We dont know exactly what happened at the Norwiegens camp, just the aftermath. What if Those crazy sweedes attacked it 1st after it tried to communicate using those unworldly screams to say "Hey thanks it was cold in there , got a hot cup of joe?" I doubt it. Although the moment they thawed out the Thing they probably thought it was dead, or at least not a threat. The takeover of the Norwegian camp was probably quick; it either attacked them once the Norwegians thawed it out, or it thawed itself out (unlikely based on the shape of the ice block) but whatever the case, I can't imagine how a Thing could sneak around without suspicion once the Norwegians realized that their specimen was gone. The first time we see it its running away from thermite grenades and auotomatic gunfire. That's semi-auto. Shadow- I agree with you about the Norwiegens not knowing it was still alive and they were definately surprised, however it still could have snuck around after assimilating/hiding in, any number of the unnamed Norwiegen crew. They would've been just as stressful and suspicious of everyone around them as the Americans. I tend to think that the Nor. camp was taken over more quickly, it had less people and less information than the Americans/ Macready did before they learned of its existence. However I don't believe it had any of the formentioned thoughts i had previously stated ("Hey thanks it was cold in there , got a hot cup of joe?") I was just furthering a different line of thinking for discussions sake :D As for the automatic gunfire , I stand corrected.

I kinda like the idea of the Thing waking up to a hot cup of "Joe".

"Joe" (meaning from the Things perspective) the Norwiegen name Joe? Blair-Thing thinking "How about a nice hot cup of Macready". lol funny thought

Origin of the Thing...
REGARDING THE ORIGIN OF THE THING. Back in the early nineties I recall seeing a documentary on Channel 4 in the UK on the subject of "Body Horror" (anatomically correct horror movies). These included 'Alien', 'Hellraiser', the remake of 'The Blob' and of course 'The Thing'. It interviewed John Carpenter and he stated that he had undergone numberous stomach operations following a stomach cancer scare in the early eighties while he was helping right the treatment for 'The Thing'. His premise was "what if cancer had conciousness?... what if it could think and react?"... After all - a Carcinoma is just composed of cells that have become undiffentiated - they do what they are programmed to do: "REPLICATE." Usually a cell that has suffers a genetic coding error undergoes self-repair (single point reversions) or destruction (PCD Programmed Cell Death or Apoptosis). Failing do do that could lead to problems as the cells replicate without an instruction to stop. Should this continue the mass of cells can become invasive (they encroach on important structures such as organs) or alternatively they could break off and lodge in the body elsewhere (metastasize) leading to secondaries. These are usually in the brain, lung, liver or the bones. Now imagine that same cluster of cells had PURPOSE... you have: The Thing!

Origin of the Thing...
REGARDING THE ORIGIN OF THE THING. Back in the early nineties I recall seeing a documentary on Channel 4 in the UK on the subject of "Body Horror" (anatomically correct horror movies). These included 'Alien', 'Hellraiser', the remake of 'The Blob' and of course 'The Thing'. It interviewed John Carpenter and he stated that he had undergone numberous stomach operations following a stomach cancer scare in the early eighties while he was helping write the treatment for 'The Thing'. His premise was "what if cancer had conciousness?... what if it could think and react?"... After all - a Carcinoma is just composed of cells that have become undiffentiated - they do what they are programmed to do: "REPLICATE." Usually a cell that has suffers a genetic coding error undergoes self-repair (single point reversions) or destruction (PCD Programmed Cell Death or Apoptosis). Failing do do that could lead to problems as the cells replicate without an instruction to stop. Should this continue the mass of cells can become invasive (they encroach on important structures such as organs) or alternatively they could break off and lodge in the body elsewhere (metastasize) leading to secondaries. These are usually in the brain, lung, liver or the bones. Now imagine that same cluster of cells had PURPOSE... you have: The Thing!

The thing could be an artificailly created form of life but that doesn't mean it was created as a weapon. How about this. What if an alien scientist on another planet wanted to create a form of immortality via an entirely new form of virus with no standard cell structure. The dying patient would be injected with this virus which copies all information from the patients brain and encodes it in the same way DNA is. They then have the ability to absorb another life form which they can use to swap bodies of a similiar nature thus staying alive forever by changing from body to body. But something went wrong. The virus because of it's memory harvesting ability which accumulated vast amounts of knowledge became sentient, retaining all knowledge it encountered but creating it's own agenda of survival and utter domination of all life. Soon the virus as immitated not just the populace but every life form on it's surface. The planet is wiped out by it's neighbours but a sample of the immortality virus organism escapes in the body of one of the populace in an emergency escape vessel.

