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Creating a Cohesive Alien(s) Timeline |
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Creating a Cohesive Alien(s) Timeline |
References:
Alien
II Treatment (21 September 1983) (PDF)
Aliens,
First Draft (26 February 1985) (PDF)
Aliens,
Final (23 September 1985) (PDF)
This is my attempt at creating a somewhat cohesive Alien(s) timeline that tries to retain plausibility and incorporate as much of the “expanded universe” as I can while not breaking suspension of disbelief.
Apparently, 20th Century Fox never appointed someone to be in charge of creative control over the Alien(s) intellectual property (IP), leading to absurd messes like Alien 3, the Promethus films, and most Alien(s) licensed video games, books and comics.
The default mode for an Alien(s) IP license seemed to be that they asked 20th Century Fox for the license; and once they got it, decided to put the xenomorph(s) everywhere, to “sex” up their game or book, even if it made no sense.
Dark Horse Comics apparently did appoint someone as continuity head for their Alien stuff to try and keep their comics somewhat plausible; and they tried to retcon and paper over some of the problems caused by no overall Alien(s) continuity oversight, but when Disney bought out 20th Century Fox, they got rid of Dark Horse's license, and now the licensed comics done by Marvel are as bad as the video games or books.
I exclude the Prometheus series for two main reasons:
A.) The Prometheus films violate the main covenant of the Alien universe -- in that you get a feeling that these are real people and they don't do classic slasher mistakes. If they do make a classic slasher mistake (Brett in Alien going somewhere alone), they have to have a good reason -- in Brett's case, he thought that he was looking for the Alien Larva, which at the time was half the size of an average cat, not a full grown alien.
And most importantly:
B.) Ridley Scott completely ignored all previous films and doesn't care about them. We know this because in 2012, Damon Lindelof, one of the main script writers behind Prometheus had a long interview (LINK) where he said:
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“Here’s the thing. Ridley invented this. He created this Alien universe. He birthed it out of his own heart and soul. So he gets to do whatever it is he wants to do and he wanted to use [a] Weyland as a conduit in the story, and was not interested at all when I said to him, “You know, [Charles Bishop] Weyland was a character in one of the Alien Vs. Predator movies,” he just sort of looked at me like I had just slapped him in the face. That was the beginning, middle and end of all Alien Vs. Predator references in our story process.” |
Contrast this with Paul W.S. Anderson's (Aliens vs Predator) ethos -- he was careful in regards to continuity; and designed much of the backstory of AVP, using the previously explained backstory from Predator to come up with the idea that if Predators were overwhelmed by xenomorphs on one of their hunts, they'd use their self destruct devices (or a bigger version) to wipe out all life in the area, both eliminating xenomorphs as a threat on ancient Earth, but also as a way of explaining how Predator-influenced ancient civilizations disappeared.
Anderson deliberately rejected using an urban environment such as NYC for AVP, because in his words:
“you can't have an Alien running around the city [New York City] now, because it would've been written up and everyone will know about it [and thus Ripley will know in the future]. So there's nothing in this movie that contradicts anything that already exists.”
As a testament to how good Anderson was in continuity; he impressed James Cameron with AVP (LINK).
I'm reposting that interview because it's good and explains a lot of Cameron's thinking:
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QUINT: I remember before Paul W.S. Anderson did ALIEN VS PREDATOR it came out that you kind of made an offer to do another ALIEN film with Ridley Scott... JAMES CAMERON: Yeah. Ridley and I talked about doing another ALIEN film and I said to 20th Century Fox that I would develop a 5th ALIEN film. I started working on a story, I was working with another writer and Fox came back to me and said, "We've got this really good script for ALIEN VS PREDATOR and I got pretty upset. I said, "You do that you're going to kill the validity of the franchise in my mind." Because to me, that was FRANKENSTEIN MEETS WEREWOLF. It was Universal just taking their assets and starting to play them off against each other. QUINT: Milking it, totally. JAMES CAMERON: Milking it. So, I stopped work. Then I saw ALIEN VS PREDATOR and it was actually pretty good. (laughs) I think of the 5 ALIEN films, I'd rate it 3rd. QUINT: Ummm... JAMES CAMERON: I actually liked it. I actually liked it a lot. QUINT: You know, I hate it when movies don't abide by the continuity of their series... JAMES CAMERON: When they make up their own rules. QUINT: Exactly. They did that a lot with the alien incubation time, where from egg to chestbuster it happened... JAMES CAMERON: In minutes, yeah... QUINT: That kind of stuff really pissed me off with the movie... JAMES CAMERON: Well, it starts to become a video game. It's like, "Okay, that can be in him and that can show up over here..." It becomes more metaphorical or more comic book. I don't mean comic book in a negative way, I just mean that it's working at a kind of mythic, metaphoric level as opposed to really trying to immerse you in reality. I mean, I felt when I was making Aliens I think the same thing Ridley was doing with Alien, which is... “I'm going to make you think this is real.” Even though it is completely ridiculous deep space adventure. We were going to make you feel like it's real. It's a question of does the film take itself seriously or not. |
If the licensed material is good enough and respects enough of the Alien Lore/Feel; I can find ways to fit in or retcon it -- for the extremely short lifecycle in AVP; I can come up with two retcons:
A.) The Xenomorphs in AVP aren't "pure" xenomorphs, but specially engineered/bred variants created by the Predators to shorten the timeframe required to begin a hunt.
B.) The Predators are using magic space technology™ to artificially shorten the incubation times -- similar to how today, humans will set up game feeders to feed wild deer with a scientific blend of nutrients so that they have nice strong racks of antlers when hunted.
There's a solid case to be made for both approaches – an accelerated lifecycle means that there's less time for the Xenomorphs to "go off the script" and do what they want before the Predators show up to hunt them. Presumably the Predators have been hunting the xenos for a very long time in managed hunts and have discovered that there are certain mistakes that tend to lead to the use of self destruct devices.
The SPACE JOCKEYS travel the Milky Way and one of their ships crashes on LV-426.
The timeframe given is from a simple search on how long it takes organic material on Earth to fossilize into stone -- if the ship is biomechanical and already composed of organic silicates; it doesn't take much for the hull to fossilize.
