The Thing, directed by John Carpenter, had a dismal finish that leaves people scratching their heads to this day. People have always wondered what happened to MacReady and Childs after they confronted each other in the shack with weapons drawn and a bottle of J&B in their hands.
Were they infected in any way? Is it true that someone came to their aid? If so, when do you think it will happen? Where did the spaceship go? Several comics have attempted to answer the question that the film left unanswered, but none have proven to be satisfactory.
However, there is one work that is not only satisfactory but also deserving of being made into a sequel. Marvelous Videos discovered the hidden jewel, which had essentially been lost in the shadows of obscurity. We discovered a script written by David Leslie Johnson, who worked as an assistant to legendary director Frank Darabont on films like Shawshank Redemption.
Johnson had written a follow-up to John Carpenter’s picture, and the script was to be turned into a Sci-Fi Channel mini-series, which Darabont planned to produce. But, regrettably, the project never saw the light of day.
It was a shame because the script was really good and had the ability to expand on Carpenter’s established narrative. Nonetheless, in this film, we will attempt to provide Johnson and his work the respect they deserve, in the hopes that it will be considered in the future when the next installment of The Thing is being developed. Let us get this party started, shall we?
David Leslie Johnson’s titled the first part of his script, Exposure. It essentially began in 1982 with MacReady and Childs meeting each other in the backdrop of a burning Outpost 31. The scene was from the end of Carpenter’s film, and the two survivors of the mishap were just sitting there, pointing their weapons at one another, passing the bottle of J&B scotch whiskey.
After this point, Johnson flash-forwards the story by six months. A team of Russians found what remained of Outpost 31; much of the soot from the burned-down facility was covered in six months of snow and ice. Soon enough, an Mi 8T chopper of the Russian military could be heard circling the perimeter, a red star, and the Cyrillic acronym CCCP painted on the sides of the chopper.
Inside the chopper are Dr. Yuri Lukanov and his wife Alina, both scientists are in their 40s and work for the Russian government. Apart from the pilot and the co-pilot, there’s a third passenger, Fedyenka Vigovsky. A bright man in his 20s, high on enthusiasm, not so much on hygiene.
Once the helicopter lands, Dr. Yuri and Alina are welcome by Dr. Kadakin, who was already on ground zero; meanwhile, a major excavation is going on in the background. Kadakin then takes the scientist couple to the shack where MacReady and Childs’ frozen bodies were found. They noticed that Childs was still pointing his flamethrower at MacReady, who was pointing his .357 Magnum at Childs.
Something that the two of them found very curious. But Kadakin has something else to show to the scientists, and he escorts them in choppers to another location. Upon setting their eyes at what Kadakin had to show, Yuri, Alina and Fedyenka lose their minds.
It was the spaceship from Carpenter’s film. No one had entered it yet, and Kadakin didn’t know if it was safe to do so. So, after Yuri’s nod, they made their way into the spaceship. They find something of value, apart from the spaceship itself, and we are thrown 23 years into the future in the year 2005.
Twenty-three years later, a man named Ivan Vitsenko bribed his way out of Russia and got into a Boeing 747 commercial plane that was headed to Los Angeles with more than 200 passengers. It turns out that Vitsenko had a strain of the Thing with him, but the Russians didn’t want the Thing to spread in a populated area, and neither did they want Americans to know that it was indirectly their doing or that something like The Thing exists in the first place.
Furthermore, they send Yuri Lukanov, now in his 60s, to America to serve as an expert on the matter. The passenger flight had entered the American airspace, and the only way that the Russians had was having it shot down by the Americans.
So, the Russians made a quick cover story that a Chechen rebel was carrying a weaponized version of smallpox, the mortality rate of which could hit a hundred percent. To counter the situation at hand, Pete Avery of Homeland Security contacts a senior staff of the Centre For Disease Control and Research, Dr. Anne Blackburn, and his junior from Homeland Security, Roger Pritchard.
