Alien: Xenomorphs Have An Obvious Weakness Humans Haven’t Realized Yet

Warning: spoilers for Alien #1 and #2

Despite Marvel Comics taking the reins on the Alien franchise through Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox, humanity’s best and brightest still haven’t woken up to the Xenomorphs’ undeniable weakness. After eight feature films (including the Aliens vs. Predator franchise), as well as countless novels, comics, and video games, never has a single soul thought of devising a means to protect humans from the weakest link in the Xenomorph life-cycle: Facehuggers. 

In the latest Marvel Comics relaunch of the Alien comics line, writer Phillip Kennedy Johnson and artist Salvador Larroca set their series immediately after the events of James Cameron’s Aliens, in the year 2200. For context, the crew of the Nostromo in the first Alien film, from director Ridley Scott, made contact with a Xenomorph in 2122. It wasn’t until 2179 that the colony known as Hadley’s Hope on planet LV-426 was wiped out by Xenomorphs. This means that humanity has been aware of the existence of this incredibly hostile species for seventy-eight years, and they’ve had at least twenty years to study them up close. And in all that time, not a single countermeasure has been developed to defend against what is arguably the linchpin of the Xenomorph’s ability to reproduce. 

First off, it isn’t as though Weyland-Yutani doesn’t have the resources, or lacks the vested interest in protecting its scientists and security forces from the deadly organism it’s so obsessed with researching and weaponizing. What readers are forced to surmise then is that even with all that money and technology, none of the company’s engineers or scientists were capable of designing protective armor to prevent the Facehugger’s embryo-laying appendage from entering the human throat; or perhaps bio-engineering a pheromone, or chemical, to disrupt the creature’s ability to locate hosts. That interstellar travel is possible, and synthetic humans are so sophisticated that they’re indistinguishable from normal humans, makes it all the more preposterous that not a single viable solution has been implemented. It’s frustrating that even after so much time and effort spent picking this threat apart the best course of action when encountering a Facehugger is to a) not get one on your face, and b) if you do, kill yourself. 

Secondly, it’s worth reiterating that the crux of the current crisis in the comic hinges on extensive experimentation being carried out on all Xenomorph casts as well as the species’ genome. Onboard Epsilon Station orbiting Earth, is the fruit of this hard work: a mysterious, but world-changing, “Alpha Embryo” kept in heavily-restricted suspended animation. All this to say that it isn’t for lack of knowledge either that humans can’t inhibit the impregnation process. So if it isn’t ignorance, it’s stupidity. In fact, it could be argued that a solution of sorts has been invented, and already mentioned: synthetic humans. It’s already been shown that androids like Bishop and Ash are ignored or simply eviscerated by the Facehugger and Warrior/Drone casts. Gabriel Cruz, the protagonist of Johnson’s and Larroca’s series, even requests synthetic security agents instead of human marines to accompany him on his mission to Epsilon Station. Unfortunately, the request is denied on the grounds that “artificial people” are too expensive to produce. Essentially, the company has chosen to send two extra hosts for the Xenomorphs to breed in. 

Ultimately, if there is a reason why no countermeasures have been developed or deployed against facehuggers, it has more to do with narrative necessity than any in-universe obstacles. In other words, if there aren’t aliens running around, then there’s no story. The reproductive cycle of the deadly Xenomorph is the stuff nightmares are wrought from, but, as any termite exterminator will tell you, it’s achain that can be interrupted if not broken entirely. That being said, wouldn’t it be interesting for fans, as well as the creative team over at Marvel Comics, to explore the ways in which the titular Alien could learn to adapt to or circumvent such an obstacle? 

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