There are two possible explanations for the LV-426 crash:
A.) The Space Jockeys are doing the equivalent of a relocation mission -- perhaps this Space Jockey ship encountered a planet whose star was going to go nova in the near future; and so they collected examples of that planet's high level life form in order to save them, only for something to go badly wrong.
B.) The Space Jockeys were transporting biological weapons in the form of Xenomorph eggs in order to either destroy them (project was a failure, xenos are too uncontrollable) or drop them on an enemy planet (operational combat use).
I'm more inclined to go with Option A -- rescue mission gone wrong -- because the Space Jockey in Alien is found with his chest burst open. If you're transporting biological weapons, then you know all the precautions to take to avoid fatalities, especially if they're your own biological weapons.
In both cases, the crash occurred during the twilight/collapse of Space Jockey civilization; because the distress beacon is still operational much later for the Nostromo to encounter.
If the Space Jockeys were still a going civilization when the Derelict crashed, the Space Jockeys would have picked up the beacon and sterilized the crash site by dropping an asteroid on it (remember that LV-426 has no indigenous life forms to deter the "nuke the site from orbit" tactic).
The Yautja (Predators) encounter the Xenomorphs and start to use them as the ultimate prey in controlled breeding programs. Earth is used a few times for these hunts.
A disastrous hunt that results in the deaths of an entire Predator hunting party occurs, along with the destruction of an entire unnamed human civilization in the self destruct blast. Due to scarce information on what happened, the Yautja Council of Elders proscribes the use of Xenomorph Breeding on Earth because:
1.) They're not sure what happened. Enough information was lost in the suicide blast(s) that they don't know what caused the entire hunting party to be killed.
2.) They decide that humanity is of more value as an eventual prey species; and the continued use of Xenomorphs on Earth risks the destruction of an interesting game species (humanity). Thus, they ban xenomorph hunting until humanity is advanced enough to defeat them on their own.
Major Alan "Dutch" Schaefer defeats a Predator in the jungles of Guatemala in Predator (1987). This has two effects:
A.) Industrialist Charles Bishop Weyland is invited into a secret CIA "black" program to investigate the aftermath of the incident, where a small tactical nuke sized explosion levelled a square mile of jungle in Panama; but without any radioactivity or fallout. This forms his interest for searching for alien technology.
B.) The Yautja Council of Elders after viewing the footage from the failed hunt, decides to authorize a follow up hunt on Earth to evaluate humanity.
Following the results of Predator 2 (1990), the Yautja Council of Elders decides humanity has advanced enough in technology to reauthorize Xenomorph hunts on Earth; as humanity now can defeat them without assistance.
The events of Aliens vs Predator (2004) occur on the remote Antarctic island of Bouvetøya. The death of Charles Bishop Weyland leads to the forced takeover of Weyland Industries by Yutani Heavy Industries in 2007, forming Weyland-Yutani.
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NOTE: There is no Aliens vs Predator: Requiem. It violates the basic law of contradiction by having xenomorphs appear in a decent sized town inside the Continental US; topping it off by having said town destroyed by a nuclear weapon at the end – this is such a huge “shock” to the timeline that it's discarded as clearly non-canon. |
During this period, humanity spreads to the solar system and after the discovery of FTL travel, to the stars. Along the way, ships disappear mysteriously, along with a few isolated scientific teams.
Humanity has yet to officially encounter any sentient aliens, or remnants of an alien civilization. However, over the years, people have picked up faint traces of the Yautja at the sites of hunting expeditions and nearby areas; but there's nothing conclusive; as Yautja technology is advanced enough that solid radar/IR/whatever locks or returns on stealthed Yautja ships aren't possible.
But there's enough from various encounters:
1987 Predator Incursion in Guatemala
1997 Predator Hunt in Los Angeles
2004 Bouvetøya Incident
and a few more since then that elements within humanity have a vague feeling that something is out there.
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NOTE: The lore in Aliens: Isolation has Weyland-Yutani discovering FTL travel around 2034 and keeping it a patented secret; before other competing corporations also find how to do it. I believe 2034 is a bit too early. 2060 or 2070 is more plausible; but it's best to keep the exact date vague to let people's minds fill in the blanks. |
Sevastopol Station constructed along the Sol-Thedus route; being completed two years behind schedule.
Sieg and Son (Seegson) and Weyland-Yutani are engaged in cutthroat economic/corporate battles all along the American and European Arms during this decade. In an attempt to undercut Weyland-Yutani in the Colonization market, Seegson introduces the first in a series of increasingly advanced synthetics designed to complement humans in remote locations.
Stung by the success of the the “Working Joe” synths in regaining market share for Seegson, Weyland-Yutani contracts out to Hyperdyne Corporation to create an equivalent synth for Weyland-Yutani colonies; since buying Seegson Androids is out of the question.
The Patna Incident occurs. A Weyland-Yutani mining/science team on the USCSS Patna encounters a crashed Yautja ship while surveying an unexplored world. It was transporting a few Xenomorph eggs to set up a new Xeno Hunt.
After much confusion and chaos, the lone Yautja survivor and the human(s) use the Yautja's self destruct device to detonate the fusion reactor of the USCSS Patna, destroying the Patna, the Yautja ship and the xenomorph(s) in a megaton-class explosion. There are no survivors.
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NOTE: It's clear that Weyland-Yutani has encountered something in the immediate time period before Alien – enough that they have an idea that it might be an “organism” in Alien – but they don't have enough information to completely understand what they're up against. Additionally, for thematic reasons, there cannot be any survivors of that encounter, because if there are, Warrant Officer Ripley's feats in Alien and Aliens get degraded. In keeping with the Alien mythos; the Patna is named after a ship also named Patna in Joseph Conrad's novel Lord Jim. |
The Weyland Yutani executive in charge of Terraforming Division - Bio Weapons Branch gets “read into” the USCSS Patna affair by Weyland's Military Division.
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NOTE: What better way to terraform worlds to make them inhabitable for humans then to create biological weapons which can in turn eradicate existing alien biospheres for low economic costs? |
Weyland-Yutani doesn't know much, honestly, as the Patna's communications array was damaged early in the event due to acts of plot. All they got before the signal cut off was something about an “extraterrestrial” ship and a heavily corrupted analysis of “alien biological material” by the Patna's science officer.
