Observation on John Carpenter's "The Thing"

[EJA]

Dug the DVD of this movie out a couple days ago and been watching it again after a few years. Still a bloody fantastic film, very fun, moody and scary. In rewatching it, I've began wondering again about whether or not a person assimilated and duplicated by the Thing (as in the cases of the characters of Norris, Palmer, and Blair) would actually be aware of their true nature. This has been discussed elsewhere, with most people saying that yes, they do know they're imitations, citing stuff like the deliberate acts of sabotage carried out by the Thing (e.g. contaminating the camp's blood supplies), and Blair (or rather, the alien disguised as him) secretly gathering parts from around the camp with which to build a vessel underneath his shack.

But then I started watching Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica. That series has the Cylons infiltrating humanity by placing members of their race that appear totally human in the community, and some of these humanoid Cylons aren't even aware that they're Cylons. Take Sharon Valerii, a Cylon sleeper agent placed on board the Galactica. Most of the time she believes herself to be human because she's been programmed to, but periodically her innate Cylon programming will override her human personality and cause her to commit acts of sabotage; afterwards her human personality is reinstated and she remembers nothing of what she's done. Now this got me thinking: Could something similar be going on in The Thing? Is it part of the alien's duplication process that the lifeforms it imitates believe themselves to be the originals for most of the time, with the core alien intelligence taking full control at certain times?

 

[EJA]

Interestingly, Ronald D. Moore, the creator of NuBSG, is currently involved in the writing of the forthcoming Thing prequel.

 

[Goliath]

I don't think it's ever really explained. Either alternative seems plausible to me, from what I remember.

I may have to rewatch the film to help me come to a decision on this question. What a chore that will be.

 

[Icemizer]

I believe the Thing is fully aware its not the original but will use any means necessary to fool those around it to accomplish its goals. This includes pretending to be the original to get to the resources it needs to escape.

 

[EJA]

I'm one of those who always wonders when and how Blair was taken over - was it before or after he was locked up in the tool shed by the others? If he was already a Thing, why would he sabotage the helicopter and tractor if he wanted to move on to more inhabited areas? Why kill all the station's dogs instead of infecting them?

 

[Zycho32]

Being stuck somewhere in Antartica in the beginning of the 'Bad' season- bad enough apparently that they couldn't get a radio reception before it got trashed- does cut off a great deal of options. After all, Dogs aren't going to last a journey to inhabited areas- the Thing tried it in the Alan Dean Foster novelization, but it wasn't going to succeed even if the guys didn't catch up to it. Probably not even the Helicopter would have been guaranteed to reach something civilized under such conditions.

Even then, and we're assuming 'Blair' is perfectly aware of his duplicity at all times, what hereditary knowledge does he have of operating the Helicopter? The Tractor is pretty dang useless to begin with, but he could be capable of driving it, but getting to civilization in that defies all expectations.

It's why I go with the idea that 'Blair' does not know he's a fake until absolutely necessary- a literal interpretation of Method Acting right down to the cells. That actually makes the whole threat scarier from an intellectual standpoint.

 

[saturn5]

I go for the fact that they don't know, hence when the fat guy has his 'heart attack' he doesn't realise that he's slowly being taken over by The Thing all the while. And when his head splits off and scuttles around the room it's Windows(?) who draws attention to it 'You gotta be !@#ing kidding me' but in the next scene we discover he's the Thing too

In any Thing sequal the scene I'd like to see is where they trap someone infected by the Thing in a room and actually talk to it, see what it wants, maybe to take over the world or maybe it just wants to go home but all these humans keep attacking it?

 

[Reverend]

I tend to think Blair was turned after he was locked up. He was certainly vulnerable and isolated that it could have happened at any time. I don't buy the idea that the Thing would method act to that extent, at least not under those circumstances.

I do wonder though, when there's more than one Thing, can the recognise one another for what they are or is the disguise so perfect that even one Thing can fool another?
What if at the end of the film both MacReady and Childs have been turned but neither is aware if the other is human or not and neither willing to give up the act. I think somewhere on the DVD the idea is mentioned that Things are utterly selfish creatures, even down to the cellular level and that one thing wouldn't hesitate to kill another to survive.
Also, if it only takes one cell to assimilate, why do is the whole tentacle ripping through clothes thing necessary? Perhaps this is actually the key to the whole thing; if a Thing assimilates an organism all at once then it knows what it is right off the bat but if an organism is only infected then perhaps the change is relatively slow. Starting with one stray cell that assimilates exponentially. If so then at what point would a person stop being a person (or dog) and become a Thing? Perhaps Blair was infected while he was dissecting the corpse at the beginning and it wasn't until after they locked him up that he fully "turned"? It would account for his sudden extreme behaviour if he knew he'd probably already been exposed and so, with nothing to loose was desperate to make sure nobody could get away while he was still himself.

