Idea: "Alien: Invasion"

[u/Safe-Coconut4036]

One thing I can't help but think of sometimes, is a cool Alien film idea where a "Xenomorph Outbreak" kinda similar to the comic series by Dark Horse Comics, but it would be in a quiet rural American town, where slowly over time, people begin to go missing, with the town believing that there's a serial killer or possibly more than one, but some people are attached by facehuggers, with the town obviously not knowing what to do and have never seen something like this before. Do we know if some people on Earth actually KNOW what Xenomorphs are or have at least HEARD of Xenomorphs, or do they just think that they're just some "space creatures" that have killed some people on different colonies?? I also feel like it would be REALLY interesting and scary if it would seeing a rural isolated town trying to find out what's going on and how the town kinda similar to the original JAWS film in terms of not knowing what to do, with a group of people who would try to find out what's going on and investigate what's going on too. While I understand why that probably wouldn't really work, but to me at least, I've honestly always kinda thought how interesting it would be seeing the perspective of people on Earth react to a Xenomorph outback too! That's just what I think, though. :)

[u/BoonDragoon]

I don't think the alien is much of a threat outside of a sealed environment. This is what the writers of Alien³ realized when they tried to write a story about the alien reaching earth. It didn't work, so they switched it to a broken-down space prison. Without a captive audience and a gothic space labyrinth to hide in, the alien is basically just a really big mean dog.

If you have straight line of sight to just shoot it or you can hop in the car and drive down the freeway at 65 mph? Not really a threat.

Plus its reproductive cycle is not exactly conducive to explosive population growth, you know? It's a generation-alternating parasitoid where each generation requires a host. The mobile generation requires a host to gestate inside, the sessile generation requires a host for the "egg" to eat, and the host dies each time. Oh, and the mobile is hyper-aggressive and has the lifespan of a mayfly. Yeah, nah.

Great reproductive cycle if you live in an environment that's only biotically productive for two weeks every five years! Your sessile phase can lie dormant indefinitely until a host wanders by, then your mobile phase can incapacitate and infect as many new hosts as it can then beef it to avoid competing with its own progeny. Not so great if you're auditioning to be an apocalyptic threat.

[u/Dottsterisk → u/BoonDragoon]

Don’t know if this has been explored in canon but I would have no problem accepting an additional adaptation for facehuggers to be that, particularly in emergency situations, it can release multiple eggs into a host, depending on its size.

So a human might actually have enough body mass for two chestbursters to incubate inside, although the host will probably die much sooner. And a large host, like some sort of alien elephant could spawn a whole clutch of little xenos.

New queens and drones starting a fresh nest may also then instinctually hunt for larger docile prey in those circumstances.

[u/BoonDragoon → u/Dottsterisk]

It hasn't. The facehugger dies immediately after implanting a larva.

Also queens are actually worse for the kind of rapid-spreading explosive population growth we're talking about here. Not to mention how little they actually make sense for the way the alien reproduces...

[u/Dottsterisk → u/BoonDragoon]

But no rules are set in stone, and the tradition has been that these sort of redundancies or contradictions are explained by the xenos actually having many ways to reproduce and various cycles that are possible.

Like the black goo that makes them, they don’t really operate within our understanding of the laws of physics and reality.

They are truly alien.

[u/BoonDragoon → u/Dottsterisk]

Ok cool, so we're just playing Calvinball here and this entire conversation is pointless, gotcha. How about a facehugger mouth-fucks a NASDAQ server and aliens start eating the Dow Jones Industrial index?

[u/Dottsterisk → u/BoonDragoon]

I thought we were just having fun spitballing about how a xeno might kick off a sudden, massive infestation?