The Americans quickly scrambled four F 16s to escort the Boeing to Cannon Air Force Base so that the passengers could be quarantined. But the Boeing sent out hijack alarms, and the Americans decided that it would be best to shoot it down. However, before one of the F16s could engage, the plane went down on its own and crashed in the deserts of New Mexico.
What had happened was that Ivan Vitsenko had seen the F 16s sent to escort the passenger flight, and sensing trouble, he suffered a heart attack. When the flight attendants tried to use the defibrillator on him, the Thing revealed its monstrous form and caused the downing of the flight.
As the plane went down, the situation room of Homeland Security went silent. Meanwhile, the plane crash was being witnessed by a Navajo man named John Little Bear. As he went closer to look at the situation in hand, he noticed a hungry coyote sniffing and investigating the burning plane, which had sent out a large ball of orange fire a while ago.
As the coyote started to eat and salvage whatever it could, it got spooked by a charred, fleshy mass. This unearthly piece of life opened itself as if it was a blossoming flower of flesh. The coyote was as cautious as it was curious and walked hesitantly towards the fleshy mass, but a long tendril shot out of the unearthly creature and pierced the coyote’s neck before pulling it into darkness.
A few moments later, the coyote returned to the scene, right as rain, as if nothing had happened to it. John Little Bear was shocked and startled to see what had just transpired before his eyes. The coyote looked straight into Little Bear’s eyes before trotting away into nothingness. Little Bear was sure that he had seen a monstrous demon that the Navajo called skinwalker; it was a creature that shapeshifted by assuming the flesh of people and animals alike.
How do you find it until now? I think it is good enough to be turned into a film. The script, so far, suggests that a sinister secret is being kept hidden by the Russians, Homeland Security is involved in a situation that could blow up like Chernobyl at any moment, and a Navajo man who seems to be the only American right now who knows the real danger that came slithering and crawling out of the crashed plane.
Pretty close to the crash site was a small town of Christmas with a population of about 300, the nearest cluster inhabited by humans. The Coyote Thing continued its journey after locking eyes with Little Bear and went on infecting the animals that it met on its path, and these animals, in turn, started to infect the townsfolk of Christmas, New Mexico. But by now, Little Bear knows that he has to rise and fight the menace.
He joins hands with a man named Gates to check the spread of The Thing by killing whatever infected animals they find. But the duo can not burn all the animals that have been infected; they do not have the resources. Meanwhile, Lukanov reaches ground zero and joins the strike team.
He initially didn’t tell them anything about the true nature of the threat because he was given strict orders to stick to the cover story that the Russians had crafted for the Americans. But once the American strike team and the citizens of Christmas realize that some of them are not human anymore, but only beasts in the skin of humans, Lukanov comes clean with the Americans.
He reveals everything there was to know about The Thing and his discovery made 23 years ago. He was probably drowning in an ocean of personal responsibility and the guilt for being the one directly or indirectly responsible for the release of The Thing into the outside world, a mistake that could be the end of Earth as we know it.
He tells the Americans that he and his team had found blood samples of The Thing inside the spaceship on which it had arrived on Earth. Furthermore, he reveals the spaceship had an insectoid crew. John Carpenter himself mildly revealed that no real thought was given to the original form of the alien because no one knew for sure what it really was.
However, screenwriter Eric Heisserer and director Matthijs Van Heijningen of the 2011 prequel did give it some thought. The 2011 prequel was supposed to feature a similar three-eyed monster, but it was ultimately scrapped from the film, possibly due to budgetary constraints.
Anyway, Lukanov also revealed that they learned about the Thing’s real nature and the threat it possessed through records and notes that the Americans of Outpost 31 had left behind, and also about the blood test that MacReady had developed. But the most startling of these revelations was the fact that the Russians wanted to create a bio-weapon out of the shapeshifting alien.
