Aliens: What If Carter Burke Lived? (Comic series coming in 2024)

[Johnny Utah]

What a great idea! Can this be moved to the comics forum please?
https://www.polygon.com/platform/am...jtoqBofEOCxOIhEnYdr1_EYLJWZE183scKR2Y31BRnAYo

 

[karamazov80]

I don't read a lot of contemporary comics but that is a really interesting idea. Not many characters you love to hate more than Burke.

 

[a-dev]

What are you talking about? He's really an OK guy.

 

[Johnny Utah]

I watched Aliens twice last week. Gonna watch it again soon.

 

[Mondragon]

Deleted scene was plenty satisfying.-



Other than seeing him kept alive as an impregnated human incubator for Xenos, don't really need to imagine what if he survives.
Though it could be pretty funny if he somehow conned the Xenos, BSd and negotiated his way out of it.

I'm content knowing they all got blown to h...!!

 

[ironwez20]

 

[Sachiel]

What If... Carter Burke survived, escaped LV-426, ended up in the Marvel Universe and met the heckin Guardians of the Galaxy?!

 

[ScoutingForToys]

Surely the question isn't "what if Burke survived Aliens?" But more, "what if Burke survived, sabotaged certain freezers on the trip home and made up whatever ******** he liked, whilst smuggling alien embryos back to Earth?
Otherwise he survives, goes into the freezers for the trip home (to face justice, or so Ripley thinks) but crash lands on Fury 161 with Ripley, Newt, Hicks and Bishop.
Alien 3 largely plays out as it always has. Whether Burke is killed in the crash or is killed by the Alien.
Or... survives along with Morse and we get...
WHAT IF BURKE SURVIVED ALIEN 3
I'm sceptical it would make for a very interesting story. Plays out as above. Unless they go for a redemption story for some reason and Burke turns into a hero.
I have a big soft spot for the Dark Horse Alien and Predator comics (and AvP comics as well of course) in the 90's but I have no interest in stuff Marvel is putting out.

 

[MeatHookGekko]

I'm sceptical it would make for a very interesting story. Plays out as above. Unless they go for a redemption story for some reason and Burke turns into a hero.
I have a big soft spot for the Dark Horse Alien and Predator comics (and AvP comics as well of course) in the 90's but I have no interest in stuff Marvel is putting out.

Going back to basic writing convention, the rule is always to use what was previously given to you from a legacy series ( i.e. Breaking Bad and the "Cinnabon" arc that turned into a major storyline in Better Call Saul )

- The Gorman/Vasquez grenade explosion might have caused some new dynamic to allow Burke to escape the alien chasing him in the last scene we have of him in the extended cut.
- Hudson's gear and rifle went down into the floor with him. Also the arc cutter/welder, Hudson's comtech tools and the motion tracker. Maybe Burke can retrieve a rifle.
- One of the sentry guns, IIRC, had a few rounds left in one of them in one of the hallways. That might be enough to justify a scene where Burke runs, ducks and the last few rounds kills an alien behind him. Or he uses it to breach a door somewhere.
- Vasquez talked about use "nerve gas cannisters" so some must have survived the dropship crash/APC crash.
- According to the Special Edition, Dietrich was also captured to be cocooned up and implanted. She was the Med Tech in the unit. The novelization gave her a slightly larger role in the book compared to the film. Maybe her pistol and incinerator survived.
- We technically never see Spunkmeyer killed. Maybe he never made it onto that drop ship before it crashed. ( This would be a pretty seamless pathway in some fashion, since Spunkmeyer is a copilot, hence he has the skills to fix up or pilot a colony escape ship. )

"Lived" period or lived for a short while longer? The reactor blows up. I don't see how you can survive that. Unless you have another ship. If Burke had another ship, why would he wait so long? Just to implant Ripley? The only ways to live through that explosion is to go very far underground ( it is a mining colony) or have another Bishop class android following the Sulaco quietly and with a med team, to pick Burke up before the reactor blows. A fair argument could be made that since colony reactors were likely unstable period, that the company might have designed "bunkers" to survive a blast. I know that's farfetched, but it's a plot workaround.

I've read a few of the comics back in the day. IIRC, one had Vasquez with a sister who was searching for her to find her body or to see if she survived.

The larger problem I see with all this is that the character with a real practical redemptive arc is Gorman. He's incompetent, but you can see he meant well. He wanted to do a good job. He didn't want his Marines to die. He was in over his head. A major problem with Burke is, if he survives, the fastest way to create a redemption arc for him is to have him help a child from an alien attack, which is just a repeat of Ripley/Newt. With Burke, he's entirely full of malice. He's passive aggressive. He has no redeeming qualities at all. How could Gorman survive instead? Right before the grenade goes off, the duct underneath him gives way. And Vasquez pushes in down into the gap before the explosion. Again, that's a pretty far stretch, but the entire concept of someone else surviving the colony and the reactor blast is already going off the rails anyway.

