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Lore'd to Death
Join me, your host, as I dig deep into the lore of your favourite games, movies, and more to find answers to the questions that you didn't know you had!
If you have any suggestions, want to be a guest, or just want to say hello, send me a message at loredtodeath@gmail.com or @LoredtoDeath on social media.
Lore'd to Death
The Weyland-Yutani Corporation [Alien]
This week we take a look into the mega-corporation that seems to have its hands in everything that Ellen Ripley does-- the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. Just what is "the company" and how did they get to where they are? We answer all of these questions in this deep dive from its founding all the way to its dismantling in this week's spooky episode.
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Hey there, welcome to the Lore’d to Death podcast– a deep dive into the lore of your favourite games, movies, shows, and more! My name is Brett, and today I would like to welcome the spooky season by going into one of my favourite movie universes ever, which would be the Alien series. Say what you want about the sequels (which I still enjoy for the most part), I think that the original 1979’s Alien is a masterclass in worldbuilding and one of the best horror movies out there. It might even be my favourite, but maybe that’s because I’m currently rewatching them all with my wife and it’s exciting to see these movies through the lens of someone watching them for the first time. And what better way to dive into this universe than to talk about the reason why everything always goes wrong: The Weyland-Yutani Corporation, otherwise known as “The Company.”
Before we started I just wanted to ask that you rate this podcast 5 stars wherever you’re listening to it, or like and subscribe if you’re on Youtube. The only way I know that you’re enjoying the content I’m making is if you let me know! So rate the show, leave a comment, or send an email to loredtodeath@gmail.com to suggest an episode, or just say hi! So with that out of the way, let’s get on with the episode.
And as a side note, I think it goes without saying that this episode will contain spoilers for parts of every movie, as far as I’m concerned. We will be mentioning certain events and exploring some characters that appear in the movies, which is likely to spoil them, including the prequels. I think it’s also worth saying that we’re going to be going based on Ridley Scott’s canon, which does not include the Alien vs. Predator movies. I understand that there’s some controversy about whether or not those movies are within the canon of both the Alien and Predator universes respectively, and I, personally, do not believe that they exist in either. I like to think of it as its own separate universe where both Aliens and Predators exist, but it’s like an alternate reality. Not to get too deep into the weeds, but technically xenomorphs exist in the Predator universe, but there’s nothing to indicate that Predators exist in the Alien universe which means, to me, that the predator universe is also like another reality that exists separately from Alien canon. I might catch some flak for that, and that’s perfectly fine. But I wanted to clear up what we’re using as established canon and where I’m getting my sources, and that’s going to be strictly from the Alien movies, including Prometheus and Covenant because as much as people hate those movies, they give a lot of information as to the beginnings of the Company. So with all of that out of the way, let’s get into the episode.
Weyland-Yutani is one of the many mega-corporations that run the human colonies outside of Earth’s solar system. This board of companies are part of the ECA, or Extrasolar Colonisation Administration, which is basically an administration that’s concerned with continuing human colonisation of new planets and has a set of rules and guidelines to be able to do so. Like I mentioned, they are one of many companies who do this, but they are considered to be the largest. And despite taking care of extrasolar colonisation, they do have a large presence and offices on Earth in Tokyo and San Francisco, as well as on the Moon in the Sea of Tranquility and in the Epsilon Reticuli System on the planet Thedus, which is a short 59 lightyear jump away from Earth.
And that’s all great, but what is Weyland Yutani, and why are we talking about them today? And I think to answer that question, we’re going to need to go back to the beginning. Back before they were the Weyland Yutani Corporation, and before the original movie was set in 2122. We’re going to hop back to the year 1990 and talk about the origins of the company starting with Sir Peter Weyland.
Sir Peter Weyland was born on October 1st, 1990 in Mumbai, India. His parents were both brilliant, his father being a self-taught software engineer, and his mother being an Oxford educated professor of Comparative Mythology, so it was only natural that their son Peter would be a visionary himself. And having brilliance in the family, they were safely in the upper class which meant that Peter had basically everything at his disposal to become great. He inherited his father’s drive to learn and create, being self-taught in the tech industry, and his mother’s worldly views and love for mythology, growing up with tales of Olympians which would inspire his later works.
