The Monstrefact Omnibus: Alien

In this special omnibus episode of the Monstrefact, enjoy the entire eight-part series on the creatures of the "Alien" universe all in a single package. Listen in as Robert outlines some of the details about the franchise’s lifeforms and their connections to science and culture. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Hi, my name is Robert Lham, and this is The
Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.
We recently finished an eight part look at many of
the various creatures from the alien universe here on The
Monster Fact. We did that mostly leading up to the

(00:30):
debut of the twenty twenty four film Alien Romulus, and
now we're busting out the omnibus episode of The Monster
Fact Alien Episodes that lines up with the video on
demand release of the film. So I hope you enjoy
these episodes if you listen to them previously or if
you are listening to them for the first time. The

(00:52):
omnibus episodes of The Monster Fact are all about taking
the previous shorts and stitching them together Frankenstein style into
one long episode. I understand some of you prefer to
listen to these episodes in that format, and so this
is for you. Without further ado, let's jump right in,
beginning with part one. The Engineers in this episode will

(01:16):
begin a multi installment exploration of the various strange forms
found in the Alien universe. I previously wrote about xenomorph
biology in the article how the Alien Xenomorph Works back
in twenty twelve for the website how Stuff Works. That
article is still there in full, accompanied by illustrations authorized

(01:37):
by the hr Giger Museum, and as I work up
to various considerations of how natural world biology is reflected
in or matches up to the xenomorph, I'll likely draw
on some of the same ideas, but I also plan
to touch on various additional natural world and mythological connections,
as well as such sources as the twenty seventeen film

(01:58):
Alien Covenant and the excellent Alien RPG source books from
Free League Publishing. I want to add the caveat that
I am not setting out to wrangle all the lore
here or to provide you with a one hundred percent
canonical take on everything. You have no shortage of wikis
and lore videos for that. The Monster Fact Journey will

(02:20):
touch on a lot of the same themes and information,
but will also reflect my own thoughts and obsessions as
a fan. With all that in mind, let's start at
the beginning with the Enigmatic Engineers, an elder race of
spacefaring humanoids. The Engineers have largely vanished from the portion
of the galaxy traversed by twenty second century terans. It

(02:44):
is unknown what they call themselves, but accounts whisper the
names Malakak and Ossians, While informal names such as space
jockeys and universal pilots also abound. The term engineer, used
by doctor Ilizzabeth's Shaw of the Doomed Prometheus expedition, has
stuck in the few circles allowed to know of them. Pale,

(03:07):
hairless giants of uncanny statuesque perfection. The engineers are thought
to have worn modest clothing on their home worlds, but
donned more exotic, biomechanical space suits during their interstellar voyages.
Suits that seemingly melded with their bodies, fused with their organs,
and via their strange helms, gave them the outer appearance

(03:31):
of a trunked elephantic head. They were or are, masters
of not only interstellar travel, but also biotechnology, able to
generate new forms of life, program genetics, master evolutionary process
augment their own bodies, and craft terrifying bioweapons beyond the

(03:52):
scope of even the most advanced whalen Utani weapon lab
within the wrecked Juggernaut found on planet LV four T
one twenty six crew members from the Nostromo encountered the
long dead remains of a very large engineer, with evidence
of an explosive emergence from its chest, as well as
thousands of eggs. Prior to this, the crew of the

(04:13):
Prometheus encountered even more artifacts of the engineers, and even
a lone living specimen preserved in some advanced form of
suspended animation. The android David, one of the few survivors
of that mission, went on to study their works more exhaustively,
decimating one of their inhabited worlds in the process. As such,

(04:34):
we have much more to go on than the crew
of the Nostroma, but much about the engineers remains clouded
in mystery. Members of their species seemingly seated the planet
Earth with life long ago, and as such are our progenitors,
and then much later members of their species seem to
decide to end that life instead. The rationale for either

(04:55):
impulse is a matter of debate, but we find many
ideas in the realities of human nature and our own
impulses to murder and create. We know from various engineer
artworks that they held their own form in high regard,
perhaps even worshiping themselves or deities dreampt of in their
own image. But they also held strange and dangerous forms

(05:17):
of life in seemingly high regard as well, forms that
resemble the xenomorphic creature spawned from their biotechnology. Did they
use their advanced understanding of life to create life forms
that reflected their dark beliefs? Did they harness the raw
biological power of some pre existing life form? We simply

(05:37):
don't know. The Alien RPG source book ruminates on these
questions as well as others. Is there indeed a single
engineer species and or culture or many? Are there? Different breeds?
Are there different casts? Is the space jockey individual found
on LV four to twenty six merely a large specimen,
a subspecies or something else? Again, all this is shrouded

(06:00):
and delicious mystery, as it should be. The engineers are
often invoked as gods, demi gods, or, indeed, as the
invocation of Prometheus implies, Titans. The Titans of Greek mythology were,
of course, the pre Olympic gods cast down by Zeus
in the Epic War known as the Titanomachi. Afterwards, the

(06:22):
gods imprisoned many of the Titans in Tartarus, while others
remained free. The individual nature of the Titans varied from
brutal Chronos to the culture bearing tricks, to Prometheus, who
in some tellings created human beings but is also credited
with giving them the gift of fire or fire technology.

