The Cat Did It

Hey, this is your host, Torvald. Before we get started, I just wanted to quickly mention that Microsoft was actually kind enough to invite me to appear on their Security Insights podcast this week, where I was able to share some of the work that I've been doing with AI and Copilot for Security. So if you're interested in that, go check it out. There's a link in the description. And without further ado, here is our podcast. In the Alien franchise, what do you think is a bigger problem? The Xenomorphs or the Androids?

The Xenomorphs are a pretty big problem. But those Androids, you know, sometimes the Androids help. No. No, in the second one, Bishop helps. He's the only one, though, but I mean, none of the others. I mean, something was wrong with the Ian Holm model. Yeah. I don't know. The Lance Henrich model is great. The Ian Holm model is not good. It's mouth fogged. Something's wrong with it. That's the one that kisses itself, right? Oh, no, that's the Michael Fassbender model. That's the Fassbender model. That's a great model of Android, by the way. That's really good. That model loves itself. Fassbenders were top of the line, even though they're technically the oldest ones. The xenomorphs, they're just space bugs. Or space crustaceans, I guess. I don't know. But that's all they are. They're just doing their thing. They don't care about anything. They're not even a problem if you leave them alone, right?

Like, they just kind of live. They just live in their life. No, they're just animals. They're not like predators. And I have no idea why Weyland-Yutani and the engineers are also obsessed with xenomorphs why are they yeah they're not that perfect they're just they're just space bugs perfect no you're not listening it's a perfect life form perfect no period end of story the androids are more of a perfect life form than the xenomorphs because the androids will never die you can take their heads off they do in every movie except if you like i don't know push them slightly against a wall then they just go crazy but before that they they're like the most advanced ai ever you can't even tell the difference i just don't understand how wayland built david who is a perfect android and then was like that's not good enough and was like i need to go find xenomorphs wayland was mostly impressed with

things that kill because he invented this cool thing called death race back on oh no don't blow it you can't you can't do this yet we're not doing this today well but wayland is really impressed with things that kill efficiently or not even efficiently but just do it just kill yeah his androids aren't very good at it they'll try to suffocate you with a rolled up newspaper paper that you can breathe through we're gonna talk about this it was like oh man they're perfect in every way they're just not really trained to kill that well although david kills a lot of people so david's very good at killing he he kills an entire ship full of baby embryos good in the first one man is he bad in yeah he goes way off the deep end but no no so canonically this is the actual canon of the alien universe weyland is obsessed with immortality he wants to live forever that's why he's making his androids that's why he made the lance henrickson models because

weyland was lance henrickson exactly you got it that's exactly why he made his androids david was the prototype and he believed that he could make like a weyland android that would then carry on his legacy and live forever but he also wanted to actually live forever which is why he took the trip to planet Prometheus because he believed that the engineers had uncovered the secret to the perfect life form, being able to genetically make something live forever. I don't know why he believed that because I don't think xenomorphs live forever and the engineers don't live forever. So I don't know what's going on. I mean, we've never seen a xenomorph die of old age. That's Sure, we've never seen an old xenomorph. But they sure do age fast, is all I will say. They have a lot of different stages of their life, and most of those stages last minutes. They have the same sort of convoluted life cycle as most parasitic animals.

Tremors, like graboids. Yeah, yeah. They start off as facehuggers, they turn into chestbursters, then they turn into cocooners, where they put people in cocoons. So that step is canonically optional. They can go straight from a chestburster into a full xenomorph-like drone. They don't have to do the smaller middle step in between. They don't have to molt? No. I mean, they've canonically made it so they don't have to because, I don't know. The backbursters don't have to molt. They come out fully formed. Well, maybe that's it. Maybe that's it. Maybe it's the backbursters. I mean, they come out of your back. That's weird. Yeah, that's completely different. On its surface, a single drone is not a problem. It can do nothing. It will just die. Because it's not a facehugger. No. It can't make more of itself. It can't make more. But don't try telling that to the drone on the Nostromo because it was already cocooning everyone

and getting them ready to get facehugged, even though it had no eggs. Right. Well, it hadn't realized it was alone yet. That's only in the extended version, by the way. Yes. It thought the queen was somewhere nearby. It was just a kid, you know? It didn't know. Yeah. Well, I mean, it didn't know anything. They're just animals. Like, they're not intelligent. No, exactly. They're somewhat, you know, like, they can get out of tough situations. They can gnaw off their arm. They can figure out the ship is going to explode and then crawl into the escape ship and wedge themselves into the wall real good so they can't get out. And then just kind of wiggle around there. We're going to talk about that part because I do believe that that drone had help. He was informed that he needed to get onto that shuttle. He didn't figure that out on its own. Or she. I don't know. Okay, yeah, that's true. We don't know that.

We can't assume that they're these drones. If they are like bees, then they actually are all she's. Yeah. But if they are drones, then they're he's because, of course, drones are he's. But they're not drones because they don't mate with the queen. They don't mate. Well, maybe they do. We don't know. How does she pregnant her eggs? The queens are just fertilized. Yeah.