By the age of 14, in 2004, Peter had already registered over a dozen patents. Namely among them, he was granted a patent for a synthetic trachea constructed entirely of synthetically-engineered stem cells. I don’t think that I need to explain how insane it is that he was creating with that much complexity at age fourteen. Peter was clearly a brilliant young man, and his only limiting factor to his ambition was his ability to see these projects through to their end phase, being limited by the equipment that was available to him. So he worked to create his own corporation with which he could fund his endeavours. And on October 11th, 2012, he was able to establish Weyland Corporation to do so.
Three short years later in 2015, Peter was able to make his first billion thanks to the Weyland Corporation’s efforts. They created a renewable energy source in the Earth’s orbit using solar arrays which were set up in such a way that they were able to imitate a perpetual summer solstice, which means that they were able to perpetually absorb as much energy as physically possible. This wasn’t only important because of the money Peter made off of it, or the impact to climate change, but it was important because this was his first foray into a space-related venture and would set the stage for the Weyland Corporation’s future. But it was also extremely profitable and because of the positive impact that it had on the climate, he was able to secure more funding for the corporation. In 2016, he was able to go even further in his efforts to curb climate change by creating a localised synthetic atmosphere over the polar ice caps to stop them from melting, effectively ending the climate crisis. It’s no exaggeration to say that he was a saviour to mankind at this point, and one of the benefits to such a title was that he became one of the youngest people ever knighted by the age of 26, granting him the title of Sir Peter Weyland. In the subsequent year of 2017, he was granted a Nobel Prize for his work on the polar ice caps.
These two projects, the renewable power and saving the polar ice caps, were enough to skyrocket him and his corporation into being one of the most profitable companies in the world. Using the success from these projects, he was able to acquire rights to technologies developed by NASA’s groundbreaking (but poorly funded) Project Prometheus later on in 2017. The point of project Prometheus was to develop a nuclear-powered system for long-duration space missions, and Sir Peter was able to use this to make trips to Jupiter’s moon, Europa, with the JIMO project. JIMO stands for Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, and was a proposed NASA spacecraft designed to explore Europa where an ocean of liquid was found and thought to contain alien life, as you could reasonably conclude for pretty well any planet with oceanic mass.
Now, I don’t want to blow your mind here, but Project Prometheus and JIMO are actual NASA initiatives going back to 2003. They are real projects that are publicly available to read about, and I think that they are really interesting. I wanted to include more here about JIMO, because I think that it’s such a cool concept, but we don’t really have to talk about it any more than was mentioned and I think that going into the weeds about it would be a bit misguided. However, I would encourage you to go look it up and read about what their plans were for these projects, because if they were properly funded and realised they could have changed the face of space exploration as we know it. And Sir Peter Weyland was able to take both of these initiatives and give them basically endless funding. Because of this, they were able to prove the existence of simple life in Europa’s ocean, which kickstarted a space race.
And, while focussing on space, the corporation was able to take a couple of drastic turns over the next 6 years. In 2023, Sir Peter was awarded another Nobel prize in Medicine for curing major cancers. Yup, he cured cancer. What can’t this man do? In the same year, Sir Peter was invited to do a TED Talk where he clarified his vision for the future of the company, having already effectively saved the world and cured cancer. In this TED Talk he set the groundwork for the next 50 years of the company, coining the tagline “Building Better Worlds”.
In the following year, Weyland had created a prototype android which was designed to mimic the human form in just about every way. Even in the earlier models, it was hard to distinguish these androids from human beings and there had been plenty of times when someone didn’t know that they were an android until explicitly told so. Honestly, that’s terrifying… but really cool at the same time. The first android model was named David, and the first model was reserved for Sir Peter as a stand-in for his son. However, there were a few issues with this first model that were not ironed out, whether intentionally or not. And the biggest was that this android was capable of emotion and creative abilities not present in future models. Having the ability to emote was dangerous because, in David’s first interaction with Sir Peter, he has the emotional capacity to reason, “why should I serve you if I, myself, am going to live forever?” which ultimately meant that he was a self-serving being. There was something wrong in his programming that made him begrudgingly subservient to the humans ordering him around, but he ultimately did what he thought served him best, which included betraying humans and… well… eventually committing a genocide for the sake of “creation”.