Military Division looked at the biological material in the sample, and conducted a thorough survey of the newly charted world to confirm that the biological material wasn't native to that world. Further analysis of shipping logs (and sending Weyland-Yutani enforcers to the Yakuza to get underworld records) show that the Patna was legitimately the first human ship to enter that region of space.
Ergo, we have semi-direct evidence that there is an unknown extraterrestrial sentient race doing “stuff”.
Early in 2121, Hyperdyne introduces the revolutionary new Hyperdyne 120 series android. These androids are almost indistinguishable from a human being without a medical scan, and the first few production 120-A/1s are bought immediately by the US Military for “evaluation”.
Later that year, in mid-2121, years of expensive work by Bio Weapons Branch pay off as a long range survey of the region of space that the Patna was lost in discovers the Warning Beacon on LV-426; and even then it's a close run thing. The beacon was found only through an intensive analysis of prior stellar surveys, as the Warning Beacon's signal to noise ratio is so low that it's barely above the background noise of space.
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NOTES: If you watch Alien; the reaction from the crew is more of “Ash is a goddamn robot!” rather than “impossible!”. This, combined with Ripley being able to use common electronic tools to reactivate Ash in order to interrogate him, makes me think that the Hyperdyne 120's (of which Ash is an A/2) are still “new” enough to be considered rare; but they still share enough with earlier synthetic models by Hyperdyne that Ripley can hotwire him to get Ash's final monologue. It's also clear that the Nostromo mission was a setup that took some time to set up – Ripley herself noticed it with “Micro changes in air density, my ass” after she used the “makeshift” motion detectors provided by Ash. |
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NOTE: If you look closely at the opening scene of Alien, the readout on one of the computers on the Nostromo's bridge says: ACTUAL TIME: 3 JUN Lore-wise, the reason for cryosleep is because Alien(s) FTL causes time dilation inside the FTL bubble – for the rest of the universe, it is 3 June 2122; but time on the Nostromo passed faster, so it is the equivalent of 5 November 2122; a delta of 155 extra days. |
Project Nile is undertaken under the Executive's direction. USCSS Nostromo's normal Sol-Thedus route is altered so that the return flight path passes close enough to LV-426 that the Nostromo can pick up the (extremely weak) Warning Beacon on it's own without prompting.
Two days before cast-off from Thedus, the Nostromo's regular science officer is replaced with Ash, who brings aboard with him a few toys such as the primitive “motion detector” seconded from Weyland-Yutani's Military Division.
I think the reason for selecting a Hyperdyne Systems 120-A/2 android, instead of sending a human Weyland-Yutani operative was down to a few possible reasons:
1.) Incomplete data from Patna's logs could have showed that the unknown extraterrestrial entity ignored the Patna's synthetic.
2.) A synthetic would be more capable against an ill defined enemy as it would have significantly enhanced strength over human baseline, wouldn't tire, and could theoretically operate in a vacuum.
3.) A synthetic would follow it's orders absolutely and wouldn't develop a conscience; important for Special Order 937, which was “Priority one — Ensure return of organism for analysis. All other considerations secondary. Crew expendable.”
For Weyland-Yutani; as long as the whatever they find is contained to the Nostromo, they win. They can just send a mercenary outfit with a salvage tug to recover the drifting Nostromo and tow it in, with its extraterrestrial cargo onboard.
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NOTE: About fifteen years ago, I was involved in Sci-Fi debating and several people pointed out correctly that in Aliens: Resurrection, the United Systems Military didn't need to throw grenades into escape pods that the Aliens got into. Does it really matter if an Alien gets into an escape pod and kills everyone on board, even if the pod is jettisoned? Remember that they're short ranged emergency pods. Just deal with your present xeno-infestation and when you have time, recover the pods which contain already canned and contained aliens that you can then use to repopulate your experiment rooms with. |
In the wake of Project Nile's absolute failure – Nostromo lost with all hands – the executive starts torching records; because unlike the Patna, the Nostromo was a regular, scheduled interstellar craft under the Interstellar Commerce Commission's purvew. Lots of people want to know what happened to a craft carrying 65 million tonnes of equipment and refined ore – as that in itself is a weapon at interstellar speeds.
An intensive search is carried out; but fails because:
A.) Weyland-Yutani doctored all official records on file with the Interstellar Commerce Commission, etc of the Nostromo's flight path. On the official records, the diversion to investigate LV-426 doesn't happen, causing millions of man hours to be spent searching in the wrong place.
and
B(1). Ash deliberately tampered with the Narcissus during the moments we didn't see him on screen in Alien (and he was off screen a lot). He introduced errors into the Narcissus' flight computer, as well as the distress beacon as a contingency against a lone crew member deciding to abandon the others on the Nostromo to escape alone in the Narcissus.
or
B(2). Weyland-Yutani deliberately sabotaged the Narcissus' emergency beacon during the layover in Thedus – it wouldn't have taken much – a Weyland-Yutani tech gets sent out to replace some circuit boards, due to “erroneous signals” being sent; and poof, the beacon when activated, says it's on when it's not.
Thus, Ripley goes to sleep thinking that the Narcissus is set on a course that will take her towards the core systems, but one (or both) things happen:
A.) The actual course of the Narcissus is off by 0.01 degrees from the reported course.
B.) The flight computer tells Ripley that Narcissus' distress beacon is on, but it's dead as disco.
Seegson purchases Sevastopol Station in an attempt to compete with Weyland-Yutani along the Sol-Thedus route. Sevastopol has a brief resurgence brought by Seegson money, but in the end location is everything and the station soon resumes its decline.
On 17 February 2134, the Nostromo is officially listed as lost in space – crew lost, some twelve years after it's final transmission. This allows the final round of payments to the next of kin, among them Amanda Ripley.
Having found out that Sevastopol Station has copies of specific Weyland-Yutani routing records from fifteen years ago, Amanda Ripley travels there to access them in an attempt to figure out what happened to the Nostromo and her mother.
