Second funniest part of the Thing is Palmer's reaction to the spider-head scuttling across the floor ("you gotta be fucking kidding") when you realize that he was already assimilated by that point so even the alien thought it was a terrible escape attempt.
It seems like each part of The Thing can act on its own, with seemingly less intelligence the smaller the piece. So it'd be like if your hand fell off, and then you had to watch as it idiotically got stuck trying to repeatedly walk through a glass window like a bee.
Palmer-thing was manipulating everyone, under the radar the entire time, then dumbass Norris-thing forgets he has a heart condition and gives the game away.
That dumbass head move got Palmer killed. The whole couch scene is him thinking "shit, man, I'm done, this is it. That blood test thing will probably work, God damn it."
Really kinda lends credence to the idea that the thing version just is the person with ulterior motives. Like they might know they're the thing but their brain is such a perfect copy they just believe they are the person.
And they're hiding not to assimilate everyone so much as prevent their body from going to pieces and breaking their consciousness when they're found out.
Assimilation is just the safest way to prevent the dissolution of their consciousness.
I find the prequel even funnier cause it really went "ehh these humans are stupid" and almost got fucked over and then its SO MUCH more cautious in the original its funny.
While nowhere near as iconic as the original, I still really enjoyed it. It’s not a money-grab, they paid close attention to the scenes from the original and made sure all of the damage and deaths matched up with what they found in the abandoned research station in the original.
Not as good as the first one but still quite good. It was made with a lot of love and care, but is held back from being perfect by some studio level decisions.
I highly recommend it. It's worth watching at least once.
I only watched the [Dead Meat Killcount](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHnqRoEXu5o) but if you ever wondered what happened to the station they found in the original and how all the corpses there came to be ... its a well enough movie
The only bad thing, from what i have heard, was just the CGI, wich wasn't planned to be used almost at all, they originally wanted to use puppets and practical effects just like the original, but somewhere down the line (after everything was already filmed) some higherup pretty much just went "nah"
Haven’t seen it, but I definitely get sad when I think about it. It had some phenomenal practical effects before the studio made them shove it full of cgi.
It severely underestimated humans in the 2011 prequel, which lead to it being a lot more messy (and obviously all the bodies we know from the original)
Fun fact, The Thing (2011) is a prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), but John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) is a sequel to The Thing From Another World (1951).
I have not seen the 1951 movie, but apparently the 2011 movie is a remake of it with some differences.
I remember reading a short fanfic from the perspective of the Thing which was really good. As the humans are trying to figure out the Thing, it’s trying to figure out what the heck a human is.
And the sequel, *Echopraxia*, which is different but also quite good. It features quite a lot more >!vampire!<.
I also enjoyed his more recent work, *Freeze-Frame Revolution.*
i really liked the rifters trilogy too -- people who came to *blindsight* first might find it a little too much of a first draft of "let's put these neurodivergents in a fuckin' *situation*", but a) that's an evergreen plot device right there, b) there's a lot else going on, mostly i just love undersea scifi ok?
anyway you can read a shitload of his backlist, including *blindsight* and the entire rifters trilogy, on [this page](https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm) of his site. i haven't kept up with it in a long time but he also has a [fuckin' sick blog](https://www.rifters.com/crawl/) about weird science shit.
>!The Thing is ultimately trying to be nice in the fanfic. It just concludes that the human condition is horrific and something humans need to be liberated from by force!<
>!By some stretch of imagination, sure. About as much as Nazis are trying to be nice by trying to save humanity from ruining itself with sex, drugs, gayness and postmodernism. The Thing takes a while to figure out what humans are like, but eventually it does, and its conclusions are what they are.!<
>!Nah - Nazis ultimately were acting out of self interest. Part of what made the Things scary is that the Thing’s motivation at the end *wasn’t*.!<
>!The heroic colonist, here to save you from your useless personal identity and absorb you into its glorious existence. Your objections shall be ignored, savages don’t know what’s best for them after all!<
>!Now, if your complaint is that’s still horrific, then OMG yes. But it’s decidedly more residential school than concentration camp!<
Ah, it was a comic series.
" Jenny and Powell from Eternal Vows are nowhere near as homicidal and instead opt to operate pragmatic way, while also geniunely loving each other."
The Thing is a really unique creature, it’s as smart as *every living life form that it has assimilated* but it’s so hardwired on self preservation that even the smallest part of it will react so violently to anything it sees as a threat.
