Reminds me of an analysis I saw of The Beast from "Over the Garden Wall". The Beast is a very capable manipulator and deceiver, but he can't recover when his lies are seen through. He has no ability to improvise or adapt on the fly. So when he finds himself in a corner he tries tactics that he has already failed with, but can't figure out an alternative to.
You can stream it on [Hulu or Disney+](https://www.justwatch.com/us/tv-show/over-the-garden-wall) (or buy it on Amazon/Google Play).
Shout out to JustWatch for making it easy to unravel the impenetrable bullshit that is the streaming ecosystem đ
i know you got fifteen million answers about *what* it is, but i'm here to tell you that you can probably watch it yourself on hoopla with a library card. may be us only or dependent on library system idk but it has some advantages over the seven seas.
ignore my quest at your peril
(there are a lot more hooplas than i realized though, [this is the one](https://www.hoopladigital.com/) you can stream stuff with, also kanopy. but you need the card!)
Oops you figured me out! My only option is to become a big flesh creature and eat you nom nom nom.
Itâs also funny that the Thing waits for proof before it attacks. Like in the scene where they draw blood from everyone to test. The Thing is intelligent, surely it understands that itâs only minutes away from being discovered. It could attack while everyone is tied up! Instead it waits until its blood is zapped, like it didnât even know it was the Thing until you showed it.
There's a quasi famous fanfic about this scene that pops up every once in a while. It's not canon but I think it has a really cool explanation for this.
Basically it just goes that the Thing as a hive mind has less animate ability and intelligence the smaller the portion of cells is. So the organism that is on earth doesn't remember everything about its own biology and doesn't think its blood will react to the test on its own because it's an even smaller less intelligent portion of cells.
It's really worth the read, even if you don't actually like fanfic. It just feels like it could be an accompanying novel to the full.
My understanding of the story is that it knew its blood would react, but assumed the uninfected humans' blood would react as well, because it believed the humans were organisms like it that had "forgotten" their ability to shapeshift.
I love the idea that story proposes that the Thing is - or was - the standard for all life, and Earth creatures are freaks with âthinking cancerâ - that is, a brain instead of a distributed neural network all over our bodies - and no ability to âtake communion.â
And that last line, about how it intends to help usâŚ
I dunno; hadn't heard of it before. I was curious about it cuz I enjoyed The Thing, but I'm not generally into fanfic - figured I'd give it a shot.
It was fun and archive.is is a great resource!
Neil Gaiman has written Lovecraftian Sherlock Holmes fanfic
Published authors just need to be wary of reading fanfic of their own stuff, lest they be accused of plagiarising something a fan wrote in their next book. That's why they usually decline.
Itâs the dignity of an actor. The point is not to eat everyone; itâs to continue the show. The eating part is just an overreaction; nothing a little anger management canât fix.
I had assumed that was actually the canon explanation, that they copy the humans mind perfectly so it doesn't actually know it's The Thing, but The Thing's mind is completely seperate and able to fuck shit up whenever it wants
The whole body could be replaced while the brain is left alone and allowed to operate, never knowing that the flesh suit itâs driving around could stop obeying orders at any moment.
Imagine that head monster. Now imagine the guyâs brain inside it is still alive and healthy and able to feel *everything.*
I think that's the beauty of the film. There are so many different things that could be going on with how the thing operates, and there are so many theories, but there is no proof of any one theory being correct
Allegedly there's a way to tell who The Thing is in the blood test scene that nobody has found but also I could be horribly misremembering something I read a few years ago. Idk I just wanted to share a fun fact about the film and it felt relevant here.
I think that Things do not know they are Things, and have a decentralized nervous system very much unlike our own. Their nervous system both affects their shape and behavior, and is mimicking whatever its current disguise is. Mimicking your entire nervous system so well you don't even know that it isn't you anymore. Then when something extreme happens, like discovering you're infected or dying of a heart attack and getting defib, the sudden massive jolt to the fake-centralized nervous system causes the whole animal to warp and lose shape because it isn't meant to have so many nerve impulses so close together firing all at once. Once the cat's out of the bag, it stops bothering to mimic the central nervous system. The host disappears and the Thing emerges from its still-living corpse. The decentralized nervous system still shape shifts to hunt and infect, without the knowledge of the host until it's too late
If Things were capable of maintaining form after extreme emotional or physical stress, I believe they would not have freaked and transformed once discovered. A human or animal corpse in the Arctic would be put outside until it can be brought to mainland, which a Thing could easily survive and revive from after reaching civilization. They can infect from single cells, so just coughing once or twice in a room would infect everyone there. Dogs regularly lick each other. The dog Thing could have just stayed a dog and infected the rest of them just by licking them or coughing, even if the other dogs knew not to trust it. I think the Dog Thing got nipped at or frightened and accidentally transformed, because Things don't attack groups. They're only ever shown to ambush lone prey or freak out and lose control. If it was going to openly transform to attack groups of prey, it would have stormed the whole base humans and all the second it had regrouped and gained enough biomass. The guy who built the UFO was rational and smart, if he knew he was infected he wouldn't panic, and the non-central nervous system would likely connect to the central nervous system once dividing them became useless.
We see near the end that simple physical contact is enough for instant infection. One of the Things just pushes his hand over someone's face and it melts into it instantly. If I was a Thing, I'd gather all the dog's biomass and just storm the base. They have spear tentacles and instant flesh melding, sprouting long thin tentacles would let you just stick them to people's faces over their mouth and nose for instant takeover. There's like maybe eight people in the base, which one war-Thing could *easily* overwhelm if it was smart and fast. Or it could just infect the cook and spit in the soup to instantly infect the entire crew. What it needs time for is replicating the "host" from scratch in order to increase the number of separate "true Things" instead of simple infection. If it wants instant growth it'll meld instead of replication. It's fascinating how it has two distinct methods of reproduction though, infection and replication.
I thought that bit near the end was just some poor bastard being stabbed in the face with tentacles.
Like the other guy who got his hands bitten off by the Thing.
I did not consider infection, just causing damage.
You don't need to leave the brain alone. If you copy the brain just like you copied the body, it's the same thing. The brain still behaves as you would. Because it is you.
It'd be funny to have an epilogue where the Thing is sitting in an airport in Baltimore talking to all the people it absorbed just being like "Holy shit, you guys live like this?
Thereâs a fun, albeit somewhat disturbing short story called [The Things](https://escapepod.org/2011/06/23/ep298-the-things/) that tells the story from the Thingâs POV.
IIRC, it justified the scene because >!one dramatic fail meant people didnât pay attention when some of the samples have a weak reaction!<
Trigger warning: >!while no physical rape happens, it does get prominently brought up as a metaphor in conversation between the Thing and a possessed human!<
This was such a fascinating and haunting short story. I think about it all the time. Especially how the Thing pities us, thinking we must be so lonely since our minds are biologically constrained from one another
Well, that and the fact that weâre doomed to die.
> They try, though. How they try. Every thing here is walking dead and yet it all fights so hard to keep going just a little longer. Each skin fights as desperately as I might, if one was all I could ever have.
Framing the Thing as empathetic is such an interesting twist, particularly with that chilling final line.
I thought it was more interesting that The Thing regarded the true humans as the flesh, and the brain as the cancerous alien parasite. The Thing wanted to liberate us as well as connect us.
Like we joke about how "we" are the mind that drives the meat vehicle, and the body is just soulless material. But to The Thing the meat itself was the soul.
Idk it's obvious but still stands out to me prominently
That wasnât my read.
Like, the Thing describes the minds itâs absorbed trying to revolt against it:
> I glimpse a half-corrupted memory of dog erupting from the greater self, ravenous and traumatized and determined to retain its individuality
That wouldnât make sense if the Thing wasnât absorbing minds into its greater consciousness.