(06:42):
This is a common trope in many different cultures, so
even in invoking the Engineers as Titans, a certain mystery remains.
Are they are creators? Are benefactors, cruel former masters of
the cosmos? Maybe all of the above. In the film Prometheus,
the Ers are explored in a manner clearly partially inspired

(07:03):
by the pseudoscientific ancient astronaut hypothesis, and I personally think
science fiction is the right place to deploy these concepts.
While the idea that aliens visited the Earth in ancient
or prehistoric times carries no weight in serious consideration of history, mythology,
or science. Please see our past Stuffable Your Mind episodes
for more on this. It's all fair game. In a

(07:25):
twisting tale of futuristic fictional space horror, the Engineers provide
us with a great Elder race for the alien universe,
shrouded in mystery, ultimately unknowable and untrustworthy. In the films
that follow the life of the Android David, they also
serve as a fitting contemplation point for humanity's own place

(07:46):
in the universe as a creator of artificial life and
an expansionist terraforming civilization in decline. Look on their works,
Ye Mighty and Despair. All right, now, let's move on
to Part two, The Black Goo. In the previous episode

(08:12):
of The Monster Fact, we began our alien series with
a look at the mysterious Engineers. Today we'll turn to
this Elder race's most dangerous creation, a highly volatile genetic
accelerant classified by human researchers as Agent A zero thirty
nine fifty nine x point ninety one dash fifteen. In

(08:33):
its purest form, this so called black goo does in
fact resemble a viscous tar like material or liquid. Human
explorers first discovered the substance amid the ruins of an
engineer outpost on the planet designated LV two twenty three.
They found the gou and coretets of glass like vials

(08:53):
secured in steatide ampules or urns. The engineers had secured
it there like a precious tread me, like the remains
of the dead, like a devastating bioweapon, the pinnacle of
the engineer's advanced biotechnology. We can even think of agent
A zero thirty nine to fifty nine x point ninety
one slash fifteen as a kind of biological AI that

(09:16):
reprograms everything it touches, perhaps following specific instructions, general directions,
or left entirely to its own generative impulses. As revealed
in the film's Prometheus and Alien Covenant, and as discussed
in Freely Publishing's Alien RPG, the black Goo aggressively recodes DNA,

(09:37):
rapidly transforming individual organisms, species, and entire ecosystems. When exposed
to the atmosphere, it atomizes and spreads as an aerosol,
but may also be further manipulated in liquid form if
handled with proper expertise. High level exposure to the substance
generally spells instant death for organic beings. Select engineers are

(10:00):
to have ritualistically ingested the substance in its pure, concentrated
liquid form to seed new worlds, allowing the black good
to rapidly break down their bodies and spend new life
forms out of the genetic pieces. Likewise, when weaponized, aerial
bombardments of the steatide ampules quickly laid waste to entire populations,

(10:20):
finally twisting the life forms at the peripheries of the
attack into dangerous new creatures. At lower exposure levels, the
Black Goose steadily mutates human beings into zombie like forms
known as abominations, noted for their increasingly aggressive behavior, enhance strength,
elongated limbs, and swelling craniums. They are also able to

(10:42):
pass on their rampage in genetics through different infection routes,
as we'll explore in the next episode. It's impossible to
know exactly how the engineers regarded the Black Good, but
we might best understand it, like many forms of technology,
as having tremendous potential to destroy or create. It can
enable the seating of whole new worlds with the divergent
genes of a single donor. But it can also be

(11:04):
a weapon of terrifying power, wiping out most life on
a world and reprogramming the surviving biome into aggressive monstrosities
that steadily grind all life to its end. But let's
set aside metaphors and interpretations, and consider a few additional
takes on black goo. With all of these extraterrestrial horrors

(11:25):
now running through your brain, you might find it a
bit unnerving to realize that here on Earth, outside of
the Sci Fi horrors of the alien franchise, we actually
do have to contend with strange black goo within the
buried creations of ancient civilizations. As Kate Fulcher reported for
the British Museum back in twenty twenty, the goo in
question here would have been poured warm into the caskets

(11:47):
of mummified individuals, effectively cementing their linen wrapped mummy cases
into the encasing casket. Museum scientists analyzed more than one
hundred samples of the now long dried goo and determine
that while the exact ingredients varied, the main components tended
to be plant oil, animal fat, tree resin, beeswax, and bitumen,

(12:09):
a viscous or solid form of petroleum. Egyptian black goo
was reserved for royalty and those rich enough to afford
the very best in their funerary preparations. We've even found
the stuff on the golden mask of Tuton common According
to fulcher. Its pitch black color was associated with mythic
osiris and concepts of rebirth and regeneration. It's clear that