It's an interesting cycle that they have. But so, wait. Waylon he was obsessed with immortality but again even if that was his obsession he had already created immortal things by creating his androids I feel like he did better than the engineers ever did but I do have to say I think it's a little inefficient that they run on milk they should definitely run on acid it's hydraulic that would be way better you're right I mean you're definitely not wrong I think Waylon saw that he was like oh my guys run on milk with this you like dim cookies in that these guys run on acid like they can burn everyone up when they get killed because that happens a lot you can't dip cookies in acid no you still eat them after yeah well yeah um no but i have an actual question for you okay canonically the chain of events is they discovered prometheus wayland went to prometheus he died that was how they discovered xenomorphs the lady from prometheus took david and went to another planet which was

the planet of the engineers it was already dead and deserted david decided to kill her and he decided to restart colonizing xenomorphs and i believe the ship that he took to do that became the ship with the space jockey the space jockey's ship yeah so alien one starts with them coming out of hypersleep or whatever and they think they're home they say oh it's good to be back at earth all right hey that's not our system earth we're not at home you that's not our system one of the things that rubs me the wrong way about alien is that they don't seem to react strongly to certain things that they should react strongly to like waking up and not being home very muted reactions very mumbly reactions they were drawing heavily on 2001 a space odyssey yeah and the humans in 2001 a space odyssey yeah are robots yeah they're not human they are so i feel like that that influence from 2001 somehow made it so yeah they all just have very muted reactions to the crazy

things happening except for lambert yeah lambert reacts appropriately yeah every situation the only one who's emoting um but no i agree she sorry she's the only one who's kind of emoting all the time she identifies as she emoting so hard that she just can't get out of the way which is about the one time she has a bad reaction is um is when she gets killed by the the alien so they come out of hypersleep they're not home they just like apparently don't care they're like that's odd oh well hey let's scan for radio waves oh this seems to be a distress signal so the ship was always scanning for for radio waves it was doing that while they were in cryosleep it picked up that signal and that's why it brought them out of cryosleep yes so that's what we find out home yet is that this was all part of weyland yutani apparently knew about that ship full of xenomorphs and wanted them to bring one home and that's where my question is how did weyland yutani

know about that shit full of xenomorphs as far as i know david didn't tell anyone what he was doing he just did it so well but david is an android and he also is not a good pilot because he crashed the androids are very loyal to weyland yutani so i mean he might have told them at some point although david maybe in his distress signal that wasn't a distress signal maybe it told them exactly what was going on i just don't understand why weyland yutani is so obsessed with getting a xenomark they really want no that is weird it is weird they just really want one this is it would be great to have and they do get them later and they're like hey anything with what if we made them a little more human not a lot more human but a little more human they're just a little bit Like maybe if they had like skulls, like human skulls on the outside of their body. And they can like smile at you like.

Let's first just give some context. Hello and welcome to The Popcorn Isn't Real. I'm Leif Eric. I'm here with my co-host Torvald. And this is the podcast where we talk about fan theories, especially fan theories regarding film. Today we're going to be talking about Alien. Of course, Ridley Scott's masterpiece. The space horror film of all space horror films. It is a striking film. It's an unforgettable film. Masterwork of Dan O'Bannon, the screenwriter, one of the screenwriters at least. And H.R. Geiger, the dude who created all the designs. Yeah, H.R. Geiger or Geiger. Unbelievably cool. If you don't know about the alien universe, it is vast and has a lot of movies. And it's very convoluted. And it encompasses the alien movies. the prometheus movie and the predator movies and possibly the death race movies but yeah we'll talk about that in a different theory so we've been talking a little bit about prometheus we're

actually going to focus on the very first one on alien for this one and if you start an alien you don't know anything about anything like you're just dropped into it they give virtually no explanation for what's going on and the first time watching this you might be completely lost because they don't talk loud and they don't talk much. And there are very long sequences of absolutely nothing happening. There's nothing happening. Yeah. But I mean, those were in there to build ambience and atmosphere. And you got to say like, dude, the set designs in this movie are off the chain. Yeah. The Nostromo is crazy. It's so cool. The space jockey ship is crazy. The alien is just insane. The costume design. Yeah. like when he reaches out to hug dallas yeah he's always reaching out to hug someone i think that alien costume couldn't really move its arms from like a forward they did what they could with what

they had you know um but wait now would be a good time to actually ask you how do you feel about this movie do you like do you like alien do you like watching it do you enjoy watching alien my dad told me about alien long before i ever saw it he explained the entire plot and it sounded really good to me um so i think that sort of hyped me up for it and i always loved the idea of alien however my first time actually watching it when i was an adult it felt very boring yeah it was hard to get through it has such a profound influence on pop culture yeah that you already know what's going to happen and it tries to be so mysterious that right you can't have the story already going into it unknown right like when people first watched it there were no space horrors like the best you had was 2001 a space odyssey well there was some other like cheesy 1950s horrors we'll save dark star for later because i think i think torvald has a theory

about that i felt bored the first time i watched it not bored with the plot because i think when stuff starts happening it does get very intense but man like the very first kill in this movie not kane but when brett the assistant engineer dies they take their sweet time getting to brett dying like it's over an hour it's crazy and we know he's gonna die he goes off looking for a cat that's a surefire way to die in a horror film well unless you're ripley she can manage but yeah yeah she's all right i admire alien and i love alien but watching it is hard for me because i just want the alien stuff to happen and it takes so long it's so slow and the people mumble so much i can't understand them there is an extended version of alien and the thing that just boggles my mind is what they cut out versus what they kept in the theatrical cut. Because there are some really interesting and even important scenes they cut out.

