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"Climate of Fear" Part 2
The Thing from Another World: Climate of Fear #2 (Dark Horse)
Script by John Arcudi
Pencils by Jim Somerville
Inks by Robert Jones
Cover by John Higgins |
An old face shows up at the Tierra del Fuego base.
Story Summary
The personnel of the
Tierra del Fuego Environmental Research Station struggle to
stay up all night around a campfire, afraid to go to sleep
lest one of them, secretly a Thing, should turn against the
others. They are too afraid of infection to even submit to
the blood test, fearing that a single alien cell can infect
them.
In the early morning dawn, an altercation between the
arrogant Dr. Deseado and Sgt. Quintana escalates into
Deseado getting shot. His body is buried within the compound
and Quintana orders everyone confined to their quarters for
8 hours to get some sleep, including himself, while two
teams of his soldiers guard the base from incursion (or excursion of
any other individual from their rooms).
During this time, Deseado, obviously a Thing himself, rises
from his shallow grave and ambushes two of the guards. At
the end of the curfew, Sgt. Quintana is unaccounted for and,
breaking into his quarters, the others find him bound and
gagged. Quintana reports it was too dark for him to see who
did it, but the person took the flame thrower. And MacReady,
now missing from the infirmary, seems the most likely
suspect. Searching for MacReady, the group suddenly finds
the communications shack up in flames.
Sgt. Quintana takes his men to the abandoned airfield of the
former military base in their search for MacReady and find
instead a Thing gathering pieces of aircraft. The soldiers
start shooting at it and it counterattacks. Suddenly,
MacReady bounds out of the forest with the flame thrower and
torches it, but a semi-human figure leaps out of the flames
and escapes into the forest. MacReady gives chase and comes
upon another military patrol burning the creature to
cinders. To MacReady's great surprise, the team is led by
Childs (last seen going down with the sub at the end of
"The Thing
from Another World" Part 2).
Some time later, Childs' team keeps all of the station
personnel under cover of their guns and gathers them all to
undergo the blood test, while Childs explains to
MacReady that after the sub flooded (in
"The Thing
from Another World" Part 2), the Navy came
immediately to investigate the wreck and found him.
MacReady is first up to undergo the test and when his blood
is exposed to flame, it leaps out of the dish with a
screech. It seems MacReady is a Thing!
CONTINUED IN THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD: CLIMATE OF
FEAR #3
Didja Notice?
The introductory narrative on the inside front cover of this
issue corrects the misstatement from
"Climate of Fear" Part
1, to correctly state that Childs (not MacReady) blew
the sub's hatches to destroy the Thing on board.
The introductory narrative also (incorrectly?) states that
the Thing had been effectively held prisoner in the
Antarctic cold for a million years. In
The Thing, Norris only
estimates it was buried in the ice for about 100,000 years
(or longer, he hedges).
This issue reveals that the former military base at which
the story takes place is the
Tierra del Fuego Environmental Research Station. This
appears to be a fictional facility.
The misapprehension that one cell of the alien organism is
enough to infect another being is again repeated on page 2,
as it was in previous issues of Dark Horse's The Thing
from Another World series.
On page 6, Dr. Deseado refers to Sgt. Quintana as a
Neanderthal. The Neanderthal, of course, is an extinct
species (or possibly subspecies) of humans which is
popularly thought to have been brutal and of low
intelligence, though anthropological studies have
increasingly shown they were intelligent and reasonably
civilized.
On page 8, one of the soldiers says, "Dios Mio!" This is
Spanish for "My God!"
On page 12, the Deseado-Thing grabs two of the soldiers by
the face, his fingers sinking into the flesh in a manner
similar to what the Blair-Thing did to Garry near the end of
The Thing.
On page 16, a Thing appears to be gathering pieces of
aircraft from the abandoned airfield of the base. Possibly,
it was planning to build a craft of its own in which to
escape, as Blair-Thing attempted to do in
The Thing.
Notice that, on page 23, MacReady still has the flame
thrower strapped on (this becomes important at the beginning
of
"Climate of Fear" Part 3), even though he is under suspicion
along with the rest of the inhabitants of the station and
being made to undergo another blood test. Why would Childs
and the U.S. military men allow him to keep it at this
moment?
Notes from Readers from Another World
In the lettercol of this issue, editor Randy Stradley states
that Dark Horse has decided for their "own piece of mind"
(and, presumably, ease of storytelling) that the Thing can
only infect flesh and blood creatures, not plants (or, I
assume, fungi). In defense of this position, Stradley
speculates that the harder cell walls of plants may protect
them. It's true that only plants, fungi, and bacteria have true
cell walls which keep cell membranes contained; animals and
protozoa have only the membrane around their cells. So it
does seem somewhat logical that the Thing would not be able
to infect organisms that have cell walls.
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