Arthur Dallas was captain of the USCSS Nostromo in Alien, played by Tom Skerritt. He led Kane and Lambert onto LV-426 and carried Kane back after a Facehugger locked on. He later crawled the air shafts to drive the creature into an airlock, and the adult Xenomorph took him there. Ellen Ripley later found him cocooned, and the Gateway inquiry filed him as Arthur Dallas Coblenz.
Biography
Previous Life
Alan Dean Foster's novelization treated Dallas as an organized captain who looked lazy until the work started. He took his beard into the freezer, a habit nobody else on the tug would take in, and treated that as part of who he was rather than something to shave off for hypersleep. By the Nostromo haul he had spent more than a decade in space, first as a civilian pilot, then as a United Americas officer, then as a man who had to buy his licence back.
The hidden Nostromo crew file on Fox's 1999 Alien Legacy DVD listed him as A.J. Dallas, born 27 February 2076 in Wolf Point, Montana, in the United Americas. He left Mercerton Flight Academy in 2099 and first shipped as navigator and pilot on the salvage vessel Snark under Captain Van Shuyten, then as pilot on the military cargo ship UTX Ganymede under Captain Britten. In 2106 the United Americas Outer Rim Defense commissioned him as a lieutenant and stationed him at Liberty Echo. From there he piloted the fast-attack ship UAS Leviathan under Major Baines through the civil war on Torin Prime.
That same Legacy file, and Free League's Colonial Marines Operations Manual, made him captain after the liberation of Torin Prime in 2108, with the Sunburst Medal of Honour and command of the troop carrier UAS Archangel. On 25 December 2109 that ship was destroyed on a peacekeeping run to Thedus, after a miners' revolt and an environmental accident that had wrecked parts of the world. The Archangel came down on an atmospheric processor, more than 15,000 military and civilian people were killed, and the hull could not be salvaged. The United Americas blamed command error, and Dallas lost his flight licence and took a dishonorable discharge on 3 January 2110, with no criminal charges.
The Legacy file left his whereabouts unrecorded from then until April 2113. He next turned up on the civilian cargo ship Vider under Captain Joshua, running weapons and medical supplies into the Solomons. Weyland-Yutani then put him on hazardous-materials runs in the same region, which restored a probationary licence and paid enough for him to buy his own cargo vessel, the Tremolino, in July 2114. He hauled cargo for the Company through the Outer Rim until the Tremolino was decommissioned on 7 December 2119 and the crew broke up. Weyland-Yutani gave him the Nostromo on 4 January 2120.
Keith R.A. DeCandido's Isolation novel put Ripley and Amanda Ripley on the Tremolino to Mars during Ripley's year of leave after the Sephoria. Dallas was a welcome guest on that run, and he made a joke of getting Amanda's name wrong from then on, calling her Armadillo, Aardvark, and later whatever other animal came to him. When his Nostromo warrant officer retired, he asked Ripley onto the new contract and hired Kane as executive officer. That haul would take the tug to Neptune, then through eight months of sleep to Thedus, a month of loading, and thirteen months back with a heavier refinery. In the month before they left Earth he joined Ripley and Amanda on ordinary outings, then met them at Tereshkova Terminal in a Nostromo ballcap, introduced himself to Paul Carter as Arthur Dallas, and called the tug his boat.
The Aliens inquiry file later shown on Gateway did not match that career. It listed Arthur Dallas Coblenz as chief operating officer grade MV-2, five foot eleven, one hundred sixty pounds, brown hair and blue eyes, born 9 June 90, and sent him through O'Bannon Preliminary School and Rambaldi High School in Port Arthur, Texas, then Beilecki University on Mars and Lippincott Astronautics University for a pilot's licence. Earlier ships on that sheet were the Anobile as executive officer, hauling bio-plasmic spores for Seymour-Cobb Genetics, and the Shusett as warrant officer, hauling colony supplies for the Tyrell Corporation. The remarks called out hostility to authority and a drop in his personality score as rank rose, then closed the file when the Nostromo was lost. That same sheet also listed Gateway transits from years before construction of the station began.