And then look at what they kept in, just like these really long, like I get that it's a spaceship, okay? I only need to see that for a few seconds. I know. The extended cut has the cocoons, like that tells us like the third part of their life cycle. That's important, I think. It's important. they show them in aliens so it's like it's canon there's the scene where lambert gets mad at ripley which i think is a good scene because lambert is the only one who has like emotions and it makes sense that she would be mad at ripley even though obviously ripley was correct you're talking about when ripley wouldn't let them back in because they were contaminated right yeah because it really felt like someone was going to chew her out for that but then in but no one version of the film and that adds to the sense of these people being like weird muted robots because no one cares that Ripley just kicks them to the curb she's like I do not care that there is an alien attached to

Kane's face you are not on the ship ergo I am the one in command her captain and her second in command and her navigator are begging to be let back in the ship and she's like no we're following protocol which she is right to do but still it feels really heartless well and but they could have used that same logic in prometheus for like the weird big man zombie big man who shows up random unbeatable zombie who just shows up speaking of ridley scott the next thing i want to say about the length was it's weird that there appears to be no middle ground between alien and prometheus where it's like just long shots that are so slow and boring and yet they keep it simple there's just one alien whereas on the opposite end of the spectrum is prometheus which is just like crazy stuff happening constantly all the time and there's a bajillion like they just land in the middle of a zoo apparently yep or like just crazy aliens popping out everywhere and like dancing

snakes that like really excite people oh they love them they love those snakes they're like hey snakes those are usually like nice let's handle them they look like a lot of people have a lot of different feelings about prometheus that are all justified but i love that movie i will go to bat for prometheus any day it's like one of my favorite movies of all time theory at some point contrasting the subtlety of alien dialogue and like the mumbling like really really laid back where they just like no one says android nothing is on the nose no one's saying anything the audacity of prometheus dialogue where she gets out and is like this planet is barren just like my womb dude but the symbolism it's impregnated later no i mean i get it i know she gets impregnated later to me it's like actual art and i love it out i love it so much i'm just saying it's such such an unbelievable departure from alien i'm gonna give a brief overview of alien for anyone

who hasn't seen it and i'm also going to introduce all the characters and then the theory it is about a group of space miners just blue collar workers on a spaceship they go to investigate a stress call one of them gets face hugged by an alien that face hugger alien implants a xenomorph in him which hatches out of him on their ship and the xenomorph is the alien the titular alien they then try to find and exterminate that alien but it actually finds and exterminates all of them except and only one person survived two creatures survive only one person the other creature that survives is not an alien by the way it's a cat that is alien in a nutshell it's very simple the crew there are seven members aboard the nostromo that's the ship they're on the towing they're just towing or back home to earth i'm going to introduce all of them because i'm going to be throwing their names out so maybe this will help you keep track all right now if you

watched it when it came out and you didn't know anything about sigourney weaver because she wasn't a huge star yet people didn't know who the main character was and that was one of the things that made this suspenseful was no one knew who would survive if you just went into it you might think the captain was the main character and he dies when he dies yeah the captain's out it's great because he just asked the computer what his odds were and then it's apparently not good these guys do not know how to talk to a computer these guys they do not know how to interface with the machine they're very bad yeah so the characters are the captain his name is dallas you have the second in command the executive officer his name is kane we have another executive officer or warrant officer she is the third in command her name is ripley ellen ripley you might know her the best then there is the science officer his name is ash he seems perfectly normal to begin

with but he's kind of a weirdo there is the navigator her name is lambert and there are two engineers parker and brett parker of course is the chief engineer and brett is the helper i guess he just agrees with parker that's everyone oh and mother mother is the name of their computer which they seem to think is an advanced ai that they can talk to they are wrong this is a very unadvanced computer that cannot do anything for them and cannot help them in any way they keep trying though they seem to think it's hal 9000 but it isn't hal 9000 it's not in any way it's not even it's like a glorified word processor yeah oh sorry i forgot to mention the last member of the crew every member of the crew goes by their last name because this is a professional vessel of working class people the last member of the crew is jones jones is a cat kitty cat um they call him jonesy sometimes but his name is jones now my theory is that jones did it the cat did it jones was working stalking around

killing everyone it didn't necessarily kill everyone the alien the xenomorph was just like in the wrong place at the wrong time and the cat actually he framed the xenomorph no i don't think I don't think the cat was quite capable of it, but I believe that Jones was working with the Xenomorph to preserve the Xenomorph's life and kill the members of the crew who were hunting the Xenomorph. That darn cat. Because, of course, they wanted to get rid of it. I mean... That darn cat. I need to prove that Jones was around during all the kills that happened in this movie. That is going to be pretty easy, actually. Yeah. I need to prove that there is at least precedent for Weyland-Yutani having the ability to build an advanced life form that looks like a cat, but is actually much more intelligent. So random question, just because it happens at the beginning of the movie. Is the space jockey an engineer?

As far as I know, he's supposed to be, but he doesn't look like an engineer. I've always tried to see it. He looks nothing like those guys. He has, like, I think he has a face hugger on his face. Right. But he still doesn't look like an engineer to me. In this movie, they get a distress call, and the ship takes them out of whatever faster-than-light travel they have. And they go to investigate because the ship says they have to. It's part of their contract. Small correction. I don't know if they have faster-than-light travel in the alien universe. Well, they have something because it's going to take them 10 months to get back home. and it would take them much longer than 10 months. But no, you're right. The spaceships in this universe are not particularly advanced. In some ways, they're much less advanced than the ones we currently have in real life. Yeah, a lot less. Yeah. So they find out as they are going into the ship,

they find out that it wasn't a distress call. It was a warning. It was saying, stay away. Yeah, so wait, who says that? Someone says, I've partially deciphered the message and it actually seems to be a warning. Mother says that to Ripley. I was confused because Mother says it to Ripley, Ripley announces it to Ash, and Ash says, no, no, no, we're already here, we might as well do this. And of course, we find out later that Ash is an android and he's working for Weyland-Yutani and he knows there's xenomorphs here, wants to bring him back. For him to know there's xenomorphs here implies that either he was told before they ever even left Earth, which is the impression I had, or that he somehow got that information in the time between they woke up and now. It would mean it must have been included in this distress signal. And if it's included in the distress signal, then that distress signal is like really, really classified.

