Alien

[flano]

Question : What is the alien doing in the space shuttle in the last scene all tugged up in the pipes or something? Either way its not interested in killing rippley like it has been for the entire film i.e breaking their heads open with its extendable mouth.

[Loosehead]

The Alien is intellegent enough to know that ripley has set the self destruct on the Nostromo and tries to survive by stowing away on the escape ship. The Alien initailly hides and once she realises it's there she makes it into some sort of locker, puts on a suit straps herself in and depressurises the ship and the alien is sucked into space. The audience is expected to have taken in that the Alien is an intellegent survive at all costs predator, it needs Ripley to pilot the ship to somewhere where there are more people etc etc so it's best chance would be to hide, unfortunately it gets discovered and ejected. If it killed ripley it would not survive itself. That's what I figured anyway!

[andy hughes]

i always figured it intended to simply move on to which ever world Ripley was heading for - survival anywhere, anyhow.

[delboy3]

Apparently an early draft of the script had the alien bite Ripley's head off, sit at the console and then speak in her voice to Earth control... Interesting but too far fetched so this idea was dropped.

[Mattk]

im with loosehead

[Loosehead]

does that clear it up for you flano?

[flano]

yup that pretty much tells it like it is thanks