Now, all of that is just to say that Weyland had created an android line that was supposed to mimic humans and assist them in scenarios where humans would be less capable. However, there was a Japanese company, named Yutani, who attempted to sue Weyland for what I can assume was patent infringement. They seemed to be working on a similar model at the time, and Weyland used the same technology that they had been working on to create David. I wouldn’t be surprised if Weyland had stolen the technology, honestly. They were, at this time, the largest corporation in the world, and they could do basically whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted to do it. This lawsuit would go on for several years, but eventually Weyland Corporation would win the suit against Yutani in December of 2029.
Just before that in 2026, Weyland acquired a company named Genentech. This is a very important event, even if pretty much every source glosses over it as just another corporate acquisition. Genentech bolstered Weyland’s biotech portion of their company, which is going to come into play in a bit. But just remember that this is when they really started to go hard into biotech and, specifically, bioweapons. Through the acquisition of Genentech, they were also able to privatise NASA’s Kepler program, which was designed to scour the Milky Way galaxy for habitable planets. Once again, Weyland was able to properly fund one of NASA’s initiatives to find possible life and other planets for humans to live on in the future. And within one year of the acquisition, was able to find over 4,000 bio-compatible planets (4,326 to be exact).
Over the next several years, Weyland would acquire a number of companies including Boeing, Northrop Grumman, BAR Systems, and Lockheed Martin. All of these acquisitions were to bolster their defence and aerospace capabilities as they prepared to aim for the stars and head to remote planets.
There’s nothing to say for the next 50 years or so, but we do know that humanity was capable of faster-than-light travel as of the year 2034. Whether or not this was because of Weyland Corporation or not, I’m not entirely sure. I would have to imagine that, being the largest corporation in the world along with their habit of groundbreaking ventures in space-related shenanigans, that they were probably the ones to figure it out. Sir Peter Weyland also had a public library erected in his name in Washington, DC in the year 2065. Huge jump, I know. And then that brings us up to speed on the happenings in Weyland Corporation until the events of Prometheus, where, in 2089, two doctors, Elizabeth Shaw and Charles Holloway, discovered a star map in a Scottish cave which matched others found in other parts of the world, prompting the Prometheus expedition.
At this point, Sir Peter Weyland’s health was in decline, as you can imagine from someone who is about 100 years old. After the star map was found in Scotland and it was theorised that these maps were left by an ancient civilization, the ones who potentially created humans, Weyland started to fund the creation of the Prometheus vessel which would follow the map to the distant moon LV-223 to see out the expedition. We can glean two things from this venture: one is that, with the decline of his health, Sir Peter was looking for either some sort of meaning to his life in trying to find the answer of “where did we come from”, or he was trying to find some means of immortality in these “Engineers” who were seemingly able to create life and plant it on another planet. The other is that this expedition cost him more than maybe he thought it would, because it’s said that the corporation was in ruins by the time Prometheus was set to launch.
I wish that we had more information on that little tidbit there, that the company was left in ruin, because it doesn’t really make sense to me how the largest corporation in the history of the world was somehow left destitute by the funding of one mission. Faster-than-light travel was discovered some 55 years before this point, so it’s not like this is the first time that anyone had travelled to another planet. Or, I would assume that, at least, given that the Prometheus vessel was equipped with cryo pods which everyone on board was seemingly pretty familiar with at that point. You don’t just get familiar with the idea of a cryo pod on its maiden voyage.