And Mother shouldn't be translating it for Ripley. Like, what's going on here? Yeah, so Mother telling them about that doesn't make a lot of sense, except that, yes, Mother is not an AI in any shape or form. She just relays messages, that's all. Unfortunately for them, second-in-command, Cain, sees an egg and thinks the best thing to do is to put his face in it. Yeah, I mean, he would fit in well with the snake-loving biologist's son playing Prometheus. Yeah, no, it's true. Now, in his defense, the glass on his helmet is ridiculously thick. Yeah, yeah. So I wouldn't think that anything could get through that. It's not as thick as the acid that gets through it. Somehow the facehugger gets through it, but not his own skin. I have to call out just how amazing the practical effects are here for the egg. I always think that that egg looks amazing with that facehugger wriggling around inside of it.

I want to scramble it and eat it up. And then when it opens up the top and he looks down into it, you can still see the facehugger wriggling like up to the top about to come out. It's very good. I don't see how the cat could have caused this, by the way. OK, well, the cat didn't necessarily cause Kane's death, but we already know that Ash is the one who's sort of pushing them toward getting this alien. Well, how could he have possibly guaranteed that they would bring back a specimen? Like, it only came down to this guy's idiocy of putting his face in the trap, right? Putting his face in the giant evil hole that he found. The assumption was just that they would get infected. He was sending them in as sacrifice. If you send three people and there are like 100 eggs there, someone's coming back with a facehugger. Now, Ash, we find out later, his primary objective is to bring back a chestburster, a xenomorph.

And I believe that Jones is some kind of android cat. And his job is to make sure that the alien gets back to Earth. You might say that Jones's designation is something like, I don't know, computerized, animal-shaped, technological robot. Cat. Well, that spells cat. Wait, except it doesn't. It spells casture. We are, of course, referencing a movie called Lilycat, which we are going to discuss. Everyone knows Lilycat. It's a very obscure movie called Lilycat. It's an anime. It's a Japanese animation film. It's really good. You all should watch it. It's so fun. It's only like an hour long. Yeah, it's well worth the hour. Anyway, we'll talk about Lilycat at the end. but after the facehugger just falls off of Kane which when my dad told me the story I thought that was the coolest part it's like he gets a facehugger on him and the facehugger just falls off and dies like that's just so weird no one is expect that to be the alien but it's not this part's so good

and yet I feel like the movie kind of half ruins it by no one reacting to it they're just like oh okay back to business as usual no one cares fine to some extent i can appreciate the very muted dialogue like i like when parker and brett the engineers are in charge of fixing something and ripley calls them up and she knows they're lying about how long it's going to take to fix and she's going to come down and ask them personally and they get pissed because they don't want that so when she does come down they turn on all the random hoses and start asking her stupid questions and when you're watching this you're like you have no idea what's going on why are they asking these stupid questions why are they and then ripley just gets frustrated it's like all right i'll see you later and then they turn off the hoses and you realize oh they just wanted to get rid of them to get rid of they didn't want like the command crew down in their

engineering area yeah so that was actually a really good scene i like that part i do like how ripley is very just by the books that's one thing i love about ripley so of course she's known as like an action star heroine. And what I think she gets better than most of the more recent ones is that she's not an action star. No, she's just an officer. She's just a professional. She's doing her job. She's so professional. She literally just wants to follow the rules. I think most of the action stars we get nowadays are like loose cannons who don't want to follow the rules. I have to give her minus points because the one dumb thing she does do is like she sets the ship up to explode and then she's like, Time to find the cat. I'm like, lady, this ship is massive. That's important. Finding a cat is impossible on the best of days in like a one room house. Jeez. But first, the chestburster jumps out of Cain.

Cain dies and it runs away and they are looking for it. And when that chestburster runs away, that is like the peak of cinema. I love that thing. It's a very famous shot. Just looking left and right and then just zips out of there. So I love that they didn't even try to make it look like it went and like hid or like slithered into a pipe or something. They just cut to the people all being like, oh, we're going to go. It's gone. It's out. I just love it. I love it. The contrast between that and the egg. It's beautiful. It's so beautiful. I do have to ask, though, who do you think did it better? Alien or Spaceballs? Oh, I mean, well, you can't really compare it. Spaceballs did it really well. Spaceballs at least did it as good, right? They got the same dude. They got the same actor to get chest-bursted. Like, I mean, honestly, I would kind of say Spaceballs is the remaster of that scene. Like, Spaceballs kind of did it better.

But they don't have it sip off the table. No, it dances off the table. It puts on a show. It's fantastic. And I love that that's apparently the expected outcome of that meal. Because the waiter doesn't care. The waitress, she's just like, oh, he ordered the special. As he's laying there dying.

They split up, as they do often in this movie, to search for the alien. The two engineers, Brett and Parker, go with Ripley and they end up finding a cat instead of an alien. And the cat runs away and they're like, Brett, catch the cat. And he's like, why? It's just a cat. So you think the cat is leading them towards the xenomorph? Yes. I think the cat... Is it feeding it? Like, what's it doing? Why does it want them dead? So they, right now, are trying to catch this xenomorph and blow it out into space. it's just trying to stop them it's like if the xenomorph kills them they can't they can't kill it it's essentially doing the same thing as Ash but just in the way it can as a cat Brett finds the like the molted skin of the alien and I think we can attribute that death entirely to the cat because he goes looking for the cat he gets killed by the alien and it shows the cat the cat's watching the whole time with like dead eyes

just like yeah the cat's like it's kind of being a little suspicious right there what what even is that horrible evil room he gets killed in like the room of the hanging chains water and why does he want it in his mouth yeah he loves it he's so into that water like he he finds it and he's like ah yes ambrosia elixir of life allow me to stand under this for like two minutes instead of like looking for the alien on the engineering level is acting like it's particularly hot down there but brett is like sweating and he's like oh water ha ha he loves it man well and no one acts like that water like pumping out of the ceiling is a bad thing like no one's like ah our ship is leaking let's fix this i mean i'm assuming my best guess was that it's some sort of coolant room there's like condensation from something that he's bathing in well no it's the condensation so that is so it's um that's a lot of condensation i mean it's