The reason the records exist are because of ICC regulations for operating along the “frontier”. To ensure that possibly vital transmissions are not lost; every ship in the frontier has to transmit duplicates of their correspondence to nearby ships, bases or outposts; even if said locations are corporately hostile or nation-state hostile to the ship. In those cases, encryption is commonly used to secure national or corporate secrets.
Because Captain Dallas was a bit lax in keeping his cryptological programs updated, he used an older encryption scheme for the Nostromo's records when he sent them to Sevastopol. Thus, when the Project Nile executive began to destroy records, the file hashes for the Nostromo records at Sevastopol didn't match; and they escaped oversight until Amanda found them.
Arriving at Sevastopol, Amanda gets embroiled in Weyland-Yutani/Seegson corporate intrigue and survives an assassination attempt by an undercover Weyland-Yutani Synthetic. Breaking into Sevastopol's data core, Amanda recovers the Nostromo's correspondence; and once safely on her ship, she decrypts it.
Recovering a partial copy of Special Order 937, as well as routing logs for Order 937, Amanda can directly link the Project Nile executive to the loss of the Nostromo.
She doesn't know everything – just that the Nostromo was told to recover something and that the crew was considered expendable – but it's enough to damn the executive, who commits suicide. Following the executive's suicide, Amanda proceeds to destroy his personal files – she can't read them anyway as they're all encrypted – but by destroying them, she ensures that Weyland-Yutani can't recover whatever it was that ended up with the Nostromo being lost.
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NOTE: The reason I didn't discard Amanda Ripley, Seegson, and Sevastopol Station completely like I did AVP 2 and the Prometheus films was that the Isolation team put a lot of effort into developing the Alien universe by creating Seegson as a competitor to Weyland-Yutani – even if they had to use the Xenomorph to “sell” the game to corporate suits. Also, by tying the Project Nile Executive with Amanda; we now have a plausible reason besides “corporate liability risk avoidance” that Weyland-Yutani doesn't “know” about the Nostromo's mission – Amanda torched the executive's personal files that he kept as a “burn note” after destroying the “official” ones fifteen years ago – so that if someone ever tried to hold him liable for the Nostromo, he could burn the upper level executives who approved his plan. The reason I wrote out Isolation's basic plot was that forty-two years later, the Colonial Marines “go in blind” completely, something not possible if there's a successfully contained xenomorph outbreak 40 years earlier in this universe, which despite being 1970s-1980s “technoir punk”, still has a lot of advanced technology to record things. This way, Amanda gets closure, while still retaining the mystery of the Xenomorphs, which is critical to their deadliness (more on this later). |
Colony of Hadley's Hope founded as part of a joint ECA (Extrasolar Colonization Administration) / Weyland-Yutani venture.
By this time, most ships are increasingly automated, with minimal crew. The use of Synthetic (Android) Executive Officers during FTL flight operations is now routine, as the androids do not mind the months added to the flight caused by FTL dilation. They provide more sophisticated options for on-board repair and operations during FTL flight, instead of slowing to sublight to defrost human crew if there is an anomaly.
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NOTE: In the original 1983 Alien II treatment, Bishop as the Executive Officer is the only person specifically assigned as ship's crew – and he stays on board the Sulaco during the entire movie, monitoring events from the bridge. |
Amanda Ripley-McClaren dies of cancer, aged 66.
What follows is my attempt at laying out a somewhat rational “Hadley's Hope Collapse” timeline that doesn't require too much suspension of disbelief.
The published Alien novel that purports to do so (River of Pain by Christopher Golden) is riddled with errors and major plotholes; and despite this, a lot of people go with the dates given in the novel, because they're repeated in wikis and elsewhere.
There are several reasons why I discount the Golden novel as "really bad fanfiction", and they are:
1.) Newt's parents wander through the Alien Derelict, encountering dead Xenomorphs sprawled across the various corridors (something the Alien team of Dallas and Kane didn't notice). When they enter the Space Jockey's chamber, they find scores of Xenomorph eggs on the ground below the central platform containing the Space Jockey.
But if you actually watch Alien, the Space Jockey Chamber is empty of everything except the Space Jockey. There however, is a hole in the floor; which the crew of the Nostromo sets up a winch over, to lower Kane into. Below the Space Jockey's Chamber is a second chamber, divided into bays containing rows of Xenomorph eggs. Only one bay has a faint blue glow over it and it happens to be the one that Kane is lowered into.
Further investigation of the scene reveals that Kane still has the cable used to lower him into the Egg Chamber still attached to his suit; so that when he gets facehuggered, they just have to turn on the winch and haul him back up, without exposing anyone else to the other eggs.
If Golden can't be bothered to watch the first thirty minutes of Alien to get the little details right; particularly in 2013-2014; when he could pop in a DVD to freeze frame everything, why should I view his book as a reliable source?
2.) Golden has Hadley's Hope contain a "small" Marine detachment of a reinforced squad (8 to 15 marines); which begs the question, given how in Aliens, the Sulaco's reinforced squad was able to keep killing Xenomorphs right up to the end, despite being massively handicapped by acts of plot and outnumbered 30:1, how did the Hadley's Hope Marine detachment fail so utterly, particularly since they'd have military training and a not-small amount of small arms.
Laying down a concrete timeline for the events of Aliens starts with the one solid piece of dating we're given:
“I just checked the colony log. Directive dated 6-12-79, signed Burke, Carter J.”
There are also four tertiary pieces of dating:
1.) A Weyland Yutani worker says to the boss of Hadley's Hope:
“Remember you sent some wildcatters out to the middle of nowhere last week, out past the Ilium Range?”
This fixes a rough relationship of the time from Hadley's Hope to the Derelict that we can use to guess distance.
2.) The boss replying:
“I don't ask, because it takes two weeks to get an answer out here, and the answer is always...”
This implies that FTL comms require one week to reach Earth from Acheron, and then another week for the reply from Earth to arrive.
2.) A Marine saying during the SULACO wakeup sequence:
“You had three weeks on your back, Frost.” [21 days]
3.) The Ripley/Hicks sequence in the Command Center:
RIPLEY: “How long after we're declared overdue can we expect a rescue?”
HICKS: “Seventeen days.”
This implies it takes a Sulaco-class ship about 17 days to reach Acheron from Earth.
So without further ado...