(12:34):
a certain amount of Egyptomania went into conceptions of the engineers.
It even goes all the way back to artist hr
Giger's late seventies concept art for Alien, which includes a
hieroglyphic inspired alien life cycle tableau. Look it up, and
it makes sense in later ruminations of the franchise that
filmmakers might have found inspiration in the real life black

(12:57):
Goo of Egyptology. It's rather fitting, after all, given that
the ancient Egyptians seemed to have viewed the journey into
the next life as something cosmic and transformative. The sarcophagus
in many ways like a cryo chamber, and monstrous entities
like Ahmet awaiting the passage of the dead. Black Goo has,
of course another larger life in sci fi in general,

(13:21):
sometimes as a catch all name for just black inky evil,
or other times more specifically as a self replicating meta
material graphene oxide. Jason Kahey profiled the notion in a
twenty twenty two article for Wired Magazine, drawing on sci
fi usages of the stuff on TV's Westworld and TV's Severance,

(13:43):
and if we go wider than that, he points out,
we see dangerous black goos in the original X Files
as well as in Miyazaki's Spirited Away. Elsewhere, We've watched
it drip onto Gary Olben's head in The Fifth Element,
and Yes, the low budget nineteen eighty five alien knockoff
Creature features a scene in which the leaks from an
alien tube shortly before a monster breaks out of it.

(14:04):
What is Marvel's Venom but a slightly more stylish black goo,
and the Sorcerer egg Shin and Big Trouble in Little
China warned us, matter of factly, not of oil, but
of the black blood of the earth. The examples are endless,
though they often betray a Western prevalence for the negative
connotations of the color black, which dates back through the

(14:25):
Middle Ages and into humoral theory with its black bile.
But black also represented power in secrecy during this time
period as well. Colors are in the end multipurpose, culturally
dependent and based on context. The color black may be
invoked to convey everything from darkness and mystery to beauty
and power, and when we combine all of that with gooiness. Well, visually,

(14:49):
there just seems to be something otherworldly about black goo,
and so it's the perfect visual manifestation of the underlying
power in the alien universe of anti blood and anti seed,
as dark as the spaces between the stars. Up next

(15:15):
Part three, Trilobide and Deacon. In the previous episode, in
this special alien themed monster fact series, we discussed Agent
A zero thirty nine to fifty nine x point ninety
one slash fifteen. The Black Goo, a powerful evolutionary accelerant

(15:35):
created by the Engineers and deployed as both the creator
and destroyer of worlds. We consider the various ways that
it worked itself through a host, spawning zombie like abominations
in the process. As witnessed in the film Prometheus, a
mixture of pathogen infected hosts can lead to truly strange forms.

(15:58):
The android David infected the human crew made Holloway with
a mere drop of the black Goo. The infected Holloway
then impregnated his partner, doctor Elizabeth Shaw, who then employed
appalling medpod to surgically remove the resulting squid like embryo
before it could burst out of her on its own.
Left to its own devices. The resulting creature rapidly grew

(16:21):
into an enormous, seven tentacled monster, sometimes referred to as
the trilobite. The creature has virtually nothing in common with
the prehistoric arthropod of the same name, which we previously
discussed on Stufftable your Mind. If anything, the creature looks
more like an octopus. They will find very few seven
armed organisms in the natural world. The seven arm sea

(16:43):
star comes to mind, but we also have to consider
the so called seven armed octopus. Some call it the
septipus or the blob octopus, but Halifron atlanticus actually does
have eight arms. It's just that the males hectocotylus, or
specialized fertilization arm, remains coiled away in a sack beneath

(17:05):
the right eye, thus giving the creature the appearance of
having only seven arms, at least in the males. But
back to the monster, we quickly learn that the alien
trilobite is merely an intermediate stage in the creature's overall
life cycle. When the trilobite overpowers a surviving engineer, incapacitates

(17:27):
the host and implants its own embryo, orally, the tentacled
monster then covers the host's body in a posture that
the Alien RPG from Free League Publishing describes as a
protective posture. There's already a lot to unpack here. I
don't want to get too ahead of ourselves, but the
creature here is essentially more of a body hugger than

(17:47):
a face hugger, though it still depends on oral injection
of its embryo. It also feels as if the trilobite
form developed expressly for the purpose of infecting larger than
human prey, that its juvenile form somehow detect the presence
of a much larger engineer in its midst and morph
into a form capable of taking one down. It's unknown, however,

(18:09):
we do know that the black goop pathogen seems to
ultimately result in more stabilized xenomorphic creatures with distinct life cycles,
and we can suppose that these stabilized forms in life
cycles are informed by environment and host survivability. Certainly, engineers
or rogue android scientists might manipulate this development, but it

(18:30):
seems to be a typical pattern. But the resulting creatures,
as we'll discuss, remain highly adaptive to host availability. But
I will go ahead and speculate, and I'm sure others
have speculated along these exact lines as well, that the
Trilobyte is a specialized engineer naver, and that Holloway and
Shaw's genetic contributions were marginal at best. The android David

(18:51):
in his covenant recordings at least mentions in passing that
the engineers are perfect carriers and perfect mothers. We're also
to understand that the engineers are genetically somewhat similar human beings.
But perhaps there is something else about the Elder race's
biology that draws the pathogens and creatures of their own creation.