a big ship there's an actual thunderstorm has formed in that room like having some sort of method to drip it down a drain it just drips on top of their like equipment sitting under this large tunnel cooling i get it yeah and also there's lots of chains hanging down i really yeah so that's the end of brett it may have taken me a little while to get to brett's death but nowhere near as long as it takes the movie. Now, in the Dallas death scene, which is the next one, Dallas goes into the vents. Dude, he does that. No, this time, Alien does Dallas. Yeah, Alien does do Dallas. So, Alien must do Dallas, because, like, it doesn't chomp him. Apparently there's no blood. It hugs him. No, and Dallas is one of the ones in the extended cut who is cocooned. It keeps them alive. Right, yeah, I got you. Yeah, that does make sense, yeah. So, that might also be another reason that the cat is helping the alien catch people because it knows it thinks there's a

queen somewhere the cat's also maybe maybe it knows what the alien doesn't seem to know which is that the alien might be able to turn into a queen maybe he's the alien does know and he's getting ready right like he's prepping he's like i'll make my house full of cocoons and then i'll become a queen they are using motion sensors to track the alien while dallas crawls through the vents. I really love the attention to detail in this movie. And it's amazing how much attention to detail there is that just kind of like falls to the wayside because they just mumble it out. And one great example is when they're talking about this motion tracker. And then Ripley, I think, actually asks, what's it tuned to? She says, what does it key off of? Yeah. And then the other guy explains exactly what it's keying off of. Like, it's not just movement it's micro changes in air density yeah and i thought that was incredibly

cool because no other movie do they bother to explain anything like that they're just like you know it's a motion tracker and ripley who doesn't seem to like or trust ash at all when they're using the motion tracker she whispers to herself she's like micro changes in air density my ass like she does not think that this thing works like and it doesn't it turns off i mean it doesn't work at all it's also like gigantic and it's clearly like a vacuum cleaner of some kind yeah and it's just not an effective way to to show where something is how gigantic it is it has the tiniest little screen that just shows a little grid with dots on it i felt like it should have had one of those brazil style screen and larger magnifying glasses that would have been pretty cool one thing i do like about that tracker is that in the game alien isolation you have to use that to track the alien and it is terrifying because it's pretty good yeah it's not a good

great game yeah alien isolation very very well captures the feeling i love the way she saves on tapes like well that's actual data tapes well and it's especially good how halfway through the game you realize the problem isn't the alien it's the androids as always the infinite far more androids here than aliens oh man what a game in the dallas scene lambert keeps picking up a blip on her like screen that is confusing them and it's disappearing and i have always been confused by this scene i don't know what dallas is doing he doesn't seem to be listening to lambert i'm not quite sure what lambert is doing i don't exactly know what the screen is showing us but at some point dallas goes down a tube and gets hugged by an alien and then dies i always took it as in like and this does make sense in context these guys don't know what they're doing like this is some random motion tracker crap thingamajig that they rigged up yeah and they don't know how to use it

and they don't know the layout of those tubes and he's like going up and down levels and they don't know that because he's not telling them right and i think ash says that it has like a range of like five meters which is nothing for the size of their ship yeah it's crazy pretty pitiful it's worthless lambert's not moving no and dallas is so he would very quickly be out of range yep i believe that the extra blip that keeps showing up on their tracker is jones i think jones is purposefully confusing them so that dallas doesn't know what to do and lambert doesn't know what's going on either and also i mean the tracker was made by ash anyway so who knows how well it's working but i think that the extra blip that's showing up and disappearing is jones just darting in and out so that dallas will get confused and not know where the alien is even if he's not evil he's a cat he'd be running around through the vents of course i mean just side note they should

not let this cat have free run of the ship it's a huge ship yeah they would find this cat dead like in a corner somewhere like i mean it's an outdoor cat right like yeah it finds its way home it knows what it's doing when brett finds it it's climbing around and all that wet equipment that just gets dripped on like it cleans the equipment it i don't know what that equipment does but i don't think the cat should be in it i also don't think that the crew should be in it but they are bathing in it and they love it so maybe that's just actually their shower room that's kind of work well and also because they don't shower very often because who cares they're asleep most of the time anyway they just store equipment there and it gets showered on because oh well we can't turn it off we also can't turn it on more it's just a trickle you know they gotta make do they're they're in space so water is a luxury next death is ash uh this is of course not directly related to jones

this is like the best part in the entire movie yeah as far as the movie goes crazy after being like really slow and a little boring suddenly this movie is just off the chain so i have a few questions for you about this part and you can kind of walk me through this scene as i ask you questions so ripley is she says that mother is mine now basically she's like mother will tell me what's going on she's the commanding officer so she has clearance to go into the white room that has just like the only computer a ridiculous amount of buttons on the wall like just lights everywhere and each light is labeled like each one is is a status of some kind but no one would look at all those lights there's so many of them it's not on the ceiling and the walls and the consoles yeah this actually corresponds to a real principle in aviation which has been adopted i think since like the 80s or 90s, flight consoles in airplanes and in the control tower as well

used to just be covered in buttons and lights. They all had different meanings. You had to know what the meaning was. You had to know the code to know which one suppressed. And it was good if you knew the code, but if you didn't, it could be mind boggling. Since then, they have adapted a model of user interface design in aviation setting. Essentially, it boils down to when nothing is wrong, there should be no lights, basically. So if there's a light, you know that that is the thing that needs your attention right now and nothing else does. That's better than just all lights all the time. Yes, exactly. It used to be that they used light to signify the code of, you know, what it meant. Now light signifies attention, which is, I think, a lot better. But it makes sense because the Nostromo was clearly built in some sort of like 70s, 80s alternate universe and that they hadn't adopted that methodology so all the time is when ridley scott comes back

