Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) may have survived her first encounter with a Xenomorph, but as the Alien series went on, things got harder. Thankfully, recent years have seen an increase in the amount of badass female action heroes in movies, as Hollywood attempts to get more diverse. That said, all of today’s butt-kicking women owe a debt to characters like Ellen Ripley, who managed to become a cinematic badass long before female action stars were common.
Along with characters like Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor in the Terminator franchise, Ripley showed that moviegoers were just as willing to shell out their hard-earned cash to see a resourceful, touch-as-nails female protagonist battle fearsome foes as they were to check out the latest Indiana Jones adventure. While Ripley began the first Alien movie as someone just trying to do her job, her resolve and unwillingness to lose to her much more powerful extraterrestrial foe made it clear that a true hero could be found within.
So, everyone knows what happened to Ripley in Alien, one of the most famous sci-fi/horror films ever made. But what became of her later on in the franchise? Read on for a full rundown.
What Happened To Ripley In The Movies
At the end of Alien, Ellen Ripley blasts the Xenomorph out of the airlock, and then burns it to death using her escape shuttle’s engines. After recording a message explaining what happened, Ripley then enters hypersleep for the long journey back to Earth. According to the 2014 officially licensed novel Alien: Out of the Shadows, Ripley is actually first awakened in the year 2159, thanks to Ash having uploaded his consciousness into the escape shuttle’s computer. Ash tries to force Ripley and the surviving crew members of the ship Marion to complete Weyland-Yutani’s mission of capturing a Xenomoprh and bringing it back. Naturally Ripley instead kills the Xenomoprhs and is sent back into hypersleep after having her memory of these events purposefully erased. It’s a cheap plot mechanic, but it maintains series continuity.
Ripley of course returned to Earth finally in 2179, being awakened to discover that she’d been gone so long her own daughter had grown old and died. This leads into the main events of Aliens, in which corporate scumbag Carter Burke lies to Ripley to get her to accompany a group of space marines to the Xenomorph invested LV-426. Ripley ultimately triumphs over the Xenomorph threat once again, surviving alongside space marine Hicks, new surrogate daughter Newt, and friendly android Bishop. Hypersleep again goes poorly, thanks to a stowaway facehugger, and the Sulaco ship crashes down onto Alien 3’s prison planet Fiorina 161. Hicks and Newt are killed, and Bishop is badly damaged, but Ripley survives.
Ripley and the prisoners team up to defeat another Xenomorph threat, but Ripley has an queen embryo inside her from the facehugger, and she takes her own life to prevent Weyland-Yutani from using her to obtain it. In Alien: Resurrection, Ripley returns, but only sort of. She’s a clone of Ripley taken from a blood sample of the real deal, and her DNA is a mix of human and Xenomorph, giving the so-dubbed Ripley 8 inhuman strength, speed, and other physical characteristics. Ripley 8 finally succeeds in returning to Earth, but it’s now a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and the future is left uncertain.
More: Alien: The Differences Between Theatrical & Director’s Cut