(19:12):
I wonder if it might have to do with the
various other biotechnological alterations that the engineers have made to
themselves or are made via their suits. And of course,
in Prometheus's closing moments, we see the Trillabite crumpled and
dead and watch a juvenile's xenomorphic organism emerge from the
engineer's body. It has indeed grown quite large in the

(19:34):
giant body of its hosts. The alien RPG describes the
gestation as effectively hollowing out the host creature's body, reducing
it to little more than a husk. The new form,
dubbed the Deacon, emerges as a more typical bipedal eye
list xenomorphic creature with an elongated head, though lacking a
tail and various other key features associated with its kin.

(19:58):
It boasts protrucible jaws like that of the deep sea
goblin shark, and its nickname derives from the sharp point
on the end of its head, which resembles the pointed
miter worn by some Christian clergy. The creature uses this
point to violently rip its way out of the host body.
In this regard, we might reasonably compare the Deacon's headspike

(20:19):
to the egg tooth, a temporary sharp protrusion that various birds, reptiles,
and monotremes use to penetrate their own eggshell and break
free spiders, too, are known to develop an egg tooth
like spike to aid in their hatching. The Deacon's spike
would seem necessary as it has to emerge not only
from the body of the engineer, but also through its

(20:41):
biomechanical spacesuit, which again may to varying degrees, be biologically
integrated with the engineer. Just as birds quickly lose their
egg teeth. It's possible that the Deacon loses its key
feature as it develops into its no doubt gigantic adult form. However,
we have no idea what this form might look like.
Perhaps its full development puts in more in line with

(21:02):
other xenomorphic forms, only on a scale devoted to prey
on giant humanoid hosts. We also have no idea what
the Deacon's life cycle would consist of in whole, but
we might assume that it would resemble that of a
stabilized xenomorphic life cycle, which we'll discuss in the weeks ahead,
only with larger eggs that produce a body hugging embryo depositor.

(21:25):
The engineers might know for certain, but fortunately humans remain
in the dark. Now it's time for part four, the
neomorph our journey through the alien universe. This time brings
us to the mysterious planet for the rotting paradise of

(21:46):
Alien Covenant. Once an occupied world of the Engineers, the
planet suffered a mass extinction event at the hands of
the rogue android David. Descending from the sky in a
stolen Engineer starship, he unleashed a devastating bombardment of the
skeetide ampules eradicating most non botanical non fungal life with

(22:07):
the dreaded evolutionary accelerant agent a zero slash thirty nine
fifty nine x dot ninety one slash fifteen. But as
we've explored already, the black goo doesn't destroy everything in
such incidents. No, it also creates new dangerous organisms to
prowl the lifeless borders of devastation, and it tends to

(22:27):
find its way back to the basic form of a
xenomorphic predator, in this case working its way up from
fungal and possibly insect life. The neomorph begins as a
fungal growth that produces small pods or egg sacs, which
release a swarm of moats upon disturbance. These moats are
able to move through the air by their own volition,

(22:49):
sometimes synchronizing in murmurations to zero in on a potential
host organism's vulnerable orifices. The moats are often compared to
plant pollen, though of course pollend on vectors such as
wind or other organisms to move from one plant to
the next. We might instead be tempted to compare these
moats to fairy flies or fairy wasps. The smallest known

(23:11):
flying organisms. As pointed out by Julius Klarr in a
twenty twenty four article for The Sierra Club, fairy wasp
body length can measure as little as zero point one
three nine millimeters, equal to the thickness of a human hair,
so it's not out of the question for something so
small to be capable of powered and deliberate flight. According

(23:33):
to Freely Publishing's Alien RPG source books, the neomorph moats
make their way into a host body, where they deliver
microscopic amounts of the black goo to the host's blood stream,
and then the moats die. In the blood the evolutionary
accelerant mutates white blood cells, forming a tumor like mass
that rapidly develops into an embryo, referred to as a

(23:55):
blood burster. When this small quadruped is ready to emerge
from i'm the host, it bursts out through whatever part
of the anatomy is most accessible the mouth, the back,
even an eye socket. It depends in large part on
where the tumor develops. If it survives, the bloodbuster rapidly
develops into a neomorph. These medium size pales xenomorphic predators

(24:20):
boast goblin shark like protrusible jaws much like the deacon
that we previously discussed, along with a whipping spike tail
in a cluster of dorsal spikes, which as a blood burster,
aids in its emergence. Let's talk a bit more about
those goblin shark jaws. Though the deep sea mitsucarina o