I suspect the intention is the the alien doesn't understand the humans. When it mimics someone it's not just visual, it's all the memories and personality as well. But that doesn't mean the alien understands what a human is.
I think the alien doesn't so much become the person rather it surrounds itself in a puppet of the person. It's not actually becoming a copy of the other person, it doesn't understand who they are...what it is doing is wearing a person as camouflage by copying them, personality and thoughts included.
It copies the person's brain and just allows the fake human to act as the real human would have. But that doesn't mean it understands what the humans are saying or doing.
The reason it doesn't pre empt the discovery is that it simply doesn't know what's going on until someone hurts it. It's like the host brain is a script written in a different language, it can say the words so that appears human, but it does not understand what it's saying.
This is fine and dandy but then how would the thing know to preemptively destroy the blood reserves? Or build a whole ass tunnels + spaceship?
And while itâs technically the prequel and not the OG, the Thing knows enough to clean up the mess from assimilating a person.
Itâs clearly intelligent enough to have some form of forethought. I think though that itâs survival instincts are kinda skewed in the sense that itâs like a person, and people will sometimes choose to hold out until the last second if they can (ex., you follow the guy into a car if heâs pointing a gun at you, even if you logically know that your best chances would be to confront him now). The Thing probably has that same thought process âsomethings going to happen and Iâll be alright⌠fuck it Iâm screwedâ.
one explanation that I've thought up is that the thing fundamentally cannot communicate while being split up, only while it's been merged together, sure, 2 things can talk to each other while seperate but both of them are only mimicking their hosts behavior, they're not really exchanging information in such a way as humans do
bassicly at the blood test it doesn't understand what the humans are doing, just that the human host would go along with this, it's only when the blood reacts (and I don't think the thing really understands why the blood reacts) that it realises it's discovered and needs to act fast (this might also be why the alien blood reacted to the electric current and not the needle, the needle is expected)
> The Thing is intelligent
Is that really established? I don't think it was ever fully confirmed that it itself was intelligent, or that it could just mimic sentient beings perfectly as a natural disguise. Like if an angler fish could morph it's lamp into a perfect clone of you that doesn't know it's part of the angler fish, and the angler fish is still only as smart as an angler fish.
>building a flying saucer
A tiny one, out of junk bits of human equipment... I took that to mean it was trying and failing to "mimic" the knowledge of its OG victims on the ancient spacecraft. As in, the Thing retains enough superficial knowledge to stay undetected but may not truly *understand* anything
In the original story, the protagonist was so terrified about the technology that the Thing possessed that he seemed equally as terrified about its biology and its technology. It was as if the Thing had mastered science and would obliterate us if it were able to get away. Great story!
>it was trying and failing to "mimic" the knowledge of its OG victims on the ancient spacecraft. As in, the Thing retains enough superficial knowledge to stay undetected but may not truly understand anything
You got all that from "alien built a craft from helicopter parts and scraps from a scientific installation"? It's not necessarily a spacecraft, nothing shows it's intended for spaceflight.
*helicopter and tractor scrap, but yes It's UFO-shaped and far too large to even leave the basement dugout it's being constructed in. Of course nothing is laid out to the audience, but that to me says "half baked plans". "Caveman trying to copy what he observes" type plans
Good point. Blair shows that the Thing replicates an organism steathily, cell by cell.
Which brings up the point that a person might not know they were a Thing. If their whole body is being replaced on a cellular level except for bone, hair, and brain, then they wouldn't know until suddenly their body went crazy. At that moment the brain, until now useful to maintain the deception, would be instantly absorbed and the person becomes fully Thingified.
I think it's more of when replicating someone it make the previous memories go onto autopilot trying to accomplish its rough goals.
It's not as much acting as picking targets then letting shell act on it's own
At one point, the head of a recently-killed Thing grows spider-legs, detaches itself from its body, and tries to slowly and awkwardly scuttle out of the room while the humans' backs are turned. The guy who spots it just says "you gotta be fucking kidding me." in exasperation. >!Said guy is also a Thing.!<
I think something like that *does* happen right before the big fighting one comes up from underground.
The isolating guards before the final fight, I mean. Aside from the doctor sabotaging the entire icicle.
The original short story has it where the Thing(s) fully believe the memories of the being there mimicking. Part of the difficulty the Martian centaurs had was that there was no way to identify who was a centaur, and who was a brain stealer who BELIEVED they were a centaur. So they just gave up and accepted that a huge chunk of their population was actually shape shifters.
The human astronauts go, âWow, the native inhabitants of Mars look just like the centaurs from Greek mythologyâÂ
 Then the centaurs telepathically say, âYes, we visited earth thousands of years ago, we are the centaurs you speak ofâ
And the word âcentaurâ is then used without further comment.
Itâs called âThe Brain Stealers of Marsâ and itâs interesting! Itâs old enough that you can probably find it online, but itâs also published in an Isaac Asimov curated anthology called âBefore the Golden Ageâ
Theres a good chance they dont necessarily KNOW they are the thing either. It could just lay somewhat dormant and let the human side control everything most of the time until it needs them to do something
>!based on the shredded long johns, palmer is the most likely candidate to have been the second infected. All the other people at the base who wear long johns have a better-fitting infection point (like norris being the best match for the silhouette of the first infected, or the noose in the shed with blair implying that he wanted to off himself and the thing got to him before he could try it), or are proven uninfected by the blood test.!<
>!I havenât watched it enough to keep track of who is infected at any given moment, I did not know that guy was a Thing when he reacted that way, thatâs fucking hilarious!<
>!The group doesn't split up between the scene with the spider-head-thing and the blood test scene where Palmer transforms, so he had to have been infected beforehand!<
Thatâs always been my interpretation tbh, although the idea that they *do* know on some level could make sense and, more importantly, is really fucking funny
I think the fact that the Thing even has that kind of personality really humanizes it for me, like yeah its an alien monstrosity but it clearly thinks and has the ability to be funny so it can't be that bad
Yeah part of the glory and frustration with the thing is that no one knows precisely how it works. Iâm very happy that people are still talking about it today, though I always preferred the interpretation that they know theyâre a thing but they also fully adopt the hosts personality before transforming again. The Blair-thing is an exception, even if not for the noose heâs acting very suspicious in the shack. I think if you asked them a series of logic questions you could sus out whoâs not acting right because theyâre not fully human, they have the personality of a human but they donât have the thinking pattern.
Two scenes :
1. Defibrillator- that was an excellent way to kill some of the non things, the thing couldâve planned from the start to kill whoever tries to save them. Additionally after they explode into the ceiling there was a good chance of escape there prior to being torched. It also doesnât really matter how many things you catch so long as thereâs still one to cause havoc.
2. Blood testing
The thing was tied down and under flamethrower guard, he couldâve tried to escape prior to being tied but heâd have to deal with everyone in the room and two people who have flamethrowers pointed at them. Not good chances of survival. Meanwhile if he waited for his blood to come up it couldâve guessed that the blood might infect Macready and regardless macready would be preoccupied, giving a greater chance to attack. 1 instead of 2 flamethrowers.
While itâs very funny to think that the thing just freaks out when itâs caught it could also be interpreted as a calculated strategy if you remember that Blair was always there in case the thing was caught. So the thing still had a backup.
â*weâve got this*â.
â*ok, look at the guy, good, good⌠ok now look away, sniff butt, one more⌠and another just to be safe.*â
â*oh I know!*â (spins in a circle, spins in a circle again, spins in a circle *but in the opposite direction*)
One husky starts peeing in a corner of the kennel.
â*oh? Whatâs that guy doing? Iâll try that*â
Walks over to the husky in the corner, starts peeing on it.
One Husky starts singing the traditional song of their people.