But they learned the hard way that it was something they neither understood fully nor could they control. Oh, and by the way, Avery and Pritchard get into sort of a major disagreement, so much so that Avery later asks for Pritchard’s resignation, but we wouldn’t get into the details because it would just make this video unnecessarily lengthy. And this was more or less the end of the first part of Johnson’s script.
The second part of Johnson’s script is called Extreme Amplification. It seemed as if writer Johnson was having a field day with the creatures; the monstrosities he described in the script were far scarier than what Carpenter had depicted in the film. Rob Bottin, the man behind The Thing Creature, would be impressed by what Johnson had written in his script.
Anyway, Dr. Lukanov of Russia and Blackburn of America have met already and are worried about the situation at hand. Meanwhile, the General from the military, who was put in charge of the containment operation, plans to send rescue teams into the town of Christmas to bring back people who’ve not been infected.
Despite warnings from Lukanov, who knows exactly the kind of threat they are dealing with, nevertheless, the General proceeds and Lukanov’s fears turn into reality. The military quarantines the survivors, and they begin testing them one by one, using the blood test that MacReady had developed.
It wasn’t before long that one of the townfolk turned into a monstrous creature filled with tentacles and looked like a flower of flesh in the middle of a desert. The horrid sight opens the General’s eyes, and Pete Avery loses his mind. Well, not literally, but yeah. Dr. Blackburn soon advises the President to do something radical.
She tells him that even though the General has sent out his men to shoot and burn down any animal they can find, there’s a possibility that birds, insects, etc., might be infected, and these would go unnoticed by the military men. Furthermore, there was a possibility that the infection may become airborne, and The Thing could travel even if an infected person sneezed in front of others.
Also, what if the Thing managed to figure out a way to beat the blood test? After all, it was a highly intelligent creature that retains the memories of anyone it infects. Blackburn was hinting the President to launch a nuclear strike if it came to that.
And, keeping in mind the safety of millions of Americans, and the world, at large, it was decided that in favor of the greater good, a nuke would be dropped on the town of Christmas within the next 10 hours.
Furthermore, to ensure an extra level of safety and precaution, Lukanov, Avery, and the others decide that they would stay at Christmas and die from the strike unless a new foolproof test mechanism was discovered. However, Blackburn and Lukanov had an epiphany of sorts and concluded that another way to figure out if someone had been infected was through giving the subject an electric shock.
But things are bound to get difficult and the paranoia more pronounced when the Thing has found itself in the midst of hundreds of soldiers and more than 300 ordinary residents of a small town. But another greater issue was that many of these 300 people were missing; they just disappeared without a trace.
And among those who remained at Christmas, no one knew who’s human and who’s not! Adding insult to injury, the townsfolk had taken several of the soldiers as hostages and demanded that they should be released.
Blackburn went to the town to make a truce, where she informed them that if they didn’t take the new electric test, all of them would die as a nuke was on its way. Hearing this, they agreed to release the hostage and take the test.
All of them were given serial numbers, and their blood samples were taken, only to be electrified. This newfound test proved to be a success. When the results came out, only 16 people were truly human, and the rest were incinerated.
Previously, Gates and Little Bear had found themselves inside a missile silo, where Little Bear got attacked by the Coyote Thing, but Gates managed to escape unscathed. He later joined the military and Blackburn to fight off the monsters. He was the only one who knew that there was something going on in the silos.
Lukanov joined the party that was going to the silo, and upon reaching there, their jaws dropped. The missing people of Christmas were found, all of them converted into Things. They were manufacturing makeshift spaceships, large enough to fit heads and not entire bodies.
As Gates and the others rained fire on the Things, the team saw that several spider head things came into being and boarded the spaceships to fly out of the silos. As an act of great courage and sacrifice, Lukanov went to the control room of the silo and closed its opening but got ambushed by several Human Things.
But before they could turn him into their kind, he destroyed the place through an explosion. Meanwhile, Blackburn, the 16 survivors of Christmas, and a few others boarded Black Hawks to escape the nuke’s blast radius.