– – –
April 2179 – The Narcissus is found by salvors working a remote route. Several days after it's discovery, Carter Burke finds out about the lone survivor of the Nostromo and goes “wait a moment.”
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NOTE: My own “head canon”, previously discussed HERE is that Burke had a connection to the original Project Nile executive, giving him the knowledge needed to look into the files that don't technically exist to find out about the Nostromo's hidden mission. That's the thing about document destruction/cover ups – it's impossible to get everything in a modern corporate bureaucratic environment. People talk, and rumors spread. Before Ripley showed up, Burke had no reason to dig through those files and make waves; because all he's got is some secondhand “phone tag” from the Project Nile executive to Burke's corporate mentor and then to Burke himself. But once Ripley shows up making wild claims, Burke, as previously mentioned, is going “wait a moment...” |
May 2179 – The Narcissus (with Ripley still in her cryopod) arrives at Gateway station. Burke through cutouts has the Flight Data Recorder seized before the ICC's forensics division can image it. Ripley's cryopod is moved to Gateway, where it is put into “slow wake” mode to prevent her from suddenly dying due to complications from her extremely long hypersleep. Eventually, Ripley wakes up and spends most of the month recovering. Likewise, Burke spends most of May “cleaning things up”, whether it's the Narcissus' flight data recorder, or whatever remaining records on the Nostromo he can find.
12 June 2179 (X-12) [Known Fixed Date]: Burke transmits his infamous directive that orders the Jordens to search out beyond the Ilium Range.
14 June 2179 (X-10): Ripley has the infamous ICC hearing. The reason for the date (14th) is that it's the second Monday in June 2179. The first Monday is the 7th and I'd imagine that Burke wanted to have everything cleaned up and his plan in motion before the ICC hearing; so the ICC hearing has to happen after Burke sends his directive. Presumably, he's able to arrange for “delays” to enable this to happen.
19 June 2179 (X-5): Acheron receives Burke's directive; and it's assigned to the Jordens. (Remember that it takes one week of travel distance for FTL comms from Earth to Acheron.)
23 June 2179 (X-1): The Jordens arrive at the Alien Derelict; past the Ilium mountain range. Assuming it takes the Jordens one day to get ready for the trip after being issued directives and then three days' worth of travel; the time/distance relationship works out to:
12 MPH @ 10 hrs day for 3 days = 360 miles ground distance.
Furthermore, if you divide that by 1.7 because Acheron is extremely rugged and mountainous, requiring crossovers and switchbacks – you get a crude air distance of 210~ miles from the derelict to Hadley's Hope.
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NOTE: This all comes down to another time-distance relationship – the location of the Alien Derelict has to be plausibly far enough away from Hadley's Hope that it wasn't discovered in over twenty years of human habitation of LV426, before Burke sent out his directive saying “go here”. |
24 June 2179 (X-Day): A VTOL “Puddle Jumper” flies the Jorden family back to Hadley's Hope after Amanda Jorden sends out a distress call. After arriving at Hadley's Hope, Russ Jordan is carried from the landing pad to the medical isolation unit at Hadley's Hope. Along the way, the chestburster emerges and scuttles off into the darkness of the vents.
The reason for it having to happen here is another distance-time relationship – we know that “stock” chestbursters erupt within 24 hours of initial implantation, so...
If Russ' chest explodes on the way to Hadley's Hope, there's no way the Xenomorph Larva can make it to Hadley's Hope on it's own.
If Russ' chest explodes inside the medical quarantine unit at Hadley's Hope, there's no way for the Xenomorph to go anywhere – it'll be stuck in an isolation ward; which would be airtight and secured against potential xeno flora/vermin – in this universe, humanity has surveyed three hundred worlds by this point.
25 June 2179 (X+1): The Colonial Administrator and the Weyland-Yutani Scientist/Doctor assigned to Hadley's Hope frantically confer in secret.
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NOTE: Weyland-Yutani would have a pretty decent Doctor/Scientist assigned to their colonies, not because they're evil and controlling everything, but for basic liability reasons -- if you are xenoterraforming, people are coming into contact with lots of xenobugs/viruses/bacteria, and terraforming may cause incidents. For example, you spray an iron-eating bacteria that oxidizes iron to release oxygen into the atmosphere faster than atmosphere processors alone. What happens if it mutates and becomes toxic to humans, or the “kill switch” on the bacteria doesn't work? It would be nice to have a presumable “Expert” on site, rather than trying to teleconference with a two week delay on questions being asked and answered. |
They decide to hush this up for a more prosaic reason. A colonist/staff rotation is coming up, a bunch of people signed five year contracts which are expiring in a week or two, and they've already begun packing. If they push the “Xenofauna Bug Hunt” button right away because of Russ Jorden's death...
...It will take two weeks to get a response from Gateway; and at best four weeks for a response team (1 week signal travel time + 3 week ship travel time) to arrive to fix the bug problem. Furthermore, the bug problem may take an indeterminate amount of time to fix; during which nobody can leave Acheron due to quarantine protocols.
After viewing the blurry footage they have of Russ Jorden's death and reading the eyewitness accounts, they decide that what they're dealing with is a parasitical and carnivorous xenofauna that's the size of a large rat. Furthermore, they decide that they might have a “man eating xenofauna” problem in about three months when it's grown big enough to be a problem.
If it can be hunted down and killed before the next scheduled subspace broadcast is sent off, we can legitimately claim that we're clean of any contaminants and our scheduled personnel rotation can go off without a hitch. They decide that they've got until the weekly signal broadcast on 28 June 2179 (a Monday) to deal with the Xenobug infestation. They start organizing a sweep of the colony with the colony's police officers to find the bug.
Later that night; the Weyland-Yutani Scientist/Doctor calls the Colony Administrator and points out that based off the footage he's viewed of the Alien Derelict as well as of interviews with Anne Jorden and the rescue team sent to pick them up, he's concluded that it's an extraterrestrial spacecraft, something we've never encountered in nearly two centuries of exploration and three hundred worlds.
“Think of the cut of shares from the discovery of an actual extraterrestrial spacecraft! If we tell Corporate HQ what we've got on Monday, we would only get 1/100th of a share. If we wait until we're sure of what we have, we can negotiate a better rate!”
