so well and even how they were opened when there was nobody around to trigger them. It would also give them a chance to do another movie as the remaining aliens would still be on the ship when it gets reclaimed.
    • This is simply not possible. We never see any aliens behind the queen, nor does the film make it appear like something along these lines is possible (it's enough of a stretch that the queen was able to hide on the landing strut without being noticed). The queen may be clever, but considering she was simply sitting at the nest laying eggs even when the processor was melting down, she clearly isn't intelligent enough to work out that a) the atmosphere processor is about to explode; b) Ripley will be going to a ship and c) that ship will enable her to bring eggs along with her. The queen was just chasing Ripley at the end and knew she was on the strange flying thing that came along. Alien³ as it was filmed was based on an impossibility, because we know Ripley would've checked that ship from bow to stern before she felt comfortable enough to go into hypersleep, knowing an alien queen had been on board.
  • I believe the impossibility of an intact egg being on the Sulaco at the end of Aliens is the best evidence that Alien³ and Resurrection are simply Ripley's hyperspace nightmares.
  • I was also boggled by it. We saw that Bishop was inside the dropship all of the time during their return to the Sulaco and furthermore if he could've gotten an egg all along, remember that we have Hicks there? Would not a facehugger come out of that egg and facehugged him all the way? Well, let us go forward! How can he be the one to bring it when he HIMSELF WAS TORN INTO TWO?! Also in the battle scene between two Mama Bears, we saw that the Alien Queen herself did NOT even do anything other than to attack, attack, and attack! Also within the final scenes where she was about to fall into space when Ripley pulled down the lever for the air duct to bring the Queen down to space. No eggs were seen in any of the scenes there of and wait! Would not the egg also be sucked out too? Come on! Let us be vigilant! Look here, I hereby state that it is damn impossible for that to happen in any of the scenes there.
  • It's plausible (barely) that the Queen can, indeed, lay eggs without the egg sack. The egg sack seems to be a place for them to mature a bit before actually being laid, and they seem to need to mature a bit afterwards (the freshly-laid eggs are a notably lighter color than the ones we see hatching.) Additionally, the egg sack isn't really a "part" of the Queen, in that she can easily tear away from it. The egg sack is also attached right between her legs at the bottom of her pelvis. So it's pretty obvious the eggs actually come from within the Queen herself. She could have laid two while on the dropship, as part of the species imperative to keep the species overall alive (the Queen cares more about her eggs than her adult aliens, or even herself it seems). Once she had some eggs set up to start maturing, then she could go about her Roaring Rampage of Revenge and ultimately get smacked down by Ripley and Power Loader. These eggs took quite awhile to mature and hatch, which explains why the Sulaco had traveled some distance before the accident (caused by one of the facehuggers bleeding some acid as it broke into a cryotube) forced the EE Vs out of the ship. Plausible, if unlikely.
  • While Aliens: Colonial Marines is a controversial game (to say the least), it is, however, acknowledged as canon. The Stasis Interrupted DLC reveals that the Sulaco was intercepted by Weyland Yutani while returning from LV-426, and was converted into a lab ship for studying the xenomorphs. The eggs were bought onboard by Wey-Yu, along with some unfortunate colonists.
  • Disregarding the video game, and returning to this assertion "Alien³ as it was filmed was based on an impossibility, because we know Ripley would've checked that ship from bow to stern before she felt comfortable enough to go into hypersleep, knowing an alien queen had been on board". I would beg to differ. Ripley's experience in the extended climax of Aliens is that she has just totally genocided the xenomorph nest, with enough varied and extensive firepower as to take out all the eggs, facehuggers and drones left, and she witnessed the ovipositor getting blown to kingdom come. On top of that, the thermonuclear fusion explosion would have wiped out any potential stragglers. And on top of that, she ejected the Queen into space. Her final actions are to provide medical attention to Hicks and (in a manner of speaking) Bishop (who really needs it!) and then soothe Newt to hypersleep. So a variety of factors may come into play here. The exertion of all of those actions is exhausting, especially after all the adrenaline rushes and especially the euphoria on (in her mind) wiping out the species for good. If she hadn't taken priority care of her companions and then put herself to hypersleep, she would have just straight up passed out outside of the cryo pods... which actually would have left her equally as vulnerable as she had actually ended up being inside of her's, but may have been a worse outcome for the remaining crew as Hicks and Newt would have also been facehug-vulnerable (according to some materials there were as many as three facehuggers intended for Alien³) instead of dying in their sleep. Also, she may well have assumed that sans-ovipositor, the Queen would have been rendered sterile. It's a recurring thing in the series that for everything the protagonists slowly manage to learn about the xenomorphs' biology, they continue to end up having nasty surprises which they hadn't anticipated... and this one ended up biting Ripley and her friends. I get the rationale that you figure she was just too vigilant to allow this to happen, but for me I feel that the combination of euphoria on (falsely) assuming she had rendered the species extinct, extreme fatigue, and having more urgent matters of triage to attend to with regard to her friends would have pushed this possibility out of her mind, to their cost.

