There are certainly Sci-Fi/creature feature/horror movies made throughout the ages where it may not be unjustified to question why an alien that is apparently intelligent enough to build a spacecraft capable of interstellar travel would land on Earth and immediately start acting like a violent, mindless animal. It’s a recurring logic hole generally papered over, thinly, in order to justify traditional genre entertainment. Even The Thing From Another World, the starting point for many of these extraterrestrial thrillers, only provides a vague sort of justification for its monster’s behaviour, and it actually does more plot logic legwork than many of the films that followed it. In general, the alien’s perspective is not always given a lot of thought in these things, although it’s an area where even an otherwise rote story can really distinguish itself…when there’s the motivation to do so.
Speaking of The Thing, John Carpenter’s 1982 remake is another one of those movies where the question applies, probably even more than the original. It features one of the most inventively-portrayed alien creatures in film history, but its true form is so incomprehensible that it seems almost impossible to imagine it piloting a spaceship—but it not only does that, it also has the knowledge to build another one from scrap parts. I’ve always thought of the titular Thing as being like an intelligent communicable disease, seeking only to propagate itself and absorbing whatever knowledge and technical skill it needs to do so. Other people have their own theories about this, but only Sci-Fi writer/marine biologist Peter Watts, author of the evocative first contact novel Blindsight, managed to get his version published in Clarkesworld, one of the leading English language SF publications. “The Things”, his re-interpretation of the dynamics of John Carpenter’s version of the story, focuses entirely on the alien’s perspective, giving us a surprisingly benevolent take on the shapeshifting flesh beast that infects everything around it—as it turns out, such a thing is possible.
Originally published in January 2010, “The Things” is an extended act of fan fiction that is intelligent enough to stand on its own—but it’s still very much a piece of fan fiction, inserting itself into specific scenes from John Carpenter’s film and filling in some of the intentional blanks in the original script (Watts notes on his website that story “…got an unexpected amount of love when it came out— and, so far, not a single lawsuit.“) At its best, fan fiction is the act of taking something you love and bringing a new perspective to it—sometimes, that perspective focuses on fleshing out a low-stakes romantic history between two characters who may or may not be in a relationship in the original fiction, and in this case, it’s about making the alien monster into our lead, giving it a personality and purpose it did not have in its original context. The story does engage in other sorts of fan fiction-style tics as well, such as making its lead character noticeably more cunning than it is in the original—the alien is always one step ahead of the humans, observing their actions with patient detachment, all their flamethrower-based victories dismissed as part some elaborate ploy to get them off its back for a time—and explaining away certain illogical moments from the movie, such as Wilford Brimley’s character’s unexplained ability to quickly create an alien invasion timeline calculator on his early eighties desktop computer. It comes off as tongue-in-cheek, but still a little hyper-fixated on “correcting” the fuzzy plotting of a movie that was aiming more for atmosphere than airtight storytelling.
(Since I don’t read fan fiction, though, it’s still weird to me to read something so openly derivative of another work—oftentimes with the full original dialogue and characterizations included. That also makes sure you know this is based on the 1982 movie and not John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”, the 1938 novella that all Thing movies are based on, but especially Carpenter’s version.)
Minor details are there for the Thing-heads to notice in between the actual meat of the story—Watts transforming The Thing into a full character, one whose situation and actions has real intelligence and emotion behind it. This is something that Carpenter would never do, as he prefers to explore the existential dread of a universe full of inexplicable evil, although the characterization Watts goes with here is not actually that far from that tone (Blindsight certainly works in that mode as well.) It even manages to, in a way, show that dread going both ways.
The alien in “The Things” is “… an explorer, an ambassador, a missionary…” for its own amorphous biology, a being that goes from planet to planet spreading the good word through its infectious cells, which it calls “communion.” All the creatures it becomes are part of a gestalt whole, essentially bonding together every living thing into an endless shared experience—it can watch itself perform separate actions, but then they can all join together as one massive communal mind. They become one being, where the individual flesh parts are less important than their one massively bonded soul, “all biomass” being “interchangeable” in its mind. It carries with it the seemingly happily conjoined spirits of numerous planets…but then on our planet, things go wrong.
