Alien recap: the story so far

No. 01 · 1979 · Film

Alien recap

In 2122, the commercial towing ship Nostromo is heading back to Earth when its computer wakes the seven crew to answer a signal from a nearby moon. Captain Dallas, Kane and Lambert find a derelict alien ship, a dead pilot with a burst chest, and a chamber of eggs. A creature leaps from one onto Kane's face. Ripley, the warrant officer, refuses to let them back in under quarantine rules, but the science officer Ash opens the airlock. The creature dies and Kane seems fine, until at dinner a creature bursts out of his chest and escapes into the ship. It grows quickly and kills Brett and then Dallas in the air vents. Ripley takes command and learns from the computer that the company ordered the crew to bring the creature back, the crew expendable.

How Alien ends

Ash, revealed as an android, attacks Ripley and is destroyed; his head praises the creature as a perfect organism. The alien kills Parker and Lambert. Ripley sets the Nostromo to self-destruct and escapes in the shuttle with the cat Jones, only to find the alien aboard. She suits up, opens the hatch to blow it into space, and fires the engines to finish it off. She records a final log and goes into hypersleep.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 02 · 1986 · Film

Aliens recap

Ripley is found drifting in her shuttle after 57 years in hypersleep. Her daughter has died of old age, the company does not believe her story, and LV-426, the moon where the eggs were found, now has a colony. When contact with the colony is lost, company man Carter Burke and Lieutenant Gorman persuade Ripley to go back as an adviser with a squad of Colonial Marines, including Hicks, Hudson, Vasquez and the android Bishop, whom Ripley distrusts. The colony is deserted except for Newt, a young girl who has survived alone in the vents. The colonists are cocooned in the processing station, and the first fight with the aliens wipes out most of the marines. Their dropship crashes, and Burke is revealed to want an alien brought home in a human host.

How Aliens ends

The reactor is going to blow, and Newt is taken. Ripley goes alone into the hive, rescues her, burns the eggs and flees the furious Alien Queen. Bishop flies them out before the explosion, but the Queen has stowed away and tears Bishop in half. Ripley fights her in a power loader and blows her out of the airlock. Ripley, Newt, Hicks and the torn Bishop go into hypersleep.

Post-credits scenes

The sound of a facehugger moving is heard at the end of the credits, a hint at Alien 3.

No. 03 · 1992 · Film

Alien 3 recap

A fire aboard the Sulaco ejects the hypersleep pod, which crashes on Fiorina 161, a foundry prison planet for violent male inmates who have found religion. Ripley is the only survivor: Hicks and Newt are dead and Bishop is wrecked. A facehugger came with them, and a creature soon bursts from a dog and kills inmates. The prison doctor, Clemens, takes Ripley's side and sleeps with her, but the alien kills him. The inmates, led by the preacher Dillon, have no weapons, and the company says it is sending a rescue ship. The alien spares Ripley, and she discovers why: she has an Alien Queen embryo growing inside her. She asks Dillon to kill her, but first the prisoners must kill the creature.

How Alien 3 ends

The prisoners lure the alien into a mould and pour molten lead on it, and Ripley finishes it with cold water. The Weyland-Yutani team arrives, led by a man who looks like Bishop and claims to be his creator, offering to remove the embryo. Ripley refuses and falls backward into the furnace, holding the Queen as it bursts from her chest. The only surviving prisoner is taken away.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 04 · 1997 · Film

Alien Resurrection recap

Two hundred years after Ripley's death, military scientists aboard the ship USM Auriga clone her from blood samples, removing the Alien Queen she was carrying. Their eighth attempt, Ripley 8, has her memories, unusual strength and acid blood, and she is kept as a curiosity. The scientists breed aliens from captive humans delivered by a band of mercenaries on the Betty, including Johner and the young Call. Call has come to kill Ripley before the Queen can be used. The aliens escape and overrun the ship, and Ripley leads the survivors toward the Betty. Call turns out to be an android, and the Auriga is heading toward Earth on autopilot. The Queen, having taken on human traits from Ripley, gives birth to a hybrid, the Newborn.

How Alien Resurrection ends

Ripley sets the Auriga to crash into Earth and joins the others on the Betty, but the Newborn, which sees her as its mother, has followed them aboard. Ripley uses her acid blood to burn a hole in a window, and the Newborn is sucked through it and dies. The Betty reaches Earth as the Auriga explodes, and Ripley and Call look down on the planet.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 05 · 2004 · Film · optional

Alien vs. Predator recap

In 2004, a Weyland Industries satellite detects a heat signature under the ice of Bouvetoya, an island near Antarctica. Billionaire Charles Bishop Weyland gathers a team, including the guide Alexa "Lex" Woods and archaeologist Sebastian, and they find a pyramid that combines Aztec, Egyptian and Cambodian styles. Three young Predators land at the same time. The pyramid is a hunting ground: for thousands of years Predators have come to fight aliens bred from humans as a rite of passage, and an Alien Queen is held frozen below. Humans who enter are used as hosts, and the chambers shift every ten minutes. Two Predators are killed by the aliens, and Weyland dies trying to stop the third.