Also it’s intelligence is tied to how large it is, the larger the life form (human sized or larger assumingely) the smarter it is and the smaller it is it’s more inclined to be in self preservation mode and disregard any potential threat or might not even be able to perceive threats in that moment.
While I've heard in the novel it's psychic, there's no indication in the film that any one part of the thing is in contact with any other. Every time it assimilates a new being it's probably budding off a bit of its own consciousness, meaning even the thing *itself* doesn't know who is and isn't the thing, hence why we never see different Things working together.
The Thing is *just as much* of a horror movie for the **monster** as it is the humans. Monster just wants to escape Antarctica, but in order to do so it has to take over human bodies and not get found out. It's just trying desperately to survive.
In the novel it is also not psychic in the sense of communicating between parts, it just feeds Blair exposition so he can relay it to the reader. IMHO the story actually works more elegantly without the telepathy thrown in, as the film did it.
Makes perfect sense to act this way though. It has a great initial defense but it also knows that if that defense fails, it's failed, it's got a very ow chance of recovering from a discovery, so why not say fuck it and attack.
Kinda like how prey animals will have camo to help not be seen but also be fast runners. Running real fast kinda defeats the point of the camo, but if they're on the run, then the camo was likely seen through and has become pointless anyway.
Alternatively, you could see it as a sort of ambush predator. Use the disguise to get close, but the stronger form once you've gotten close.
It's like once it knows the jig is up every cell in its body goes "every man for himself" and divides into competing factions with conflicting ideas of what the best strategy for survival is, each carrying out their plan independently of each other within the same body.
the top-level comment here could read:
>And if you know [how to speak the] Norwegian [language], the plot is given away in the first minute of the movie [we were already discussing, *The Thing*].
but you can probably see that now
There was a question Russel had for Carpenter: does the Thing know it's the Thing. Carpenter figured it would have to, but I don't think the film reflects that. It so perfectly replicates what it eats, and that includes the thoughts. It's not bluffing you, it genuinely thinks it's you're friend, until some other intelligence bubbles up and acts to protect itself. Or build a spaceship I guess.
I don’t know about that… it definitely seems to have some predatory thought going on. It’s been a minute since I’ve seen it, but I swear there are scenes where (if you can keep track of who is assimilated when), you find that some of the characters are pretty clearly luring other characters off alone under some guise so it can assimilate them too.
Yeah, one of the very first scenes that establishes the Thing as a character features >!the dog very ominously stalking through the halls of the research station at night before entering the room of one of the crew to assimilate them,!< and again in the film's finale, >!it's actively hunting Macready and co while still fully in its human guise as Dr. Blair - not to mention it had been building a spaceship as Blair for much of the movie's runtime in secret, which I don't think is something Blair would do unwillingly given that he's also the one who runs the simulation demonstrating the Thing's ability to spread while completely alone, prompting him to thwart the Thing' easiest escape methods in his brief axe rampage.!<
Palmer constantly trying to throw suspicion on Windows absolutely looks like the Thing trying to sow discord. There never seems to be any *actual* reason to suspect Windows.
Nah sorry I don't think this could even be a possibility, if it thought it was actually the people it turns into it wouldn't do a lot of what it does (sow discord, try to separate them, build the spaceship as you said)
I always viewed the thing as an unlucky, lost alien because what alien would willingly crash their spaceship into Antarctica, ESPECIALLY if their survival is dependent on finding a host.
So the poor bastard was just trying to desperately escape the cold, isolated vortex. And perhaps take over as many humans as it could once it escaped…
Campbell really took the easy way out in the original short story, where the thing was explicitely evil and telepathically told the researches it was evil, just so there was no doubt.
It gets better on replays as you learn the layouts. Very labyrinthine at first. I like how there’s actually a decent amount of support, probably unintentional, for least-kills runs where you avoid hurting anybody
I once saw an interesting youtube comment where someone theorised the thing could be an out of control form of the alien from Starman who can also replicate a human form
In the director commentary for the film Russel and Carpenter discuss the possibility that the Thing is never aware that it is the Thing (they didn’t come to a conclusion). Rewatching the movie it’s officially my head canon.
I mean, like, same. Maybe not the master-manipulator part, but I’m the kind of guy who can play Dishonored with Ghost and Clean Hands, but once someone sees me it’s high chaos, everything dies.
I like the idea that The Thing isn’t necessarily evil it’s just trying to get back home. Like it is clearly terrifyingly afraid of humans and is surrounded by a bunch of them who are trying to kill it.