The choppers took off as soon as possible and were flying low and fast. To her absolute terror and horror, Blackburn saw one of the flying saucers rise from the rubble of the exploded silo, her chopper was extremely far away from the saucer, so it resembled like a bright star, and it eventually disappeared in the bright light that came to life because of the nuke’s detonation.
The script reaches its conclusion with Blackburn’s voice-over in which she says that even after several days, no traces or instances of the Thing have been found, and it is possible that the nuclear explosion managed to destroy all the creatures.
However, it finally ends with a panoramic view of New York, the camera slowly closing in on the multitudes of people and closing in further on a man, whose back faces the camera. But he turns, and it turns out that this man is none other than Little Bear. So, there we go, another The Thing story that ended in a major cliffhanger.
The Beauty of Johnson’s Script
What David Leslie Johnson did to John Carpenter’s The Thing was nothing short of what James Cameron did to Ridley Scott’s Alien. No, I am not talking about adding the alphabet S to the title. Ridley Scott’s film was filled with riddles about the Xenomorphs. I mean, yes, it was a stupendous film featuring a mind-boggling alien that invoked unnerving horror.
But, at the same time, it was filled with mysteries, mysteries about the creature’s lifecycle, its strengths, weaknesses, its origin, intentions, etc. But when Cameron made his film, he did what sequels are supposed to do, i.e., stick close to the existing backstory and create a related but expansive lore.
Of course, this way, most of the dark mysteries get dissolved because of light shed by new pieces of information, but this path only adds to the building up of interest in the viewers. When Cameron told us that the Alien from Scott’s film was just a pawn, a drone of the Xenomorph species, and introduced us to the Xenomorph Queen, we were thrilled.
We were also thrilled to learn how the creatures functioned and reproduced. So basically, by taking away a little something, Cameron gave us far more than what we expected. That’s exactly what Johnson did to Carpenter’s The Thing. He stuck true to the original and expanded on the mythology, showing us sights where our jaws drop.
I am cent percent sure that if his script was turned into a mini-series or even into a film, many balls would have shrunk to the size of raisins; I can’t say the same for the other half of the population. Johnson’s script was detailed and well-researched; for instance, there’s a scene in which an infected person is struck several times with electricity, and each time that happens, the Thing changes its face revealing hideous creatures, both human and otherworldly.
Speaking of the electricity test, he went to the original film when Copper tried to defibrillate Norris, who had suffered a heart attack. Norris’s chest opened up and chomped off Copper’s arm. When Norris’ head grows into a strange organism, MacReady theorizes that each part of The Thing acts as a separate being, leading to the conception of the most famous blood test in Hollywood’s history.
So, Johnson figured that since electrical impulses make the brain and muscles function, he used electricity as the test parameter. Simply put, when there’s an overload of electric charge in the body, the Thing loses control of its host and reveals itself, and since each part is alive on its own, the infected blood also reacts to electricity, like it reacts to heat.
Long story short, Johnson’s piece is grounded in the source, offers innumerable and grotesque transformations, has a great story, and is an efficient sequel, which brings us to our next entry.
What Went Wrong? Why The Thing 2 Never Came Into Existence?
Well, no one really knows for sure, but I would place my bet on monetary constraints. It wasn’t as much the lack of mettle in Johnson’s script as it would have been the lack of budget for a television mini-series. I mean, after classics like Alien, Jurassic Park, etc., were made, their sequels had higher budgets than the originals.
However, Johnson’s script was written with the intent of being converted into a TV mini-series, and naturally, these ventures don’t always end up like Game of Thrones. Did you know that the last three seasons of Game of Thrones cost around $100 million each? So despite a promising script, Johnson couldn’t manage to see it through.
With news that a reboot of the original is in the early stages of development, we can only hope that Johnson’s work is taken into consideration as it has a lot of scopes. Let us know what you think about this video. Also, if you wish to know the prequel and sequel stories of The Thing according to the comics, check out the links in the description.