Summary; Not like Alien 3? No, me neither. What were they thinking? "Ah we have a fantastic franchise with characters people love and demonstrating the triumph of the human spirit. I know, let's kill them all off and replace them with characters no one likes and in fact can't even tell apart and make it all as depressing and bleak as possible. That will be packing them in the aisles!" (these are the folks who greenlight films like Battlefield Earth and The Postman!) . Not even Joss Wheldon could rescue it in Alien 4. But did you ever notice how little sense Alien 3 actually made? Here's the reason why….All apologies to Dallas if you're ancient enough to remember Bobby in the shower like me (and if you're not you are totally baffled by what I just said, don't worry about, it was sort of an early version of 'The OC')
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It was all for nothing.
All the courage, all the sacrifice, all the effort for nothing.
They lost. The creatures won.
Gorman, Vasquez, Hudson, they'd all given their lives for nothing. The colonists had all died for nothing, their valour meaningless with Newt's death.
Bishop was glad of the oblivion he had convinced Ripley to consign him to. He just lay in the darkness, comfortably numb.
But something disturbed him.
There were voices in the darkness.

"What's actually wrong with him?"

As they lay helpless in their hibernation chambers the facehuggers scuttled around them. Where had they come from?
The Alien Queen must have brought them on board. Laid her eggs in the drop ship.
But the Queens' reproductive system had been destroyed when she'd detached herself.
And why did they activate?
Surely they would have activated in the hanger when they were moving around? Why would they wait until they were hibernating? And how could they get through the sealed hanger?

"Hold a second, I think I see the problem"

And the creatures were burning through the hibernation tubes, implanting Ripley in her tube. And the other scurried about, destroying the ship's systems, causing it to crash as it concealed itself in the escape pod….
But Ripley's tube was still sealed in the escape pod. Why didn't they implant Newt and Hicks? And why wasn't the dead facehugger in the pod afterwards? How would they know to destroy the ship's systems? And why would they do it? How could they?

"There we go, that should do it"

And they were crashing. The terrible crash. And Hicks was dead, brave Corporal Hicks who had survived so much. And poor Newt, who had escaped for so long, who had lost her entire family to the monsters. Who had won them back again only to lose them after all. Ripley had promised her she could sleep all the way home. But now she would never awake.
Ripley had broken her promise. They all had.
Bishop shed a tear for her. Shed a tear for them all. The anguish he experienced was many times worse than the Alien Queen ripping him in two.
But he wasn't programmed to cry.

"That fix it?"

Poor, poor Ripley, after all she had suffered, after all her toughness and ingenuity and bravery. He was glad she deactivated him so that he wouldn't have to see what followed.
But he would help her. He wouldn't leave her by herself to face this awful fate…

"Yeah, that's it"

He could still see her, see Ripley's fate as she cast herself into the molten vat, clutching the infant Queen Alien to her chest in a vile parody of maternal embrace. Poor Ripley…
But how could he be seeing this if he was deactivated?

"Coming on line"

And they were in the future, on the space station. And the military were kidnapping hibernating workers to use in their implantation experiments.
But why do that? Use apes or cows or even criminals. Why use workers who would be missed?
And why clone Ripley? Why not just go back to the ship and take more eggs from it, there were hundreds there? Why did it take them so long?
And the technology hadn't advanced, it didn't seem like the future at all.
The creatures escaped by using their acid. But surely even the stupidest scientist would have thought of that and used materials that could survive it? It beggared belief.

"Here we go"

And there was Cal an android like him. He saw the new Ripley, saw her through Cal's eyes.
But it defied logic. How could she keep her origin a secret? How could she bear to kidnap the workers?
How could the Earth be polluted? Mankind had the technology to go to the stars and terraform other planets, to make their primordial atmosphere's breathable again. Surely they could cure their own planet's enviromental ills?
And the rupture of the ship's hull? The explosive decompression would kill them both instantly, how could they survive?

The images of Ripley and Cal faded. They were replaced by bright lights and a pair of bored looking technicians stripping off their sterile gear. He glanced down and noted that he was still ripped in half. He was grateful that he felt no pain.
"You can come in now" one of the techs called out.
He wasn't sure if he could feel elation. Maybe it was just his circuits running cross checks on themselves to make sure he was actually seeing what he was seeing. But the sight of Ripley, Newt and Hicks walking into the repair bay filled him with a sensation that resembled an uncontrollable power surge.
Newt was holding a cat, a large orange tom. Bishop looked at it curiously. He had never actually seen one before.
"How you feeling Bish?" Ripley asked. Bishop stared at her hair, half expecting her to remove it and unveil a shaven head. But it was real, as was this.
"I…I had all these images in my head, all these things that didn't make sense. There were the creatures and another planet and the future and you, and you…"
"Did I have a little dog called Toto?" Ripley asked.
Hicks laughed, even though it caused him considerable pain through his injuries. He was in his formal dress, a mass of decorations on his chest, lieutenant's bar newly installed on his shoulders. The cosmetic surgery had taken well and you had to look closely to notice the acid burns. He noticed that he and Ripley were standing close to one another, almost holding hands.
"Sounds like you were dreaming" Hicks observed.
"Synthetics don't dream" one of the technicians stated bullishly. "It was just his primary cortex trying to make sense of random data created by damaged memory chips during shutdown" Newt looked puzzled.
"Sound like dreaming to me" Ripley ventured. The tech stormed off in a huff.
A thought occurred to Bishop. "The other ship, the one the Nostromo found…"
"We nuked it from the Sulocco before we left orbit" They all shared a look of relief at Ripley's pronouncement.
Newt set the by now squirming ginger tom down on the bench. Tentatively Bishop reached out and stroked him. Jonesy seemed unsure at first but rapidly submitted to his petting. The texture was amazing, the soft warm fur an incredible sensation to the touch. It occurred to Bishop that a cat's affection and trust was not something given lightly but was all the more precious for it.
Newt reached out and placed her tiny hand in Bishops' palm, smiling broadly.
As was the love of little girls.
"We slept and dreamt all the way home. But now it's time to wake up" she said.
He grasped her hand gently and smiled back, finally awake.
The End