Alexa "Lex" Woods was an ice guide and environmental scientist, played by Sanaa Lathan in Alien vs. Predator. Charles Bishop Weyland pulled her off a solo climb on the Lho La Icefall in Nepal to take his 2004 team under the ice of Bouvetoya. She was the only human who walked back out. She fought beside Scar, killed two adult Xenomorphs, helped sink the Queen, and left the ice with a hunter's mark on her cheek and the Elder's spear in her hands.
Biography
Earlier Life
Alexa Woods was twenty-eight in 2004, an ice guide and environmental technician who led scientific parties into Antarctic wilderness. She was on a solo climb of the Lho La Icefall in Nepal, placing her own screws and ropes, when Weyland's people reached her. She had seven seasons on the ice by then, more Antarctic work than most scientists see in a lifetime, because her father had taken her and her sister south in the summers. He trained pilots on that ice and had a reputation as a hard man. Her sister hated the cold and moved to Florida.
Her father broke his leg about seven hundred feet below the summit of Mount Rainier and would not turn back. They reached the top and drank champagne there at 14,400 feet. On the way down a clot from that break moved into his lung, and he was dead four hours later, twenty minutes from the base. After that Lex would not leave a team once she had agreed to lead it.
Marc Cerasini's novelization names him Colonel Alexander Woods of the United States Air Force and ties him to an Air Force study of an unclaimed 1979 nuclear blast on Bouvetoya, a detonation no nation took and whose isotopes did not match Earth uranium. The book also has Lex on Everest more than once. When a mercenary asked if she was the youngest woman to climb it, she said no. Miller said she was the youngest to reach that summit without oxygen. Lex worked with the Foundation of Environmental Scientists, a group that tried to keep species from disappearing, and she had shut down an Alaska oil push run by the driller Quinn.
Meeting With Weyland
Maxwell Stafford reached her on the icefall for Weyland Industries. He offered a full year of funding for the foundation if she met Charles Bishop Weyland the next day. Lex treated that Weyland family company as a polluter that had already sued the foundation, then took the money because the group was close to folding. Stafford was waiting on the summit shelf in a helicopter. She left Nepal in climb gear and crossed to the Antarctic by private jet and a Westland Sea King marked Weyland 14.
On the icebreaker Piper Maru, Weyland showed the team a heat bloom two thousand feet under Bouvetoya and a pyramid shape that matched Egyptian, Cambodian, and Aztec work at once. Quinn wanted seven days to drill. Lex wanted three more weeks of training, because Bouvetoya is one of the most isolated places on Earth and nobody in that hold was ready for a storm on that island. Weyland refused, because other satellites would see the site. Lex packed to leave, then learned the replacement guide was Gerald Murdoch, a man with two seasons of ice time. She stayed so Murdoch was not sent in her place.
The Piper Maru Reaches Bouvetoya
Chemical engineer Graeme Miller rode the last helicopter in with her and photographed the trip for his sons. Archaeologist Sebastian De Rosa came from a shut dig at Teotihuacan, still wearing a rusty Pepsi bottle cap on a thong. The mercenaries included Adele Rousseau, Verheiden, and Stafford's security detail. Quinn treated Lex as the woman whose foundation had shut down his Alaska oil exploration. Weyland was dying of lung cancer, and he went onto the ice so he would not die in a cabin.
The abandoned Razorback Point whaling station on Bouvetoya sat over a shaft the hunters had burned through the ice. Lex went down with the others because she had said she would not leave a team once she led it. On the way down the rope failed, and she caught Weyland against the ice wall. Hunters killed the men left on the surface during the storm.
The Team Enters The Pyramid
Inside the pyramid, Lex and Miller found a stripped human spine, the kind of trophy a Yautja takes when it finishes a kill. The structure under the ice was a hunt machine on a hundred-year cycle, built to hold humans as hosts and to blood Young Blood hunters on the creatures that came out of them. Sebastian read the walls as a clock, and the rooms shifted about every ten minutes. When the team took weapons from a hunter sarcophagus, that clock moved to the next stage of the hunt. Three Young Bloods were inside: Celtic, Chopper, and Scar.
Chopper Predator Attacks Lex
A cloaked Chopper closed on Lex with a blade after the corridors shifted and cut the team apart. The Grid Alien drove its tail through him from behind before he could finish the strike, then bit through his mask. Steaming Predator blood hit her cheek as she went down on the floor of that chamber. Celtic died later, in a separate fight with that same adult Xenomorph.
