When the sequel to the first Alien film, Aliens, was released, it was clear that the franchise decided to pull away from the greater mystery of the series for the sake of highlighting the much more mass-appealing monster, the Xenomorphs–and while Aliens proved to be a necessary installment that went into the intricacies of the Xenomorph species, the third movie, Alien 3, continued to ignore the wider story that was set up in Alien: the mystery of the Space Jockey.
In Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien, the crew of the Nostromo go to an unknown world after receiving a distress signal being broadcasted from its surface. After they land, the crew discovers a derelict ship with the corpse of a giant alien creature laying in what seemed to be the ship’s control room with a massive hole in its chest–a creature that would later become known as the Space Jockey. Upon further investigation of the spacecraft, the crew found a chamber filled with Ovomorphs where one of the crew members became impregnated with a Xenomorph, an event that charted the course for the rest of the film and the entire Xeno-centric sequel–and the Space Jockey was never brought up again (minus the prequel films, but even those don’t fill in the gaps perfectly).
In Aliens: Earth War #1 by Mark Verheiden and Sam Kieth, Ripley reveals where she’s been the past two storylines (Aliens Vol. 1 and 2) which both took place after the events of the movie Aliens and followed Newt and Hicks as they battled against cruel doctors, evil military madmen, and, of course, Xenomorphs. As it turns out, Ripley was awakened from the hyper sleep she, Newt, and Hicks went into at the end of Aliens before the other two as she was needed for an immensely important mission. The company needed Ripley to go back to LV-426 once again, only this time it wasn’t a consulting job giving intel on Xenomorphs, it was to revisit Alien‘s derelict ship and the Space Jockey. Since the representative of the company didn’t really give Ripley a choice, she agreed and returned to that seemingly cursed world–and she finished her mission off by destroying the very ship that threw her life into a living nightmare.
Ripley’s return to LV-426 for the sole purpose of uncovering the secret of the Space Jockey and ultimately destroying it is exactly the kind of bookend storytelling the film franchise was missing. In Alien 3, Ripley gets infected with a Xenomorph embryo by a Facehugger and lands on a prison planet following the unceremonious deaths of Hicks and Newt. The film then played out much like the first one, with a single Xenomorph hunting a group of people trapped in an enclosed space without weapons or resources. Then, the movie went one step further and killed Ripley–giving her a tragic end to an already tragic life. While the movie felt a bit derivative with an ending that was arguably less than satisfying, the worst part about it is that it neglected to wrap back around to the first film.
Alien introduced the Space Jockey and the Xenomorph, then Aliens delved into the specifics of the Xenomorph species, so it should have been the third film’s job to investigate the mystery surrounding the Space Jockey. While Alien 3 delivered on a terrifying Sci-Fi adventure filled with action, tragedy, and horror, it didn’t pay off the setups of the earlier films the way this Alien comic series did–a comic series that gave fans the ‘Alien 3’ they deserve.