As I get older, I can sympathize with Gorman more. All of his behavior rooted itself from his perpetual fear. Fear of being seen as weak. Fear of making a decision ( which is a decision it itself). Fear of having to live with regret. Knowing you got good Marines killed even though there was no real malice involved. Think about the shame you have to feel when, at the end, Hicks decided to give Ripley the last rifle, instead of you. A civilian. Stripped of your command in the most visceral sense of it.

You can do something with Gorman. There's narrative juice there. Obviously his survival is a major stretch. But there's zero available with Burke. The real creative difference comes down to, IMHO, a sense of personal agency. Burke is a means to an end to drive the plot forward. He has zero agency. He cannot exist as a character without Ripley. Gorman however is a bit of a different story. As you get older, and as the audience gets older from the Aliens story, many people start to see that "failure", in concept, is much more complicated as a larger overall question of the human condition. Ripley failed her daughter, but it was different, the choices were different. She could contain her failure on a more personal internal level. Gorman's was much more inescapable.

I guess they really are going to milk this cow until it stops bleeding out nickels and dimes. Just some thoughts.

 

[ScoutingForToys]

Going back to basic writing convention, the rule is always to use what was previously given to you from a legacy series ( i.e. Breaking Bad and the "Cinnabon" arc that turned into a major storyline in Better Call Saul )

- The Gorman/Vasquez grenade explosion might have caused some new dynamic to allow Burke to escape the alien chasing him in the last scene we have of him in the extended cut.
- Hudson's gear and rifle went down into the floor with him. Also the arc cutter/welder, Hudson's comtech tools and the motion tracker. Maybe Burke can retrieve a rifle.
- One of the sentry guns, IIRC, had a few rounds left in one of them in one of the hallways. That might be enough to justify a scene where Burke runs, ducks and the last few rounds kills an alien behind him. Or he uses it to breach a door somewhere.
- Vasquez talked about use "nerve gas cannisters" so some must have survived the dropship crash/APC crash.
- According to the Special Edition, Dietrich was also captured to be cocooned up and implanted. She was the Med Tech in the unit. The novelization gave her a slightly larger role in the book compared to the film. Maybe her pistol and incinerator survived.
- We technically never see Spunkmeyer killed. Maybe he never made it onto that drop ship before it crashed. ( This would be a pretty seamless pathway in some fashion, since Spunkmeyer is a copilot, hence he has the skills to fix up or pilot a colony escape ship. )

"Lived" period or lived for a short while longer? The reactor blows up. I don't see how you can survive that. Unless you have another ship. If Burke had another ship, why would he wait so long? Just to implant Ripley? The only ways to live through that explosion is to go very far underground ( it is a mining colony) or have another Bishop class android following the Sulaco quietly and with a med team, to pick Burke up before the reactor blows. A fair argument could be made that since colony reactors were likely unstable period, that the company might have designed "bunkers" to survive a blast. I know that's farfetched, but it's a plot workaround.

I've read a few of the comics back in the day. IIRC, one had Vasquez with a sister who was searching for her to find her body or to see if she survived.

The larger problem I see with all this is that the character with a real practical redemptive arc is Gorman. He's incompetent, but you can see he meant well. He wanted to do a good job. He didn't want his Marines to die. He was in over his head. A major problem with Burke is, if he survives, the fastest way to create a redemption arc for him is to have him help a child from an alien attack, which is just a repeat of Ripley/Newt. With Burke, he's entirely full of malice. He's passive aggressive. He has no redeeming qualities at all. How could Gorman survive instead? Right before the grenade goes off, the duct underneath him gives way. And Vasquez pushes in down into the gap before the explosion. Again, that's a pretty far stretch, but the entire concept of someone else surviving the colony and the reactor blast is already going off the rails anyway.

As I get older, I can sympathize with Gorman more. All of his behavior rooted itself from his perpetual fear. Fear of being seen as weak. Fear of making a decision ( which is a decision it itself). Fear of having to live with regret. Knowing you got good Marines killed even though there was no real malice involved. Think about the shame you have to feel when, at the end, Hicks decided to give Ripley the last rifle, instead of you. A civilian. Stripped of your command in the most visceral sense of it.

You can do something with Gorman. There's narrative juice there. Obviously his survival is a major stretch. But there's zero available with Burke. The real creative difference comes down to, IMHO, a sense of personal agency. Burke is a means to an end to drive the plot forward. He has zero agency. He cannot exist as a character without Ripley. Gorman however is a bit of a different story. As you get older, and as the audience gets older from the Aliens story, many people start to see that "failure", in concept, is much more complicated as a larger overall question of the human condition. Ripley failed her daughter, but it was different, the choices were different. She could contain her failure on a more personal internal level. Gorman's was much more inescapable.

I guess they really are going to milk this cow until it stops bleeding out nickels and dimes. Just some thoughts.

Good post.
I agree, I'm struggling to see where this can go with Burke. Perhaps that's just a failing of my imagination but I suspect this will be a "and Burke was also there" type story.