Thursday, April 05, 2012

The Aliens from Alien Explain

First of all, let us start by offering our sincere apologies for the unfortunate Nostromo incident, and our profound condolences to the relatives of the dead humans involved.

But please listen in charity as we try to put the incident in context.

It is true that we evolved from ancestors whose young needed to gestate in a living host of another species, just as you evolved from ancestors not unlike the bone-swinging tapir-clubbing meat-eating primates at the beginning of 2001*. But we are what we are, not what we were. Just as some of you eat no meat products at all for ethical reasons, we now carefully breed our host animals for certified non-sentience and a high pain threshold. Frankly, it's a wonder they remember to breath. In fact, in late stage gestation our government requires an attendant to be standing by to deliver a merciful killing bolt to the host at the first sign of chest-bursting.

In our home culture our young are rigorously trained from infancy to control our ancestral instinct to leap and devour, and taught that secondary mandible drooling, although natural, is rude, and unpleasantly disturbing to non-predatory sentients.

So, when we learned that your Nostromo's crew had encountered a ship full of illicit and unsupervised eggs and unwittingly released an unsocialized larva, we were just as horrified as you would have been if the sentient crew of Pigs in Space had landed on that island in Lord of the Flies with equally unfortunate results.

Again, we offer our profound apologies and condolences, and hope that our species can put the late unpleasantness behind us.

*2001 is a real credit to your species, from the bit where they start playing the Blue Danube waltz, up to the point where Bowman flies the EVA pod into the Stargate. And some us liked some of the scenes after that, and some of us even liked the "hotel" scenes, in a kind of enigmatic way, but we really liked the middle part of the movie better. And please don't take this as rude, but did Kubrick by any chance outsource the beginning and end of the movie to a completely different species?

We understand that there may be species specific cultural cues that we non-primates just don't get. If so, please accept that if your species understands and enjoys the end of 2001, that's something we do not presume to judge or value for better or worse.

(We also understand that there's a species of sapient tapiroids that find the beginning of the movie completely unwatchable, for obvious reasons. And we can also understand that the end of the movie doesn't yank at your suspension of disbelief nearly as hard if the audience hasn't personally experienced significant subjective time dilation.)

2 comments:

Fridrikr inn gamli Tomasson said...

Thank you for much needed laugh, Will!

Michael De Aston said...

Okay that cheered me up a bit...