Warning! Spoilers for Alien Annual #1 ahead!
Other than the Xenomorphs themselves, the Weyland-Yutani corporation is considered the primary antagonist of the Alien franchise, and now a Marvel Comic is finally giving fans a chance to see how its leadership wields the deadly aliens as a weapon.
As a typical capitalistic company, Weyland-Yutani puts profits above all else, including human life. There are plenty of examples throughout the Alien franchise of the company’s leadership sacrificing people for the sake of either earning money or the development of resources, including obtaining Xenomorphs and turning them into weapons. An example of this is when Paul Reiser’s character Carter Burke is fully prepared to sacrifice Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley in Aliens in order to have her be a host for a facehugger.
In Alien Annual #1 by Philip Kennedy Johnson and Salvador Larroca, fans get to actually see a Weyland-Yutani boardroom and how the executives actually make these heartless decisions. They are discussing a group of protesters called the Second Hand and propose using a Xenomorph, which they refer to as “The organism” and “The bioweapon,” against them. Together, the executives come up with a plan to have a fire team bring the Xenomorph into a station and unleash it in order to take care of the protesters. They even want to send along a synthetic in order to document the Xenomorph’s performance.
It’s one thing to know that Weyland-Yutani is a cruel corporation with zero morality that makes decisions to kill people to further their stock price. But it’s something else entirely to actually witness how those decisions are made. For the most part, Weyland-Yutani is a relatively faceless entity throughout the Alien universe. They are puppet masters and largely a boogeyman that operates behind the scenes. Meanwhile the stories themselves focus on the people affected by those decisions rather than the people actually making them.
This scene gives a lot of insight into the minds of Weyland-Yutani’s executives. It seems they don’t even consider the Xenomorph to be a dangerous creature and a threat to all of humanity. They truly treat it just like any other resource to be used and deployed however they see fit. They are so detached from the Xenomorph’s killer nature that it would be interesting to see the script flipped and for them to become the prey in a future storyline. Then these cold and calculating individuals — the true villains of the Alien franchise — can finally realize that the Xenomorph isn’t just a tool for them to further the Weyland-Yutani bottom line.