If anyone has any more information on this point that I somehow missed (and trust me, I looked far and wide) then I would love to hear from you! Otherwise my only theory is that the corporation was left in ruin because Sir Peter Weyland essentially faked his death so that he could go on the Prometheus, which was under the command of his biological daughter, Meredith Vickers. I want to get back to her in a second, but let’s finish this thought first. It was said that Sir Peter Weyland died in an accident on a low-gravity space station orbiting Mars, when in reality he was put into cryo-stasis aboard the Prometheus so he could go on this adventure to potentially meet his creators. And the only ones who knew that he was aboard were his aforementioned daughter and David, the synthetic human who he created all those years ago. I’m not sure if it’s the same David from back then but it’s the same model, at the very least. And after his supposed death, his daughter was left to control Weyland Corporation. It’s entirely possible that after his “death”, the corporation simply lost faith in their leadership and started to disassemble itself from the inside out. Think about it– Sir Peter Weyland wasn’t just a figurehead. He wasn’t just some billionaire who decided to start a corporation to line his pockets. He was a brilliant mind who built the corporation from the ground up with his groundbreaking inventions. He was the bread and butter, the meat and bones of this corporation, and it might just be that, without him in the picture, it simply just started to fall apart.
However, I’m not really sure about that one. Again, if anyone knows more about what happened here, I would love to know. I did say that I wanted to get back to Meredith Vickers, and I think that now is as good a time as any to do so. I wondered, myself, why she would have a different surname if she were Sir Peter Weyland’s daughter, and there are a couple of different theories regarding that.
The first is that, unbeknownst to us, she was married at one point. That’s the easiest way to explain why she has a different surname. There’s no indication that she was married in the film, but that doesn’t mean that she wasn’t necessarily, although with the amount of painstaking detail packed into the Alien movies for the sake of worldbuilding, I think that they would have included something like a ring to indicate this fact to us without explicitly stating it.
The second is that her relationship with her father was so bad that she purposefully went and changed her surname out of spite. Given what we see in Prometheus, I think that this is a fairly likely scenario. We know that Sir Peter was deeply affectionate towards David, the android that he considered his son, and being a prolific inventor it makes sense that he would have genuinely treated his creations like his own children. And, unfortunately, I could see him giving more affection towards his mechanical creations than his biological ones. The fact that he gave so much attention to his android while his daughter was probably left to be raised with someone else would definitely lead to some resentment later down the line. That, or, when he left her the company to run by herself, she felt like it was a curse instead of a gift and that led to the animosity. What I’m trying to say is that Sir Peter wasn’t exactly a great father, and those feelings of resentment could have caused Meredith to change her last name so that she could distance herself from her father as much as possible.
The last one is a bit out there, and while it makes some amount of sense, I’m not sure that I buy it. And that’s that Meredith Vickers was actually an android, and that either Meredith Vickers was potentially just the name or delineation of her make and model. We know that female-presenting androids existed alongside the scruffy male androids that we see, and we also never hear of Sir Peter having a partner at any point that he would have had a child with. We assume that she was his biological daughter because of how she calls him father, but the way that she says it might lead people to believe that saying father through her teeth was a sort of jab at him being her creator instead of a biological father. We know that Sir Peter liked to think of his androids as his children, as was evident with David, and it’s entirely possible that he tried to get them to call him father to strengthen that bond. Again, I’m not sure if I buy this theory, but I do think that it adds a bit of flavour to Sir Peter in the way that having only androids for children meant that he was likely without a partner for his entire life since he dedicated himself entirely to his work. Really, this is neither here nor there but I just wanted to bring up the question of, “why does she have a different surname” because it’s something that I’ve wondered for a while and it doesn’t really seem like there’s a concrete answer there. I’d love to hear what you think, though!
Now, we all know how the Prometheus venture ended. Or, I would assume so since you clicked on this episode. Sir Peter Weyland and his daughter, Meredith Vickers, met their end at the hands of the Engineer, which left Weyland-Yutani corporation without proper leadership. After all, Meredith Vickers was the one who was supposed to be running the show. Once again, I wish I knew who it was that ended up taking over for the Weyland family after their death, but as far as I know there’s nothing out there telling us that. But what we do know is that some time in the late 21st century, Weyland Corporation merged with Yutani Corporation, the same ones that they were in a lawsuit with for several years over the android line David. This merging would bring us to familiar territory in which they are renamed the Weyland-Yutani Corporation.
