As long as we're discussing the Alien franchise in general, there's an idea that's been in my mind for a few years that I'd be interested to hear feedback about. Originally when I heard there were talks about a prequel my thoughts automatically went to the place that fascinated me most about the franchise, which was the xenomorph life cycle, its biology and behavior. I loved how each new film in the franchise built on the information established in the previous ones and added to it, gradually filling in the holes and revealing new details about these complex organisms and how they interact with each other and with their environment. This lead me to spend some time wondering if there was room for an additional major contribution in this area or if all the big holes had already been filled. Here's what I was able to come up with:
We're all familiar with the concept of a hybrid animal from life on earth: cross a horse and a donkey to get a mule, or a lion and tiger to get a liger, etc. We're also familiar with the fact that it's common for such hybrids (if they can even be created as embryos in the first place) to be born with certain undesirable traits that make it difficult or impossible for them to reproduce.
With that in mind, it seems that we can think of the classic alien (i.e. non queen variety) as such a hybrid without contradicting anything already established in the main films (and possibly the spinoffs too, I haven't seen them all). The classic alien has so far been portrayed in the films as something akin to a sexually immature worker ant, which we can think of as a xenomorph lacking the ability to reproduce because of some genetic mutation. Its also been portrayed as an organism with traits that are borrowed from both its parent species, which is exactly what you'd expect from a hybrid.
The reason this is interesting is that opens up a huge new creative area! If the aliens we've seen so far represent such hybrids, then besides the queen we haven't actually seen any other "pure" aliens. And assuming the queen from the second film represents a sexually mature xenomorph of one gender, what does a mature xenomorph of another gender look like? I say "another" because we could imagine more than two genders! And they have to be sufficiently different from one another in order to be consistent with what we already know about the queen's side of the reproductive cycle. In other words we could imagine a xenomorph that has special organs that bond to the face huggers and, adding its own genetic cargo, houses the resulting embryo within a womb, for example, eventually giving birth. Or we could imagine something different from a mammalian womb such as an egg, or a pouch or something far wilder and more outlandish. We could also imagine that creatures of this sex look very very different from a queen alien, so much that they may not even appear to be members of the same species on first inspection. For example maybe one would want to design them as something beautiful and benevolent, with alien qualities on the completely opposite side of the spectrum as the classic xenomorph, or maybe not.
The point is this would open up a huge number of interesting possibilities, and as I'm not a writer I can only hope that such possibilities would also extend themselves to new and interesting stories. Not necessarily stories that are a prequel to Alien, though they could be. The question is: are these stories that fans of the franchise would be interested in hearing? What do you guys think?