Leaving Thedus
In DeCandido's Isolation novel the cargo load on Thedus finished on time, and Ripley ran the dock work. Thedus loader Stefano Vanini later remembered Dallas, Ripley, and Lambert as good people, Kane as hard to like, and Ash as a man he did not care for. On the last night Chiro Nagashima opened sake for the dock crew. Ripley drank little, then walked Dallas back to his cabin after he drank far more. The Legacy flight plan listed the Nostromo's departure from Thedus as 12 June 2121.
Foster's book, and Michael Jan Friedman's Original Sin, both put a last-minute science-officer swap on that dock. Dallas had shipped five hauls, long and short, with Umbulu, liked the work, and expected him back for a sixth. Two days before they left, Umbulu vanished and left Dallas a note that something had come up. The Company put Ash in that empty slot and gave Dallas no other reason. Christopher Golden's River of Pain treated Ash as a man the Company forced onto the crew at Thedus, and Ripley disliked him from that moment. Dallas did not share that dislike. He thought Ash was an ordinary Company science officer, and as long as the science work got done he did not care about the man's personality.
Mother Interrupts The Run Home
The seven-person crew came out of hypersleep on the haul back from Thedus, with the tug towing the ore refinery toward Earth. Dallas left the mess and went into Mother while the others ate. He came back with a garbled transmission from an unlisted system, repeating every twelve seconds, and nobody on the table could tell if the source was human. Mother had cut the run home and parked them over that signal instead of finishing the transit.
Ash recited the contract clause that forced them to investigate any systematic signal of possible intelligent origin or forfeit pay and bonuses. Parker and Brett wanted the money first and the detour later, and Dallas held them to the clause rather than argue the science. He treated the stop as Company work, not a vote, then went to the bridge to put the tug on a landing course.
Landing On LV-426
Dallas sat the command chair, separated the tug from the refinery, and left the processing plant in a holding orbit. Kane took the headset on the way down and called the weather while Lambert worked the boards and Ripley hunted for a flat patch. The descent went through a dust storm that tore the shield off intake three, packed grit into the lining, and started an electrical fire in engineering. A shock ran through the hull when the landing struts hit, the screens went dark, and Parker and Brett lost a main cell and full ship power for a stretch. The compartments stayed sealed, but the landing wrecked the Nostromo badly enough that the tug could not lift until those intakes and ducts were patched.
Parker and Brett had to reroute ducts, reline the damaged intakes, and fake repairs that needed a drydock they did not have. That left both engineers aboard for the first walk. Three was the limit off the ship, so Dallas took Kane and Lambert and left Ripley on the lock with Ash on the cameras. He treated the landing party as his own work, not a science-division errand, and he wanted Kane on the ground because Kane had asked to go.
Walking To The Derelict
Dallas, Kane, and Lambert left the lock in compression suits and walked about 3000 metres of lava toward the source of the beacon. Wind and dust cut the lamps, and Lambert held the heading while Dallas checked the range back to the tug. Kane pushed the pace once the hull came into view, and Dallas let him lead rather than turn the party around in the storm. Ripley and Ash watched that walk from the ship, with no spare suit ready if the three of them lost the path.
Exploring The Derelict
Dallas, Kane, and Lambert entered a U-shaped hull that Mother could not match to any listed ship. Inside they found a giant fossilized Space Jockey fused to a chair, with a hole blown out of its chest. Dallas treated the open hull as empty of living crew and reported the corpse as an alien life form that had been dead a long time. He did not order a retreat from that chamber, and Kane wanted to see what else the wreck held.
Below the chair they found a smooth shaft in the floor with no ladder and no bottom a lamp could reach. Kane went down that shaft on a cable while Dallas and Lambert held the line from above. In Foster's book Dallas warned him not to rush down the shaft, then stayed on the radio as Kane described a closed cave full of leathery objects under a blue mist.