(24:41):
stony isn't alone in having protrusible jaws. Shark jaws are
not attached to the organism's cartilage skull and move as
separate parts, allowing for varying degrees of protrusion when attacking prey.
The goblin shark nearly boasts the most extreme jaw protrusion known,
both in terms of reach and speed. According to a

(25:03):
twenty sixteen article by Nakaya at All published in Scientific Reports,
the jaw sling shots forward at a maximum velocity of
three point one meters per second to eight point six
to nine point four percent of the total length of
the shark. They cited the phylogenetic evidence that suggests the
adaptation involved in response to their food poor deep sea

(25:26):
environment and is a possible trade off for the loss
of strong swimming ability. It might not be able to
catch desired prey in an all out pursuit, but if
they get close enough, their jaw length can make up
the difference. As seen in Alien covenant, Neomorphs can act
as both pack hunters and solitary stalkers. While they may

(25:47):
enter prolonged states of hibernation, they're ultimately short lived and
don't seem to engage in any form of host recurement
or parasitic reproduction while alive. When they die or are killed,
their corpses simply produce more sporesas ready to release more
black moats when a potential host ventures near. Now, in

(26:07):
the natural world, we certainly have organisms that die after reproduction,
what we call simularity. These organisms reproduce but a single
time and then die. The Pacific salmon are a great
example of this, along with certain insects and molluscs. The
neo morph, however, would seem to reproduce through death, which
is of course a fitting xenomorphic and gigresque twist on

(26:29):
everything it kills, it dies, and through its death it
ideally spreads more of those moats that will produce new
blood bursters, and new neomorphs, presumably until all life on
a world is reduced to just a few hibernating xenos
and their weighting fungal eggsacts, we might reasonably compare it
to various pathogens that spread via contact with dead hosts.

(27:01):
How are you ready for Part five? Let's look at
the xenomorph egg. In the original nineteen seventy nine film Alien,
the crew of the Nostromo discovered thousands of strange rubbery eggs,
each between two and three feet in hide or point
six two point nine meters in height, aboard a derelict

(27:22):
engineer spacecraft. As I originally discussed in the article how
the Alien xenomorph Works back in twenty twelve for the
website How Stuff Works, the first stop in interpreting this
strange stage of the alien life cycle is to approach
it as an egg. That is to say, we have
to compare it to the amniotic eggs of birds, reptiles,

(27:43):
and amphibians, which protect and nourish the organism inside during
its early development. The xenomorph egg certainly contains and protects
an organism the face hugger stage of the xenomorph life cycle.
No matter what the external environmental conditions might be, The
egg seems to keep the face hugger moist alive and

(28:04):
possibly at the appropriate temperature, within a vat of fleshy
pulpy material that we might compare to the yolk or
dudoplasm that serves this purpose in terrestrial eggs. But the
Zeno egg seemingly evolved to not only protect a developing organism,
but to preserve it in a state of readiness. As
we'll discuss in the next episode, the face hugger absolutely

(28:26):
depends on host availability, and the egg patiently awaits delivery
too or discovery by suitable hosts. And this is where
we consider another possibility, one explored by the alien RPG
from Freely Publishing. Perhaps it's not merely an egg, but
a full blown stage of the alien life cycle, an

(28:46):
ovomorph and an organism in and of itself. Consider the
face hugger doesn't hatch or burst from the egg like
a natural world hatchling. Instead, it's the ovomorph that opens
its four dorsal petals or lips and allows the face
hugger to spring forth. Perhaps indeed, it is the egg
that initially senses nearby prey and not the face hugger.

(29:11):
We might also look to the ropey tendrils that seem
to protrude from the bases of these eggs. Are these
merely secreted resin strands to bind the eggs in place
against environmental stress or gravitational changes, or are they tentacles
that may help sense interlopers. Are they in fact roots
that seek nourishment to sustain their hidden organic payloads. Finally,

(29:33):
in the phantasmagorical concept art of dark surrealist hr Giger,
the eggs dorsal openings are sometimes manifested as a single slit,
implying not hatching but live birth. Ah. But there is
more mystery to consider here concerning the ovomorph, as seen
in alternate cuts of Ridley Scott's Alien and is embraced

(29:55):
in the Alien RPG source book. There are two known
ways to wind up with the xenom. A hive queen
may deposit the eggs in great number, as we see
in James Cameron's Aliens, or a living host may develop
into a xenomorphag Here's how it allegedly works. A lone
xenomorph drone such as the titular creature in the original Alien,

(30:18):
collects hosts, incapacitates them, cocoons their bodies with resin secretions,
and then uses a barb on its tail, perhaps a
form of ovipositor, to inject them with enzymes, hormones, and
perhaps some derivative of the black Good. The unfortunate host
then slowly transforms into a swollen ovomorph themselves, complete with

(30:40):
a face hugger, drifting dreaming in its semi translucent depths.
With enough time and enough available hosts, the new egg
may birth a whole new hive of xenomorphic world consuming horror.
What comes out of the xenomorphag wine the face hugger.

