Written by Mr. Mouseburger 23rd Jan 2006

Kindly submitted by Tom

After rescuing her daughter-figure Newt from within a hive of alien horrors (itself within a nuclear power plant on a God forsaken ball of rock in deep space) Ripley blunders into the dark heart of the nest and confronts the vast Alien Queen, brooding over dozens of her eggs while she proceeds to lay more.

There is a momentary standoff because, although Ripley is carrying a child and, obviously, surrounded by alien killing machines and two hundred stories of malfunctioning nuclear reactor, she is very sensibly armed to the teeth. As the Alien Queen watches the guttering pilot light on Ripley's flamethrower weave towards the eggs, the two bad mothers seem to strike a tacit bargain - Ripley leaves untouched, and the eggs stay that way too. Ripley backs carefully off as the Alien Queen hisses her warrior guards into submission.

But Ripley is either every bit as merciless as the aliens themselves are to humans, or simply unable to suffer the existence of these great big slimy affronts to the part of us which wants to obliterate cockroaches out of pure revulsion (I lean towards the latter theory, in that the whole place is going off like a roman candle in five minutes anyway!) She burns the eggs, machine-guns the warriors, pumps several grenades into the Alien Queen's egg sac, and finally, as she escapes, tosses a sack of explosives into the flames. Ripley does not, it is safe to say, do things by halves.

What she misses, being too busy getting to the rendezvous with her ride off this rock, is the Alien Queen tearing herself free of her egg sac and charges in pursuit. There's a spare freight elevator to the rendezvous and we know the Queen is smart enough to figure out an Up button.

On the helipad it seems that Ripley has been deserted by the pilot; an android called Bishop. Unarmed, with a cowering Newt clutched to her side, they face off against the Queen once more. This time there's nowhere to go except a hundred stories into the abyss, and only moments until the reactor goes critical; there won't be another bargain between the Queen and Ripley.

At the last possible moment, the ship comes into view and it seems their escape is complete. They leave the atmosphere inches ahead of the blast wave from the meltdown, rejoin their old ship in orbit, and share a quiet post-climactic moment. This lasts about a minute. Ripley's android rescuer is impaled and messily bisected by a tail like the spine of a giraffe before the rest of the Queen's massive bulk drops out of shadows.

The Queen wants Newt first, as payback for her lost children, but Ripley does her best to distract the Queen's attention while the little girl climbs under a floor grate and tries to hide from the Queen's slime-glistening teeth and black claws.

Ripley runs through a doorway, and then reappears behind a new one, silhouetted from behind and swathed in steam. She is inside a hydraulic exoskeleton, called a Loader, used by the marines to load heavy cargo into their dropships. It doubles Ripley's height and gives her her own massive claws. At this point, the two fight. Ripley's Loader has a wicked servo-powered right hook and is strong enough to get the Queen in a choke hold, but the Queen has many claws, two sets of teeth and a tail we've just seen rip a man in half. She only needs to get lucky once. Ripley does her best, punching, wrestling, and even doing a little light welding on the Queen before the first set of hull doors grind open in the floor.

Finally, Ripley puts a metal foot wrong and the Loader and the Queen tumble into the hole, landing on the secondary doors beyond which is nothing but deep space. The Queen is trapped under the Loader's bulk as Ripley unclips herself from it and escapes once more. She climbs half way up the ladder and throws the open-hull-door switch. Everything inside the hold that is not bolted down, including Newt and Bishop, starts being sucked into the vacuum. At the last moment possible, the top half of Bishop finds a handhold and catches a squealing Newt as she slides by. Ripley has the ladder in a death grip as she climbs, but the Queen has one final trick - as the Loader tumbles into the void she lashes out and catches Ripley's foot in one claw. Her entire weight hangs from Ripley's leg for a few seconds as they both grip on with everything they have left, until the Queen finally loses her hold and is sucked screaming into space.

Note from Mouseburger - wonderful write up Tom, thank you