Recap / Film Reroll: Alien

"One of them has, like, blueprints; there's a whiteboard​..." ^note  Art by dandesonmyarm

We play through Alien. Pitr drinks a beer! Jon barks out commands! Paulo freaks out about cool stuff! Joz drives a spaceship!

Episodes 26-27 of Film Reroll. Based on the 1979 movie.

The year is 2122, and the mission of the space freighter Nostromo is interrupted by a sudden Distress Call coming from an uncharted moon. There the crew find the remains of an ancient crashed spaceship from an alien civilisation, a ship whose pilot died under mysterious circumstances. They soon learn that the ship is full of extraterrestrial parasites, which prove very dangerous as they infect members of the crew. What's worse, it seems like someone onboard planned for all of this to happen...

The campaign was released in between episodes 2 and 3 of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, making it the first time in the show two campaigns were running simultaneously.

Starring Jocelyn "Joz" Vammer as Ripley, Paulo Quiros as Dallas and Brett, Jon Miller as Kane, Kara Strait^note  credited as “Pitr Strait” as Parker and Andy Hoover as the Dungeon Master.

Followed by Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. A follow-up based on Aliens was later released, this time featuring Jon Miller as the Dungeon Master.

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Tropes:

• The Alcoholic: Brett and Parker. Also, Captain Dallas.
  Dallas: The captain always gets drunk with the ship.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: After Ripley, Kane and Parker escape the Nostromo, it blows up. However, Lambert was still on board^note In reality, by the time it blew up, Lambert was in a coma; Andy only reveals this once the campaign ends.. As such, Paulo asks if he should roll for damage.
  Andy: Yeah, uh, roll, um... Yeah, roll to dodge at minus... 80,000.
• Body Horror: Dallas' corpse, which has a dislocated jaw and eyes that have popped out of their sockets.
• Burial in Space: The crew give Dallas' dead body one.
• Call-Back:
  • Kara Strait gives us one when Andy Hoover says that there is a harpoon onboard, but it's probably not worth getting.
    Kara Strait: Last time I got a harpoon gun on this podcast, it went great.
  • When the "ghosts" first appear, Kara Strait speculates that they were created by Jareth the Goblin King.
  • When Ripley plans to send out the Alien into the cold depths of space, the other players say that maybe cold doesn't bother it.
  • When the players inadvertently kill Jones the Cat, they compare his death with Toto in the Oz episodes, concluding "they're with Bors now."
• Captain Crash:
  • Ripley, who causes a minor crash when she doesn't fold out the landing wheels correctly. Averted with Lambert, who actually flies the ship, as she seems to be an Ace Pilot. (Though neither of them have any problems getting the ship back up again.)
  • The crew also speculate that the dead Space Jockey — along with his entire race — was one of these.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Dallas drops a ton of them when seeing the alien spaceship for the first time, and also while investigating it.
• Convenient Replacement Character: Sort of. When Dallas gets infected by a facehugger, Paulo Quiros decides to start playing as Brett instead, just in case the captain would die. This turns out to be a smart move. When Brett dies too, Paulo instead takes up the role of Lambert. Unfortunately, she doesn't make it to the end of the campaign, either.
• Death by Adaptation:
  • Jones the cat, who is killed when the crew try to kill the alien by evacuating the ship's air.
  • In the category of "died significantly earlier than in the original", Dallas, who gets impregnated and killed by the facehugger instead of Kane.
• Does Not Like Guns: When Lambert is given a gun by Ripley, she gets scared, as though she's never held one before. However, she still accepts it pretty quickly, albeit reluctantly.
• Explosive Decompression: Brett dies in this manner after being shot by Ash in a vacuum-filled room. It's even more squicky than most examples, as he had already barfed up quite a bit inside his space suit...
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: invoked Parodied: After Paulo is made aware of the fact he burnt through three characters while everyone else still had their first, he compares himself to Jesus, before immediately asking if that makes sense.
• General Failure: Captain Dallas is a civilian example. He has no problems with getting drunk on duty, completely loses his self-control when exposed to new things, gets himself tangled up in his own climbing rope, and falls headfirst into a newly discovered alien egg, smashing it to pieces and becoming the first facehugger host. The players even wonder if he really isn't a 12-year old boy with a glued-on beard.
• Glamour Failure: At one point, Ash just stops in his tracks to "process data." The others just think that he's had a stroke.