As for The Thing being a weapon of war, if one merely wants to punish one's enemies and make them experience an agonising demise, then The Thing would certainly do the job. But couldn't the same effect be achieved by simpler means? Saddam Hussein's acid baths would achieve a similar effect, as would simply throwing them into the back of a garbage truck. And if one wanted to vanquish one's enemies because they are a threat, then the Thing imitations, being perfect imitations, would still be a threat, and a worse one at that, because in addition to their desire to defeat you in the conventional sense, they could Thing-Out on you. Even if you had effective countermeasures against the latter possibility, the conventional threat would remain. So, nothing would be achieved, in a strategic sense, by exposing one's enemies to The Thing. It is for these reasons that I don't believe that The Thing is an engineered weapon. XidiouX

Not always true. Sometimes a good plan can backfire. We don't know if the 'developers of the Thing' weren't able to tell who's who? Or even so, the Thing could have gone a-wire by a genetic change. The Thing was twice beaten by humans, but we had to pay a high price in costs.

Also, as for evolution, in terms of "survival of the fit-*test*-('")", we can wonder about the prosperity of Thing* imitations within a given ecosystem. These imitations would be in a somewhat advantageous position. Indeed, it's tempting to imagine that The Thing would always win against ordinary organisms, because it can imitate any such organism and thus benefit from any competitive advantage. The question is: how does it get to that advantageous position from an inferior one? This seems to be a deceptively difficult question, and I won't attempt to answer it here. XidiouX * We can also wonder whether not 'Thingification' itself can evolve, and by what mechanism? Being a metabiological process to which all species are subject, such a transformation could not be understood in terms of DNA mutations. Leaving aside the question of potential evolutionary mechanisms, there is the more obvious question of how this process could actually be improved? Could it, for example, be extended to non-organic matter? It's interesting to wonder what scenarios could lead the the evolution of this process in this direction or perhaps others.

Alright... Here's my theories... Take 'em or leave 'em as you see fit... Plausable Origins: 1: Bioweapon. As has been stated before, if the Things assemilate an entire planet's ecosytem, there's nothing left and they'll all eventually die out. On paper, it sounds like a good "planet killer" idea. The agility of the Things to imitate other lifeforms is a nice bonus. Instead of dopping bombs on your enemies, give them a litter of cute little Thing-puppies. Similar to how the White Man spread plagues to the Native Americans by giving them infected blankets, water, and food. The level of technological advancement of the attackers is irrelivent beyond the point of being able to engeneer (or obtain) Things. Sometimes a big, hightech planet-killing gun is just too obvious. Especially if you're not supposed to be at war with the planet you're trying to kill... 2: Engeneered/Mutated Pet Gone Bad (EMPGB). Again, an idea that sounds good on paper. A non-agressive Thing would be the perfect pet. Practically unkillable, able to change its form, possibly becoming fairly intelligent, and able to retain its genetic memory in small groups of cells (if not a single cell). No doubt, they understimated it and wound up with the Thing we all know and love. Wether it was a whole new creation or a modification of some other life form isn't really important to this theory. They both lead to the same conclusion. Additionally, this may be a precursor to my Bioweapon theory, as sometimes happens with accidental discoveries. 3: Xenomorph Parallel (XP). This one requires the Thing to be its own organism before it's discovered. The exact hows and whys are beyond my level of education (I don't know enough about advanced genetics to really get into those), so feel free to replace this sentence with your theories on how it would evolve... At some point, a space-faring alien comes ot the The Planet Of The Things, unaware of just what lurks there. In typical science fiction fashion, they get thingified and return home, spreading the "infection". Or, perhaps it was one person amonst a group, resulting in something similar to a hybrid of Alien and The Thing (the movies, that is). Except that the alien "Ripley stand in" doesn't quite make it and crash lands the saucer in Antartica. 4: Super Disease (SD): Let's face it. We don't know jack about actual exobiology. We usually keep getting hung up on science fiction steriotypes. So, it's not out of the realm of possibility that an actual alien being may in fact have developed a very nasty case of the Alien Flu or Alien Cancer or Alien AIDS and this spread and mutated, eventually becoming its own life form. Ship Theory: The ship crash landed, not full-on crashed. Not all crash landing are spectacularly destrucive. The ship could have initially hit the ocean, and being a disk, skipped onto land at an impessive speed, where it would eventually skid to a halt on the ice. Or, it may have been "nosed up" in time to avoid a head-on collision with the ground and come skidding to a halt. Between the ship's size and alien conctuction (presumably they have some incredibly stong materials), any damage done to the ship is confined to the bottom. We only see the top of the ship in the ice, so we have no idea what the underside looks like. It could very well have been ground off and scattered all the way back to the point of impact, leaving only the upper layers of the ship intact. Such debris would remain under the ice below the level where the saucer and aliensicle are found. The Thing-alien most likely crawed out of the crashed ship disoriented and hurting. There may have been an onboard fire, giving it additional motivation to abandon ship. The surface of the ship probly was hot and may have melted some of the nearby ice, but not enough to actually sink the ship. Space ships are usually built in such a way as to prevent the ship from retaining external heat for very long. Coupled with ice and snow being plowed through, the ship would've cooled off rather fast. The Thing-Alien probly escaped the ship to get away from the supposed onboard fire and let the surface cool down (perhaps to gather ice/snow to put out the onboard fire) and froze. It doesn't take very long to freeze to death (or to stasis as the case may be) in Antartica.