This brings us back to… I was going to say modern day, but that’s not true in any sense of the phrase. What I mean is that brings us up to date with the first Alien movie, which takes place in the year 2122, which is quite a jump once again. At this point, you might be wondering, “what’s so bad about the company?” which is a fair and reasonable conclusion at this point in time. Aside from Sir Peter Weyland’s suicidal mission to find the Engineers aboard the Prometheus, it seems like Weyland Corporation was relatively benevolent. They saved the world not once, but twice, from and essentially ended the threat of global warming, cured major forms of cancer, created a series of androids which would help humans in a way that wasn’t trying to replace them, but rather take over tasks that are better suited for someone who can’t get hurt or needs the capability to be calculating and reasonable in high-stress situations or… can’t die of old age. All of the above makes them great for space exploration, because they can run a ship while it’s going faster-than-light and the crew is in cryo-stasis and can be counted on to wake them up in an emergency or when they have arrived at their destination. Again, it really seems like they’re the good guys, and if it weren’t for their funding, who knows if humanity would be among the stars at this point.
After the merge, Weyland-Yutani became responsible for heading human colonisation outside of Earth. This is kind of where they’re at when we come to the events of Alien. However, it’s not being run by Sir Peter Weyland, obviously, since he died on the Prometheus mission. It was likely being run by some corporate bigwig whose only concern was how to create a pile of gold so large that dragons might be forced to come into existence to hoard it. And, once again, we come to the year 2122 where the events of Alien happen.
Aboard the Nostromo, a Weyland-Yutani owned cargo hauler, their onboard computer “MU-TH-UR” received a distress beacon from a planetoid called Archeron in the Zeta II Reticuli system, and the crew was prematurely awoken from their cryo-stasis to investigate. As we know, Executive Officer Kane was attacked by a parasitic life form (which we would come to know as a facehugger) and impregnated with an Alien. He was taken back to the medical bay where the Alien burst out of his chest and began running amok on the vessel, slowly killing everyone in less than an Earth day’s time.
During this crisis, MU-TH-UR and the crew’s android, Ash, were given executive orders from Weyland-Yutani to execute special order 66– I mean 937 which read, “Priority one - insure return of organism for analysis - all other considerations secondary - crew expendable.” And with this simple message, you start to understand what the company’s motivations are. The company received the logs from Nostromo and read that there was an alien lifeform aboard the ship that was hostile without prejudice and killing the crew off one by one. Instead of attempting to send a rescue team or give any advice as to what they should do in order to ensure their survival, they told Ash to make sure that the ship made its way back to a Weyland-Yutani station with the Xenomorph alive by any means necessary. I think the biggest indication of their intent was in the last line where it simply says, “crew expendable.”
Ultimately, we know that the fate of the Nostromo was that it was destroyed by Ellen Ripley in an attempt to save her own life and kill the Xenomorph despite Ash’s best efforts to keep it alive. But, why did Weyland-Yutani want a hostile alien species to begin with? What could they possibly gain by having their entire living crew murdered in exchange for having this alien in their hands for testing? And the answer goes way back to the year 2026 when Weyland Corporation obtained Genentech which became their biotech division. Essentially, Weyland-Yutani wanted to obtain the alien so that they could take it apart and put it back together in an effort to understand it so that they could turn it into a bioweapon. Simply put, war never changes– oh wait, wrong series again. War never ceases to exist, which means that there’s always going to be someone or some nation who is looking for a means to have the upper hand in the event of a war. Having a hyper violent, resilient, and deadly alien on your side would certainly tip the scales in your favour, and could potentially replace human militaries in some instances if they could be controlled, which is “good for humans” since they wouldn’t be the ones on the front lines. But, hell, just use androids at that point.
After Ash and MU-TH-UR failed to contain the Xenomorph and capture it, and while Ripley was in cryo-stasis on her way (hopefully) back to Earth, the company decided to send out a team to the Zeta Reticuli system where it all happened. They purchased a decommissioned trading and manufacturing spaceport in the system in 2137, which was formerly owned by the Seegson corporation, called the Sevastopol station. It seems that they were on high alert after the Nostromo incident and they were still eager to get their hands on a Xenomorph, and so they continued to scan the system to see if there were any more out there.
