Alien First Names

 

I know I’ve written extensively about Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie Alien. About how influential it was to me as a young lad. About how into it I was back in those ancient pre-internet times. But I just learned something new about the characters in the movie (and the Alan Dean Foster novelization, I suppose).

 

Their first names.

 

Much like The Lord of the Rings, I feel maligned that now two whole generations of fans (millions of them!) have absorbed this wonderful thing from my youth seemingly known only to me and a small group of pals. So be it; I’ve made my peace with it, and I spend my time actively seeking out and/or revisiting other things that have not found their way into the zeitgeist. But it is always fun and exciting to learn something new about something I thought I knew all about.

 

Alien entered my life when I was 11. I was too young to see it in the movie theaters way back then, I had to make due with Foster’s novelization. Which I read over and over and over again, during this magical time in my life poised midway between childhood and teen adolescence. One of the things that struck me as odd was that none of the characters had first names. In the entirety of the novel the cast of seven were referred to – and called each other by – only their surnames. I was reading a lot of science fiction paperbacks at the time, and I’m sure this happened in other novels, but it was rare enough to stand out.

 

Sure, as the sole survivor of the crew of the Nostromo signing off in the final lines of Alien Ripley mentions her first name – Ellen. And I think there’s a line in the novel where they ask a post-face-hugged-but-still-alive Kane if he knew who he was and he says, “Thomas Kane.” So that’s two first names of our characters.

 

But to my knowledge nothing else. All we knew the crew as was – Captain Dallas, Lambert, Ash, Brett, and Parker.

 

Now I stumbled upon an Alien-universe wiki and within a few minutes I knew all their first names. It was not as I pictured them in my head:

 

  Captain Dallas (Tom Skerrit) – Arthur

   Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) – Joan (OK, she looks like a “Joan”)

   Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) – Samuel

   Parker (Yaphet Kotto) – Dennis (Dennis?! Really?)

 

Only Ash, the last-minute replacement science officer who harbors a mysterious secret (OK, it’s been 45 years – he’s an android trying to bring back a xenomorph specimen), remains first-name-less, at least to my ten minutes of internet searching, and perhaps this was a wise choice to compliment his shadowy past.

 

I feel satisfied. Another childhood mystery solved, to my partial satisfaction.

 

 … “Dennis” …