(screeching)
- All right Alien franchise nerds or any sci-fi nerds
for that matter, let's have a heart to heart for a second.
It's hard to love the Alien movies.
I mean, we do love them but when sciency plot points
don't seem to make any sense, it takes away from the films
and I think this is what's been happening with the franchise
for almost the last 40 years specifically
because of the confusing xenomorph life cycle.
Let's fix that, let's piece together every single movie
and come up with the definitive xenomorph life cycle.
Hopefully.
Maybe.
First let me admit that I made a mistake
with my previous Alien video.
In my first attempt, I didn't get to include Alien Covenant,
I didn't really include the queen, I brushed off the sequels
and I tried to fit everything into the original conception
from the original script.
That doesn't really make sense.
These movies span decades and include the visions
of many different writers and directors and producers.
So let's try again, let's start from the beginning
and include quotes from the people who actually
made these movies to see where the xenomorph life cycle
conclusively ends up from Alien to Covenant.
No just go, there's like,
there's like thousands of faces there, go.
You almost done been face hugged.
Let's start with Alien.
The Alien mythology has been added to,
subtracted from, cut, edited and trimmed so many times
that we need to go back to the original film makers
and track their intentions chronologically.
According to the original script, co-writer Dan O'Bannon
said that the xenomorphs where an ancient intelligent
species that reproduce via a third party but had two sexes.
In fact, according to Executive Producer
and co-writer Ron Shusett, the xenomorphs would reproduce
more or less like this tarantula hawk wasp
which first paralyzes prey like a spider,
leads it to a den, cocoons it, lays an egg near it,
and then those eggs hatch and feed off of the spider.
However when the film actually started production,
having an ancient species with breeding temples
and pyramids was deemed too expensive
and so Director Ridley Scott instead merged
that idea with the Space Jockey scene
which was originally just an alien ship
without any eggs on it.
Dan O'Bannon felt uneasy about this merger
because it eliminated a sex
and also made a sensical but complicated xenomorph
life cycle more of a surrealist mystery.
But we'll get back to that.
Making things even more mysterious,
a cocooning scene which would complete
the wasp-like life cycle was cut.
Fans called this the famous egg morphing scene.
In this cut scene it does look like something is happening
to the bodies of the Nostromo crew
and some fans have interpreted this as human bodies
literally turning into eggs
to complete the alien life cycle.
Some fans are wrong.
According to multiple quotes from Director Ridley Scott,
the humans are there to be used
as food by eggs already laid.
Quote "loose on the ship, a new alien begins to lay eggs
"in the bowels of the ship and it lives to propagate
"and must find food for it's offspring.
"In this case, the crew members of the Nostromo
"upon whom the young aliens can feed in their eggs
"until a new host comes along prodding the eggs.
"Then the life cycle begins all over again."
I know that it looks like something is happening
to Brett's body in this scene,
but look what's happening to this spider
when infected by a parasitoid wasp.
It's appearance can change too.
So in the original Alien,
after all the cuts and the changes,
the life cycle was a bit vague.
There was no longer an ancient with two sexes reproducing
with each other via a third party,
so Ridley Scott made them asexual
and there was no egg laying or cocoon making
in the final film so this is where we're at.
A classic xenomorph would lay some eggs
with a facehugger that has an embryo inside.
A facehugger is more or less just an embryo
delivery device and then that facehugger
would find a human host and then a chestburster
would gestate inside that host and then burst out
and become a classic xenomorph
which would then repeat the cycle.
See?
Not so bad.
But that egg morphing scene didn't just confuse fans,
it confused a director too.
According to an interview in 1996,
James Cameron thought that audiences wouldn't accept
human bodies literally transforming into eggs
even though that's not what happened
and that scene was cut anyway so Cameron
had a chance to officially establish
where the eggs came from.
He didn't think that one single xenomorph could possibly
lay all the eggs that we see in the first film
and so sticking with the insect theme,
he created the queen.
Cameron took much of his inspiration from termite queens
which first find a mate and then a place to rule
and then they begin transforming into egg laying machines.
