Forgotten Heroes: Bishop from Aliens

By Owen Quinn author

Photos copyright 20th Century Fox

I was recently made aware of just how many movies and television shows the younger generation have never heard of, never mind seen. So to that end, we look back at some characters you really need to see before you kick the bucket.

Some people think Bishop is known to everyone but I have come across people that will not watch any movies made before they were born, people that don’t watch sci-fi movies, people that didn’t like it and never gave it a second thought and those that just don’t do movies.

So, as much as it is a surprise, Bishop may well be an unknown entity to a lot of people but he is as synonymous with the Aliens franchise as much as Sigourney Weaver is. Played by the amazing Lance Henriksen, Bishop echoes down the Alien franchise forever and a day. He is in fact based on wealthy industrialist and founder of Weyland Industries, Charles Bishop Weyland. Weyland was dying of a terminal disease when he discovered a hidden pyramid structure beneath the ice of the Antarctic. Hence they learned of the aliens and the Predators even though he died there.

He becomes involved with Ripley when she joins a marine crack team aboard the Sulaco en-route to discover why all contact was lost with the colony on LV-426, the moon where Ripley and her crew first met the alien. She cannot believe that they have put entire families there given they knew the aliens were there from events of the Nostromo.

Bishop is the executive science officer just as Ash was in the original and is very quiet in nature. When he performs the knife trick on a terrified Hudson, he cuts himself. It is then Ripley sees the white fluid he has for blood and backs off. Given her near murder at the hands of Ash, she is wary of Bishop despite his reassurances that his programming forbids his ever harming a human. He also prefers the term ‘artificial person’ to synthetic. She warns him to stay away from her; smashing the plate of food he offers her from his hands. The way Henriksen plays it here makes you doubt his sincerity at being shocked at how Ash acted back then. His delivery makes you wonder if he isn’t dismissing the seriousness of the incident.

When the squad is virtually wiped out by the aliens and their drop ship explodes, Bishop takes over as a medic, caring for Gorman and analysing the colony and the alien face huggers. When Bishop detects a fault in the reactor, they must get the second drop ship down from orbit to get them off before they die in a massive nuclear explosion. The only way to do it is crawl through several miles of conduit and manually realign the relay that will allow them to remote control the ship. Hudson freaks out as usual and Ripley is taken aback that Bishop volunteers to go. When he quips that he is synthetic, not stupid, Ripley sees the first glimpse that Bishop may not be like Ash as she feared.

There is a deleted scene where Bishop does encounter an alien. It spies him through a crack in the conduit but when he doesn’t react to it, it loses interest and leaves. This has never been released.

When Newt is taken by the aliens, Ripley, an injured Hicks and pilot Bishop must go after her. Bishop is concerned about the limited time they have to leave bringing up the possibility that he will fly the ship out of there. When Ripley does rescue Newt and gets back to the landing platform our fears about Bishop after all. But he flies in as it was too unstable, allowing them to get board before going full speed to outrun the explosion.

Ripley finally accepts he is not like Ash after all. He is ripped in half by the Queen launching the iconic battle between Ripley and the Queen that has gone down in movie history. But since he is synthetic Bishop is still alive and is still able to grab Newt and save her from being sucked out into space along with the Queen. He quips, “Not bad for a human,” at Ripley for taking out the Queen before smiling. Ripley ensures they are all safe in the stasis pods but not even she can believe what happens when she wakes up.

They have crashed and she reactivates the damaged Bishop who reveals to her that an alien got aboard presumably when the Queen did or she laid an egg before the fight. It caused the crash resulting in the deaths of Hicks and Newt.

He asks Ripley to deactivate him. He can be reworked but will never be what he was. It is like a human dealing with an injury so severe that they cannot go on and have asked someone to help them end their life. He’d rather be nothing than a shell of his former self. Ripley does what he asks and her reaction is one of someone who just found a best friend five minutes before then lost them in a heartbeat. But at the end of Alien 3 the company sends the scientist that designed the Bishop series and modelled them on himself. He looks like Bishop and his name is Michael Bishop, a gesture to show Ripley a friendly face to persuade her to come with him. He may well be a descendant of Weyland himself as the looks are identical. Seeing and hearing him, in the voice of her dead friend, has little impact on Ripley. She knows it is just another ploy by the company to get the alien. Her Bishop is dead; this one is the version she initially thought Bishop was; the company man with no conscience who will bury an entire colony of people to ensure the alien is brought to them. Her Bishop would never do that because her Bishop had more of a conscience and morality than these humans who gave him their face. Rather than help them, Ripley kills herself by throwing herself and her implanted alien into molten lead.

Bishop and his likeness has continued in novels, games and comics including the Marvel Alien line. He will always be the android that showed Ripley what it is to be human whether your blood is white or red.