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NOTE: You've got to keep in mind the people who end up on Acheron working for “The Company” have screwed up in their careers and are desperate to leave, and/or get rich quick. Never underestimate human greed. |
26 June 2179 (X+2): The science/exploitation expedition leaves in the Puddle Jumper for the Derelict later that day. Meanwhile Rollo the town drunk mysteriously disappears and doesn't show up for work that day. Nobody thinks anything better of it; Rollo is likely sleeping off a bender – he was seen leaving the bar late at night piss drunk. More to the point, even a drunk human wouldn't have a hard time dealing with a rat-sized thing.
27 June 2179 (X+3): The Science/Exploitation team carefully surveys the Derelict; starting with an exterior analysis; before carefully moving into the derelict through the entrance in the side that the Jordens used.
Inside, they find themselves in the lower chambers containing the eggs. The faint blue glow that was there 57 years ago when Kane and the Nostromo crew arrived is gone – the landslide that killed the distress beacon also killed the stasis field covering the last viable egg bay as well. Fifty seven years has taken a toll on the Eggs, and the vast majority of them are non-viable. Thanks to Anne Jorden's testimony (given after she calmed down enough back at Hadley's Hope), the Science team captures several facehuggers and secures them in specimen containers along with a few eggs.
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NOTES: In Aliens Special Edition; Anne Jorden is somehow able to drag her husband back to the crawler, indicating that most of the eggs are dead, because otherwise, she would have been facehugged as well. Secondly, Face Huggers and Eggs are Ambush predators; if you know what they are and what they do; you can easily neutralize them; as shown by Ripley in the science lab delaying the facehugger(s) long enough for Hicks to rescue them both. |
28 June 2179 (X+4; Monday): The weekly “all is OK” signal is sent at midnight, London time. There is no mention of Russ Jorden's death, the xenofauna infestation, or the Alien Derelict.
Several hours later, the Puddle Jumper arrives at the Hadley's Hope landing field with the science team and their payload of eggs. A crawler is sent out to move the team and their specimens to the colony's science lab. Everything is going normally, when all of a sudden, the Xenomorph jumps onto the returning crawler. It punches through the windshield and twists the driver's head off.
Now driverless, the crawler runs over a nondescript steel box sticking out of the ground, causing a shower of sparks.
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NOTE: Remember this sequence from Aliens? RIPLEY: BISHOP: |
With a crash, the crawler stops and the Xenomorph tears off the cargo hatch, enters the crawler and kills everyone inside; before running off into the darkness with several facehuggers hanging from it and cradling a single egg.
It doesn't take long for the Xenomorph to reach it's hiding hole in the (largely) unmanned atmosphere processor; where it sets down the facehuggers and egg before leaving to capture colonists for implantation, something easily accomplished in the chaos following the attack on the crawler.
Because the egg can sense the following conditions:
Large Amounts of Prey Nearby
Xenomorph Drone Nearby
Many (3+) Facehuggers nearby
It begins to change it's facehugger into one that holds a Queen embryo.
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NOTE: I'm trying hard here to get to the known end state of Hadley's Hope (Colony overrun, everyone dead or cocooned except for Newt by the time Sulaco arrives), without making up wild new powers for the Xenomorphs, or making the colonists exceptionally stupid. Sharks can sense electrical impulses from dozens of miles away; what's to say that the eyeless xenomorphs can't sense electrical impulses from the nervous systems of potential prey? Likewise, xenomorphs would be able to send out their own electrical impulses; allowing recognition and complex decision trees such as a drone egg metamorphosing to a queen egg with the right conditions met. |
With the signal junction box to the subspace transmitter run over by the crawler totally ruined, it would take several days of a competent fiber-optics repair team working on it to restore it to working order; something not possible with a slowly increasing amount of Xenomorphs prowling Hadley's Hope and snatching people.
You could try sending someone to manually operate the transmitter (like Bishop did), but I don't know if anyone on Hadley's Hope has Bishop's technical skills to hotwire the transmitter and point it at Earth. Bishop's job was a lot easier since Sulaco was in orbit, lowering the precision required. Finally, unlike Bishop, they're not synthetic and will be attacked by Xenomorphs either on the walk there, or during the hours required to reprogram the transmitter.
Making matters worse are that the few really good weapons that Hadley's Hope had were lost on the crawler, because the Colonial Administrator sent the majority of his Police unit to search the Derelict, which also explains how the Facehuggers could be wrestled into specimen tubes – we saw canonically that Hicks and Hudson were able to manhandle Facehuggers inside the Science Lab; and the police/security outfit on Acheron would be proficient in hand-to-hand combat; as it's easier to wrestle someone to the ground rather than shoot them, important if you're a billion trillion miles from “home” and a replacement employee may take a month to arrive if you shoot someone dead during a struggle.
What's left are stunguns and maybe a pistol or two left behind, along with a .22 target rifle for plinking beer cans. Maybe some engineers jerry rigged a coilgun or railgun.
For Hadley's Hope's Denizens, it's now a matter of time.
Because the 28 June 2179 (X+4) transmission went out before the crawler ran over the signal junction box, they won't get declared "overdue" until they miss the 5 July 2179 (X+11) and 12 July 2179 (X+18) transmissions as well.
This is where human nature and policy comes into play.
Since Alien, humanity has expanded outwards for 57 years both technologically and distancewise, with travel times to/from Acheron/LV426 dropping from 10~ months to 18~ days. With Acheron now in considered "settled/safe" space; missing a scheduled call won't provoke an "oh no" reaction from the authorities.
In other words, The Powers That Be don't want to send a USCMC ship on a (somewhat costly) three week voyage, only for the colony to come back online a week later with “sorry, Private Dumbass spilled Kanta-Kola onto the main message terminal, shorting it out. We had to replace it.”
If Acheron was on the “fringes”, them missing their weekly check would cause a full USCMC battalion on three ships to respond from the nearby starbase, because it might be little green men attacking.
With all this, the final timeline for Hadley's Hope resolves to:
5 July 2179 (X+11): Hadley's Hope misses it's scheduled transmission. Some eyebrows get raised back at Earth.
12 July 2179 (X+18): Hadley's Hope misses it's second scheduled transmission in a row, triggering an official ICC/USCMC response.