As the female becomes queen,
he abdomen swells exponentially,
eventually making Her Highness here,
up to a hundred times larger than her subjects
and then she starts laying eggs.
One egg every three seconds for 20 years.
This can lead to 200,000,000 eggs laid in a lifetime.
This would certainly solve Cameron's egg problem
even though it wasn't really a problem in the first place.
This is how many xenomorph eggs would've been laid
during just this scene.
(egg squelches)
Wait, should I, should I put my face near it?
Oh, I'm not a bad scientist, okay I won't.
That wasn't Cameron's only change.
According to interviews, it was clear that Cameron
interpreted the xenomorphs as taking biological
characteristics from the hosts that they use
which would lay the groundwork for hybrids in future films.
Hybrids, I should note, that were against the original
conception in Alien by Executive Producer Ron Shusett.
Adding everything that James Cameron did, our mural morphs.
When a classic xenomorph is born,
if there is no queen around, it will become a queen,
start laying eggs and then the whole process
proceeds as Alien established but if a xenomorph
is born and there's already a queen,
it will become a male drone.
With the idea of alien hybrids now floating around,
director of Alien 3, David Lynch decided to establish it.
And as I've said in the previous episode,
one way that a xenomorph embryo could take
characteristics from it's host is through horizontal
gene transfer where cells exchange, don't worry,
exchange bits of DNA between them without,
that works, without having to go through
the whole sex and reproduction thing.
They can exchange genes right away
and express them and change the organism.
But this seems a bit too nice.
If a xenomorph embryo was actively
taking DNA from it's host,
it might work a bit like CRISPR.
CRISPR stands for clustered regularly interspaced
short palindromic repeats and it's a defense mechanism
that bacteria use to destroy the DNA of invading viruses.
When a virus invades a bacteria,
that bacteria starts cataloging bits of the virus' DNA
with it's own DNA and then it sends out that catalog
as single strand RNA molecules.
Then enzymes in the cell called CAS enzymes pick up
these RNA molecules and start floating around the cell.
If they encounter any DNA that matches their catalog,
they will cut it, they will cut the DNA
of the invading virus, inactivating it.
We are already trying to use this kind of molecular
machinery to revolutionize medicine
but a xenomorph embryo could use more or less
the same thing to revolutionize itself.
Given the Alien 3 hybrids,
let's update the board.
Facehugger interaction with a human produces a chestburster
which produces a class xenomorph which then leads
to everything that we already know.
But in Alien 3, it interacts with a dog which bursts out
and then becomes the runner alien and while we're at it,
let's also add Alien versus Predator
and Alien versus Predator Requiem
because if a facehugger interacts with a Predator,
it bursts out and becomes a Predalien.
This, this is the life cycle so far.
But while us nerds were worrying about life cycle stuff,
Director Ridley Scott was worrying about something else.
The Space Jockey.
He wanted to know who that big guy in the suit was,
and so we arrive at Prometheus.
In Prometheus, also according to the same quote, boop.
This quote here, boop, (laughs)
we learn that the eggs, I'm losing it,
we learn that the eggs aren't natural, they're bio-weapons.
If the eggs are bio-weapons,
that means that they're not natural animals anymore
as O'Bannon first envisioned and now we have a problem.
Which came first, the xenomorph or the egg?
This is a chicken or the egg situation
but in the chicken or the egg situation,
the egg comes first.
The first genetically true chicken was hatched in an egg
that had DNA that combined from two chickens
that were not yet genetically true chickens.
But aliens don't have parents, so this doesn't really apply.
Or do they?
As I said in my first video,
this is where the black goo comes in.
The goo is a genetic accelerant that takes whatever
biology it can find and weaponizes it.
But now I think more accurately,
it takes biology and turns it into the first stage
of a xenomorph so that it can reproduce itself
like a facehugger or in Prometheus where you see the goo
infect a worm and it becomes a Hammerpede
that face hugs a bad scientist.
(sighs)
Back to the board!
