MovieChat Forums > The Thing (1982) Discussion > WHAT THE THING SHOULD HAVE DONE

WHAT THE THING SHOULD HAVE DONE


The Thing does not strike me as being an intelligent creature. If it was, it would have secretly left parts of itself in places the humans would be bound to make contact with (like toilet seats). Everyone would become contaminated, the Thing would eventually release itself into the food chain (only one cell would be needed to do the trick), and the human race would be finished.

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Why are you obsessed with toilet seats?

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Good call. Dust particles of its skin shed and floating in the air even.

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If it had left parts of itself everywhere then it would have been suspected sooner.

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It had only been on Earth in awake form for a very short time (assuming frozen very quickly after crashing). It takes Humans a couple of years to learn how to use a toilet. I think you're asking too much.

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agree with this user.
potty trainin' takes a while bruh

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I think it's just a common misconception that the Thing can infect people on a microscopic level like a virus. If that were the case, Bennings would've been assimilated from the get-go after being licked on the mouth by the dog-thing, like three minutes into the movie. Mac and Doc would've been assimilated from picking up and carrying the split-face carcass on board their helicopter. Everyone in the blood test scene would've been infected by sharing the same scalple. Blair would've been assimilated from putting the pencil eraser in his mouth.

Also, if the Thing COULD infect through casual contact, it would have absolutely zero need to assimilate people by going around and painstakingly revealing itself over the course of a week. It could literally just put cells of itself on any place, like you said. Why would it choose to go days out of its way by doing the hard road?

I think that if a single Thing cell was inserted into the human body, the immune system would likely kill it. Sure, we do see that a single Thing cell can assimilate cells on a cellular level, but perhaps this can only be done in small environments, like in a petri dish. Humans have 39 trillion cells in the body, so for one single cell to attempt to overthrow 39 trillion cells would take a long time.

This is all speculation I guess. Toodles!

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Good point. I agree!

If microscopic amounts of the thing could contaminate people, it wouldn't have needed to do the things it did. Then again, maybe the screenwriters just overlooked that fact.

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Makes you wonder how big a piece of the creature is needed to procreate more of itself. What about the blood that ran away from the Petri dish?

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I'm not sure that the thing is strategizing when it does things. It could be a highly evolved and complicated organism that just does what's been working. When I think of a virus I don't think its got a plan, and its not thinking about how to infect people more efficiently, it simply does what it does.

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