Ending theory I haven't seen discussed anywhere...

This has actually been discussed a fair bit.

Either Mac has tested Childs with a whisky bottle filled with gasoline, or they are both drinking the molatov cocktail.

Or it's just whisky.

Nevertheless. I like the whisky scene at the beginning. It's Mac's response to being beaten. His Chess game couldn't handle it. Perhaps the Thing will have as hard a time with human vices when it tries to imitate them.

"Who can't use the Force now?! I can still use the Force!" - Yarael Poof

From the script:

The Pub Area, like most of the rest of the camp, exposed to the outside. He sits down with his bottle of Scotch. A figure enters the frame. It's Childs. White and black blotches cover his frostbitten face. Both men speak guardedly and stare at each other suspiciously. He looks as weak as MacReady. A beat. Childs keeping his distance.

Scripts are not written for the audience or to "fool" the audience. They are written for the actors and film crew to understand the story. If Lancaster wanted the Scotch whisky to be poison or gasoline, he would have wrote that in for the actors to understand that ploy.

The bottle was filled with whisky, no fan fiction is ever going to change that.






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One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces.

There is nothing wrong with theories etc but the "you can cant see Child's breath" or "its petrol in the bottle" really is nonsense based on zero evidence. Whether you believe they both are, one is or both are not Things is down to the person. But the only hints to either of those theories is the dialogue and the proceeding 100 minutes.

Yeah I remember reading a few years back an interview with Carpenter himself, sorry can't cite it forget where it was, discussing the scene you mention above. Carpenter expressed surprise that many viewers hadn't noticed the clue to the truth about Childs. In the scene, we see Macready, heavy breathing being knackered having blown the camp to pieces, breathing out lots of water vapour, yet when Childs arrives after what is presumably a hefty walk in all his thermal gear, no visible breath for the duration of the scene. So Childs isn't breathing ergo, he is a Thing. Check it out, you can see it so.

That or Macready is hallucinating from drinking gasoline 😉

There's absolutely no evidence that alcohol = poison to the thing.

So this theory is just completely imaginary.

Most posters here seem to forget, if they ever knew, that the Thing could read minds. Go back and read the original short story, Who Goes There, by John Campbell. The story clearly shows the Thing has ESP. That's why it is always one step ahead of its pursuers. The mind reading capability is only hinted at in the movie but it is there. So at the end, if either Mac or Childs was a Thing, it would immediately know if the other was human or not. If both were human or both were Things, they would not attack each other. If one was human and the other a Thing, the Thing would assimilate the human. Since neither attacks the other, they are either both human or both Things. When Mac says, "Why don't we just wait here for a little while, see what happens", he's either using gallows humor knowing that they're both going to freeze to death or he means, let's wait until the rescue team comes and thaws us out.

https://archive.org/stream/WhoGoesThere_414/WhoGoesThere.txt

Another theory is that it was just water and they drink water and then talk and stuff.

Honestly, I always simply assumed that both Mac and Childs were human at the end. Mac definitely has a reason to suspect Childs (at first), but there's only two of them left. If one of them was The Thing there wouldn't be any need for posturing - One would simply attack the other.