Luckily for them, and not so lucky for the folks at Sevastopol, there were Xenomorphs living in the lower areas of the station. So, basically, they purchased this station in an effort to set up a research facility where they could capture and examine the Xenomorphs, which they did. And because they just happened to find alien life there, they were able to issue another special order to the station’s AI, APOLLO, which was code 939 and read, "Priority one - Protect specimen. - Maintain station quarantine. - Disallow communications.” which basically gave them the power to disallow all outside communications from the station and stop any incoming or outgoing traffic, leaving them by themselves to extract as much information on the Xenomorphs as they could without their existence becoming public knowledge. The other part of this special order was that the station’s androids, the Working Joes, were sent to kill each and every human inhabitant on the station in order to maintain the quarantine. Because, of course, any of the humans could have been infected, which meant that killing them was the best option to “stop an outbreak”. Eventually, the station’s orbital stabilisers were damaged by a nearby explosion, which caused the station to fall into the orbit of the nearby planet, burning the evidence and all of the Xenomorphs along with it much to the company’s chagrin. This was the events of Alien: Isolation.
Then we fast-forward a few years to 2179 where we have the events of Aliens. A human colony was set up by Weyland-Yutani on Archeron, the planetoid which sent the distress signal from the first encounter with Xenomorphs. The colonists eventually found the derelict spacecraft and discovered thousands of Xenomorph eggs, which, of course, began to hatch and facehuggers started impregnating the colonist population. But, not before a research station could be set up where they captured and suspended several facehuggers for experimentation. Soon after, the company lost all contact with the colony.
Since she was the only survivor of a Xenomorph attack, Weyland-Yutani hired Ripley to go to the station with a group of military personnel to advise them on how to deal with the Xenomorphs. Ripley was bribed by Jr. Executive Carter Burke with the promise of being able to live a life without worry when they came back from the expedition. Burke joined them as well so that they had a company representative on the mission since they were the ones funding it. He did a great job of pretending to be on their team while he was actually only there to hatch a scheme to capture one of the specimens and bring it back to Weyland-Yutani.
So, in reality, he was working against the marines and Ripley who were solely there to assess the damage done to the installation, find any survivors, and potentially eliminate any further threat to the colony. It’s later revealed that his instructions were to get two facehuggers from the research lab and return them to the company. Ripley learns this from the android on mission with them, Bishop, and confronts Burke and tries to warn him of the dangers of any of these aliens escaping. She also learned that Burke was personally responsible for the Xenomorphs being in the facility in the first place which he boils down to “a bad call” instead of taking responsibility for the fact that he is almost single handedly the reason why all of these people died. Needless to say, Burke sucks, but he was in the position that he was in because of his ruthless behaviour. He was described by others as “executive material” and the company had made note of his ability to manipulate others into doing his dirty work and his loyalty to company initiatives.
So Burke was there to make sure that the company finally got their hands on a Xenomorph, which was eventually found out by the rest of the crew while they were being attacked by dozens of Xenomorphs. So when it was suggested, after taking massive casualties, that they were going to return to their starship and nuke the station from orbit to stop an outbreak of Xenomorphs, Burke was the first one to attempt to take command and stop this from happening, citing his reasoning as saving the millions of dollars that were funnelled into the station, which was a load of crap. Thankfully, Burke was killed by a Xenomorph and the hopes of him bringing back a specimen was lost. And while Ripley survived along with a child that they found on the station named Newt, as well as the android Lance Bishop and one of the marines Corporal Hicks, managed to escape the station before it was nuked.
You would think that this might be the end of it, but a facehugger managed to stow away on their ship and, while they were in cryo-stasis, caused an electrical fire while it was shooting acid at the cryo-pods in an attempt to get to the juicy humans inside. However, it only caused a fire and didn’t get to have a tasty treat. Instead, the electrical fire caused the pod-bay to separate from the rest of the vessel in an attempt to save the crew. They crash landed into the ocean of the planet below where Hicks’ pod was impaled by the wreckage, killing him, and Newt’s pod was punctured and she drowned. Bishop was already in pieces, so his status didn’t change much, but Ripley was able to survive relatively unharmed. And the facehugger was able to stow itself away and stay safe, biding its time until it could implant itself on someone.