I go for the fact that they don't know, hence when the fat guy has his 'heart attack' he doesn't realise that he's slowly being taken over by The Thing all the while. And when his head splits off and scuttles around the room it's Windows(?) who draws attention to it 'You gotta be !@#ing kidding me' but in the next scene we discover he's the Thing too

In any Thing sequal the scene I'd like to see is where they trap someone infected by the Thing in a room and actually talk to it, see what it wants, maybe to take over the world or maybe it just wants to go home but all these humans keep attacking it?

For the first part I think it's mentioned in the DVD commentary that the Thing copied that guy perfectly, right down to his heart condition. It would make sense if it doesn't necessarily understand what it is mimicking, it just intuitively copies whatever's there. It's not an expert in human anatomy and biology and probably wouldn't know a heart attack from a simple reflex. Sort of a copy/paste approach. It can recall "patterns" it's taken before, even mix and match them but it can't really grasp the inner workings of what it's doing anymore then we're really conscious of what our bodies do autonomically.

As for it's motivation, I think it's basically a VERY highly evolved virus. It doesn't "want" anything, it just seeks to survive and propagate.

 

[saturn5]

I tend to think Blair was turned after he was locked up. He was certainly vulnerable and isolated that it could have happened at any time. I don't buy the idea that the Thing would method act to that extent, at least not under those circumstances.

I do wonder though, when there's more than one Thing, can the recognise one another for what they are or is the disguise so perfect that even one Thing can fool another?
What if at the end of the film both MacReady and Childs have been turned but neither is aware if the other is human or not and neither willing to give up the act. I think somewhere on the DVD the idea is mentioned that Things are utterly selfish creatures, even down to the cellular level and that one thing wouldn't hesitate to kill another to survive.
Also, if it only takes one cell to assimilate, why do is the whole tentacle ripping through clothes thing necessary? Perhaps this is actually the key to the whole thing; if a Thing assimilates an organism all at once then it knows what it is right off the bat but if an organism is only infected then perhaps the change is relatively slow. Starting with one stray cell that assimilates exponentially. If so then at what point would a person stop being a person (or dog) and become a Thing? Perhaps Blair was infected while he was dissecting the corpse at the beginning and it wasn't until after they locked him up that he fully "turned"? It would account for his sudden extreme behaviour if he knew he'd probably already been exposed and so, with nothing to loose was desperate to make sure nobody could get away while he was still himself.

I go for the fact that they don't know, hence when the fat guy has his 'heart attack' he doesn't realise that he's slowly being taken over by The Thing all the while. And when his head splits off and scuttles around the room it's Windows(?) who draws attention to it 'You gotta be !@#ing kidding me' but in the next scene we discover he's the Thing too

In any Thing sequal the scene I'd like to see is where they trap someone infected by the Thing in a room and actually talk to it, see what it wants, maybe to take over the world or maybe it just wants to go home but all these humans keep attacking it?

For the first part I think it's mentioned in the DVD commentary that the Thing copied that guy perfectly, right down to his heart condition. It would make sense if it doesn't necessarily understand what it is mimicking, it just intuitively copies whatever's there. It's not an expert in human anatomy and biology and probably wouldn't know a heart attack from a simple reflex. Sort of a copy/paste approach. It can recall "patterns" it's taken before, even mix and match them but it can't really grasp the inner workings of what it's doing anymore then we're really conscious of what our bodies do autonomically.

As for it's motivation, I think it's basically a VERY highly evolved virus. It doesn't "want" anything, it just seeks to survive and propagate.

I don't buy the idea that it's mindless, it's actions are far too intelligent and at the end we see it's been building a spaceship which would be beyond the ability of Blair it must retain intelligence

 

[Reverend]

^I didn't say it was mindless or lacking intelligence, just that I think it's motivations are driven by fairly simple biological imperatives. No master plan beyond survive and multiply. It wouldn't have done either of those things for as long as it apparantly had without being extremely cunning and highly adaptive.

 

[Sabataage]

I would rather not have a speech from the thing. The closest we get to one in the original (well, the Carpenter movie, not the 50's classic) is when the Fuchs thing (I think) howls at the group before he's set on fire. I kind of like that, as it implies the creature itself is beyond peer-to-peer communication. It's the whole Eldritch Abomination thing that sends shivers up your spine. The idea of something so alien it could never possibly communicate with you, because it doesn't even consider you alive.

 

[EJA]

While I'd like to think that Blair was "compromised" after he was locked in the shed, it's shown in the novelisation of the movie that afterwards all the men tend to stay within sight of one another, and go around in groups of two or three, the idea being not to get too isolated so that something might happen. It would be highly suspicious if either Norris or Palmer decided to take a little stroll outside the camp in the middle of the night by themselves, for example.