• Why didn't Ripley just let them have the Queen chestburster at the end? As shown in "Resurrection", they would've been able to surgically remove it without killing Ripley. So what's the deal?
  • After ruining her life twice Ripley wants the aliens dead. She has very little reason to trust the Company either. She's not sure they would really try to remove the Queen chestburster surgically rather than just let it kill her. Even if they did surgically remove it, she's not sure she would survive the procedure (the Company might find it much more convenient to have her die on table during the procedure), and she's pretty sure the Company would not kill the queen after they have it in their possession, but use it to breed more aliens.
  • In "Resurrection" yes they do successfully surgically remove a Queen chestburster from a clone of Ripley, but that is 200 years later. What new techniques did they learn in the last 200 years?

• Why is there no proper colony on Fiorina? The previous movie shows that they went to a lot of time and bother to terraform LV-426, implying that Earthlike planets are rare or unknown to humans. Here Fiorina has breathable air but the only settlements are an abandoned mine and a shut down prison.
  • Perhaps LV-426 has other resources that make it more tempting for colonisation than Fiorina? It might be in a better location as compared to other systems as well. It is close enough to the route of the Nostromo in the first movie that it might be a reasonable place for a spaceport to service ships on their way.
  • It's also indicated that Fiorina has a really inhospitable climate with prolonged nights and associated low temperatures which are unpleasant to Earth-originating life. Now, in this franchise's universe and by the time of Aliens and Alien³'s level of technology, it seems a lot more achievable for them to make an atmosphere breathable, than to make it necessarily warm or with less extreme weather. Hence why in the previous movie LV-426 had unpleasant weather, and Fioriona's is even more so, which makes it less suited to colony endeavours beyond a mine repurposed as a prison and now used as a leadworks.
• How was Ripley able to cling onto the Queen chestburster after it erupted from her chest? Wouldn't Ripley have died instantly from that? I mean, it came out of her CHEST (hence the name), so that would be an instant kill right there...
  • Death by chestburster would not be instant, like a decapitation would, just really quick. The person could have at least a few more moments of consciousness before their brain dies from loss of circulation, and they might be able to weakly grab the creature. Ripley didn't have to hold it very long.