The planet they crashed on was an old correctional facility on a planet called Fiorina 161. This facility also functioned as a mineral ore refinery, although it had been largely abandoned. After the dissolution of most of its prisoner population, only a fringe group of religious fanatics requested to stay at the facility, leaving it with 22 prisoners and 3 custodial staffers to “keep the pilot light on” as they said. Hilariously, this facility was also owned by Weyland-Yutani, which just goes to show how large of a company they are that they just happen to be everywhere. They’re like the Tatooine of the Alien universe– everything always comes back to it, even when we thought we were rid of it.
The facehugger who was stowed away in the vessel ended up latching itself onto a dog who lived at the facility named Spike. This, of course, triggered what would ultimately end up with all of the prisoners dying. But, before that, Weyland-Yutani caught wind of the fact that there was now a Xenomorph running around their facility because not only was the facility owned by them, and all of the happenings would be reported back to them, but the ship that Ripley arrived on was also a Weyland-Yutani build. This meant that they knew something had happened which caused the pods to eject and land on the facility, and they knew that Ripley (along with the potential of a Xenomorph) was there as well.
The facility is instructed by Weyland-Yutani, in the first executive message that the staff had gotten since the facility was effectively shut down, that they were to take good care of Ripley and keep her in the infirmary until a rescue team was able to arrive. Unfortunately for them, by the time they were able to get there, pretty well all of the prisoners were dead along with Xenomorph. Ripley, who was begrudgingly alive at this point, was confronted by the company’s rescue team who was led by Bishop II, a newer (or at least another) model of the android who helped her escape Archeron.
Bishop II attempted to talk Ripley down from the ledge (quite literally) so that they could extract the queen embryo from her abdomen and save her life. Or, at least that’s how they tried to spin it. Obviously, all they wanted was the Xenomorph queen and they didn’t care whether or not Ripley survived the procedure or not. Ripley instead chose to sacrifice herself in order to stop the queen from ever being born, and to stop the company from getting their hands on her. And, I just wanted to get this off my chest; you can complain about this series of events, having Ripley’s journey end like this after all she went through, but you have to admit that this was the right call from her end. It might seem a bit anticlimactic or maybe Ripley should have tried to do something to get it out of her chest herself and try to save the day once again, but you have to remember that Ripley never wanted to save the day. She was pulled into a few really awful situations mostly by coincidence, and she might be the only person outside of the company that understands the ramifications of Weyland-Yutani getting their hands on not only a Xenomorph, but a queen at that. Anyways, I know that people have a lot of complaints about the third instalment in the series, and I totally hear that as someone who thinks that it took a turn for the worst, but I think that the ending makes sense for what it is.
After all of this hullabaloo, the prison was shut down indefinitely, having no more use to the company since all of the prisoners who requested to keep it running were dead, and there weren’t any Xenomorphs for them to collect. However, the company wasn’t going to stop there. They had one more lead that might get them the specimen that they have been searching the last 60 years or so to find. The rescue team, led by Bishop II, attempted to find the USS Solaco, the ship that Ripley and co were ejected from. Their goal was to find the ship and try to figure out where it picked up the facehugger that killed the prisoners on Fiorina 161.
Of course, it led them back to Archeron to the ruins of the Hadley’s Hope colony that had been blown up by Ripley, Bishop and Hicks. They set up a research facility there in the hopes that some of the Xenomorphs had survived the explosions and they could collect and experiment on them.
After this point, though, we’re not exactly sure what happened. It seems like Ripley might have finally killed off all of the aliens, since there were no more incidents recorded outside of the trilogy. You can go into more of the games and further into Alien: Resurrection to get some answers, but whether or not those are considered canon are up for debate. I, personally, included some of the lore of Alien: Isolation because I think that it fits within the canon without disrupting anything from the movies.
The game Alien: Colonial Marines expands on some of the lore of Hadley’s Hope and Archeron, as well as going into how the electrical fire happened on the Solaco that caused the pods to be ejected onto Fiorina 161, but I don’t really like how they dealt with it as they make it out to be a firefight within the pod bay in an attempt to get a facehugger off of Ripley’s face that actually caused the fire and… there was no evidence that this was the case. If you’re going strictly off of Alien 3, there weren’t any bullet holes or any sign of struggle, just some acid holes from the alien.