(31:00):
Of course, it's time for part six. In our look
at the xenomorph life cycle, we finally come to the
horrifying face hugger. This is the creature that emerges from
the traditional xenomorph egg aggressively attaches itself to the face
of a human host, implants an embryo in the comatose

(31:23):
host organism, and then dies. The embryo, of course, develops
into a standard xenomorph, which we'll explore in the next episode.
There are a few different ways to look at the
basics of the face hugger. On one level, we can
ground it in the dark surrealism of hr Giger another
twist on sexual reproduction, Freudian death drive, and physiology. But

(31:45):
just as we previously face the question of whether the
xenomorph egg is an organism in and of itself, we
must also consider this with the face hugger to some degree.
In HowStuffWorks dot COM's How the Alien xenomorph Works from
twenty twelve, I explored the idea that the face hugger
might not constitute a true organism at all, but would
rather be a delivery system for the embryo. No more

(32:08):
an organism than a sperm cell is an organism, and
of course this alone is a comparison worth considering. A
human sperm cell is not a human being, but it
does metabolize sugar to produce energy, grow and move on
its own to reach the egg as part of human reproduction.
But anyway, back in twenty twelve, the face hugger also

(32:28):
brought to my mind at any rate, the male argonaut
or paper nautilus, which has a detachable spermatophore filled arm
called a hectocoutilus that it leaves with its mate. So
if the xenomorphic could be considered an organism, we might
consider the face hugger to be its hectocoutilyus of sorts,
only one that moves on its own to seek how

(32:50):
the host. However, there's an important point to be made here,
and one that I don't think is properly reflected in
that twenty twelve How Stuff Works article I wrote. A
hectocodulus is not free swimming like a sperm cell. Some
creatures of the hectocodulus use it as a sex organ
that remains attached. In others, such as with the argonaut,

(33:12):
it detaches and the male manually leaves it, with the
female leaving it inside a special cavity in her mantle.
In the Free League Alien RPG, the authors present three
rival theories concerning the face hugger. The first, in line
with what we've been discussing, is that it deposits an
embryo of some sort, thus making it another morph of

(33:34):
the same species. The second idea is that it deposits
not an embryo, but a cancerous growth that mutates into
a chessbuster. This, I would imagine puts it more in
line with the concept of the black goo in the
alien universe. The third premises of the face hugger is
its own species in a symbiotic relationship with the prime
xenomorph species, and that it injects bacteria into the host

(33:57):
that leads to the development of the chess burster. Part
of the confusion here is due to the fact that
the developing embryo or chess burster inside the host takes
on at least some of the host's genetics, be it
the chessbuster we see emerge from the quadruped host in
Alien three, or if we're considering Ash's comments in the

(34:18):
original Alien, that the xenomorph that emerges from Nostromo Executive
Officer Caine is essentially quote Cain's son. And even this
is not entirely outside the boundaries of the natural world,
as recent studies have shown that horsehair worms steal genes
from host organisms in order to control their behavior, and

(34:38):
we see plenty of other examples of horizontal gene transfer,
the non sexual transfer of genetic information between genomes. But
let's get back to the face hugger itself. I turned
to the paper science Fiction The Biology of the Alien
in Alien by Armand im Curis and Mona Wi Leo,
published just last year in the Portland Press. They classify

(35:00):
the face hugger as a quote hoxt attack larval stage
and conclude that quote unattacking larva injecting the next larval
stage is realistic for earthling parasites. For a natural world
example of something related, they turn to Seculina Carcini, the
crab hacker barnacle, one of the parasitic Rhizocephala crab castrator barnacles.

(35:24):
One of the organism's early motes, is a specialized juvenile
form known as a kentragon, which boasts only the antennuals
necessary to attach to its crab host, and is otherwise
a living hypodermic needle that exists only to inject a
cell mass known as a vermagon into the crab, and

(35:45):
the vermagon is described here by the authors as microscopic
and worm like. The injected vermigon then proceeds to grow
like roots through the host organism, branching through its organs,
leaving it unable to reproduce and completely control its physiology
and behavior. Absolutely fascinating and another example of how the

(36:05):
natural world is always willing to match even our most
bizarre sci fi and fantasy inventions. We might well think
of the face hugger as a kind of kentragon and
its reproductive payload as a vermigon. And indeed, the vermigon's
role in the natural world is to grow and establish
the adult form of the organism within the body of

(36:25):
the hosts. Only in the case of the xenomorph, that
final form must burst free. As we'll discuss in the
next Monster Fact episode. Ooh, Finally, part seven, let's look