• Why exactly was Newt just unceremoniously killed off? Could they just not think of a way to write her into the prison setting? It seems to me they could just say all the prisoners are the Wouldn't Hurt a Child type to get around this.
  • There are a few possible reasons: The Unfortunate Implications of a 10-year-old girl in a prison filled with convicted rapists, the fact that Carrie Henn would be 5 years older (she decided not to pursue an acting career after Aliens anyway), some of the writers saying they had found Newt annoying, and the same writers wanting to give Ripley a motivation of personal loss for the film. Really, Alien³ is infamous for being a troubled production and making questionable storytelling choices. Turning Aliens into a "Shaggy Dog" Story by killing off Newt and Hicks was just one of the more notable ones.
  • I figure they could just have the prisoners not want to hurt her (in prison, even vicious murderers and the like find child abusers/molesters to be scum, so presumably none of them would want to actually be a child molester. As for the rest, it just seems like a big fuck you to people who liked the previous movie.
  • Still leaves you with real problems in terms keeping the character around. Either convince the actress to come back and try to explain why she aged five years in cryogenic suspension, recast her with another child actress and good luck finding one that can convincingly play the same character and have the same bond with Ripley and Hicks, or kill her off and piss off everyone who liked her and the mother-daughter relationship. The second great mistake of Alien³ is having it be an Immediate Sequel, when that automatically introduces narrative problems that have no good answers (see "where did the eggs come from?" for another of those problems). The first great mistake was setting a release date before having a director, script, writer, or even concept, as that influenced every other decision.
  • Indeed, unlike adult actors in cryosleep, child to teen actors unfortunately suffer from being at an early stage of their development, which means that to depict them coming out of cryosleep as the same character age in a subsequent film is very difficult as the actor/actress has aged, in real life, in real time. But I find what you say about this film being an Immediate Sequel (and that being a mistake) interesting grounds for debate. Looking at Aliens, from Ripley's perspective (and Jones the cat's too!) that film is also an Immediate Sequel, but from the perspective of everywhere (and everyone) else outside of her shuttle's cryosleep, it isn't. Is that a problem for that film? Likewise, in Alien³, Ripley's POV makes it an immediate sequel, but we don't know how long the Sulaco drifted through space so as to give time for the eggs to mature and start to move against the crew. So in your view, is it still an immediate sequel, and does that dichotomy still render it a problem in your eyes?
    • It's exactly what you said: five years of aging is a lot more noticeable in a child or teen than an adult. If you look close at Sigourney Weaver from Alien to Aliens, yeah, you can tell she's aged, but you have to look close and it's not hard to suspend disbelief. Seeing Newt age five years when she shouldn't have aged at all, be treated as the same age or different age with no explanation, get other Darrin'ed, are all bad solutions to a problem that doesn't need to exist. Also, Aliens isn't really an immediate sequel even from Ripley's POV. The narrative spends a fair amount of time just catching up to Ripley returning to Earth (sort of) and the consequences of the first film before the plot kicks up. We don't know precisely how much time, but enough for Ripley to recover from record-breaking hypersleep, get fired, get a new job, and be pretty secure in it.
    • No, Aliens is not really an immediate sequel to Alien. The beginning is, with the salvage crew finding Ripley in the Narcissus in hypersleep, but there are time skips after this. There is an indeterminate amount of time (probably weeks at least, perhaps months) between when she is found and when she has her license suspended at the board meeting, and then there is another timeskip of at least several months until she goes with the marines to LV-426. So the main plot of the movie is not an immediate sequel. Alien 3 is an immediate sequel. It follows directly on from Aliens with no room in its plot for days, weeks, or months of unseen time.

• Shouldn't the movie be called "Alien 2" and not "Alien³" if it's the second movie to be titled "Alien"? Yes, I'm being somewhat facetious here but I still think it's a valid question.
  • Whether you're leaning majority-facetious or majority-valid for this question, the creators are entitled to title their films according to whatever convention they wish. Aliens as a title works both as a reflection of the fact that in that film there are a plurality of the beasts, and also to indicate that it is a sequel to the first movie. Likewise, Alien³ reflects that the threat has returned to just one Xenomorph (discounting the omen of the in-utero queen) and also that it is a threequel to the original. Prometheus didn't even share the title of the main series, but it is still clearly part of it.