Bringing Kane Back
A Facehugger sprang from an egg under the blue mist and locked onto Kane's faceplate, then burned through the glass. Dallas and Lambert hauled him back across the lava with suit air to spare and called the lock for an emergency open. Ripley held the inner hatch under quarantine rules: twenty-four hours of decontamination before anyone came aboard. Ash hit the emergency override from inside the ship, and Dallas carried Kane into the corridor while the outer lock was shut.
Trying To Remove The Facehugger
In the infirmary Dallas tried to pull the creature off by hand, and Ash used pliers. They then used a laser scalpel to cut a finger joint, and the wound sprayed acid blood that ate through the infirmary deck, then the next deck, then toward the hull. Parker and Brett watched that drip from below and called the levels up as the metal opened. Dallas and Ash stopped the cut before the acid reached open space, and the Facehugger stayed locked on Kane's face. Parker wanted Kane frozen until a doctor on Earth could look at him. Dallas would not freeze a man whose condition they did not understand, and Ash did not push the point.
Ripley later challenged him for leaving that kind of decision to the science officer. Dallas treated science-division calls as Ash's word and Company procedure as the reason the hatch had opened. When she asked if he had shipped with Ash before, Dallas confirmed Umbulu had been swapped two days before they left Thedus, and he trusted nobody.
The Facehugger Drops Off Kane
The Facehugger dropped off on its own after a couple of days and lay dead beside Kane's bunk. Dallas and Ash bagged the empty husk and looked it over in the infirmary while Kane slept off the attack. Kane woke later with no memory of the derelict beyond a dream of smothering, asked for food, and treated the whole stop as finished business. Dallas took that recovery as the end of the medical emergency and put the crew back on a course for the freezers once Parker and Brett finished the hull.
Kane Dies At The Mess Table
Kane sat at the mess table for a last meal before the freezers, with Dallas and the rest of the crew around him. A Chestburster tore out of him, sprayed the table, and fled into the ducts before anyone could hold it. That infant grew into an adult Xenomorph within hours, and the ship lost its executive officer in the same room where they had eaten after hypersleep. Dallas stayed on his feet through the birth, then took charge of the body once the creature was gone.
The crew wrapped Kane and put him in the airlock. Dallas offered the others a chance to speak, nobody took it, and Ripley opened the outer hatch. The body went out into space, and the rest of them watched that send-off on the bridge monitors. In Foster's book Dallas then accused Ash of letting Kane die so the creature would live.
Planning The Hunt
After Kane's funeral, Dallas put the crew on a hunt through the ship. Foster's book sent them into a food locker first, where Dallas filled the doorway with fire and found no body. Ash built a short-range tracker from ship parts so they could follow movement in the ducts instead of walking into them blind. Brett went looking for Jones in the lower bays and was taken among the chains in a landing-leg well. Dallas lost his engineering tech before they could use that tracker on a live contact, and the remaining crew had no clean shot at a creature that used the ducts.
With Brett gone, Dallas laid out a plan to drive the adult Xenomorph down a shaft into the main airlock and blow it into space. He treated the air shafts as the only route that gave them an advantage, and he took the crawl himself instead of assigning it to Parker or Ripley. Lambert and Parker would watch the grille and call the contact on the tracker, and Ripley would wait at the hatch they meant to seal behind him.
Dallas Enters The Vents
Dallas crawled the air shafts with a flamethrower and a headset, moving from junction to junction while the others tracked him from outside. Ripley waited at the hatch they meant to use, and Parker and Lambert covered another grille with the tracker. Lambert watched the contact close on Dallas, then the signal and the man both vanished. The theatrical cut left that crawl as the last anyone saw of him.
Parker and Lambert pulled back from the grille after the scream, and Ripley sealed the shaft rather than follow him in. No body came out of that duct, and the adult Xenomorph stayed loose on the ship. Command of the Nostromo passed to Ripley after that, with Ash as the remaining officer who had never left the science post.
Ripley Finds Dallas Cocooned
In the 2003 Director's Cut, Ripley's search of the lower hold found Dallas packed in resin, partway through being turned into an egg. Brett was further gone in the same corner, his head ruined by a bite. Dallas could focus on Ripley and wanted her to kill him. She burned the cocoon and the compartment around it, then went on with the self-destruct and the Narcissus escape.