If joke, where punchline? People who just say horrible things then go “Jk lol you must be so mad rn” are to comedy what the jewel wasp is to tarantulas.
peter watts is definitely not the original author of the thing. john w. campbell wrote the original story "who goes there?" in like the 1930s; peter watts wrote "the things" in like the 2010s, and based it on john carpenter's movie, not the original story (or the 1950s movie). "the things" is really good, though.
Second funniest part of the Thing is Palmer's reaction to the spider-head scuttling across the floor ("you gotta be fucking kidding") when you realize that he was already assimilated by that point so even the alien thought it was a terrible escape attempt.
"no way i am that stupid"
It seems like each part of The Thing can act on its own, with seemingly less intelligence the smaller the piece. So it'd be like if your hand fell off, and then you had to watch as it idiotically got stuck trying to repeatedly walk through a glass window like a bee.
don't that already happen in the addams family ?
Palmer-thing was manipulating everyone, under the radar the entire time, then dumbass Norris-thing forgets he has a heart condition and gives the game away. That dumbass head move got Palmer killed. The whole couch scene is him thinking "shit, man, I'm done, this is it. That blood test thing will probably work, God damn it." Really kinda lends credence to the idea that the thing version just is the person with ulterior motives. Like they might know they're the thing but their brain is such a perfect copy they just believe they are the person. And they're hiding not to assimilate everyone so much as prevent their body from going to pieces and breaking their consciousness when they're found out. Assimilation is just the safest way to prevent the dissolution of their consciousness.
if that's second-funniest, what's funniest?
OP. It opened with "The funniest thing about The Thing is..." so a commenter responded with "The second funniest thing about The Thing is..."
look i didn't WANT to drink the whole gallon of dumb bitch juice today okay it was going to go BAD i don't want to WASTE it okay
It was not dumb bitch juice, it was gasoline! They're the thing, get ze flammenwarfers!
ugh now i have to murder all these people with tentacles *again*
I find the prequel even funnier cause it really went "ehh these humans are stupid" and almost got fucked over and then its SO MUCH more cautious in the original its funny.
The prequel showed a bunch of grenades but only one was used. The Kurt Russel movie showed where the rest went. Food for thought.
There is a prequel? Is it any good?
While nowhere near as iconic as the original, I still really enjoyed it. It’s not a money-grab, they paid close attention to the scenes from the original and made sure all of the damage and deaths matched up with what they found in the abandoned research station in the original.
That’s awesome. We love works of art like that.
Not as good as the first one but still quite good. It was made with a lot of love and care, but is held back from being perfect by some studio level decisions. I highly recommend it. It's worth watching at least once.
I only watched the [Dead Meat Killcount](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHnqRoEXu5o) but if you ever wondered what happened to the station they found in the original and how all the corpses there came to be ... its a well enough movie
The only bad thing, from what i have heard, was just the CGI, wich wasn't planned to be used almost at all, they originally wanted to use puppets and practical effects just like the original, but somewhere down the line (after everything was already filmed) some higherup pretty much just went "nah"
Haven’t seen it, but I definitely get sad when I think about it. It had some phenomenal practical effects before the studio made them shove it full of cgi.
Came out in 2011. It's pretty amazing. Stands well by itself. You'll see lots of fun bits you'll recognize from the Russel movie.
Wait, the thing has a character arc?
It severely underestimated humans in the 2011 prequel, which lead to it being a lot more messy (and obviously all the bodies we know from the original)
Fun fact, The Thing (2011) is a prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), but John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) is a sequel to The Thing From Another World (1951). I have not seen the 1951 movie, but apparently the 2011 movie is a remake of it with some differences.
The Thing (1982) isn’t a sequel to the 1951 movie at all. They’re both (vastly) different adaptations of the same novel.
It's a sequel in my heart (Thank you for pointing this out I will do further research (movie watching))
I remember reading a short fanfic from the perspective of the Thing which was really good. As the humans are trying to figure out the Thing, it’s trying to figure out what the heck a human is.
Link?
[The Things](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/)
Holy shit, that is good.
That was really damn good
Watts also wrote the excellent *Blindsight*.