(36:48):
at the adult xenomorph. Thus far in the Alien Monster
Fact series, we've discussed everything from the mysterious engineers and
their black goo, to the xenomorph ag and the face
hugger that emerges from it. As we all know, the
next phase in the alien life cycle is the violent
eruption of the free living chest burster, which swiftly grows

(37:11):
to become an adult xenomorph, sometimes referred to as a
stage four xenomorph or simply a drone or warrior in
science fiction. The Biology of the Alien in Alien by
Armand im Kurus and Mono why Law, published just last
year in the Portland Press. The authors describe the xenomorph's
parasitic development inside the host as lining up with natural

(37:34):
world coinobiant parasitoids, parasites that attack hosts that then continue
feeding and growing during the parasitism. Because, of course, we
see this in the original nineteen seventy nine film Alien,
when Caine's face hugger falls away, he awakens and acts
like his old self again. He chats and jokes with

(37:55):
his crewmates. He enjoys a meal and prepares to carry
on his ship duties before the creature inside him violently emerges.
Corros and Low compared this to various parasitoid wasps, horsehair worms,
and the Cortescep's fungus. In general, we're dealing with examples
where the doomed host organism continues to behave as usual,

(38:16):
sometimes even feeding, but also acting in a manner to
benefit the parasite. Corticeps infected ants climb to a high
point and release spores. Horse hair worm infected crickets seek
out water to drown in, enabling the spawn inside them
to burst free into their desired watery habitat and swim
off in search of a mate. The growth of such

(38:38):
parasites is amazing, consuming host tissues to the developing organism
is almost as large as the host in some cases, converting.
According to Chris and Low, upwards of quote seventy percent
of the host tissues into parasitoid biomass and up to
ninety percent of its nitrogen, mostly to build parasitoid protein.

(38:59):
In twenty twelve article how the Alien xenomorph Works for HowStuffWorks,
dot com I pointed to some grizzly natural world examples
of this sort of thing, including the parasitic wasp cotesiaglomerata,
which may pump up to sixty eggs into a single caterpillar,
which may ultimately account for thirty percent of the host
organism's body weight. The hatching larvae drink the host organism's

(39:22):
fluids but avoid vital organs. Other organisms, such as the
Dinocampus cosinella wasp, seem to reprogram the host to protect
the emergent larvae. And here's another interesting wrinkle to this.
Parasitic wasp larvae seem to use a virus mimicking poison
to shut down a host's immune system, allowing their growing

(39:43):
spawn to develop inside the host unopposed. In a matter
of hours, perhaps aided by the consumption of additional biomass
and even metals, the xenomorph chest burster develops into a
full grown adult, standing a good eight feet or two
point four meters in height, glistening and black, the bipedal
xenomorph boasts a number of features that indeed make it

(40:06):
worthy of the moniker perfect organism. It seems to benefit
from a dual skeletal system, both indo and exo, as
well as caustic blood that burns anything that might injure it.
They're fast, They're stealthy. They attack with vicious claws, spiked tail,
razor sharp teeth, and a secondary jaw that launches piston

(40:28):
like to puncture prey, often compared to the pharanngial jaws
of the moraeel. Yet while the eel uses this adaptation
to pull in prey, the xenomorph seems chiefly concerned with
killing and subduing its prey, either for transformation into an
ovomorph or in preparation for a xenomorph. Queen's eggs alone,

(40:49):
an adult xenomorph betrays cunning and a fair amount of
vicarious learning and problem solving, and within a high context,
they may benefit from emergent intelligence or some manner of
hive mind. They have even been observed to exploit human technology,
at least to a limited degree. To quote the android Ash,
we are left with a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse,

(41:13):
or delusions of morality. It may constitute the ultimate creation
of the Engineers, or that of the rogue android David.
It may also be the true form of a creature
that inspired the Engineers in their biotechnological pursuits, still dominant
in the dark reaches of the galaxy, or resurrected via

(41:33):
the mad research of a demented, vengeful mind. We don't know,
We may never know, and it seems entirely likely that
we should never have left the Earth to begin with.
And finally getting into spoiler territory for alien Romulus, let
us consider the offspring and other hybrids. First and foremost,

(41:58):
we have to remember that even the ror xenomorph life
cycle is one of horrific and deadly hybridity. The adult
Xenomorph is inherently a combination of alien and host DNA
agent A zero slash thirty nine to fifty nine x
point ninety one slash fifteen. The black Goo works as
an evolutionary accelerant on most biological modes of life in

(42:22):
the series, pushing them into stranger, more hostile, and more
durable forms. So most of the individual forms and lifestyle
stages we've discussed so far can be thought of as
the most likely forms and morphs of xenomorphic life, but
many other paths are possible. This is especially true when

(42:43):
human engineer or android scientific manipulation changes the shape of
things to come. In nineteen ninety seven's Alien Resurrection, set
two hundred years after the events of Alien three in
the year twenty three eighty one, we encounter United Cisdum's
military scientists who have not only created numerous clones of