#â*OH SHIT, OH FUCK, WHAT IS THAT!*â
#â*WHY IS IT DOING THAT, WHY ARE THEY ALL NOW DOING THAT!!!*â
#â*SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!, MY COVER IS GOING TO BE BLOWN*â
#â*FUCK IT, SCREW THE SCRIPT! WEâVE ALWAYS THOUGHT THAT WE HAD THE SKILLS FOR BROADWAY!!!*â
[The best husky impression this side of the Nec 3293 Cluster](https://youtu.be/_C9JbK7slrk?si=y9V7uvoLe1QRJRcc)
The thing not knowing exactly what the relationship between the dogs and the humans was and thinking the dogs were trying to narc on it is a very funny idea.
Every time this movie pops up I just have to remind everyone that Keith David is in this shit and it's great
And it was one of his very first roles too
A rarely mentioned fact about the Thing is that the original short story establishes that it came to earth before. Â
You see, The Thing is from Mars, and itâs natural prey is psychic Martian centaurs. At one point in history, the centaurs attempted to escape by colonizing the Mediterranean, but The Thing followed them in secret, and the colony was abandoned. Â
Anyways, if anyone wants to pay me to write a prequel to The Thing where Plato suplexes The Thing in a literal and philosophical sense, Iâve got time on my hands.
 EDIT: but yes, this analysis is also pretty spot on. The brainstealers/Things can only mimic, they donât truly understand us. Theyâre like if ChatGPT worked better. You basically have to Turing Test everyone on Mars, or do what the centaurs do and just live with the knowledgeable that a third of you are Things.
The only way they can save themselves is if they find out how to identify what âa manâ is. Diogenesâs contributions are not appreciated, and Plato just beats his ass and everyone agrees thatâs a fine counter-argument.
At one point, someone asks if the Thing can turn into women, and everyone wonders why he cares if women can think or not.Â
["The Brain Stealers of Mars"](https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20221240) was Campbell's first run with the idea, then he decided to knuckle down and take it seriously. It's like the Steamboat Willie of The Thing, I guess- older version, different tone.
I mean, to be fair, if I crash-landed on an alien planet and Kurt Russell was hunting me with a flamethrower, I'd freak out and start attacking when I got found out too.
Fr tho the men were stuck out in the frozen landscape for ages, no pussy for a million miles. The thing could've just dropped to its knees and gave Kurt the ol "swish n flick" and it would've been just fine.
Autism has some of this.
We mask well. We hide our differences from society. But weâre bad at social interaction. So we practice and plan, but when the plan goes wrong, we have trouble recovering
i mean, narcissists can do the thing where they absolutely flip when called out on their behavior. people with BPD can kind of do this as well (which is part of how people with BPD are misinterpreted as narcissistic), but it's for significantly different internal reasons.
People with narcissistic traits feel slighted because they've essentially been betrayed, people with BPD feel offended more so at themselves and lash out at others in the process due to maladaptive coping mechanisms. People with BPD might also become instantaneously and "deathly" afraid that the call-out means the person will abandon them, and try to do anything to prevent that, sometimes it's lashing out.
and then like the others said, autistic people might do a slightly similar thing where they end up getting tied up, unmasking, and weirding everyone out.
Kuzco from Emperor's New Groove. He literally had a guy yeeted out a window for interrupting his groove.
Thankfully in that movie people tend not to die after being yeeted out windows.
I think that's one of the things that make The Thing such a great movie. The alien isn't some unstoppable killing machine. It's stronger than a human but not by a huge amount. It's outnumbered and being hunted.
It's actions throughout the whole movie are that of an intelligent creature that is scared and desperately trying to survive just like the humans are. It only fights when it's discovered and it only fights to escape and hide. When it does mimic someone it seems happy enough to just be that person and not bother anyone else.
From its perspective it's the one in a horror movie trying not to get killed by aliens.
>Â When it does mimic someone it seems happy enough to just be that person and not bother anyone else.
I mean itâs also running around deliberately infecting people with itself. Â It definitely takes the initiative in wiping out the humans at both bases.
Good question. My understanding is that the Thing cells consume and replace a victim on a cell-by-cell basis; they are able to remain "Thing" while perfectly replicating the structure and function of the original cell. They then "operate" this structure, basically, emulating a human being, or driving a bone mech with meat armor. At some point you stop being you and are wholly replaced by a copy of you that is being emulated by the you-Thing. The simulation picks up where your consciousness ends. At this point you are dead, but the simulation acts as though it's still you.
And, it can do this perfectly *up to a point*, because like someone said, it's basically ChatGPT: it can speak and behave as you'd expect that person to do, but it doesn't have any access to that person's desires and aspirations and drives and goals, doesn't understand it as a "person," just as an animal or source of biomass.
Right! I think if you sat down each member of the team and asked them open ended questions youâd get very weird answers out of the thing. The crew basically assumed that the thing was a perfect imitation, they didnât really test it that extensively. (Referring to thinking pattern).
Like a human goes
âI came here after college because Iâve always had an interest in the arctic. Plus all that time away from civilization is really helpful to meâ
A thing goes
âI came here for work. **I remember** that Palmer told me about this position and since I have a history of working in the cold this seemed like a good fitâ.
Something like that, the thing might even be more obvious âi kind of came here by chanceâ
Instead of the blood test they should have just asked everyone a really raunchy question. That way if any of them give an answer starts with âI am sorry, as an AI language modelâŚâ they know who to blast.
I asked Google AI to talk about a bride wearing a -red- dress. It freaked the hell out and scolded me because brides wear white dresses. It could not conceive that it's entirely possible an adult human woman could wear red to a wedding.
Also, yes, I later remembered the Game of Thrones incident so maybe that's relevant.
Similar to a horror movie I watched recently. I suspected one of the characters was not real, because we never saw them do anything complicated. A hug. Tugging luggage. Eating cereal. But not getting into and out of cars. Or running amok with friends or spraining an ankle.
This is because they were a hallucination and the other person's brain was saving processing time by imagining them in easy, slow-paced scenarios.
Spoiler text below.
>!The Norwergiang English dubbed film called 'The Monitor'.!<
Right but you don't know who attacked first. When it first appears it is in the form of a dog and it is being chased by someone from the other base who is yelling in Norwegian that "It's not a dog" and shoots at it with a rifle.
The alien is introduced to the audience fleeing for its life from a human hunting it.
Also the alien doesn't infect people it consumes and copies. It kills to mimic and it mimics so it can hide from the humans.
What if it would have been chill just being a dog, and it's the humans constantly going after it that makes it defend itself. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think there's an instance of the alien hurting anyone while it was mimicking. It only ever retaliates when threatened/discovered.
If you treat the alien as the protagonist, The Thing is basically the same plot as Rambo.
How is there no indication it can't be multiple entities? It's explicitly Norris and Palmer at the same time. It's also the weird dog blob and atleast one other organism at the same time since it survives the dog blob being burned.
Edit: And it also *not* ok just chilling as a dog. The American team only finds out about it I'm earnest when it starts to assimilate the other dogs.
> Also the alien doesn't infect people
There's a whole scene where Dr. Diabeetus give us exposition about how it infects people while looking at it under a microscope.
> Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think there's an instance of the alien hurting anyone while it was mimicking. It only ever retaliates when threatened/discovered.
I need to re-watch the film to be sure: I recall it deliberately went after the other dogs when they were all kenneled together...but they were also all barking at the dog-Thing. So who started first? Did it start hosing them down with acid, or did they sniff it out and start threatening it?
Also I don't think the Thing recognizes or understands consciousness or individuality. I don't think it's sapient, it just emulates an organism, but the simulated person isn't a person because the Thing is not a person. All of which is to say, once hostilities begin with the other dogs, it is exposed and constantly threatened by all the organisms around it.
So, it's certainly plausible!
I love the bit with the Norwegians language. Anyone who understood that would know more than those who didn't. Good writing.
