Places You Wouldn’t Want To Live - LV-426
Do not let your travel agent send you here, under any circumstances.
The colonisation of other planets has always carried with it a kind of utopian promise, and the covers of old science fiction novels would be adorned with fantastical images of idealised alien worlds. Imagine stepping off a spaceship like Columbus, discovering an extraterrestrial New World plentiful with natural resources, a pleasant climate, and friendly natives. When we inevitably have to plunder other planets for living space, you would hope that, with whole galaxies of potential new homeworlds out there, we would at least be able to settle somewhere sunny.
So when the Weyland-Yutani corporation were recruiting budding colonists to start a new world on LV-426, they must have conveniently missed out the part about how the planet is enveloped by perpetual dust and rain storms and has precisely zero days of sunlight a year. There’s a moment in James Cameron’s intense xenomorph shoot-out sequel Aliens when, stranded on LV-426 after a fatal dropship crash, the recently-orphaned colonist ragamuffin Newt says, “We'd better get back, ‘cause it'll be dark soon, and they mostly come at night.” My first thoughts were: At night? This is daytime? HOW CAN YOU HAVE DAYTIME WITH NO SUN?
Someone at the Weyland-Yutani Planetary Nomenclature Division (a division of the sinister “Company” we see little of in the Alien franchise, mostly because I just made it up) was clearly having a wry little joke to themselves when they nicknamed LV 426 “Acheron.” Students of Greek mythology and Wikipedia will be aware that Acheron was commonly known as the river of pain, the body of water across which the dead would be ferried to Hades. Everything we see of LV 426 gives us the impression that the planet is so terrifyingly inhospitable it deserves the moniker. Whoever decided LV 426 was worth terraforming was either batshit insane or conducting some kind of sick experiment into the furthest possible limits of human misery.
Apart from being perhaps the least hospitable environment in the entire universe, LV-426 is also the adopted home of the most singularly fearsome alien species ever conceived. So, after arriving on a planet that could only be more unfriendly if it was made entirely out of exploding knives, your reward for braving such hostile conditions is to be horrifically impregnated by a sex-organ with legs and have a newborn deathbeast tear its way out of your abdomen. To be fair, any colonist arriving on LV 426 could never know that their new home plays host to a horrifying race of face-raping, chest-exploding, acid-spewing, double-mouthed space monsters. But when you looked out the window of the bar at Hadley’s Hope and saw a swirling maelstrom of icy, neverending blackness, you had to ask yourself: what else did you honestly expect to find here?
If you happen to be lucky enough to find safety or refuge from the tenacious alien mouth-hole botherers, your woes won’t end there, because you’ve now unwittingly become collateral in the quest to capture an alien. If there’s one thing we’ve learnt from four Alien films, it’s that Weyland Yutani really, really really, want a live alien to experiment on, which makes you totally expendable – a warm, fleshy vessel to carry an alien freak-baby past customs. It might just be me, but weathering the desolate wasteland of LV 426, only to become the human equivalent of a cat carrier to an alien organism, seems like a pretty bad deal to me.
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