Ripley begins as the tough, battle-weary soldier at the start of the film, with all of the masculine connotations still attached to her from the previous installment. She argues at the disciplinary hearing to no avail: “I don’t know how many ways you want me to tell you the same story,” she tells the group, arguing for hours that her version of events (and the destruction of property) was for the greater good. Her word is doubted, and her cautionary tale becomes a moot point as she begs them, “Please, you’re not listening to me… Kane saw thousands of eggs.” Ripley was the lone survivor, and uses this experience to assert her expertise in what the group may deal with if they go back to LV-426; however, her license is revoked and it is recommended that she receive monthly reviews by a psychiatric technician. Ripley is reduced to the powerless woman by acting as the strong survivor. Those masculine traits she adopted for survival in the first film backfire, stripping her of hard-earned status as both the fighter and the voice of reason. In the meantime, she’s also rewarded for her efforts with continual nightmares and the knowledge that her child has grown up and died while she was in hypersleep. Traditionally (at the time this film was made), quite a few mothers were raising their children at home rather than participating in the work force; the guilt she feels is swift and acute, murmuring, “I promised her that I’d be home for her birthday. Her 11th birthday.” This is a scenario that we often see played out in 1980s cinema, but with the father in the role of not being present: this aspect works to further assert that Ripley adopted the masculine breadwinner role of the time. By adopting the masculine role, Ripley not only gained status which was subsequently stripped away, but also lost out on involvement in her child’s life.

Which means that once she gets a chance to go back and exterminate the aliens, Ripley does so at first under the masculine intention of dominating the enemy. She asks Burke (Paul Reiser, whom I still sort of hate for this role)’s assurance that the species will not be studied or brought back; only then does she agree to go to Hadley’s Hope. Remember, she notes that families are on that colony at the hearing – however, the large draw for her is the promise of wiping out the species rather than saving other people. Ripley writes the families off as dead, which means that she’s acting on a sense of domination rather than maternal protection. She’s still entrenched in the masculine role, directing the team and weilding weaponry in her efforts to annihilate the aliens. It’s when she sees Newt (Carrie Henn) that she begins to transition out of this role, and even then, it takes time. We see her caring for the traumatized child and cleaning her face, but while she’s opening up and becoming more gentle in her questioning, Ripley still needs the information in order to perform her mission. That side of her is still stuck in the masculine role when she declares Newt to be a survivor to Hudson (Bill Paxton), which Newt models by saluting her while wearing a military helmet. In this respect, Newt has had to adopt the masculine role, as she has had to conceal herself from the aliens in order to survive. “Survival technique” best suits the assumption of the masculine role for both females: each has had to abandon the more emotional side in order to remain alive. Each does what she has to rather than nurture others, which flies in the face of traditional constructs of femininity up until this point in film.

It’s when Ripley decides to latch on to Newt in a maternal role that we get to see the most intense will to survive. Newt responds to the positive attention at first by modeling the behavior with her doll, reassuring it, “It’s okay. Don’t worry. It’ll be okay.” The bonding goes both ways very quickly: when the escape ship crashes, Ripley immediately grabs Newt and turns away to protect her from any fallout. Newt then begins questioning the concept of monsters with Ripley, who levels with her not only about the subject, but her lost child as well. She gives Newt her watch for luck and tells her, “I’m not going to leave you… I promise.” Ripley remains true to that: when the face hugger comes after them, her first actions are to protect Newt; when they get the chance to escape through an air duct, Ripley won’t let the child go first, while listening to Newt’s directions in a show of trust; when Newt falls through the gears, she immediately turns her attentions toward finding her at all costs. It’s this determination that leads her to the alien nest on a time crunch, which is where the greatest display of defense of one’s progeny occurs: upon spotting the alien queen laying eggs, Ripley demonstrates that she has fire, which causes the other aliens to back away at the signal of the queen. Once they’re a distance away, Ripley begins to torch the nest in order to remove the threat to the girl she’s adopted as her child; the queen famously retaliates by going after that which has killed her babies, culminating in the infamous fight in the ship dock. This point in the film presents the most intense fight in the context of the most primal of urges: defend your young, kiling your opponent if you have to.

It is the urge to reproduce that makes the aliens a threat to humans, and it is the urge to protect one’s offspring that needs to be awakened in Ripley in order to make her the warrior necessary to take on this challenge. Without it, she was merely surviving: a nightmaring, traumatized mess that wanted to snuff out the threat. Once she had something to fight for – once she had a little girl that mirror that which she had left behind in her pursuit of a masculine role – did she fully embrace her feminine side to triumph over the menace. And triumph she did, proving that timeless addage once again: don’t poke the momma bear.