The situation in the colony is now critical. It's been about fourteen days since the Xenomorph liberated the soon-to-be Royal Egg – that's long enough for a Queen to grow to egg-laying size allowing the xenos to grow their population to about 30 to 40 individuals, against a reduction in the colony population to about 70 people (down from 158).
Presumably, at some point, after enough people went missing, the Colonists used the same trick with surgically implanted transmitters to discover the xenomorph nest in the atmosphere processors and sent out a rescue mission, only for it to fail horrifically. In retaliation, the xenomorphs counterattacked en masse, wiping out all organized human resistance in Hadley's Hope.
“Looks melted. Somebody must have bagged one of Ripley's bad guys here.”
Newt and several others survive the massacre, but over the next eighteen days, they're captured one by one until only Newt is left alone in her bolthole.
13 July 2179 (X+19): Lt. Gorman and Burke visit Ripley in her apartment. Ripley declines, before later agreeing that night.
14 July 2179 (X+20): Sulaco leaves Gateway Station.
30 July 2179 (X+36): The last survivor (other than Newt) is captured by the Xenomorphs and is cocooned in the hive. (The woman who says “Kill me” to the Marines).
31 July 2179 (X+37): Sulaco arrives over Acheron.
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NOTE: I think this timeline ends up pretty close to reality – Ripley ends up working about a month (14 June to 13 July 2179) as a dockyard worker after her Flight license is pulled by the ICC, giving her the skills necessary to sling cargo with a Powerloader as shown in Aliens. Additionally, the time that Newt spent alone “feels right” – she survived by withdrawing through the vents into a bolt-hole that the Xenomorphs were too big to reach; but that means she's entirely dependent on scavenging for prepackaged food – she can't cook because she can't drag a camp stove back to her place, and cooking might alert the Xenomorphs to her presence via smells – with prepackaged foods, you can eat the food, and then bury the wrappers underwater in the sewers, etc. But there's a limit to just how much prepackaged food a place like Hadley's Hope would have on hand, particularly since Newt can't go too far from her bolt hole, lest she get snatched by the Xenomorphs. The one “wildcard” are the hamsters in their cages – apparently Hamsters can only go for about 3 to 4 days without food (maybe a week if you squint hard). But we can handwave that away as an automated servitor (space!roomba) keeps reloading their food and water. |
In a lot of licensed Aliens material, you find the ruins of Hadley's Hope (Marvel's 2021 Aliens: Aftermath comic), but that alone makes them non-canon.
Remember Bishop's pair of lines?
“Four hours. [until the atmosphere processor blows] With a blast radius of 30 kilometers, equal to about 40 megatons.”
and
“In 19 minutes, this area is going to be a cloud of vapor the size of Nebraska.”
Because Bishop specifically stated a yield (40 megatons), we can do some extrapolation with NUKEMAP (https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/).
Selecting a 40 megaton (40,000 kt) surface burst gets us a fireball radius of 5.49 km and a 20 PSI blast radius of 7.44 km.
In the 21 September 1983 Treatment, Cameron stated that the distance from the Atmosphere Processor to Hadley's Hope was half a kilometer (0.5 km); something that's supported by visuals and travel times (the APC driving time and the Xenomorph travel times through that tunnel).
Hadley's Hope is pretty much vaporized. Additionally, because it's a very close to surface burst, there would be significant cratering.
Using Horizon Technologies' “Weapon Effects”, dialing in a 40 megaton yield at 30.48 meters (100 ft) burst height generates against HARD ROCK, a crater 260 meters (853 feet) wide and 54 meters (177 feet) deep. (NOTE: These figures are imprecise as they are significantly outside Weapon Effect's model limits of 25 MT for a burst at that height.)
The Alien Derelict likely survives, as it is likely far enough away from Hadley's Hope to not be affected by the explosion, and there may be mountain ranges that shield the Derelict from the blast.
But fortunately for humanity, and unfortunately for Weyland-Yutani, the Derelict is now a tomb. As I speculated earlier; the stasis field protecting that final egg bay failed sometime in the 57 years between Alien and Aliens – due to the the fact that Anne Jorden was able to drag her husband back to the crawler after he was facehugged (instead of being facehugged herself).
This indicates that the majority of the eggs in that final bay were non-viable at the start of Aliens.
When the rescue/exploitation team from Hadley's Hope arrived, they would have triggered/killed the remaining facehuggers (remember, the success rate of ambush predators kind of suck if the victim knows they're coming) as well as removed all surviving viable eggs to Hadley's Hope, where they were either used up by the Xenomorphs themselves, or destroyed in the 40 megaton explosion.
This is where we get really controversial.
After the events of Hadley's Hope, Xenomorphs shouldn't be a serious threat in the Alien(s) universe going forward, barring complete outside context problems.
The big thing that Xenomorphs have is that they're the ultimate ambush predators with a hyper-fast reproduction rate – they go from a larva about the size of a man's fist to a 8 foot tall beast capable of tearing a grown man apart in about ~24 hours or less.
They essentially get inside the OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act) loop, because everyone underestimates them, e.g. the bureaucrat in Ripley's ICC hearing:
“And found something never recorded once...in over 300 surveyed worlds. A creature that gestates inside a living human host and has concentrated acid for blood.”
Everyone is used to conventional animal problems in this universe – remember how Hudson on the Sulaco went:
“Is this gonna be a stand-up fight, sir, or another bug hunt?”
As he was likely envisioning something similar to the Tsavo Man Eaters (LINK).
But once someone survives and brings back good solid, hard data on xenomorphs, their lethality drops significantly, because:
1.) Embryos are easily detected with obsolete medical scanners 60 years out of date in 2179. Remember that in Alien, Ash can see the embryo on his video screen, but when Ripley enters the medical ward, he obscures the screen with his body before turning that monitor off so Ripley can't see it.
2.) Xenomorphs are dangerous because people underestimate them early on. Once people know about the hyper fast growth rate of Xenomorphs, quicker responses become standard – i.e. everyone starts running for the escape pods after a xenomorph chestburster emerges instead of going “Man, it was the size of a large rat. Are you telling me you, a big strong grown man can't handle a rat?”