Instantly adaptable to its situation, all the alien’s horrific transformations are said to be a way to keep itself safe in a harsh climate against what are, to it, unnervingly hostile lifeforms. Barely able to stay alive and in one piece after its spaceship crashed in Earth’s distant past, it awakens after being unthawed in the movie’s mythical Norwegian Camp and attempts to continue doing what it had done countless times before, joining with the surrounding organisms and integrating them into its intergalactic collective. It spends much of the story in shocked disbelief at the reaction of humans, saying early on “I tasted the flesh of the world…and the world attacked me. It attacked me.” Its subsequent actions are motivated partly by self-defence, and partly by a manic attempt to figure out what our deal is, and why it finds it so difficult to understand us.
The alien is portrayed as strange and mysterious, but its sense of bewilderment is even more palpable, and the slow revelation of why it feels that way is a beautiful parade of heady Sci-Fi ideas. As we come to learn, its references to “the world” and the way it calls the humans “offshoots” arise from its own experiences: evidently on every world it had visited previously, all lifeform was already part of ever-adapting planet-wide intelligence, hiveminds being the norm in the universe, and so the joining of them through “communion” was a meeting of equals. On Earth, however, things are different, but at first the alien is only be baffled by the rigidity of the planet’s biology, and how ill-adapted the lifeforms are to their Antarctic environment—it’s even more puzzled by the fact that infecting those lifeforms does not create a joining of minds, with the humans operating on their own even after it has mostly taken over their bodies (which implies that the humans in the movie don’t even know they were the alien until the moment they suddenly morph.) The infamous blood test and defibrillator scenes from the movie are shown to shock the alien as much as it does the human crew, behaviours and reactions it didn’t even know it had until it attempted to join with these strange organisms. It isn’t until it figures out the strange “tumour” (i.e. The brain) in the human body is the thing controlling the biomass, and that they are in fact, individual beings and not simply extensions of “the world”, that the cause of its plight is evident, and just as us humans are appalled at the shapeless monstrosity the alien becomes, it is is appalled at a biology that seems completely perverted to what it knows to be universal and “correct.” It refers to us a living cancer, an aberration of normal cellular activity.
To it, the ability to rapidly change to fit an environment is normal—”Adaptation is fitness, adaptation is survival. It’s deeper than intelligence, deeper than tissue; it is cellular, it is axiomatic.” But with that conception of normalcy comes the next step, an even greater exaltation and spiritual interpretation of its biology, for the act of instant adaptation “is pleasurable”, and as it goes on to say, “To take communion is to experience the sheer sensual delight bettering the cosmos.” If one were to look at it in evolutionary terms, it does make sense that the continuous act of better fitting one’s situation is an ultimate end goal, a sign of something that can endlessly thrive and come together with other endlessly changing beings—and when put into those terms, you can kinda understand why a thing that is incapable of morphing at a moment’s notice might seem a little odd to something that can. In its eyes, or I guess “eyes” is more like it, separate, individual organisms are a Thing That Should Not Be.
One of the core ideas behind monsters and what makes them figures of horror is that they represent Things That Should Not Be, forms twisted and behaviour completely contrary to what humans know to be normal. So, one of the core ideas behind Watts’ story, then, is a complete reversal of that, with one of the weirdest monsters in cinematic history turned into the one confronted by flesh shapes that are horrific in their implications. We are horrible because we are “the things”, a plurality in a universe that does not often create pluralities. It is by all means the easiest postmodern trick in the book, but so much thought and detail has been put into the alien’s existence, not just its basic biology but also the way it views that biology in much higher and more spiritually fulfilling terms (most of our monsters are also made to be contrary to our religious sense of morality), that it doesn’t feel like a one-note literary joke.
Over the course of the story, we can see the alien go from pitiful fear and confusion to disgust to, essentially, feeling sorry for us and our completely non-functional kind of living. We cannot change, we don’t even know that such change is possible, and we will end with short, weak lives, forever separate from a greater, happier whole. The alien learns much about us, learns our terms and how we think of ourselves (the idea of “they” is still unfathomable to it), and thinks that we should be so much more than the absurd little evolutionary accidents we appear to be, biomass without a “soul.” The story ends as the movie does, at first, with only two survivors—however, while sacrificing the ambiguity that made the movie’s ending perfect, we instead get a different sort of chilling denouement, a promise by the alien to collectively give humanity a religious conversion by any means necessary.
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