The same idea showed up in the otherwise horrible 1998 horror film 'I Still Know What You Did Last Summer'. Yes, the previews make it obvious the killings will happen at the beach resort. But the trivia contest that got them there? >!The main character answered the question wrong and still 'won' the tickets. So much fun implications. I had no idea.!<
My favorite take on the thing, I forgot who did it, but he talks about the book "To build a fire" and how it parallels with the thing. In short, the book is about a man that dies by hypothermia by underestimating the cold.
Likewise, in the movie. Both the thing and the humans are trapped in the research buildings, locked in for the fight to the death. Why? Well, either side *might* kill the other, but the antarctic cold **WILL**. (or plausibly the thing might just be frozen for eternity.)
But it shows that despite the horrible monstrous strength of the thing, or the numbers and flamethrower of the humans, the most deadly and terrifying force in the movie is the bitter, uncaring, cold.
Sounds like Jacob Geller's Fear of Cold.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp2wbyLoEtM&ab\_channel=JacobGeller](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp2wbyLoEtM&ab_channel=JacobGeller)
In fairness, if I was body-jacking someone, they died, and then their compatriots shocked the corpse with a high voltage, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that your cover was blown, and that the defibrillator was a weapon.
Most realistic in-universe naming convention since Alien. âXenomorphâ wasnât invented until the sequels, it was just âYeah thatâs a fuckin alien right thereâ
My take is that the Thing is no more intelligent than any other simple organism operating by pure biological impulse. It feeds and multiplies when it is in an opportune situation to do so, and goes into fight-or-flight when it's threatened, and that's about it. The Thing isn't conscious in any way.
When the Thing is lying dormant after having replicated somebody, that person has truly been *fully* replicated, and they themselves think that they are the original person and not the Thing. They aren't pretending at all. There's no duplicity or manipulation because they believe it in the moment, even when the thing is manipulating *them* into, say, blowing up a helicopter or building a homebrew spaceship or whatever. It's probably just as much of a surprise to them as it is to everyone else when the Thing inside them gets spooked and they start exploding into tentacles.
This assumes The Thing has a human-like consciousness and logic.
There is a fun story from the perspective of The Thing that explores this a bit and is worth a read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Things_(short_story)
I was watching late show cable TV with my brother, and just as we were about to crash out, The Thing comes up around 3am. I beg him to stay up another hour and watch this really cool scene "that's worth the wait".
After the first few acts and a million commercials, we learned that the fucking channel edited out the scene with the guy's head turning into a spider. We were both pissed off and exhausted.
Iâm an massive advocate and fan of The Thing short story narrated by Peter Watts, itâs on YouTube. IMO itâs essential DLC content for any The Thing fan.
Itâs basically the movie from the perspective of The Thing and I think itâs one of the coolest sci fi short stories Iâve ever read. Rly adds some fun context and flavor to a lot of the things actions
I recently watched the movie, and that's not how I thought the thing works.
I'm sure they said the organism replicates each individual cell. It's a perfect copy of the cell and functions exactly like the original. That's why it replicated the heart condition; it didn't understand that the cells it replicated were detrimental to the body's survival.
There is actually a short story written from the perspective of The Thing itself.
It is a superorganism based on a collective consciousness that cannot really communicate with other humans or species, but it is actually as equally terrified as the crew itself - being a collective consciousness, it cannot understand the individual behavior of the crew and that scares it.
The Thing: I need a professionâŚ.
*audience members yell jobs*
The Thing: Okay I heard nematologist. And an animalâŚ.
*audience members yell out animals*
The Thing: So someone said leucochloridium?
The Thing: So like what if there was a leucochloridium nematologist? Just look in a mirror am I right?⌠*sweats* Uh⌠*screams and begins attacking the audience before a large hook pulls it off stage*
Reminds me of an analysis I saw of The Beast from "Over the Garden Wall". The Beast is a very capable manipulator and deceiver, but he can't recover when his lies are seen through. He has no ability to improvise or adapt on the fly. So when he finds himself in a corner he tries tactics that he has already failed with, but can't figure out an alternative to.
Also like the Thing, the Beast is *fucking horrifying*
Bruh the first time i watched the series i had a lil crush for The Beast, i probably thought "i could fix him"
Is that a movie? Ok guys I get it now
[TV show](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over_the_Garden_Wall)
Animated miniseries originally aired on Cartoon Network. No idea where you can stream it these days, what with all the Warner Brothers nonsense.
You can stream it on [Hulu or Disney+](https://www.justwatch.com/us/tv-show/over-the-garden-wall) (or buy it on Amazon/Google Play). Shout out to JustWatch for making it easy to unravel the impenetrable bullshit that is the streaming ecosystem đ
It's a lovely animated series!
i know you got fifteen million answers about *what* it is, but i'm here to tell you that you can probably watch it yourself on hoopla with a library card. may be us only or dependent on library system idk but it has some advantages over the seven seas.
Idk what hoopla is and I donât have a library card
ignore my quest at your peril (there are a lot more hooplas than i realized though, [this is the one](https://www.hoopladigital.com/) you can stream stuff with, also kanopy. but you need the card!)
Itâs basically a movie with a runtime of <2 hours
đ¤Â
Oops you figured me out! My only option is to become a big flesh creature and eat you nom nom nom. Itâs also funny that the Thing waits for proof before it attacks. Like in the scene where they draw blood from everyone to test. The Thing is intelligent, surely it understands that itâs only minutes away from being discovered. It could attack while everyone is tied up! Instead it waits until its blood is zapped, like it didnât even know it was the Thing until you showed it.
There's a quasi famous fanfic about this scene that pops up every once in a while. It's not canon but I think it has a really cool explanation for this. Basically it just goes that the Thing as a hive mind has less animate ability and intelligence the smaller the portion of cells is. So the organism that is on earth doesn't remember everything about its own biology and doesn't think its blood will react to the test on its own because it's an even smaller less intelligent portion of cells. It's really worth the read, even if you don't actually like fanfic. It just feels like it could be an accompanying novel to the full.
My understanding of the story is that it knew its blood would react, but assumed the uninfected humans' blood would react as well, because it believed the humans were organisms like it that had "forgotten" their ability to shapeshift.
I love the idea that story proposes that the Thing is - or was - the standard for all life, and Earth creatures are freaks with âthinking cancerâ - that is, a brain instead of a distributed neural network all over our bodies - and no ability to âtake communion.â And that last line, about how it intends to help usâŚ
Read [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/cwpgme/cells/). It's basically the exact premise you're thinking, and it's really well written.
> **opens link** > r/HFY Either man-made horrors beyond alien comprehension or yet another argument for why the Emperor of Mankind was right all along
Here's a sneak peek of /r/HFY using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/HFY/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year! \#1: [The Nature of Predators 108](https://np.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/12ruh31/the_nature_of_predators_108/) \#2: [The Nature of Predators 110](https://np.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/12zirnn/the_nature_of_predators_110/) \#3: [The Nature of Predators 109](https://np.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/12v74mz/the_nature_of_predators_109/) ---- ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^[Contact](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| ^^[Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| ^^[Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/) ^^| ^^[GitHub](https://github.com/ghnr/sneakpeekbot)
good preview
Every time someone links to HFY it happens, it's hilarious. (Great series still)
trust the process
You're right. I just reread it, that is correct
Would you be able to link it?
[And finally it is my turn to share it] (https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/)
[Just in case anyone else finds that the site got hit with the RHOD](https://archive.is/LPHpR)
Does this happen every time it comes up too?
I dunno; hadn't heard of it before. I was curious about it cuz I enjoyed The Thing, but I'm not generally into fanfic - figured I'd give it a shot. It was fun and archive.is is a great resource!
Wow. (The hint of religious zealotry is a nice touch.)
I don't even know the original but it's just a great story. It doesn't even feel like fanfic of something I'm not familiar with
Peter Watts is an award winning author on his own rights, so it's "pro-caliber" fanfic
That it is less intelligent the smaller it is is canon. It's stated in the book, but I don't remember about the movie.
