Warning: spoilers ahead for Alien #3!
Marvel's new futuristic corporation Weyland-Yutani in its study of the Xenomorph species. While the story takes place almost eighty years after the events of the first movie, famously starring Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley, fans could be forgiven for believing that mankind’s first encounter with the bloodthirsty aliens was much more recent.
As Weyland-Yutani has been capturing and studying the apex predators for decades at this point, one would think that the corporation would have developed countermeasures to ensure that the Xenomorphs were robbed of every possible advantage in the event of escape. Despite this, human spaceships and space stations still suffer from a critical design flaw that allows the Xenomorphs to dominate the dark, claustrophobic environments humanity occupies in the final frontier.
In Alien #3 by writer Phillip Kennedy Johnson and artist Salvador Larroca, former Weyland-Yutani employee Gabriel Cruz has boarded the Epsilon Space Station as it plummets from orbit to recover Weyland-Yutani’s most prized asset: the embryo for the genetically modified Alpha Xenomorph. As Cruz and his colonial marine escort board the station, they find that it is already infested with Xenomorphs, and that they have made short work of the station’s security measures. And when the team attempt to destroy a pair of Xenomorphs, the creatures make a quick escape through the station’s suspended ceiling, revealing a fatal flaw in the design and construction of Epsilon Station, and indeed, most human spacecraft seen throughout the Alien franchise.
As seen in Alien #3, Epsilon Station features false ceilings that can be easily opened to access the vents and other internal ship components. In the fiction of the Alien franchise, this style of construction is favored by most human ships shown so far, due to the ease of access it provides for maintenance, especially on ships and stations manned by a small crew. As a result, rooms on most ships are connected through a sprawling system of vents and tunnels hidden just behind the apparent surface. While this eases the amount of work engineers must undertake to keep the ships functional, the unparalleled access to every area of the ship provides a huge advantage to Xenomorphs when they ultimately get loose on human ships.
The Xenomorphs of the Alien franchise are nothing if not incredibly agile and limber. As ambush predators, their agility and stealth capabilities allow them to exploit humanity’s design oversight when it comes to their starships. Xenomorphs can not only rapidly navigate structures like Epsilon Station, but also vanish with little trace until they're ready to kill again. Setting up barricades and bulkheads to cut off the alien advance is worthless if the Xenomorphs can just access the ceiling and circumvent hallways and doors altogether. In Alien #3, Cruz and his men barely manage to hit the Xenomorphs before they quickly spring up and escape through the ceiling. Despite having studied these creatures for decades, and Epsilon Station's remit to experiment with the most dangerous form of the species ever, Weyland-Yutani still hasn't bothered to construct a station that's anything other than a Xenomorph's ideal hunting ground.
For a megacorporation with interests in bioweapons and construction, Weyland-Yutani’s longstanding design oversight is inexcusable, and downright stupid given the corporation's grand plans for the Xenomorphs and near unlimited resources to correct this flaw on their installations and ships. While not every ship can be alien-proofed, Epsilon Station certainly should have been, and Cruz's team are now paying the price for Weyland-Yutani's lack of caution. Marvel’s Alien series proves yet again that the megacorporation’s shortsightedness is part of what makes the Xenomorph threat so incredibly dangerous to humanity.