Weyland Dies On The Stairs
Stafford died in a hunter net, speared through the chest. Weyland stayed on the stairs to buy Lex and Sebastian time. Scar read the sick man as unworthy prey and turned away, following the Yautja rule against killing the weak. Weyland vented an oxygen tank and lit it. Scar walked out of the fire, stabbed him, and dropped the body. Lex saw that kill and went on with Sebastian.
Sebastian Is Taken Into The Hive
Lex and Sebastian were the last of the expedition still free in the maze. They watched Scar mark his mask and forehead with a Facehugger finger and take that as his blooding. Sebastian read the mark and they used the name Scar for that hunter. After they left that chamber, another Facehugger got Scar, which they did not see. He woke with a Chestburster growing in him.
Sebastian read the walls as more than a clock. If the hunters lost, a raised wrist would take the temple in green fire. They decided Scar needed his plasma caster back so the Xenomorphs would not reach the surface. On a stone walkway Lex slipped and Sebastian caught her, then an adult Xenomorph pulled him into the hive.
Lex Fights Beside Scar
After Sebastian was taken, Lex was alone in the maze. Scar blocked the corridor, opened a telescoping spear, and aimed the point at her chest. He paused long enough to scan her with a wrist device. She pulled the plasma caster from her pack and slid it across the stone. Scar lowered the spear and took the weapon instead of striking.
That started a human and Yautja team-up through the hive. He had passed her in the dark before and left her alive. After the caster changed hands he treated her as a fighter, and his voice box later played back her English in broken pieces.
Lex Kills An Adult Xenomorph
An adult Xenomorph hit Scar from behind and knocked the spear from his hands, then jumped Lex from above. She grabbed the fallen hunter spear, planted it on the stone floor, and let the creature land on the point. She held the shaft while it thrashed and acid blood ran down the metal, melting the staff. She tipped the spear so the adult Xenomorph's weight drove the point deeper, and she held on until it went still.
Scar cut the head from that kill and made her a shield from the dome, because that plate does not burn in acid. He wired the tail onto a staff and put both weapons in her hands. They moved toward the hive with the shield and the tail spear.
Lex And Scar Escape The Pyramid
They went into the hive after that. Lex found Sebastian cocooned in the resin, and he asked her to end it. Scar stood with her and had seen the Chestburster inside him. She shot Sebastian before the Chestburster tore out of him, and Scar killed it.
The Queen got free of her chains. Scar stripped a gauntlet, armed the self-destruct, and he and Lex ran for the shaft while the hive came after them. At the shaft an adult Xenomorph jumped Scar. Lex fired a drilling gun from the ice-camp gear into its head and blew the back of its skull open. They rode the sledge up the ice tunnel they had climbed down, and they came out into the abandoned station as the blast wrecked the pyramid under their feet.
Lex Is Blooded
After they came out of the wrecked station, Scar stopped Lex on the ice and used the blood of an adult Xenomorph she had killed. He marked her cheek, the same blooding honor a Young Blood takes after a first worthy kill, and the same rite he had scored on his own mask and forehead below.
Lex And Scar Fight The Queen
The Queen broke through the smashed ice after the blooding. Her tail struck Scar first and threw him through a shack on the station. Scar cut her throat with a throwing disc, and Lex drove the spear into that wound. They chained the Queen to a heavy oil separator on the ice, and as they locked those chains her tail impaled Scar. The vat went through the frozen sheet and pulled her into the harbor as an anchor.
Scar Dies On The Ice
The Queen's tail had impaled Scar, and those wounds killed him on the ice after she went under. The Chestburster inside him lived through that strike. Lex went to him in the bloody snow, knelt with him, and stayed until he died. A hunt ship then shimmered into view over the crater, engines humming in the wind. She was soaked in human, Alien, and Predator blood, and she was the only member of Weyland's team left alive on the surface of Bouvetoya.
The Elder Gives Lex A Spear
An honor guard came down onto the ice around Lex and Scar's body. The Antarctica Elder traced the blooding mark on her face, put his ornate combistick in her hands, and the hunters bowed before they took Scar up the ramp. Lex carried a trophy home after all three Young Bloods had died. On the ship they laid Scar out for a funeral with his mask off, and a Predalien later tore out of his corpse on the voyage that led into Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem.
Final Fate
After the hunt ship left, the film leaves Lex walking to a Snowcat on the wrecked station ice and driving away. Cerasini's novel adds that she took Sebastian's rusty Pepsi bottle cap from her pocket and named the full moon over the ice Hunter's Moon. A tracked Snowcat could have carried her back to the icebreaker Piper Maru, about eleven miles off the coast in the book. Captain Leighton had been told not to leave without the team, so the icebreaker may have had its captain and sailors waiting offshore.
