I've been watching the Alien series lately on bluray and have been wondering about the fate of the Sulaco. In Alien 3 it is seen ejecting the escape pod but not destroyed.
I've learned to love
Alien³ on it's own terms over the years (the workprint/director's cut even more so) but man do I so hate the opening sequence. There are just too many leaps of faith that I am asked to make all at once for the sake of getting the plot moving down on the planet. Case in point: the computer says there's a fire... so what exactly was the point in maintaining an atmosphere capable of supporting a fire that could threaten the whole ship if the crew is frozen for the journey? Was the Colonial Marine Corps suffering budget cuts when the
Sulaco was built and decide to skimp on a few things... such as a fire suppression system?
Assuming it wasn't destroyed, would it not have been a much better source for obtaining xenomorph dna since it had multiple eggs and the queen's residue from the dropship. It would be a hell of a lot easier than finding a few specs of blood from Fiorina 161.
Here's another leap of faith, but one I came up with on my own after hanging out with medical professionals over the last several years: It's highly likely that Clemens drew a few vials of Ripley's blood when she was first brought in so that he could test for diseases that might threaten the prison population.
Plus if the WY cleanup crew was any good at their jobs they would have found the corpse of the facehugger that arrived with Ripley, the corpse of the host (ox or dog, take your pick), and a bunch of dead prisoners covered in all kinds of forensic goodness... not to mention bits & chunks of the alien spread around the lead works. All that sounds like such a total jackpot to me that I have to wonder what all the fuss was over cloning Ripley.
When a person is infected by a facce hugger, it rewrites the victim's DNA so the host grows the alien inside, yes? We see this DNA exchange in Alien 3 when the alien is quadripedal after using a quadriped as a host, and in AVP when it takes on characteristics of the Predator.
So, if you get a DNA sample from an infected Ripley, then cloning her from that DNA will include the genetic code that grows the alien inside her.
Simply remove the alien and you have a Ripley ready to go. But, due to the cloning process, Ripley ended up with some alien traits.
It has been a long time since I forced myself to endure the fourth movie, did it outright state that the alien's DNA had mixed with Ripley's? If it didn't, I can understand how the audience might have inferred this to be the case given how genetics is treated in modern fiction. However, I
strongly doubt that the alien facehugger or embryo would attempt to rewrite the host's DNA. Even if we assume that genetics will be the same for everything everywhere in the universe, mucking about with unfamiliar DNA could quickly lead to an nonviable host (ie, dead) which would be counterproductive to the aliens' reproductive needs. It already strains credibility that the alien is able to sample, decode, and incorporate the host's DNA within itself in such a short gestational period in order to fit in more readily in it's environment (not to mention how the parasite is able to feed off of and grow within the host as fast as it does without killing it before emergence). But given what we've seen on screen we have to take what we're given as is.
It seems much more likely to me that the embryo would take active steps in protecting itself from being fought off as an infection by the host's immune system, either by pumping the host full of some sort of immunosuppressant or by deploying it's own version of white blood cells to actively attack the host's. It is these compounds / enzymes / cells that could be found throughout Ripley's blood sample. Considering the amount of time that passed between the third & fourth movie there could easily have been degradation of the sample that caused everything to get mixed up leading the genetics team to make multiple attempts at separating & refining the DNA until they got an alien they were happy with - a viable Ripley clone was just a happy accident.
I'm still trying to understand how eggs got on the Sulaco in the first place since Ripley and crew didn't take any with them and the Queen was never shown to have any with her and her egg sack was long gone.
That, quite frankly, was the biggest pill for me to swallow. Not only did the queen sneak aboard a couple of eggs but she managed to stick them to the side of a cabinet or locker while nobody was looking - and I'm pretty sure Bishop would have been keeping an intent eye on her since he apparently had nothing better to do.