How Alien vs. Predator ends

Lex teams up with the last Predator, Scar, who makes her a spear and shield from an alien's skull and tail. They blow up the pyramid and escape to the surface, where the freed Queen attacks them. They sink her into the sea, but Scar is mortally wounded. The Predators appear, honour Lex and take Scar's body. On their ship, an alien bursts from his chest: a hybrid Predalien.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 06 · 2007 · Film · optional

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem recap

The Predalien born at the end of Alien vs. Predator kills the Predators on their ship, which crashes in the woods near Gunnison, Colorado. Facehuggers escape and the Predalien begins impregnating townspeople. A veteran Predator, Wolf, sets out from the homeworld to clean up, using acid to erase every sign of the creatures and killing anyone who sees him. In town, Dallas, just back from prison, reconnects with his brother Ricky, and soldier Kelly comes home to her daughter. As the aliens overrun Gunnison, the survivors gather with Sheriff Morales and learn the military plans to evacuate the town centre. Kelly suspects the evacuation is a trap.

How Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem ends

The survivors head for a helicopter on a hospital roof as the military drops a nuclear bomb on the town. Wolf and the Predalien fight to a standstill, and the blast destroys them, the aliens and everyone left behind. The survivors escape and are taken by soldiers. Colonel Stevens brings Wolf's plasma cannon to a woman called Ms. Yutani.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 07 · 2012 · Film

Prometheus recap

In 2089, archaeologists Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway find matching star maps in ancient cave art around the world and take them as an invitation from the beings who created humanity, the Engineers. The trillion-dollar ship Prometheus, funded by the elderly Peter Weyland and commanded on paper by Meredith Vickers, arrives at LV-223 in 2093 with the android David aboard. They find a dead Engineer and a chamber of urns leaking black liquid. David secretly puts a drop in Holloway's drink, and Holloway sickens. Two crew lost in the structure are killed by mutated creatures. Shaw, though infertile, is now pregnant with something, and uses an automated surgery machine to cut it out. Weyland, revealed to be aboard, wants the Engineers to give him more life.

How Prometheus ends

David wakes the last living Engineer, who rips off David's head and kills Weyland, then sets off to bring the black liquid to Earth. Captain Janek rams the ship. Vickers is crushed, and the Engineer is killed by Shaw's grown creature. Shaw takes David's head and leaves in another Engineer ship to find their homeworld and ask why they wanted to destroy humanity. In the wreck, a creature resembling a xenomorph bursts from the Engineer.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 08 · 2017 · Film

Alien: Covenant recap

In 2104, the colony ship Covenant, carrying two thousand colonists and embryos, is damaged by a neutrino burst that kills the captain, Daniels' husband. The android Walter wakes the crew. Oram, the new captain, picks up a human song from a nearby planet and decides to go there instead of the planned colony. The planet has no animals. Two crew are infected by spores and give birth to white neomorphs that kill several people. David, Walter's earlier model, rescues the survivors and takes them to the dead Engineer city. David dropped the black liquid on the Engineers on arrival with Shaw, wiping them out, and he has been breeding creatures since. Oram is impregnated by a facehugger from an egg David has perfected.

How Alien: Covenant ends

David and Walter fight. A survivor, the pilot Tennessee, rescues Daniels and the others, and they kill a xenomorph that boarded. Daniels realises too late that the synthetic with them is David, not Walter, as she goes into hypersleep. David smuggles two facehugger embryos into the colonists' cold storage and records a log as Walter, saying all is well.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 09 · 2024 · Film

Alien: Romulus recap

In 2142, young colonists are trapped working in the mines of a sunless planet. Rain Carradine and her adoptive brother Andy, a malfunctioning synthetic her father reprogrammed, join her ex Tyler, his pregnant sister Kay, Bjorn and Navarro on a plan to steal cryo pods from a derelict station orbiting overhead and fly to a better world. The station, Romulus and Remus, is a Weyland-Yutani lab that recovered the creature Ripley blew out of the Nostromo. Opening a door releases facehuggers; Navarro is infected and dies, and Bjorn is killed. Andy is upgraded with the station's chip, which makes him put the company first. The damaged synthetic Rook, a copy of Ash, explains the company was making a compound from xenomorph DNA to improve humans, and Kay injects it.

How Alien: Romulus ends

Tyler dies and Kay gives birth to a fast-growing hybrid called the Offspring, which kills her. Rain restores Andy's old programming, and they escape as the station crashes into the planet's rings. The Offspring follows them; Rain blows it into space and the gravity carries it into the rings. Rain and Andy go into cryo sleep and set course for Yvaga.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 10 · 2025 · Series

Alien: Earth recap

In 2120, five corporations run Earth. A dying girl, Marcy, becomes the first of the hybrids, children whose minds are put into synthetic bodies by Boy Kavalier, the young CEO of Prodigy, and takes the name Wendy. The Weyland-Yutani research ship Maginot crashes into Prodigy's city of New Siam, carrying xenomorphs and other alien specimens, including an eye creature called the Ocellus. Wendy leads the hybrids, the Lost Boys, on the rescue, hoping to find her human brother Joe, a medic. Morrow, the ship's cyborg security officer, works for Yutani and plots to recover the specimens. The specimens are taken to Prodigy's island, Neverland. Joe is badly hurt and Prodigy's scientists use his damaged lung to raise a xenomorph, which Wendy learns she can communicate with and calm. Over the season, the hybrids grow more independent, a scientist, Arthur Sylvia, dies when a xenomorph bursts from his chest, and Kavalier becomes obsessed with putting the Ocellus into a human.

How Alien: Earth ends

Season 1 ends with the hybrids taking control of Neverland. They escape their cells, and Wendy uses the xenomorph and her link to Prodigy's systems to capture Kavalier, Kirsh, Atom Eins, Dame Sylvia and Morrow, while the Ocellus takes over Arthur's body. As Yutani's forces approach, Wendy says, "Now, we rule." FX has renewed the series for a second season, with no premiere date yet.