The Tail Spear At Stargazer
The makeshift spear Scar wired from a hunter staff and a Xenomorph tail left Bouvetoya with the rest of the surface wreckage. By the time of The Predator it stood behind glass in a Project Stargazer lab, next to other recovered hunter weapons. Someone collected those trophies after Lex walked off the ice, and Stargazer later held gear from her hunt. The ceremonial spear the Elder gave her as a trophy was not in that lab. Christopher Golden and Mark Morris's novelization of The Predator puts a scarred helmet, a chest plate, and a long battle staff in those cases. The book never names the tail spear, and it never lists Lex's ceremonial spear.
Weapons And Equipment
Lex went onto the ice with climb kit, cold-weather gear, and the habits of a guide, not a soldier. In the pyramid she carried a pistol taken off the dead and used a hunter spear for the first adult Xenomorph kill. She fired that pistol to end Sebastian. At the ice shaft she used a drilling gun for the second adult Xenomorph. Scar made her the Alien-head shield and the tail-tip spear after that first kill, and she used both on the Queen with him. The Elder's ornate combistick was the trophy she carried off the ice, which puts her with the other humans who left a hunt holding Yautja weapons.
Personality And Skills
Lex was an experienced ice guide rather than a soldier. Seven seasons of Antarctic work made her cautious about weather, isolation, equipment, and the limits of an unprepared team. She was also an accomplished climber who could place her own protection and lead people through dangerous ice. Her strongest principle was responsibility for those under her care: after her father's death on Mount Rainier, she refused to abandon a party once she had agreed to lead it.
Lex was skeptical of Weyland Industries and willing to challenge Charles Bishop Weyland when she believed an expedition was unsafe. Inside the pyramid, however, she adapted quickly to threats far outside her experience. She learned to use human and Yautja weapons, killed two adult Xenomorphs, and recognized that cooperation with Scar offered both of them the best chance of surviving the hunt. Her combination of survival experience, adaptability, and loyalty ultimately earned Scar's blooding mark and the respect of the Elder's hunting party.
Similar Humans
Lex left Bouvetoya Blooded with a hunter's spear, the same honor given to other humans who hunted with the Yautja. The closest match is Machiko Noguchi, the Ryushi administrator who fought beside Dachande and took a thunderbolt mark on her forehead when he died. She later hunted Xenomorphs in Yautja armor with a clan. Ash Parnall, also called Caryn Delacroix in Aliens vs. Predator: Deadliest of the Species, became a hunter after Big Mama trained her. Ripley 8 was blooded in the Aliens versus Predator versus The Terminator comics and used a hunter spear. The Weyland-Yutani synthetic Thia was not human and was not blooded, but after Predator: Badlands she left with Dek as part of the clan he formed.
Behind The Scenes
Paul W. S. Anderson wrote and directed Alien vs. Predator, with a screenplay credit shared with Shane Salerno. Sanaa Lathan played Lex. Principal photography used large physical pyramid sets at Barrandov Studios in Prague. Amalgamated Dynamics built the creature suits. Ian Whyte played Scar, Celtic, and Chopper, and Lance Henriksen played Weyland as an echo of Bishop from Aliens. The film opened in the United States on 13 August 2004.
HarperEntertainment published Cerasini's novelization on 29 June 2004, weeks before the film. He worked from earlier drafts, so the book keeps a 2000 B.C. Cambodia teaser, five Young Bloods instead of three, Weyland in his forties with a golf club for a cane, and a thunderbolt burned into Lex's forehead instead of the cheek brand. That thunderbolt is the mark given to Machiko Noguchi in the 1989 Dark Horse Aliens vs. Predator comics, the earlier blooded human the film's Lex follows. The film opens on the Lho La Icefall in Nepal. The book moves that climb to the Khumbu Icefall on Everest and has her skip the Sherpa icefall doctors.
Anderson's first draft, dated 25 November 2002, named her Alexia Kline and opened on her photographing birds in Alaska. A 2003 draft still used Alexia "Lex" Kline, and other early papers list Alexa Kline and Lex Klein. The finished film and the novel use Alexa Woods, and the film has Lex shoot Sebastian after the hive cocoons him.
Conclusion
Alexa Woods was the ice guide who survived the 2004 Bouvetoya hunt in Alien vs. Predator. She killed two adult Xenomorphs beside Scar, helped sink the Queen, took the Elder's spear, and left the ice Blooded. The Xenomorph tail spear from that hunt later sat in a Stargazer lab.
Appearances
- Alien vs. Predator (2004)
- Alien vs. Predator (novelization by Marc Cerasini, 2004)
Tag Categories: Predator Lore | Avp Lore | Predator Hunt Survivors | Xenomorph Encounter Survivors