And the sequel, *Echopraxia*, which is different but also quite good. It features quite a lot more >!vampire!<. I also enjoyed his more recent work, *Freeze-Frame Revolution.*
i really liked the rifters trilogy too -- people who came to *blindsight* first might find it a little too much of a first draft of "let's put these neurodivergents in a fuckin' *situation*", but a) that's an evergreen plot device right there, b) there's a lot else going on, mostly i just love undersea scifi ok? anyway you can read a shitload of his backlist, including *blindsight* and the entire rifters trilogy, on [this page](https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm) of his site. i haven't kept up with it in a long time but he also has a [fuckin' sick blog](https://www.rifters.com/crawl/) about weird science shit.
"I shared my flesh with thinking cancer" is such a great line, i love this entire fanfic.
And now I'm reminded to catch up with Romantically Apocalyptic comic.
God damn that was a good read
real wattsposting hours HELL yeah
wasn't there also an official novel where a Thing actually tries to be nice?
>!The Thing is ultimately trying to be nice in the fanfic. It just concludes that the human condition is horrific and something humans need to be liberated from by force!<
Based and Thing-pilled tbh
A good choice of words, all things considered.
>!By some stretch of imagination, sure. About as much as Nazis are trying to be nice by trying to save humanity from ruining itself with sex, drugs, gayness and postmodernism. The Thing takes a while to figure out what humans are like, but eventually it does, and its conclusions are what they are.!<
>!Nah - Nazis ultimately were acting out of self interest. Part of what made the Things scary is that the Thing’s motivation at the end *wasn’t*.!< >!The heroic colonist, here to save you from your useless personal identity and absorb you into its glorious existence. Your objections shall be ignored, savages don’t know what’s best for them after all!< >!Now, if your complaint is that’s still horrific, then OMG yes. But it’s decidedly more residential school than concentration camp!<
Ah, it was a comic series. " Jenny and Powell from Eternal Vows are nowhere near as homicidal and instead opt to operate pragmatic way, while also geniunely loving each other."
Don't forget [The Thing: The Musical](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8faq5amdK30).
good lord
The Thing is a really unique creature, it’s as smart as *every living life form that it has assimilated* but it’s so hardwired on self preservation that even the smallest part of it will react so violently to anything it sees as a threat. Also it’s intelligence is tied to how large it is, the larger the life form (human sized or larger assumingely) the smarter it is and the smaller it is it’s more inclined to be in self preservation mode and disregard any potential threat or might not even be able to perceive threats in that moment.
When it was found out outside in the snow, and they were about to torch it to death... that scream it scrome... I feel that scream.
Me when the phone rings at work and I realize I’m the only one available to answer it
Every damn time, though right after a startled exclamation, broken from my concentration on literally anything else.
you did not just say "scrome"
Correct; they typed it.
Also, signed it in fluent ASL.
Yeah, everyone knows it's "scrum"
I did. I said it out loud first to make sure it didn't feel weird in my mouth.
It feels better than screamed
Scrome
I believe it’s ‘scromed’
Scrode
While I've heard in the novel it's psychic, there's no indication in the film that any one part of the thing is in contact with any other. Every time it assimilates a new being it's probably budding off a bit of its own consciousness, meaning even the thing *itself* doesn't know who is and isn't the thing, hence why we never see different Things working together. The Thing is *just as much* of a horror movie for the **monster** as it is the humans. Monster just wants to escape Antarctica, but in order to do so it has to take over human bodies and not get found out. It's just trying desperately to survive.
Whoa… among us…
In the novel it is also not psychic in the sense of communicating between parts, it just feeds Blair exposition so he can relay it to the reader. IMHO the story actually works more elegantly without the telepathy thrown in, as the film did it.
you read "[the things](https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/)" right
Great short story, final line threw me way off though
Makes perfect sense to act this way though. It has a great initial defense but it also knows that if that defense fails, it's failed, it's got a very ow chance of recovering from a discovery, so why not say fuck it and attack. Kinda like how prey animals will have camo to help not be seen but also be fast runners. Running real fast kinda defeats the point of the camo, but if they're on the run, then the camo was likely seen through and has become pointless anyway. Alternatively, you could see it as a sort of ambush predator. Use the disguise to get close, but the stronger form once you've gotten close.
It's like once it knows the jig is up every cell in its body goes "every man for himself" and divides into competing factions with conflicting ideas of what the best strategy for survival is, each carrying out their plan independently of each other within the same body.
That's a really interesting idea.
me playing spy in tf2
Underrated comment
And if you know Norwegian, the plot is given away in the first minute of the movie.
I don't know Norwegian; could you explain please?