Foster's book used that hold scene as well, with Dallas far enough gone that a rescue was not possible. The theatrical cut of 1979 left him in the vents and never returned to the hold. The later cut showed how the adult Xenomorph used him after the crawl, and it was the last time Ripley saw her captain alive.
Personality And Traits
Dallas treated Company rules as the frame for the work, not a belief he argued for. In Foster's book he called himself a cargo pilot first, with captain as a title of last resort, science as Ash's department, and engineering as Parker's. On the Nostromo he held the crew to the contract clause and to science-division procedure because that was what Weyland-Yutani had written, not because he argued the science himself.
He did not run a tight military ship. Kane got a long leash once they were on the ground, and Dallas left science calls with Ash even when Ripley wanted a captain's answer. He also put himself into the dangerous work instead of sending someone else, walking the rock with the landing party and later crawling the air shafts himself.
Dallas trusted nobody as a rule. That did not stop him from giving Ash the last word on the organism, the hatch, and Kane's treatment. He had not shipped with the man, and he treated him as ordinary Company staff anyway. Ripley disliked Ash from the first, and Dallas did not share that dislike.
DeCandido's Isolation novel put Dallas in Ripley and Amanda's ordinary life before the Nostromo haul. He went with them on the Tremolino and spent Earth days with them as a family friend, and Ripley was more at ease when he was around. On the ship she came to his quarters after the Facehugger argument. He was her captain on the contract, and in that book he was also someone she knew at home.
Dallas In The Comics
Dallas In The Illustrated Story
Heavy Metal published Alien: The Illustrated Story in 1979, scripted by Archie Goodwin and drawn by Walt Simonson. Dallas stayed the Nostromo captain who took the landing party onto the rock and later crawled the air shafts with a flamethrower. Simonson drew him with Skerritt's face, unlike Kane, who did not get John Hurt's likeness in that book. In this version Dallas also shut off the derelict beacon, a beat the film left to later crews and later stories.
Chaz Standard In The Original Screenplay
Dallas is not in Dark Horse's Alien: The Original Screenplay (2020), because he did not exist in that draft. Writer Cristiano Seixas and artist Guilherme Balbi adapted Dan O'Bannon's 1976 Star Beast script, whose captain was Chaz Standard on the commercial starship Snark, a standalone freighter with no refinery in tow. The later Dallas command role grew out of that earlier part when the crew names and the Nostromo rewrite locked in. Navigator Dell Broussard was the host, and First Officer Martine Roby later found Standard half-alive in a green cocoon as the Snark became the creature's nest.
In that comic Standard stood among a field of pyramid eggs while the Snark called in, then lost crew as Hunter and Sandy Melkonis were taken. Roby reached to get her to the autodoc before Standard asked for a mercy kill. Melkonis later appeared cocooned beside her, and the ship stayed the Alien's nest rather than a tug that escaped.
Dallas In Alien: Isolation
Alien: Isolation put Dallas back on the Nostromo in the Crew Expendable mission, first shipped with the Nostromo Edition in 2014. Tom Skerritt returned for the voice and likeness, with Yaphet Kotto, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, and Sigourney Weaver also back as the rest of that crew. Ian Holm did not return, so Ash used a likeness and a new voice. The mission started after Brett was taken, and the player picked Dallas, Parker, or Ripley to crawl the shafts with a flamethrower and the film-style tracker.
Ash directed the volunteer through B Deck and C Deck from his terminal, including a pass by Brett's body in the landing-claw bay. The plan matched the film: seal the hatches, drive the adult Xenomorph toward the main airlock, and blow it into space. When the creature entered the outer lock, the switch failed, an alarm sounded, and the adult Xenomorph knocked the player out as it fled. Ash was waiting when that person woke, and the organism stayed loose on the ship.
