Egg McGuffin, or the Xenomorph-or-Egg Paradox

The 1991-2 production of Alien 3 was by all accounts more of a slog than this photo of Sigourney Weaver and her tall, dark plus-one would suggest.

Here’s a Smithsonian piece wherein I put my lifelong independent study of xenobiology to good use by documenting curator Ryan Lintelman’s quest to sleuth out exactly which ALIEN flick the big prop egg in the Smithsonian Museum of American History. It’s not the first time I’ve recounted the tortured history of of Alien 3, a less imaginative exponent of the visual and thematic ideas that had made the first two pictures in the slime-dripping series so widely admired.