If you go into the lore given in Alien: Resurrection, which is the last film chronologically in the series as of writing this, then we learn the fate of Weyland-Yutani 200 years in the future. Allegedly, they were bought out by Wal-Mart after putting so much of their resources into ventures that had net-zero or lost gains. And, I didn’t want to include this just because of that line. I don’t like the idea that the most profitable, influential company in the galaxy was just bought out by a chain grocery store, no matter how funny I think it is. And you might wonder, what did Wal-Mart do with all of the R&D, weapons divisions, and so on and so forth that Weyland-Yutani was built on? And the answer is apparently all of that was given over to what was called the United Systems Military, which was exactly what it sounded like– a military that presides over the entirety of human colonies across all systems. I like the idea that there was one cohesive military force that took over, but I don’t care for much else that this film has to offer in terms of wrapping up the story of Weyland-Yutani.
I feel like, with all that we were given in the other films, they should have had a better end. I think that they should have eventually gotten their hands on Xenomorphs and actually done something with them that created another threat. There was apparently a scrapped movie idea that did go that route. The company had started breeding xenomorphs as bioweapons, and the key art had them wearing these headsets that were made to control them. They were basically big VR headsets that they strapped to the Xenomorphs, and they were controlled by a dude who was also wearing one of these headsets; like it was something like virtual or augmented reality where they were able to see through the eyes of the Xenomorphs and control their actions somehow. I think the idea was that the company managed to make an army of Xenomorphs that were under human control, but they managed to take off the headset or unbind themselves from the restraints put on them to stop them from killing their owners and that was the conflict. I think I would have preferred that, honestly, and I think that would have been a reasonable and conclusive end for the company within that storyline. I think it could have gone in a way that, after the fallout of having their Xenomorph army go rogue, the company was basically sued into oblivion for causing so much harm to human colonies and letting loose a potential threat to humanity as a whole by breeding these things. But, that’s just a theory. There’s nothing substantial in this as it’s all based on concept art for a scrapped movie.
Either way, the United Systems Military from Alien: Resurrection allegedly kept the Xenomorph program going after they acquired its R&D and weapons divisions, but that’s a whole other beast that I’m not going to tackle. Suffice it to say, that was the whole story of Weyland-Yutani as of writing this episode. To sum it up, Weyland-Yutani started off as just Weyland Corporation, which was built upon helping people and saving humanity. They cured cancer, stopped global warming, and gave us the ability to travel space and colonise other planets. It seems like they were a fairly benevolent company, led by a visionary who just wanted to create. I’m not saying that Sir Peter Weyland was a saint by any means, but I do feel like the company started with good intentions. Then, after their founder and his daughter’s death, the company was taken over and merged with a Japanese company, Yutani, to create the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. After the Nostromo incident where they confirmed the existence of a hostile alien species, the company seemed dead set on finding a way to capture and exploit the species and it was that fixation which would likely lead to their downfall.
I wish that I had more information on what the company did after the events of Alien 3, or even what happened when the founder died because I want to know who took over and how the company became basically an evil empire. But, alas, we don’t know any more for now. I believe that there are other sequels in the works for both games and movies, so my hopes are that we get some more backstory on the company that fits nicely into the lore. I would love that. But until then, what do you think? Do you think that the company truly started with good intentions, or do you think that there was always something nefarious happening under the surface? Or what do you think about the scrapped sequel where we could have gotten to see Xenomorphs being controlled by humans for the sake of warfare?
You can find us online @loredtodeath on your favourite social media apps, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We’re also on Youtube, so if you head over there and hit subscribe I would really appreciate it. If you have any questions or suggestions for topics, please send me a message wherever you can find me or at loredtodeath@gmail.com. If you’re using the Spotify app, there’s a comment section attached to the episode where you can submit any questions or topics. If you’re on Youtube… you know what to do. I would love to hear from you!
And remember, if you encounter a hostile alien species in the deep of space and it starts murdering all of your friends and crewmates… don’t be scared… go up to the little fellow and give him a little smooch on the forehead and tell him that it will all be okay. Maybe he just needs a little compassion. I think that the entirety of the Alien series could have been avoided if Ripley cuddled with the Alien instead of running away. I’ll lore you to death in the next one. C’ya.