Another idea offered elsewhere is that Blair could've been taken over during the filmed, but deleted, "lights out" sequence (There are one or two little references to this cut part in the film, notably in the scene where the men are discussing when and how MacReady could've been infected, and one of them suggests "When the lights went out.") But this doesn't work, as only a couple of hours pass between this time and the discovery of the craft under the shed, and Blair had obviously been working on it for quite some time, at least 48 hours.

Personally, I find it a bit difficult to believe that Blair was infected via examining the Thing corpses. It just doesn't seem very likely to me, somehow. He is a professional biologist, after all.

 

[Lt. Trull]

My only question is.... was the bottle passed between the two at the end of the movie... contaminated with that virus... ???

 

[Reverend]

Personally, I find it a bit difficult to believe that Blair was infected via examining the Thing corpses. It just doesn't seem very likely to me, somehow. He is a professional biologist, after all.

I suppose it depends on how virulent stray "Thing" cells could be. It's not as if the corpse was treated as a biohazard or anything. They just dumped it on a table and sliced it up. I don't think he even wore a mask.

Of course, that would beg the question why wouldn't they all get infected if it was that easy? I suppose they would raise the rather interesting and novel concept that perhaps they were ALL infected but about half way through and each thing was trying to "out human" all the others.

 

[Sabataage]

MacReady states at one point that the Thing needed time alone with you in order to finish the horrific process. If it was so easy to contaminate and replicate a whole person through blood alone, the Dog-Thing would have just splattered itself all over everyone while they were trying to kill it. Whoever was the Thing could just open an artery in their wrist and squirt blood into people's mouths when they weren't looking.

 

[Reverend]

But then it'd be killed. Remember that these things are supposed to be utterly selfish and survival appears to trump breeding.

The way I see it, the bit where it needs time, like what one of them tried to do with the dogs and what the other did to Bennings was to absorb and mimic them because it's current form had either ceased to be useful (like the wolf) or become a liability (like the Norwegian corpse.) A slow infection (if indeed it works that way at all) would be a side effect and not necessarily the intended goal. Plus, as I said, even if everyone was infected and eventually taken over then the Things would still probably try to kill one another in an attempt to appear as human as possible. Hell for all we know it was another Thing pretending to be something else that shot down that saucer in first place.

 

[EJA]

even if everyone was infected and eventually taken over then the Things would still probably try to kill one another in an attempt to appear as human as possible.

I doubt that. I think once it had absorbed everything, it would no longer require the need to hide inside an imitation. The Thing doesn't really want to be humanity, it wants to destroy it via infecting it, like a disease, and replace it with itself. But in order to do that, it has to be stealthy and disguise itself. Once that objective is fully achieved, the need for subterfuge is over.

 

[Lt. Trull]

if you were the last two alive... like their was... wouldn't you leave a message for the teams that come later... somekind of message that warn's what to expect or what happens.... if you didn't leave one or if you destroyed that message.... wouldn't that be a indication that who was left over was infected... ???

 

[EJA]

MacReady did record what the men knew about the Thing onto a tape, with the intention of hiding it somewhere so that if none of them survived, anyone else coming along would have some idea of what to do. Whether or not the tape survived the destruction of Outpost 31 is highly conjectural though.

 

[Reverend]

even if everyone was infected and eventually taken over then the Things would still probably try to kill one another in an attempt to appear as human as possible.

I doubt that. I think once it had absorbed everything, it would no longer require the need to hide inside an imitation. The Thing doesn't really want to be humanity, it wants to destroy it via infecting it, like a disease, and replace it with itself. But in order to do that, it has to be stealthy and disguise itself. Once that objective is fully achieved, the need for subterfuge is over.

Like I said before, these things are selfish right down to the cellular level and I can't see one risking exposure until there was no other choice. You appear to assume that the Things are either able to recognise another like them or that they share a common consciousness. Nothing in the film suggests either is true.

Let's say for the sake of argument that "Thing A" absorbs "Person 1" who then becomes "Thing B". "Thing B" later absorbs "Person 2", making "Thing C" while elsewhere "Thing A" is busy absorbing "Person 3" into "Thing D". Now there are four Things but C & D each only know about one other Thing while "Thing A" knows about B & D but not C. Now say there are a total of five persons, even though all but one is a Thing, none of them know that and if "Thing A" is found out and killed, of the four remaining B & C only know about each other while B & D only knew about A who's now been torched

So long as each Thing isn't sure about the others, they won't break cover and B might even implicate the one it does know about to divert suspicion....and you thought the humans were the only paranoid ones!