and it's suddenly it's more high tech i know no that's why i like alien isolation nothing was more high tech no but so she goes into this room she learns that there's a secret objective to bring a xenomorph back ash apparently can go into this room at will ash is just next to her and he thinks the best course of action would be to announce himself by saying there's an easy explanation for this or whatever i actually i love ash i love how he's just so normal and casual when he speaks but then when he takes any other action he's really weird he's a great actor he's fan as are all of the androids in all of an alien universe the androids are always like the best actors they're fantastic but my question is she like lightly shoves ash aside like she's frustrated and she's like get out of my way and then he's bleeding milk all over right so what happened to ash she shoves him against a wall but not like to attack him and suddenly in the next scene

she has a nosebleed and he is bleeding milk from his forehead meaning yeah whatever happened in that altercation damaged both of them much more than it looked like maybe they like cut a bit of the tussle out i guess i don't know but they're not fighting yet no they seem pretty amicable until he starts but she's not like trying to kill him and he's not yet trying to kill her well and he does try to kill her by shoving a rolled up magazine down here not trying to kill her very well it's the greatest it reminds me of the scene in scary movie where she's like should i use the gun the grenade the banana and starts trying to kill the guy with the banana right it's like there's a million things in here you could bash your head in with why pick the magazine and of all the things you could do with it why down her throat even if you manage to get it down her throat she can still breathe it's like a trachea it has a

hole in it just strangle her it'll be so much more effective he somehow thinks that this will kill her i mean admittedly it would mess you up like to get a magazine shoved down your throat it just wouldn't effectively do anything to stop no yeah like it's not a good thing to do to someone maybe there's something we don't know about androids that if it gets messed up in their throat like that really takes them out oh he's like extrapolating he's like this would hurt me so it must hurt her and even though he's a science officer he knows nothing about human anatomy me i got you maybe it's like a fail safe like wayland didn't want androids to hurt humans so he like programmed this stupid stupid like command in them where he's like if you want to hurt a human put a magazine down their throat that'll hurt them it's like that won't hurt them well but it actually but like apparently anything hurts an android because rash is like malfunctioning just

from getting pushed against a wall like he's not doing well and and ripley has done nothing to him well he pretty easily rips out some of her hair and then swings her around the room a little bit he seems pretty strong at least oh yeah he's strong he like does this weird crab claw thing on parker and parker's like yeah like it really hurts even though he's just barely pinching his like ribs i guess i don't know he's a robot that would hurt just but that's also not not effective like magazine crab claw like he could have just smacked parker yeah yeah i mean it's it's kind of like the the the terminator logic of fighting right like technically if a terminator could touch you it could kill you because all it would have to do is like bring its hands together on your head right so instead whenever the terminator is close enough to touch someone it throws them it throws them as far away as it can because then it can't kill them and it has to

go after them somewhere anytime if it killed them well it's this is true in every terminator movie even the earlier ones whenever the terminator is close enough to kill someone manually it throws them and i love that it's it's wildly consistent and even in the there's a terminator resistance i think was what it was called a terminator game released a couple years ago even in that game the first altercation you have with the terminator first thing he does he grabs you and he throws you and i'm like yes that is what terminators do maybe ash has kind of the same thing going right well ash it turns out is far squishier than a terminator because parker just well he's full of like milk and like balls he's a bag of rubber and milk i do like when they bring his head back to life to talk to it you know as they always do android heads often come back to life in alien movies they sure do so the next deaths that we're going to talk about are parker

and lambert one of the few times that ripley was not correct in her course of action lambert previously suggested they all get on the shuttle and leave and they really should have done that i agree but ripley said no because they could only see three people and there were four of them and when she said that i'm like who cares lady just get on that shuttle and leave i i just want to give a metaphor because the first thing i thought was ah there's a bear in the house quick let's drive away from here and then the the dad is like no sorry sorry everybody there's there's five of us and it's a four-seater car we'll have to stay with the bear and i'm just like no just get in the car and leave don't stay with the bear you can fit another person in parker and lambert why do they die and how does it relate to jones well what are they doing what what is their job here are they the ones disabling the coolant so the ship can explode no because ripley does that

that's exactly what i was gonna say so what are they doing parker seems to believe that they need a certain amount of supplies on the shuttle now they might yeah he must be wrong about that because i don't think ripley gets those supplies on the shuttle but no she survives parker and lambert go to get supplies now they commit the cardinal sin of a horror film which is they split up from the main character if they had stayed with ripley they would have survived why don't they stay with ripley what is ripley doing that's so important that causes her to leave her two crew members behind she's looking for that darn cat she goes to the bridge to look for the cat she gets the cat she then brings the cat somewhere and then goes to try to protect lambert and parker but they're already dead so then she goes to the bridge not to get the cat this time but to start the self-destruct sequence yeah then she goes to the shuttle but the alien's just chilling in front of the shuttle

which is really hard to figure out because the shots don't make it very... Because they can't show the alien except in close-up. No, they can't show it. So then she goes back to the bridge. So then she goes back to reconnect the coolant, right? Because she wants to turn off the self-destruct sequence, but she doesn't turn it off fast enough. And then she keeps calling Mother a bitch even though Mother told her if you don't shut it off in this amount of time, you can't shut it off. And she didn't do it fast enough. So quickly she goes to the bridge, to the shuttle, to the bridge, to the shuttle, to the bridge, back to the shuttle. And then luckily when she gets back there after having failed. You skipped an important thing that she does. Yes. I think, or maybe you said it, but when she goes to the shuttle, she deposits the cat in a shoebox. Yes, so she puts the cat in a little box. And then when she leaves it there to go do the self-destruct sequence or turn it off, I forget which time.