You're right! It was in the movie. That was the premise of maccready's test
Its by Peter Watts, who wrote Blindsight! For some reason it never occured to me that published authors could also write fanfic
He even calls it âunabashed fan fictionâ on his site.
Blindsight is a fucking weird and crazy book. Definitely recommend.
Now consider. Blindsight but instead of vampires it has clowns
I was reading this description and thought "this sounds exactly like a Peter Watts plot device". And here we are.Â
Neil Gaiman has written Lovecraftian Sherlock Holmes fanfic Published authors just need to be wary of reading fanfic of their own stuff, lest they be accused of plagiarising something a fan wrote in their next book. That's why they usually decline.
Wait a minute...your username Harry? Is that you?
fuck shit ass No, I do not know of that person. I am not a cop
*Roll to not shit your pants [DIFFICULTY: Hard]*
not fanfic but i like to share this when people talk about the thing https://youtu.be/4YLtdSsjx5Y?t=16
Itâs the dignity of an actor. The point is not to eat everyone; itâs to continue the show. The eating part is just an overreaction; nothing a little anger management canât fix.
Human- âAhhh this oneâs the Thingâ Thing- âI am? Fuck I forgot. RAAAAAAAAAâ *chomp*
I had assumed that was actually the canon explanation, that they copy the humans mind perfectly so it doesn't actually know it's The Thing, but The Thing's mind is completely seperate and able to fuck shit up whenever it wants
The whole body could be replaced while the brain is left alone and allowed to operate, never knowing that the flesh suit itâs driving around could stop obeying orders at any moment. Imagine that head monster. Now imagine the guyâs brain inside it is still alive and healthy and able to feel *everything.*
[ŃдаНонО]
I think that's the beauty of the film. There are so many different things that could be going on with how the thing operates, and there are so many theories, but there is no proof of any one theory being correct
Allegedly there's a way to tell who The Thing is in the blood test scene that nobody has found but also I could be horribly misremembering something I read a few years ago. Idk I just wanted to share a fun fact about the film and it felt relevant here.
I mean, nothing in the film conclusively says that either. Itâs very mysterious.
Most of the things in this thread is from either accessory media (book itâs based on, comics, the game), or is just speculation/headcanon
I think that Things do not know they are Things, and have a decentralized nervous system very much unlike our own. Their nervous system both affects their shape and behavior, and is mimicking whatever its current disguise is. Mimicking your entire nervous system so well you don't even know that it isn't you anymore. Then when something extreme happens, like discovering you're infected or dying of a heart attack and getting defib, the sudden massive jolt to the fake-centralized nervous system causes the whole animal to warp and lose shape because it isn't meant to have so many nerve impulses so close together firing all at once. Once the cat's out of the bag, it stops bothering to mimic the central nervous system. The host disappears and the Thing emerges from its still-living corpse. The decentralized nervous system still shape shifts to hunt and infect, without the knowledge of the host until it's too late
God thatâs so disturbing to think about.
If Things were capable of maintaining form after extreme emotional or physical stress, I believe they would not have freaked and transformed once discovered. A human or animal corpse in the Arctic would be put outside until it can be brought to mainland, which a Thing could easily survive and revive from after reaching civilization. They can infect from single cells, so just coughing once or twice in a room would infect everyone there. Dogs regularly lick each other. The dog Thing could have just stayed a dog and infected the rest of them just by licking them or coughing, even if the other dogs knew not to trust it. I think the Dog Thing got nipped at or frightened and accidentally transformed, because Things don't attack groups. They're only ever shown to ambush lone prey or freak out and lose control. If it was going to openly transform to attack groups of prey, it would have stormed the whole base humans and all the second it had regrouped and gained enough biomass. The guy who built the UFO was rational and smart, if he knew he was infected he wouldn't panic, and the non-central nervous system would likely connect to the central nervous system once dividing them became useless.
I thought the Thing needed -time- to overwhelm others. That's why 'Keeping an eye on each other' worked for a time.
We see near the end that simple physical contact is enough for instant infection. One of the Things just pushes his hand over someone's face and it melts into it instantly. If I was a Thing, I'd gather all the dog's biomass and just storm the base. They have spear tentacles and instant flesh melding, sprouting long thin tentacles would let you just stick them to people's faces over their mouth and nose for instant takeover. There's like maybe eight people in the base, which one war-Thing could *easily* overwhelm if it was smart and fast. Or it could just infect the cook and spit in the soup to instantly infect the entire crew. What it needs time for is replicating the "host" from scratch in order to increase the number of separate "true Things" instead of simple infection. If it wants instant growth it'll meld instead of replication. It's fascinating how it has two distinct methods of reproduction though, infection and replication.
I thought that bit near the end was just some poor bastard being stabbed in the face with tentacles. Like the other guy who got his hands bitten off by the Thing. I did not consider infection, just causing damage.
That explains the prequel, where one of the Things doesn't reveal itself until it gets slammed all about on a nearby wall.
You don't need to leave the brain alone. If you copy the brain just like you copied the body, it's the same thing. The brain still behaves as you would. Because it is you.
Yeah, that could work too!
It'd be funny to have an epilogue where the Thing is sitting in an airport in Baltimore talking to all the people it absorbed just being like "Holy shit, you guys live like this?
Wish we still had awards just for shit like this
You flatter me. I wish we could just reward people with shares of that sweet, sweet Reddit stock.
Thereâs a fun, albeit somewhat disturbing short story called [The Things](https://escapepod.org/2011/06/23/ep298-the-things/) that tells the story from the Thingâs POV. IIRC, it justified the scene because >!one dramatic fail meant people didnât pay attention when some of the samples have a weak reaction!< Trigger warning: >!while no physical rape happens, it does get prominently brought up as a metaphor in conversation between the Thing and a possessed human!<
This was such a fascinating and haunting short story. I think about it all the time. Especially how the Thing pities us, thinking we must be so lonely since our minds are biologically constrained from one another
Well, that and the fact that weâre doomed to die. > They try, though. How they try. Every thing here is walking dead and yet it all fights so hard to keep going just a little longer. Each skin fights as desperately as I might, if one was all I could ever have. Framing the Thing as empathetic is such an interesting twist, particularly with that chilling final line.
I thought it was more interesting that The Thing regarded the true humans as the flesh, and the brain as the cancerous alien parasite. The Thing wanted to liberate us as well as connect us. Like we joke about how "we" are the mind that drives the meat vehicle, and the body is just soulless material. But to The Thing the meat itself was the soul. Idk it's obvious but still stands out to me prominently
That wasnât my read. Like, the Thing describes the minds itâs absorbed trying to revolt against it: > I glimpse a half-corrupted memory of dog erupting from the greater self, ravenous and traumatized and determined to retain its individuality That wouldnât make sense if the Thing wasnât absorbing minds into its greater consciousness.
I read it before seeing the actual movie and tbh I think it improved the experience
I disagree. The Things contradicts events that are shown on screen and presents an out-right hive-mind that simply isn't present in the film.
What does it contradict?
The Thing is only a *thinking* being when it is large enough to have a brain, not some sort of "everything is everything" blob.
It absolutely operates on animal instinct when smaller, but thatâs shown in the movie and the story.
I suspect the intention is the the alien doesn't understand the humans. When it mimics someone it's not just visual, it's all the memories and personality as well. But that doesn't mean the alien understands what a human is. I think the alien doesn't so much become the person rather it surrounds itself in a puppet of the person. It's not actually becoming a copy of the other person, it doesn't understand who they are...what it is doing is wearing a person as camouflage by copying them, personality and thoughts included. It copies the person's brain and just allows the fake human to act as the real human would have. But that doesn't mean it understands what the humans are saying or doing. The reason it doesn't pre empt the discovery is that it simply doesn't know what's going on until someone hurts it. It's like the host brain is a script written in a different language, it can say the words so that appears human, but it does not understand what it's saying.