• Guest Host: Andy Hoover takes over as Dungeon Master in this campaign. Paulo Quiros — the usual DM — instead plays Dallas... and Brett... and Lambert.
• Hot-Blooded: Ripley. The first thing she does when getting suspicious of Ash and Lambert's "ghost" is to threaten them both with her gun, and actually shooting the latter. Fortunately for her, both turn out to be hostile. When she realises that someone has taken control of the ship, her first thought is to blow it up with herself and the rest of the crew still inside. As soon as Ash turns out to be an android, she tries to rip off his head and tear away his jaw... before realising that she's not nearly strong enough to do that.
• Insistent Terminology: GM Andy consistently calls the cryo pods "kyro pods," even correcting himself when he pronounces it correctly. He admitted on Twitter that this was a mistake, not a gag.
• In the Blood: Discussed In-Universe. Brett says that if the Alien is more or less Dallas' son, then it might end up becoming a pretty nice guy. The rest of the crew explain to him that it doesn't work like that. Ripley even says "That's not a thing, Vern." as a Call-Back to the group's earlier Stand By Me campaign.
• "Just Joking" Justification: During Part 2^note as the crew plans to abandon the ship after it is discovered that an alien escaped from Dallas' body while he was in cryostasis, after Lambert leaves to head back to the control room, Kane talks with the rest of the crew on what they need to do next. Upon making it clear they need to stick together, Kane dismissively says Lambert's dead already. When Andy and the others chew Jon out for metagaming, he clarifies that Kane wasn't being serious.
• Master of Illusion: Thanks to a fear gas expelled out of its body, the Alien is now able to create "ghosts" of its victims to trick the crew. As well as giving them brief and minor, but significant hallucinations, like making Ash's robot blood look like human blood, or making a ten-minute countdown look like it's counting down from one minute.
• Meatgrinder Surgery: Ash uses a rubber hammer to knock off a facehugger from Dallas' face.
• Never Found the Body: Lambert, who was taken by the Alien off-screen. It's eventually revealed that she was still alive, but kept in a coma by the Alien, and that she died when the ship exploded.
• Not His Sled: After discovering Dallas has two facehuggers attached to his helmet, Kane decides to shoot both... whereupon Andy reveals that, unlike in the movie, these aliens are bulletproof.
• Politically Incorrect Hero:
  • Parker throws several sexist comments at Ripley, and apparently has "Chauvinistic" on his character sheet.
  • The players also accuse Ash of this when he refuses to follow Ripley's orders, though they agree that this is unfair towards him when they realise that Ripley is the lowest ranking officer onboard.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Ash claims that this is why he took the infected Captain Dallas aboard the ship. He simply didn't want to stand there and watch him die. In reality, he didn't care about Dallas at all. He just wanted the alien specimen.
• Shout-Out:
  • In the first episode, before the situation gets really bad, Kara Strait mentions that this Lighter and Softer version of the story feels more like a Harold and Kumar movie to her.
  • When Ash dies he seems to say something, but nobody can hear him in the vacuum. Kara, however, has some theories...
    Paulo Quiros: Promise me you'll train the boy. There is another... Stanton.
• Sleeper Starship: The Nostromo is one, just like in the movie. Though the cryopods seem to work a little bit different here, given that the passengers are now snoring loudly...
  Kara Strait: In space, no one can hear you snore.
• Space Is Cold: DM Andy Hoover seems to think so, judging by his Opening Narration.
  Andy Hoover: The vastness of space. Is it cold? You bet! Is it unfriendly? Even more so.
• Space Is Noisy: When kicked out of the shuttle, the Alien lets out a terrifying screech. Apparently, in space one can hear you scream (provided you have Bizarre Alien Biology, that is).
• Spared by the Adaptation: Parker and Kane, who are last seen sleeping in their cryopods. Though it's unclear how long this will last, as it's implied that this trope might apply to the Alien as well...
• They Killed Kenny Again / You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: By the end of the campaign, Paulo played three characters that all died, while Joz, Jon and Kara were all still on their first character, something neither Paulo or Andy fully grasp until Andy points this out.
• Thrown Out the Airlock: As in the film, this happens to the Alien in the Final Battle. Here however, it's not clear if it died or if it even stayed out, as Ripley literally Failed a Spot Check at the end of the campaign. (The sequel — run by Jon Miller — makes it pretty clear that yes, Ripley won.)

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