That cat has a little conversation with that xenomorph. There's a very important scene. Why do they include this shot in the movie? The Xenomorph pops its head in front of the cat. It doesn't kill the cat. It crouched down right next to that cat and stared at it. They looked at each other in the eye. They're staring at each other. They're having some kind of communication. Like the alien could just reach and grab that cat and eat it. I mean, I don't know. So for whatever reason, the alien does not want to kill this cat. Also, the cat seems to be interested in at least staring at the alien, perhaps communicating with it. I think in this moment, the cat has a way of communicating with the xenomorph. I don't know exactly how that is, but I think because it's more animalistic, as is the xenomorph, it has a way of communicating with the xenomorph that Ash didn't have. Counterpoint. We know canonically that 300 years in the future, Weyland-Yutani is still

experimenting with communicating with xenomorphs by way of like making out with the glass in front of the xenomorphs. So they clearly don't know how to communicate with xenomorphs because making out with the glass they find out is not effective. The xenomorph doesn't like that. The problem is that they got Chucky to try to communicate with Xenomorphs, and he's just not the best person to do it. He's not. He's not cut out for that job. They got Brad Dourif as the actor, but he does the voice of Chucky. I love Brad Dourif. I think it's communicating on more of an animalistic level that there is danger here and you need to get out, which is why the alien... But it's not an actual cat. It's a robot cat. Right. But it's very good at emulating a cat, just as Ash was really good at emulating a human until he got pushed against the wall slightly. The cat communicates to the xenomorph to get onto the shuttle because the main thing is going to explode.

And the cat wants to get onto the shuttle, too. But Ripley doesn't know that the xenomorph gets on the shuttle. No. She thinks that it just, like, left. Right. She goes back to shut off the self-destruct sequence because she can't get into the shuttle because there's a xenomorph in front of it. She doesn't shut off the self-destruct sequence, gets back, sees the xenomorph is gone. It's like, all right, I'm good. Let's just go. She does kind of relax pretty quickly once she gets on that shuttle, assumes that the thing is dead. I have to point out the Nostromo explosion is mind bogglingly ginormous. why does it take so long why does it have to explode three times the biggest longest explosion in the history of all movies ever once why is it still exploding it explodes again and again at that point you've been watching for over two hours and my wife was just like why is this still exploding it keeps exploding it's the most explodey ship ever the only thing i can think of

is that whatever they were mining was extremely volatile. And that just never came up in the movie until they exploded it. Yeah, they say it's just ore, but yeah, we don't know. Now, I think that the alien was a little confused because the cat and the alien aren't good at communicating. No, so Ripley looks over and finds out that she has a new best friend just cuddling up into her wall. He can't get out. He's like, he like reaches for her, not menacingly. It's like, help me, get me out of this wall. I've somehow gotten myself stuck here and I don't know why. That poor alien. I think the cat tried to communicate with the alien that it needed to get into the cryosleep pods. But the alien misunderstood. He's like, I don't know what that is. It was like, what's a cryosleep pod? Oh, there's this weird area under the wall that I think has a bunch of tubes for life support. And it's like, I guess I'll sleep here.

The cat somehow communicated that it should take a cat nap. Ripley puts Jones in the cryosleep pod. As she does so, Jones hisses and growls at her. Jones is pissed. Jones is mad. I thought that might have just been, you know, the actor and the cat having a bit of a disagreement.

No, Jones is mad because it's like, dang, Ripley survived. I thought it was just going to be me and the alien on this shuttle. Maybe it's trying to warn the alien. No, the cat saw, the cat saw right then. The alien's sleeping in those tubes by the wall. That's not what I told you to do. So it's hissing like, hey, get in the cryosleep pond. Wake up, lazy bones. Anyway. Oh man, I just love that alien wedged into that little wall crevice. it's like the cutest thing a xenomorph has ever done what's he doing there get out of there you silly alien he's just like he needs like a little pillow yeah just leaping and ripley knows she needs to blast him out the airlock but she knows she can't do that because he's wedged into the wall right so she buckles herself into the chair and starts pushing buttons that are all labeled different kinds of like gases like chemicals and they start releasing from that wall which is why

i think it must be life what's wrong with that wall it's like a weird gas ejection but that scares the alien out of the wall and once it's just standing out or like force him out like whatever push him out with the power of those air jets i don't know i don't know but then somehow even though she's sitting in a chair staring at the alien and the alien is huge she seems to lose sight of the alien here yeah and it like surprises her somehow to be fair she's wearing a space suit so like she can't see left or right i i can i can understand and she's also like really busy singing a song right now yeah she's got to sing about her lucky star she opens the airlock the alien gets blasted out i actually love that this doesn't kill the alien and the alien tries to crawl back in through the thruster tubes when she successfully blasted the alien out of the ship why does she whip out her grapple gun and like try to save it by grappling it no that alien was

the alien grabs on with its arms it's holding on she needs a slight push to push it out the airlock that's what she does no but she didn't she it was gone she grappled it she brought it back and that's why it's starting to crawl back up and then she has to use the engines to burn grapple at it while it's still holding on i don't know no she does i don't know so anyway she has to turn on the engines while it's trying to climb back in through the thruster tubes and that now i i have to say this is the most fireproof alien i've ever seen because those engines sure did not seem to set it on fire very much well they did cause it to lose its grip in space no one can hear you burn that's the end of alien so those are all my proofs for jones did it i think jones was working with the alien trying to save the alien he was a another android doing the work of Weyland Yutani. And I'm not the only one who ever watched Alien

and thought the cat might be evil because there is another movie called Lily Cat. Cat is, in the title, cat is spelled C.A.T. And this is a crazy anime from the 80s that is very much a copy of Alien and The Thing just kind of rolled together into one. And clearly, whoever made this movie thought the cat did it. Which do you think is scarier? Xenomorphs or The Thing or HAL 9000 or The Androids or Cats? Oh, I mean, The Thing is pretty scary. If you think any of those things are scary, then I've got the movie for you. You got to watch Lily Cat because it's got all those things. Oh, you're right. It has all the things. Lilycat was like, hey, let's take all the famous space horrors and just put everything into one really short anime movie. It's just fantastic. It's got all the stuff in it. That movie has everything. It starts with a premise that could be the premise alone with no aliens involved, which is that two of the people on board are criminals.