That airlock attempt came from a sequence shot for the film and then cut, so Isolation became the place a player could walk Dallas's plan to the hatch and watch it fail. The game also included a personal log in which Dallas noted that his usual science officer was replaced two days before Thedus, with no reason given. The later Last Survivor pack put players back on the same ship as Ripley after that failure, and Dallas was out of command.
Dallas In Aliens
In Aliens, the Gateway board ran Dallas's closed file with the rest of the Nostromo crew while they questioned Ripley about the lost ship. That file named him Arthur Dallas Coblenz and listed earlier transits through Gateway, a station Ripley did not recognize because construction only began in 2130, after the Nostromo was lost. The same sheet had the usual typos and production-name schools, plus the Anobile posting under Seymour-Cobb and the Shusett posting under Tyrell. The useful Company note was the authority warning, and the file closed when continuity of employment was cut on 2/17/34.
Merchandise
NECA first released Dallas in its 7-inch Alien Series 4 line in 2015, in the Nostromo compression suit, with a Tom Skerritt portrait, a removable helmet, a pistol, and a flashlight, packed for the film's 35th anniversary. The Alien 40th Anniversary Wave 1 figure, a Target exclusive in 2020, reused that suit with new paint on the chest name and Weyland wings, photoreal facial deco, a flashlight, and a holstered laser pistol. Unlike the first Kane release, both Dallas figures used the actor's face from the start.
Behind The Scenes
Fox first sent Tom Skerritt the script as a $2 million picture with no director attached, and he passed. He had just seen Ridley Scott's The Duellists, and when the offer came back with Scott hired and a larger budget, he took Dallas. Skerritt was the best-known name in the Nostromo crew, and the part was written so the captain looked like the lead until the vents. Scott also wrote short bios for the seven actors, the notes later expanded into the Alien Legacy file that named Dallas A.J. Dallas.
Principal photography sat at Shepperton Studios through the summer and early autumn of 1978. Bolaji Badejo wore the adult Xenomorph for the vent grab, and J. W. Rinzler's making-of book records that Scott voiced one of Dallas's lines to Mother himself. The hold scene in which Ripley finds Dallas and Brett cocooned took two days to shoot. Scott dropped it before the 1979 release because it stopped Ripley on the self-destruct clock, and Skerritt agreed with that cut. Fox put a shorter version back in the 2003 Director's Cut for the Quadrilogy set, while Scott kept the theatrical cut as his preferred version.
Creative Assembly brought Skerritt back for Isolation's Nostromo missions in 2014, with Yaphet Kotto, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, and Sigourney Weaver also returning. Ian Holm did not come back, so Ash stayed a likeness-only part with a new voice. The compression-suit portrait on the Gateway file in Aliens used a Skerritt still, and NECA later put that same face on both 7-inch Dallas figures.
Famous Quotes
- "Well, you get what you're contracted for like everybody else."
- "Yellow light's for my eyes only."
- "We're going in."
- "Alien life form. It looks like it's been dead a long time."
- "Something has attached itself to him. We have to get him to the infirmary right away."
- "Ripley, this is an order. Open that hatch right now, do you hear me?"
- "Look, I just run the ship."
- "Standard procedure is to do what the hell they tell you to do."
- "I went out five times with another science officer. They replaced him two days before we left Thedus with Ash."
- "Well, I don't trust anybody."
- "Anybody want to say anything?"
- "Now, this air shaft may work to our advantage."
Conclusion
Arthur Dallas was the Nostromo captain who took the landing party onto LV-426, brought Kane back through the lock, and went into the air shafts to drive the adult Xenomorph out. The creature took him there, and Ripley burned his cocoon in the Director's Cut. Isolation later let players walk that vent plan as Dallas, and the Gateway file closed on Arthur Dallas Coblenz.
Appearances
- Alien (1979)
- Alien novelization (Alan Dean Foster, 1979)
- Alien: The Illustrated Story (Heavy Metal, 1979)
- Aliens (1986)
- Alien: Isolation - Crew Expendable (2014)
- Alien: Isolation novelization (Keith R.A. DeCandido, 2019)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Lore
