re: #152 Tommy’s cone of shame

Prometheus reminds me of Alien,right down to the creepy robot. That Alien robot scene, when he goes nuts and spews white stuff all over, still chills me to the bone

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It’s bad enough they have an acid blooded monster running around.
Good Morning!
Waffles today.

But the thing is, Ash didn’t malfunction. He was secretly placed in the crew by the Weylan-Yutani Corporation. Remember, the characters in the film work for a bottom-feeding company that does deep-space mining and salvage. The Nostromo is just a towing vessel. The crew aren’t heroic space adventurers, they’re just working stiffs.

Ash’s job was to ensure the return of the ship (along with it’s newly-discovered and potentially extremely lucrative cargo) even at the expense of the crew’s lives. The Company needed a crewman who would be completely okay with stranding the entire crew on some distant asteroid or letting them all be killed by a hostile organism, and potentially sacrificing himself if necessary. Humans won’t do that, so they outsourced it to a machine.

Ripley accidentally stumbles onto Ash’s orders, and he can’t have her alerting the rest of the crew, so he tries to kill her. He’s just doing his job. It’s at that point that she and the rest of the crew understand that they are utterly on their own.

They don’t have laser guns and warp drive; civilization of any sort is years of travel time away. They could die horribly, literally in the middle of nowhere, and the people who put them there are entirely comfortable with that outcome. It makes you wonder why the ship has a self-destruct capability. They’re not a military vessel carrying top-secret stuff. Apparently the Company contemplates a situation in which the loss of the ship and the deaths of the entire crew are preferable to whatever liability they’d otherwise incur.

That’s a big part of the horror of “Alien”. The alien itself isn’t the only villain.