I know. And they faked their way to get on board. Turns out that doesn't matter. Nope. Doesn't matter. My favorite part is right at the end. It's revealed by the criminal that the other guy on board is not a criminal, but is a detective who is hunting this criminal. And he has snuck himself on board secretly so that he could try and find the criminal who he apparently had no idea who he was looking for. So in this movie, the ship randomly and purposefully picks up a bacterium that is found in space the bacteria turns out is just the thing from the thing and for some reason the ship puts it into their like air supply yeah that part is on it it like shoves it through a wall to put it into the air supply rips itself apart to insert it where it absolutely should not go but they know that this bacteria unlike the thing not only infects organisms but also metal they keep talking about like you catch it through the air like it goes into your lungs

but no one catches it through the air everyone catches it from like an open wound my absolute favorite part of this movie was the most amazing I guess it's a Chekhov's gun which is like a literary device where they'll drop something like knowledge of something in the first act and then in the second act they're going to use that thing or in the third act at the very beginning of the movie people are talking about what they're bringing with them and they're kind of ridiculing each other and the pilot's like oh it's okay even i brought my own little lucky charm with me and we never find out what that is until the very end of the ship when it looks like all is lost and all of a sudden the pilot's like don't worry i've got my lucky charm and it turns out the captain's lucky charm is a whole freaking other spaceship inside of the spaceship he brought a spaceship in his spaceship yeah good thing he did yeah he saved the day now the captain is pretty

badass in this movie i think he's probably the best character uh he also does not care in the slightest that there are criminals on board as well that is not his concern no he's over a hundred years old i think he's like 150 or 200 and they show this by drawing and voicing him just like abraham lincoln he's great abraham lincoln he's old he's like i forescore and 70 years ago i set off on my first flight so for some reason there are two cats yeah what the heck why are there two cats on nancy brought her own cat which is a real cat but then there's like but there is though the lily cat the there is an android cat that looks exactly intentionally they say that they intentionally made a copy of nancy's cat i don't know why but they also brought her actual cat which is the weirdest thing like it seems like they would have replaced it if they did this i don't know yeah because that's a dead giveaway that one of these cats is not real anyway i think it still

works because they throw you off due to the fact that the alien is the thing so you think that it has become a cat right yeah you think it's like it's doing like the dogs yeah like in the thing but no the cat isn't it's the one thing that's not the alien it's a robot that's trying to stop the alien the whole time even the non-robot cat wasn't the thing at least to begin with yeah it's true the robot cat it turns out is in charge of this whole mission and it's the only one that can really talk to mother, which is the name of their ship. Yeah, it's also mother, yes. The cat really doesn't do much, but it is one of the bad guys, I guess. I don't know. Kind of a good guy. It's kind of trying to save the ship. It just doesn't really care about the humans. No, it's one of the random sci-fi influences in this movie. Anyway, so I don't think that's necessarily great evidence, but there is a sci-fi movie

where the cat is definitely one of the bad guys. Well, it's exactly what you described. It's a robot created by the evil corporation and it is in charge of the ship and it's trying to carry out the objective of the ship. And also, important factor, that cat is specifically trying to bring the ship home. It has decided that whatever the mission is, it's not going to happen. Whatever the crew is, they don't matter if they survive or not. The cat is just going to bring the ship back. It's going to try and recover the property of the company. And that's kind of similar to what you say the cat is doing in Alien. It's trying to bring the ship home with the alien on board. Okay, well, that's all I got. I think that's all you have to have. I think you've proven it. That cat, you know, well, let's go through the evidence. Was that darn cat there every single time somebody died? Hell yeah, it was.

Did the alien talk to the cat? Yes, it did. That alien crouched down and talked to that cat for like five seconds. They were talking to each other. Like, it definitely wasn't thinking about eating that cat, I can tell you that. Did the cat hiss at the alien when he was being stupid and had wedged himself in a wall? Yes, he did. He's like, get out of that wall, you numbnuts. What are you doing, dum-dum? Get out of here. You silly, silly alien. I could probably give this theory, like, you know, two alien claws up and one alien tail up. I will say in Aliens, Ripley leaves the cat behind with Weyland-Yutani, probably because it's their property. Oh, you're right. If you like what we do, make sure to rate us, give us a review. Yeah, we've got a Patreon. So if you really like us, you can always send us some support. And if you donate on our Patreon, you can hear some of the outtakes. Okay, so something our viewers don't know is that every single episode we record, as

long as they are every single time we record we record for at least twice as long for at least twice as long as what you hear um at least usually more and i'm the one who has to edit it and sometimes in that editing process a few absolute gems get cut out and if you want to hear those gems. There's a lot of stinkers that get cut out too, but we won't show you those. If you want to hear those stinkers, hop onto our Patreon and send us some support and you'll get exclusive access to the official cut reel of our latest episodes. Music for this episode was provided by Christine. And remember, the popcorn isn't real.