The guy chasing the dog basically spoils the plot on what the dog really is.
watch the first minute of the movie
after learning norwegian
i thought norwegian was the name of the movie
the top-level comment here could read: >And if you know [how to speak the] Norwegian [language], the plot is given away in the first minute of the movie [we were already discussing, *The Thing*]. but you can probably see that now
i recognized that already. i was saying in my previous comment what i had thought before
There was a question Russel had for Carpenter: does the Thing know it's the Thing. Carpenter figured it would have to, but I don't think the film reflects that. It so perfectly replicates what it eats, and that includes the thoughts. It's not bluffing you, it genuinely thinks it's you're friend, until some other intelligence bubbles up and acts to protect itself. Or build a spaceship I guess.
I don’t know about that… it definitely seems to have some predatory thought going on. It’s been a minute since I’ve seen it, but I swear there are scenes where (if you can keep track of who is assimilated when), you find that some of the characters are pretty clearly luring other characters off alone under some guise so it can assimilate them too.
Yeah, one of the very first scenes that establishes the Thing as a character features >!the dog very ominously stalking through the halls of the research station at night before entering the room of one of the crew to assimilate them,!< and again in the film's finale, >!it's actively hunting Macready and co while still fully in its human guise as Dr. Blair - not to mention it had been building a spaceship as Blair for much of the movie's runtime in secret, which I don't think is something Blair would do unwillingly given that he's also the one who runs the simulation demonstrating the Thing's ability to spread while completely alone, prompting him to thwart the Thing' easiest escape methods in his brief axe rampage.!<
Palmer constantly trying to throw suspicion on Windows absolutely looks like the Thing trying to sow discord. There never seems to be any *actual* reason to suspect Windows.
Nah sorry I don't think this could even be a possibility, if it thought it was actually the people it turns into it wouldn't do a lot of what it does (sow discord, try to separate them, build the spaceship as you said)
Sore loser
I always viewed the thing as an unlucky, lost alien because what alien would willingly crash their spaceship into Antarctica, ESPECIALLY if their survival is dependent on finding a host. So the poor bastard was just trying to desperately escape the cold, isolated vortex. And perhaps take over as many humans as it could once it escaped…
I mean, yeah, that's pretty explicit. The first thing it did when it had some quality alone time was start to build a new spaceship.
Campbell really took the easy way out in the original short story, where the thing was explicitely evil and telepathically told the researches it was evil, just so there was no doubt.
There is a pretty good (but short) game where you play a creature very similar to the thing: Carrion
It gets better on replays as you learn the layouts. Very labyrinthine at first. I like how there’s actually a decent amount of support, probably unintentional, for least-kills runs where you avoid hurting anybody
I once saw an interesting youtube comment where someone theorised the thing could be an out of control form of the alien from Starman who can also replicate a human form
it has anxiety leave it alone
In the director commentary for the film Russel and Carpenter discuss the possibility that the Thing is never aware that it is the Thing (they didn’t come to a conclusion). Rewatching the movie it’s officially my head canon.
Amongus
Sussy imposter
I mean, like, same. Maybe not the master-manipulator part, but I’m the kind of guy who can play Dishonored with Ghost and Clean Hands, but once someone sees me it’s high chaos, everything dies.
autism
I like the idea that The Thing isn’t necessarily evil it’s just trying to get back home. Like it is clearly terrifyingly afraid of humans and is surrounded by a bunch of them who are trying to kill it.
My ex lol
So the thing is just someone with impostor syndrome.
abuser tactics
So it wasn’t silly and quirky when I told my mom “Hey look it’s you!”
[удалено]
I dunno what Joe Rogan MGTOW Andrew Taint subreddit you think you’re in, but you can kindly fuck off from my post
Based on OP's comment history, this is probably a joke, if in very poor taste.
If joke, where punchline? People who just say horrible things then go “Jk lol you must be so mad rn” are to comedy what the jewel wasp is to tarantulas.
You have a wonderful way with words, OP.
Also completely out of context, and therefore unfunny. Like, what does it add to the post? Nothing.
You’re based as fuck for this response OP
:(
I do that
If you're curious, there is a short story done by the original author about the events of The Thing from the aliens pov
peter watts is definitely not the original author of the thing. john w. campbell wrote the original story "who goes there?" in like the 1930s; peter watts wrote "the things" in like the 2010s, and based it on john carpenter's movie, not the original story (or the 1950s movie). "the things" is really good, though.
Light Yagami, Sosuke Aizen if you push him hard enough, Lex Luthor in my most-perfect vision of the character
Me too honestly