• Why would there be no guns in a prison? How is the warden supposed to keep the prisoners inline? For that matter, why is the prison apparently minimum security despite being full of violent criminals? Yes, the whole planet is a prison so they can't escape, but you'd think they be concerned with them killing the warden or each other.
  • It's no longer an active prison. The remaining inhabitants are the prisoners who chose to stay behind after the main prison was shut down because they didn't have anywhere else to go. All the weapons and security gear and so forth were taken when the prison was officially shut down.
    • Why is the warden even still there then if he's not a prisoner? Why not take the next ship off-planet and find a new line of work?
    • Apparently the warden didn't have any better job prospects off-planet.
    • To answer the 'Kill The Warden' remark, if they do they stop receiving supply drops and get left to starve to death. Simple self preservation.
  • The prison is "half-decommissioned." The prisoners who elected to stay were all lifers, so the only place they had to go was to a different prison, and they were content where they were. One Warden/Administrator, one Vice Warden/Executive Administrator, and one Medical Officer were attached to keep an eye on them, and the prisoners function as a custodial crew keeping the complex in something resembling order in case the Company decides to reactivate it. The complex was originally a mine, which was shut down when richer sources with more accessability were discovered, at which point it was turned into a prison, then the prison was shut down (except for the remainders). That the population is so low and there are only three (technically two) staff and the Company originally shut the whole thing down twice to save money, removing all the guns means removing all the people trained to use the guns, prison guards and such. Most of this is from the novelisation, which gives Andrews the line that these particular criminals are so vicious that, if there were real weapons about, they wouldn't be able to keep order with an entire army of armed guards. The novelisation also explains that there simply isn't a need to keep the prisoners in line with force or threat of force, the Company controls all communication and transportation off the planet, and if the periodic supply ship arrives to find the inmates running the prison, they'll just keep the supplies and move on to their next destination, leaving the prisoners to eventually die from lack of things the shut-down complex doesn't provide.

• It is said that Fiorina 161 is a prison exclusively for Y-Y chromosomed persons, which means the supermale syndrome (a male with an additional Y chromosome). The point is, a supermale syndrome is a rather rare occurrence (unless a lot of cell division fuckups occurs in a population), and moreover, the men with supermale syndrome are usually taller and slow learners (with the same intelligence - it just takes more time to learn) than their ordinary peers, but there is no relation between an additional Y and excessive propensity to violence. So, why would one build an expensive to maintain offworld prison for people who could simply be kept in a regular one?
  • The idea at the time was that double-Y chromosomes were at least partially responsible for extremely violent criminals, which has since been disproven. And see above: part of the reason the facility is so sparsely-populated and run down is that it was too expensive to be feasible. Twice. The prisoners who are there are the ones who elected to stay instead of be taken to a different, presumably cheaper-to-operate prison. Which is probably still a dedicated penal colony, mind you.

• How much time passes between Aaron sending a message from Fiorina with Ripley's CAT scan and the arrival of the Weyland-Yutani team? Did they know beforehand that Ripley was carrying a chestburster and had the team sent following Sulaco, or what? Because it seems there's a very short time between the two - and assembling the proper team (including Michael Bishop) and sending it to the proper location definitely takes time.
  • They were already on their way to collect the Runner Alien so probably not much time. Michael Bishop seems to be in charge of the group at the end and very invested in getting the alien, he may have been leading the group the whole time.

• Regarding Clemens' backstory: He mentions he was a bright young doctor addicted to morphine, and after a 36-hour shift, returned home only to be called back after an industrial accident, causing the deaths of several people after he gave them excessive doses of analgesics. The question is: was this because he already was high as a kite, or simply because he was extremely tired after a day and a half of continuous work (which has effects similar to heavy alcohol intoxication) and the company simply threw him under the bus to cover their practices of overworking their doctors?
  • Clemens seems to feel guilty about it, so he feels that his addiction was at least partly responsible for the deaths.
• Why does Golic call the alien a dragon? Other than being vaguely reptilian (like all xenomorphs), it doesn't look like a dragon at all.
  • He's criminally insane. He also says "it feeds on minds," which is an apt of poetic description if the headbite attack, but still indicates this isn't a gentleman in possession of the totality of his marbles.