Here is how the goo interacts with everything
in Prometheus and everything else.
Okay, okay, okay.
The goo, if it interacts with an Engineer
and the Engineer has too much,
he vaporizes and turns into like a planet fertilizing goo.
If it interacts with a human,
if it's too much, it also causes death
or it turns you into a zombie guy.
If the goo interacts with something like sperm
which gets into Shaw, it comes out as a Trilobite.
The sperm is weaponized which finds an Engineer,
face hugs it, comes out as, it chest bursts out
but I didn't have space and then it comes out
as the Deacon alien but if it infects maybe a native worm,
it also turns it into a first stage,
the Hammerpede vagina snake thing
and then if that finds a human
who's also a bad scientist, it gets in his mouth
and then it comes out presumably as something.
Okay, okay.
All right, the last Alien film,
except for Alien Resurrection
because it doesn't really change any...
Dang it!
In Alien Resurrection, the military combines Ripley 8's DNA
with the DNA of a queen xenomorph embryo so...
If you combine a queen xenomorph's DNA with human DNA,
it also gets a womb I guess and then it doesn't have
to lay eggs anymore, it can just produce a gross
human alien hybrid which is the newborn, all right.
All right, all right.
The last Alien movie, Alien Covenant.
In Alien Covenant, oh wait, spoiler alert.
Turn back now if you don't want to hear spoilers.
Okay, in Alien Covenant we see even more biological
interaction with the goo.
Specifically we see the goo interact with some kind
of native fungus to produce a spore which would
be the first stage of its life cycle
and it drifts into some human's ear,
eventually bursting out and becoming the neomorph.
But more importantly, in the movie we see the android David
messing around with the goo,
these spores and what look like wasps
just as the original Alien intended.
How did I get that freeze frame?
Don't worry about it.
All in order to create the classic face hug--
(facehugger screeches)
Facehugger.
In this way, David is directing how the goo
interacts with organisms and what DNA
it has to work with through CRISPR like
or horizontal gene transfer like processes.
David wants the chicken, so how does he get the egg?
Doctor Elizabeth Shaw.
Through David's dialog and even his drawings,
it's implied, we don't have the same level of evidence
that we had for the previous movies,
so it's implied that he is using Dr. Shaw's physiology.
Her egg cells.
She would still have hundreds even if she was infertile
at her age to create a mutated egg that he could place
the facehugger that he created, in,
and thus complete the life cycle of the xenomorph.
Time to complete the board!
Okay, here we go.
The goo can also interact with fungus and produce spores
that when they interact with humans,
produce the neomorph.
But the goo when you have David's tinkering,
Shaw's egg cells, spores and native wasps,
can produce the classic facehugger with an embryo inside,
inside of an egg that will interact with a human,
chest burst out, only a human, and come out as a classic
xenomorph that then proceeds as we've already established.
Presumably a lot of these stages would also go on to have
their own queens if Aliens still holds in this life cycle.
But this is it, this is the the definitive,
conclusive, xenomorph life cycle, probably.
Maybe.
Gaze, gaze upon it's beauty.
I did this for you because--
(facehugger screeches)
Because science.
(sighs)
(upbeat music)
Woo!
Make sure to follow me on Twitter at Sci_Phile
where you can suggest ideas for future episodes
and on Instagram where I'm now posting
mini episodes like I did today.
Also on Facebook.
And if you want even more of my silliness,
I'm now doing a show called
♫ Muskwatch
with Dan Casey, my good friend,
and it's very silly and I suggest you watch
if you want to and also if you want even more space,
I have a new show on Alpha called The Space Program.
It's kind of a like a combination
of Cosmos and Mystery Science Theater.
So check out Alpha, check out Space Program
and check out Muskwatch,
check out all the other stuff I just said, thanks.
Okay, if all that works,
even the parts where I'm speculating
about the eggs and stuff,
how did they, how did they get to LV-426?
And why are there xenomorphs after
they appear in Alien versus Predator?
Huh?
Ridley Scott me that.
Woo, nailed it!