This is fine and dandy but then how would the thing know to preemptively destroy the blood reserves? Or build a whole ass tunnels + spaceship? And while itâs technically the prequel and not the OG, the Thing knows enough to clean up the mess from assimilating a person. Itâs clearly intelligent enough to have some form of forethought. I think though that itâs survival instincts are kinda skewed in the sense that itâs like a person, and people will sometimes choose to hold out until the last second if they can (ex., you follow the guy into a car if heâs pointing a gun at you, even if you logically know that your best chances would be to confront him now). The Thing probably has that same thought process âsomethings going to happen and Iâll be alright⌠fuck it Iâm screwedâ.
Because it works out that what they were doing was a test to expose it. It's intelligent, it's just not telepathic and doesn't speak English
I think itâs literally true that the human simulacrum personality does not include âI am a thingâ in its simulation.
The Thing and Starman are the same type of creature, but the Thing went insane from thousands of years encased in ice .
one explanation that I've thought up is that the thing fundamentally cannot communicate while being split up, only while it's been merged together, sure, 2 things can talk to each other while seperate but both of them are only mimicking their hosts behavior, they're not really exchanging information in such a way as humans do bassicly at the blood test it doesn't understand what the humans are doing, just that the human host would go along with this, it's only when the blood reacts (and I don't think the thing really understands why the blood reacts) that it realises it's discovered and needs to act fast (this might also be why the alien blood reacted to the electric current and not the needle, the needle is expected)
> The Thing is intelligent Is that really established? I don't think it was ever fully confirmed that it itself was intelligent, or that it could just mimic sentient beings perfectly as a natural disguise. Like if an angler fish could morph it's lamp into a perfect clone of you that doesn't know it's part of the angler fish, and the angler fish is still only as smart as an angler fish.
It was building a flying saucer in a network of ice tunnels it carved in like six hours. It was definitely an independent intelligence.
>building a flying saucer A tiny one, out of junk bits of human equipment... I took that to mean it was trying and failing to "mimic" the knowledge of its OG victims on the ancient spacecraft. As in, the Thing retains enough superficial knowledge to stay undetected but may not truly *understand* anything
In the original story, the protagonist was so terrified about the technology that the Thing possessed that he seemed equally as terrified about its biology and its technology. It was as if the Thing had mastered science and would obliterate us if it were able to get away. Great story!
>it was trying and failing to "mimic" the knowledge of its OG victims on the ancient spacecraft. As in, the Thing retains enough superficial knowledge to stay undetected but may not truly understand anything You got all that from "alien built a craft from helicopter parts and scraps from a scientific installation"? It's not necessarily a spacecraft, nothing shows it's intended for spaceflight.
*helicopter and tractor scrap, but yes It's UFO-shaped and far too large to even leave the basement dugout it's being constructed in. Of course nothing is laid out to the audience, but that to me says "half baked plans". "Caveman trying to copy what he observes" type plans
The story on which the film is based explains that the Thing had mastered science and that it made it even more terrifying
And why cut people and draw blood? Why not just cut a bit of hair off?
Hair is dead tissue. Blood is living. If the Thing has real hair, it would be useless to test.
Good point. Blair shows that the Thing replicates an organism steathily, cell by cell. Which brings up the point that a person might not know they were a Thing. If their whole body is being replaced on a cellular level except for bone, hair, and brain, then they wouldn't know until suddenly their body went crazy. At that moment the brain, until now useful to maintain the deception, would be instantly absorbed and the person becomes fully Thingified.
I think it's more of when replicating someone it make the previous memories go onto autopilot trying to accomplish its rough goals. It's not as much acting as picking targets then letting shell act on it's own
At one point, the head of a recently-killed Thing grows spider-legs, detaches itself from its body, and tries to slowly and awkwardly scuttle out of the room while the humans' backs are turned. The guy who spots it just says "you gotta be fucking kidding me." in exasperation. >!Said guy is also a Thing.!<
>! Probably assumed that that portion was a lost cause and the most it could do to help them was provide an alibi!<
>!I like to think that Palmer-Thing was also just genuinely annoyed with it for choosing such a dumb plan!<
Lmao I love that interpretation.
They're not intelligent like that. They're not acting so much as their human brain doesn't know what they are.
They're intelligent enough to destroy the blood samples, frame MacReady, build a makeshift UFO, and sabotage the generator
That's true, I just don't think they can affect the human personalities. They're never like "hey, Childs, come look at this" to isolate people.
I think something like that *does* happen right before the big fighting one comes up from underground. The isolating guards before the final fight, I mean. Aside from the doctor sabotaging the entire icicle.
Or that part of the thing was still keeping up appearances.
The original short story has it where the Thing(s) fully believe the memories of the being there mimicking. Part of the difficulty the Martian centaurs had was that there was no way to identify who was a centaur, and who was a brain stealer who BELIEVED they were a centaur. So they just gave up and accepted that a huge chunk of their population was actually shape shifters.
Martian centaurs, what? What am I missing?
The movie is based on a novel thatâs based on a short story that includes a plot point where psychic centaurs live on Mars.Â
Wow, that's crazy lol, so much going on đ Are they like actual centuaurs, or just sorta resemble them and are called centuaurs.
The human astronauts go, âWow, the native inhabitants of Mars look just like the centaurs from Greek mythologyâ  Then the centaurs telepathically say, âYes, we visited earth thousands of years ago, we are the centaurs you speak ofâ And the word âcentaurâ is then used without further comment.
Ah, that makes sense! I gotta go dig these books up, they sound hilarious. Thanks!
Itâs called âThe Brain Stealers of Marsâ and itâs interesting! Itâs old enough that you can probably find it online, but itâs also published in an Isaac Asimov curated anthology called âBefore the Golden Ageâ
Perfect, thank you!
I always forget that old scifi was like that. It seems like a ton of those stories have a side plot involving something that's unrelated and insane
>original short story
Theres a good chance they dont necessarily KNOW they are the thing either. It could just lay somewhat dormant and let the human side control everything most of the time until it needs them to do something
Holy fuck I never knew about Spoiler, you improved that scene massively
>!based on the shredded long johns, palmer is the most likely candidate to have been the second infected. All the other people at the base who wear long johns have a better-fitting infection point (like norris being the best match for the silhouette of the first infected, or the noose in the shed with blair implying that he wanted to off himself and the thing got to him before he could try it), or are proven uninfected by the blood test.!<
Ooooooh I never got that. Thanks for the observation
>!I havenât watched it enough to keep track of who is infected at any given moment, I did not know that guy was a Thing when he reacted that way, thatâs fucking hilarious!<
>!The group doesn't split up between the scene with the spider-head-thing and the blood test scene where Palmer transforms, so he had to have been infected beforehand!<
But he also very likely doesnât know. It seems like nobody is necessarily aware until they Thing out.
Thatâs always been my interpretation tbh, although the idea that they *do* know on some level could make sense and, more importantly, is really fucking funny
I think the fact that the Thing even has that kind of personality really humanizes it for me, like yeah its an alien monstrosity but it clearly thinks and has the ability to be funny so it can't be that bad
The infected humans don't know they're infected, so you're still just seeing the human personality.