(43:03):
long dead Ellen Ripley, but also the xenomorph queen that
was growing inside her at the moment of her death.
Their results are numerous Ripley clones with varying degrees of
xenomorphic biology, as well as an alien queen with human
reproductive physiology. The latter situation results in the birth of
a monstrous newborn hybrid, a pale humanoid xenomorph with various

(43:27):
human features and a complex emotional state. Much earlier in
the Alien timeline and more recently at our cinemas, we
witness the birth of the offspring hybrid in Alien Romulus.
We get to this creature via various missteps. First of all,
whilean Utani scientists managed to isolate the black goo from
the remains of the original nostromo xenomorph, then they attempt

(43:51):
to engineer it into a control biohacking agent that alters
human physiology to make them more resilient offworld colonists. A
futurist common that we've discussed on stuff to blow your
mind before. Instead of terraforming other worlds into something more
like Earth, what if we altered ourselves to better fit
those worlds, or at least met them halfway. So give

(44:13):
it up to Waylan Newtani. Solid concept. Their execution, however,
falls tragically short of perfection. In their vanity, they attempted
to harness the biotechnological might of the engineers, and the
violent trajectory of the black goo could not be contained.
We see footage of the supposedly successful resurrection of a
dead laborat via the formula let's call it gray Goo,

(44:35):
only to later see the disastrous mutations that the specimen experienced.
Now unaware of the latter complications, the characters and Romulus
take off with the gray Goose samples, and sure enough,
one of them k eventually injects it into their own
system to bounce back from an injury. The gray Goo
appears to work here, at least initially. However, the formula

(44:57):
affects K's pregnancy, resulting in the rapid birth and development
of a fast growing alien zeno hybrid referred to as
the Offspring, a towering, misshapen monster with elements of xenomorphic
human and engineer features. Now, I wasn't sure exactly how
I felt about this creature design at first, but it
has grown on me and I've seen that it clearly

(45:20):
freaked out and revolted plenty of viewers, So it's very
much serving its purpose in the film. So I eagerly
await revisiting this creature when Romulus is released into our
homes later this month. Now, the Romulus scientists were far
from the first to experiment with the black goo and
charge its effects on various organisms. The engineers, of course,

(45:41):
pioneered this science and the rogue android. David experimented exhaustively
on the flora and fauna of an engineer home world,
before presumably moving on to more human centric experimentations on
the far flung world of Aura Guy six. In David's notes,
and drawings from the Engineer World and Covenant, we see

(46:03):
exhaustive and increasingly nightmarish records of the Black Goose effects
on native species, as well as his own manipulation and
proposed alterations of human and engineer physiology with the accelerant
and altered strains of xenomorphic life. Interestingly enough, one of
these images depicts a creature with the head of an

(46:24):
engineer and the body of a xenomorph. It would seem
that David's twisted imagination, if not his unwholesome experiments, prophesied
the romulus offspring decades earlier. You'll see this illustration, by
the way, in the compiled volume David's Drawings, published in
splendid hardback, alongside a softback booklet about the artists Matt

(46:46):
Hatton and Dame Hallett, who created the drawings, and the
notes that litter the set of David's laboratory in the film.
The main book is a beautiful, haunting volume, and the
accompanying booklet provides wonderful insight into the vis visual design
process of the film. Now, the Extended Alien Universe contains
numerous additional hybrid complications. The Alien RPG from Freely Publishing

(47:10):
includes several of these related to the creation of the
twenty six Dracona strain, a black goo based vaccine similar
to what we see in Romulus, intended in this case
to halt the development of a xenomorphic embryo in the
human body. In the module Destroyer of Worlds, we see
one complication in which the black goo derivative is introduced

(47:32):
into the body of a human already impregnated by a
face hugger. The accelerant, they write, serves as a genetic bridge,
resequencing the DNA of human host and xenomorphic embryo into
a single organism, essentially turning the human into a xenomorph
from the inside out. The resulting body burster resembles a

(47:53):
normal adult xenomorph, but with the skull of the human
host embedded in the creature's cranial dome. This concept, in essence,
originates in William Gibson's unproduced screenplay for Alien three, and
plays on some early hr Giger suit designs for the
original Alien. It's a fitting and horrific concept that Alien

(48:15):
filmmakers should certainly come back to in the future. All Right,
that's it for this monster fact omnibus episode dealing with
the alien series. Now, some of you might be asking yourself, well,
why didn't we talk about the Queen. Why didn't we
talk about Well, maybe one or two other creatures that

(48:37):
pop up in the series. Well, maybe we'll come back
and look at them in the future. But this, for
the most part concludes the journey. So, as always, I'd
love to hear from everyone out there. If you have thoughts, opinions,
or additional analysis on anything that we teased out here,
write in I would love to hear from you. Thanks

(48:59):
to the wonderful Apossway for producing these episodes and then
stitching them all together into this final form, And if
you want to get in touch with us, you can
email us at contact at Stuffdblow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (49:12):
Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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