Post-Hadley's Hope, there's a cornucopia of evidence that the ICC, ECA, USCMC, etc can pick and choose from:
1.) The Sulaco's Flight Computer and it's Backup would have copious video feeds from the Marines (right up to when the APC was trashed, terminating the uplink), showing the initial exploration of Hadley's Hope as well as the atmospheric processor battle.
2.) Bishop would have copied everything he found in the medlabs, as well as made copious notes of his research into the facehuggers and taken it with him to the drop ship. Remember, that while Ripley gave the order for the facehuggers to be destroyed when Bishop was done with them, she never specifically said anything about destroying everything else.
3.) Bishop could simply have been recording everything he saw with his synthetic eyes to a file on his hard drive named “Acheron_Mission_Hour0100.MP4” and so on, etc.
4.) Following the securing of the Sulaco following the fight with the Alien Queen, Ripley would have had everyone record a deposition (herself, Newt, Bishop, and Hicks) before going into cryosleep as a contingency measure – as she'd already foreseen skullduggery earlier in the film:
“Yes. The only way he could do it...is if he sabotaged certain freezers on the way home. Namely yours. Then he could jettison the bodies and make up any story he liked.”
Ripley might be considered hyper-paranoid for insisting on recording (and printing out transcripts) of depositions, but at this point, Ripley has survived no less than two straight alien stowaways in addition to corporate skullduggery – in the 26 February 1985 First Draft of Aliens; there's this sequence in the ICC meeting:
VAN LEUWEN The shuttle's flight recorder corroborates some elements of your account. That the Nostromo set down on LV-426, an unsurveyed planet, at that time. That repairs were made. That it resumed its course and was subsequently set for self-destruct. By you. For reasons unknown. RIPLEY Look, I told you... VAN LEUWEN It did not, however, contain any entries concerning the hostile life form you allegedly picked up. RIPLEY Then somebody's gotten to it... doctored the recorder. Who had access to it? |
5.) Wildcard – Hadley's Hope's computers were working right up to the 40 megaton detonation – Hicks was able to use them to find the colonists, and Ripley was able to pull logs showing Burke, Carter J ordering them to search that specific location.
So...where are the panicked logs by the colonists as Hadley's Hope slowly falls to the xenomorphs? Wouldn't people be writing last wills and testaments?
There are several ways to look at it.
A.) Weyland-Yutani's known corporate scumminess. Perhaps there's a hidden worm hiding in the computer that activates when certain parameters are met – X amount of deaths in Y period of time – and it starts “accidentally” deleting files. Put into place after faulty atmosphere filters suffocated a colony five years ago over a week's time, and a jury found Weyland-Yutani reponsible and fined them 1 quadrillion credits after the jury was read the emails of people slowly suffocating over a week. All the data loss could then be blamed on a programmer who forgot to add a bracket to a program line; leading to unforeseen file corruption.
B.) ECA/Military Requirement. Similar to (A) above, there could be a military/ECA requirement to wipe computers if enough of the colony dies in a short period to prevent hostile aliens from using the computers for intelligence exploitation.
C.) Non-Hardened Systems Failed: In addition to the above, Hadley's Hope was in bad shape by the time Sulaco arrived. There was a lot of damage to the various buildings from gunfire, acid, and water intrusion.
D.) If All Else Fails, Check the Print-Out – Ripley could simply have checked the hard copy printout version of the colony communications log – the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires every action, every event in Nuclear Power Plants to be printed to a continuous loop of paper – one of the last uses of dot-matrix printers left in 2023.
There's evidence for a lot of paper in the Alien(s) universe; as Bishop checks a clipboard in the medlab referring to a specific facehugger:
“Surgically removed before embryo implantation. Subject Marachek, John J., died during the procedure.”
Elsewhere, the Colony Administrator could have started printing everything out following the initial disaster of the Russ Jorden incident; as CYA; so that he doesn't get hung out to dry by Weyland-Yutani doctoring electronic records.
To summarize, before this incident, everything surrounding the xenomorphs was very fuzzy and hazy.
Consider the case of the 2004 Bouvetøya incident (AVP):
Most of the data and recordings by the Weyland expedition were likely destroyed or scrambled by the Predator sterilization device when it detonated.
Furthermore, Alexa Woods, the lone human survivor didn't quite see everything – she didn't have a complete understanding of the Xenomorphs and their lifecycle, as she didn't see everything the way the viewer did.
So she's not able to tell whoever picked her up:
“Oh, these eggs spit out spider things...that attach themselves to people. The people appear to be fine after the spider thing dies; but about 20 hours later, their chests explode as these alien snakes erupt from inside. The snakes grow into giant 8 foot tall monsters that are enormously powerful. Some of the monsters turn into queens which lay eggs and the cycle continues...”
More to the point, a lot of crazy things were going on in under a day (the events of AVP), and she wouldn't have correctly remembered everything – would she even think that a Xenomorph Queen is from the same species as a Xenomorph Drone? Remember that the Queen has multiple arms, while the Drone is boringly bipedal like humans.
That shroud of mystery is gone post Aliens.
We've got a near complete understanding of their lifecycle and we have tons of incredibly useful tactical information, such as they don't show up well on the default settings for infrared sensors.
Modifications can be ordered in existing structures or new construction to counter xenomorph facehuggers traveling through vents – via mandating mesh screens or remote sterilization systems be installed.
Because everyone in Hadley's Hope had those locator beacons surgically implanted; there's also the possibility that a significant amount of medical data was available for Bishop to copy. The Marines had their vital signs relayed – did the civilian locator beacons also do this? If so, it would now be possible to program an algorithm to monitor everyone's lifesigns for the tell-tale symptoms of being facehugged – Hadley's Hope gave us a sample of 100 to generate it from.
Now, xenomorphs can't just ambush people and drag them off to be hosts – the hosts' would be discovered within an hour, making it possible that embryos could be surgically removed (and destroyed) before they've grown large enough that surgical removal is fatal to the host.
That significantly deflates the threat of a secret xenomorph hive growing in a colonial environment where everyone is monitored for corporate liability reasons – though you'd still have potential problems on Earth where things are “nice” enough that there's a large amount of homeless who are not tracked by anyone.