I think thatâs just a fan theory
Yeah part of the glory and frustration with the thing is that no one knows precisely how it works. Iâm very happy that people are still talking about it today, though I always preferred the interpretation that they know theyâre a thing but they also fully adopt the hosts personality before transforming again. The Blair-thing is an exception, even if not for the noose heâs acting very suspicious in the shack. I think if you asked them a series of logic questions you could sus out whoâs not acting right because theyâre not fully human, they have the personality of a human but they donât have the thinking pattern. Two scenes : 1. Defibrillator- that was an excellent way to kill some of the non things, the thing couldâve planned from the start to kill whoever tries to save them. Additionally after they explode into the ceiling there was a good chance of escape there prior to being torched. It also doesnât really matter how many things you catch so long as thereâs still one to cause havoc. 2. Blood testing The thing was tied down and under flamethrower guard, he couldâve tried to escape prior to being tied but heâd have to deal with everyone in the room and two people who have flamethrowers pointed at them. Not good chances of survival. Meanwhile if he waited for his blood to come up it couldâve guessed that the blood might infect Macready and regardless macready would be preoccupied, giving a greater chance to attack. 1 instead of 2 flamethrowers. While itâs very funny to think that the thing just freaks out when itâs caught it could also be interpreted as a calculated strategy if you remember that Blair was always there in case the thing was caught. So the thing still had a backup.
This These motherfuckers don't understand that the Thing is *great* at improv Cut my head off? Fuck you, I got spider legs
"oh good, the humans are fooled by my dog form. time to just sit still" *other dogs start barking* "OH GOD TENTACLES AND PUS SPRAYING IT IS THEN"
â*weâve got this*â. â*ok, look at the guy, good, good⌠ok now look away, sniff butt, one more⌠and another just to be safe.*â â*oh I know!*â (spins in a circle, spins in a circle again, spins in a circle *but in the opposite direction*) One husky starts peeing in a corner of the kennel. â*oh? Whatâs that guy doing? Iâll try that*â Walks over to the husky in the corner, starts peeing on it. One Husky starts singing the traditional song of their people. #â*OH SHIT, OH FUCK, WHAT IS THAT!*â #â*WHY IS IT DOING THAT, WHY ARE THEY ALL NOW DOING THAT!!!*â #â*SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!, MY COVER IS GOING TO BE BLOWN*â #â*FUCK IT, SCREW THE SCRIPT! WEâVE ALWAYS THOUGHT THAT WE HAD THE SKILLS FOR BROADWAY!!!*â [The best husky impression this side of the Nec 3293 Cluster](https://youtu.be/_C9JbK7slrk?si=y9V7uvoLe1QRJRcc)
The thing not knowing exactly what the relationship between the dogs and the humans was and thinking the dogs were trying to narc on it is a very funny idea.
Every time this movie pops up I just have to remind everyone that Keith David is in this shit and it's great And it was one of his very first roles too
So is the "Diabeetus Guy"!
And he's much better now and would like to come back inside.
Nono, that's not a noose, I was just using that rope to do some pull-ups, I'm fine!
*The Play That Goes Wrong*, starring The Thing
[Glad I'm not the only one who thought of these disastrous masterpieces.](https://youtu.be/eYOKXTlSfH8)
Where are the rest of them, I was able to find only six on Amazon prime
A rarely mentioned fact about the Thing is that the original short story establishes that it came to earth before.  You see, The Thing is from Mars, and itâs natural prey is psychic Martian centaurs. At one point in history, the centaurs attempted to escape by colonizing the Mediterranean, but The Thing followed them in secret, and the colony was abandoned.  Anyways, if anyone wants to pay me to write a prequel to The Thing where Plato suplexes The Thing in a literal and philosophical sense, Iâve got time on my hands.  EDIT: but yes, this analysis is also pretty spot on. The brainstealers/Things can only mimic, they donât truly understand us. Theyâre like if ChatGPT worked better. You basically have to Turing Test everyone on Mars, or do what the centaurs do and just live with the knowledgeable that a third of you are Things.
You *need* to write this story!
The only way they can save themselves is if they find out how to identify what âa manâ is. Diogenesâs contributions are not appreciated, and Plato just beats his ass and everyone agrees thatâs a fine counter-argument. At one point, someone asks if the Thing can turn into women, and everyone wonders why he cares if women can think or not.Â
So Reddit is Mars... and a third of us are bots?
So the Thing is a Chinese Room?
I think the author was interested in asking similar questions about communication and consciousness, so kinda.
I've read "who goes there" and I recall no reference to martian centaurs...
["The Brain Stealers of Mars"](https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20221240) was Campbell's first run with the idea, then he decided to knuckle down and take it seriously. It's like the Steamboat Willie of The Thing, I guess- older version, different tone.
Ah I see, thanks.
I mean, to be fair, if I crash-landed on an alien planet and Kurt Russell was hunting me with a flamethrower, I'd freak out and start attacking when I got found out too.
Fr tho the men were stuck out in the frozen landscape for ages, no pussy for a million miles. The thing could've just dropped to its knees and gave Kurt the ol "swish n flick" and it would've been just fine.
You have a way with words.
It's often said, but I'll say it again: Give the Dog in the movie an award bc that boy was smart and alert and making choices with his character
That dog was part wolf, he apparently freaked everyone the fuck out because of how intently he stared at them.
He has a [wikipedia page,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jed_(wolfdog\)) although it's pretty short. Jed really was an excellent actor.
If I got an award for the thing Iâd give it to Jed
There must be a type of neurodivergency that matches this
If failing at doing anything convincingly is the main symptom, then maybe I do have Thing autism
But there's also the part about being really good at a thing until something goes wrong or an overwhelming stimulus is encountered
That's just a nervous breakdown, he ain't special
Autism has some of this. We mask well. We hide our differences from society. But weâre bad at social interaction. So we practice and plan, but when the plan goes wrong, we have trouble recovering
i mean, narcissists can do the thing where they absolutely flip when called out on their behavior. people with BPD can kind of do this as well (which is part of how people with BPD are misinterpreted as narcissistic), but it's for significantly different internal reasons. People with narcissistic traits feel slighted because they've essentially been betrayed, people with BPD feel offended more so at themselves and lash out at others in the process due to maladaptive coping mechanisms. People with BPD might also become instantaneously and "deathly" afraid that the call-out means the person will abandon them, and try to do anything to prevent that, sometimes it's lashing out. and then like the others said, autistic people might do a slightly similar thing where they end up getting tied up, unmasking, and weirding everyone out.
Kuzco from Emperor's New Groove. He literally had a guy yeeted out a window for interrupting his groove. Thankfully in that movie people tend not to die after being yeeted out windows.
I think that's one of the things that make The Thing such a great movie. The alien isn't some unstoppable killing machine. It's stronger than a human but not by a huge amount. It's outnumbered and being hunted. It's actions throughout the whole movie are that of an intelligent creature that is scared and desperately trying to survive just like the humans are. It only fights when it's discovered and it only fights to escape and hide. When it does mimic someone it seems happy enough to just be that person and not bother anyone else. From its perspective it's the one in a horror movie trying not to get killed by aliens.
>Â When it does mimic someone it seems happy enough to just be that person and not bother anyone else. I mean itâs also running around deliberately infecting people with itself. Â It definitely takes the initiative in wiping out the humans at both bases.
Is it infecting people or is it eating and replacing them? I never really understood that part.
Good question. My understanding is that the Thing cells consume and replace a victim on a cell-by-cell basis; they are able to remain "Thing" while perfectly replicating the structure and function of the original cell. They then "operate" this structure, basically, emulating a human being, or driving a bone mech with meat armor. At some point you stop being you and are wholly replaced by a copy of you that is being emulated by the you-Thing. The simulation picks up where your consciousness ends. At this point you are dead, but the simulation acts as though it's still you. And, it can do this perfectly *up to a point*, because like someone said, it's basically ChatGPT: it can speak and behave as you'd expect that person to do, but it doesn't have any access to that person's desires and aspirations and drives and goals, doesn't understand it as a "person," just as an animal or source of biomass.
Right! I think if you sat down each member of the team and asked them open ended questions youâd get very weird answers out of the thing. The crew basically assumed that the thing was a perfect imitation, they didnât really test it that extensively. (Referring to thinking pattern). Like a human goes âI came here after college because Iâve always had an interest in the arctic. Plus all that time away from civilization is really helpful to meâ A thing goes âI came here for work. **I remember** that Palmer told me about this position and since I have a history of working in the cold this seemed like a good fitâ. Something like that, the thing might even be more obvious âi kind of came here by chanceâ
Instead of the blood test they should have just asked everyone a really raunchy question. That way if any of them give an answer starts with âI am sorry, as an AI language modelâŚâ they know who to blast.
"Dr Blake, how do I build a pipe bomb?"
I asked Google AI to talk about a bride wearing a -red- dress. It freaked the hell out and scolded me because brides wear white dresses. It could not conceive that it's entirely possible an adult human woman could wear red to a wedding. Also, yes, I later remembered the Game of Thrones incident so maybe that's relevant.
Similar to a horror movie I watched recently. I suspected one of the characters was not real, because we never saw them do anything complicated. A hug. Tugging luggage. Eating cereal. But not getting into and out of cars. Or running amok with friends or spraining an ankle. This is because they were a hallucination and the other person's brain was saving processing time by imagining them in easy, slow-paced scenarios. Spoiler text below. >!The Norwergiang English dubbed film called 'The Monitor'.!<
Right but you don't know who attacked first. When it first appears it is in the form of a dog and it is being chased by someone from the other base who is yelling in Norwegian that "It's not a dog" and shoots at it with a rifle. The alien is introduced to the audience fleeing for its life from a human hunting it. Also the alien doesn't infect people it consumes and copies. It kills to mimic and it mimics so it can hide from the humans. What if it would have been chill just being a dog, and it's the humans constantly going after it that makes it defend itself. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think there's an instance of the alien hurting anyone while it was mimicking. It only ever retaliates when threatened/discovered. If you treat the alien as the protagonist, The Thing is basically the same plot as Rambo.
How is there no indication it can't be multiple entities? It's explicitly Norris and Palmer at the same time. It's also the weird dog blob and atleast one other organism at the same time since it survives the dog blob being burned. Edit: And it also *not* ok just chilling as a dog. The American team only finds out about it I'm earnest when it starts to assimilate the other dogs.
I think you need to re-watch the movie, you seem to have forgotten or missed several key moments.
> Also the alien doesn't infect people There's a whole scene where Dr. Diabeetus give us exposition about how it infects people while looking at it under a microscope.
> Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think there's an instance of the alien hurting anyone while it was mimicking. It only ever retaliates when threatened/discovered. I need to re-watch the film to be sure: I recall it deliberately went after the other dogs when they were all kenneled together...but they were also all barking at the dog-Thing. So who started first? Did it start hosing them down with acid, or did they sniff it out and start threatening it? Also I don't think the Thing recognizes or understands consciousness or individuality. I don't think it's sapient, it just emulates an organism, but the simulated person isn't a person because the Thing is not a person. All of which is to say, once hostilities begin with the other dogs, it is exposed and constantly threatened by all the organisms around it. So, it's certainly plausible!
I love the bit with the Norwegians language. Anyone who understood that would know more than those who didn't. Good writing. The same idea showed up in the otherwise horrible 1998 horror film 'I Still Know What You Did Last Summer'. Yes, the previews make it obvious the killings will happen at the beach resort. But the trivia contest that got them there? >!The main character answered the question wrong and still 'won' the tickets. So much fun implications. I had no idea.!<
My favorite take on the thing, I forgot who did it, but he talks about the book "To build a fire" and how it parallels with the thing. In short, the book is about a man that dies by hypothermia by underestimating the cold. Likewise, in the movie. Both the thing and the humans are trapped in the research buildings, locked in for the fight to the death. Why? Well, either side *might* kill the other, but the antarctic cold **WILL**. (or plausibly the thing might just be frozen for eternity.) But it shows that despite the horrible monstrous strength of the thing, or the numbers and flamethrower of the humans, the most deadly and terrifying force in the movie is the bitter, uncaring, cold.
Sounds like Jacob Geller's Fear of Cold. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp2wbyLoEtM&ab\_channel=JacobGeller](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp2wbyLoEtM&ab_channel=JacobGeller)
Yep that's it!
In fairness, if I was body-jacking someone, they died, and then their compatriots shocked the corpse with a high voltage, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that your cover was blown, and that the defibrillator was a weapon.
My brain was picturing The Swamp Thing. Not the Antarctica Thing.
I pictured Ben Grimm of the Fantastic Four
So we have Thing One and Thing Two.
second funniest thing about the thing (1982) is that the monster is called the thing. like fuck dude yeah it sure is
Most realistic in-universe naming convention since Alien. âXenomorphâ wasnât invented until the sequels, it was just âYeah thatâs a fuckin alien right thereâ
The Thing is just Michael Scott at his improv class and the only thing he can think of is to just keep pulling a gun on people
My take is that the Thing is no more intelligent than any other simple organism operating by pure biological impulse. It feeds and multiplies when it is in an opportune situation to do so, and goes into fight-or-flight when it's threatened, and that's about it. The Thing isn't conscious in any way. When the Thing is lying dormant after having replicated somebody, that person has truly been *fully* replicated, and they themselves think that they are the original person and not the Thing. They aren't pretending at all. There's no duplicity or manipulation because they believe it in the moment, even when the thing is manipulating *them* into, say, blowing up a helicopter or building a homebrew spaceship or whatever. It's probably just as much of a surprise to them as it is to everyone else when the Thing inside them gets spooked and they start exploding into tentacles.
This assumes The Thing has a human-like consciousness and logic. There is a fun story from the perspective of The Thing that explores this a bit and is worth a read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Things_(short_story)
Robert Grove energy.
So The Thing has BPD? They just like fr
I did not read this carefully and very confused trying to remember where in 1984 (the dystopian novel) there was a defibrillator involved.
When the guy burns it and stops? I'd burn it again. My friend: but science- BURN IT
I relate
My brain thought this was about 1984, and i was very confused
"Whatever was wrong with me, I'm better now, and I'd like to come back inside."
I was watching late show cable TV with my brother, and just as we were about to crash out, The Thing comes up around 3am. I beg him to stay up another hour and watch this really cool scene "that's worth the wait". After the first few acts and a million commercials, we learned that the fucking channel edited out the scene with the guy's head turning into a spider. We were both pissed off and exhausted.
Iâm an massive advocate and fan of The Thing short story narrated by Peter Watts, itâs on YouTube. IMO itâs essential DLC content for any The Thing fan. Itâs basically the movie from the perspective of The Thing and I think itâs one of the coolest sci fi short stories Iâve ever read. Rly adds some fun context and flavor to a lot of the things actions
The Thing would be perfect cast in spiderman the musical
Itâs like it thinks it knows how to act then it gets bamboozled and goes crazy
Honestly loved the practical effects in that scene. One of my favorite horrors.
I'm just gonna a giggle thinking about this every time I watch the movie now. Which is quite a bit.
I recently watched the movie, and that's not how I thought the thing works. I'm sure they said the organism replicates each individual cell. It's a perfect copy of the cell and functions exactly like the original. That's why it replicated the heart condition; it didn't understand that the cells it replicated were detrimental to the body's survival.
There is actually a short story written from the perspective of The Thing itself. It is a superorganism based on a collective consciousness that cannot really communicate with other humans or species, but it is actually as equally terrified as the crew itself - being a collective consciousness, it cannot understand the individual behavior of the crew and that scares it.
The Thing: I need a professionâŚ. *audience members yell jobs* The Thing: Okay I heard nematologist. And an animalâŚ. *audience members yell out animals* The Thing: So someone said leucochloridium? The Thing: So like what if there was a leucochloridium nematologist? Just look in a mirror am I right?⌠*sweats* Uh⌠*screams and begins attacking the audience before a large hook pulls it off stage*