Chris Hooper: Marion Chief Engineer And Last Survivor

Full name: Chris Hooper
Also known as: Hoop
Species: Human
Affiliation: Kelland Mining Company
Role: Chief engineer; acting captain after Lucy Jordan
Known for: Last survivor of the Marion; sent Ripley back to hypersleep
Family: Estranged wife; two sons (unnamed)
Setting: DSMO Marion / LV-178, ~2159
First appearance: Alien: Out of the Shadows (2014)
Status: Alive at last appearance; adrift in the Samson
Injuries (novel): Molten-rock burn to right shin in the derelict cavern
Kills (novel): 2 solo adult Xenomorphs · 1 uncounted mine burial

Chris Hooper, called Hoop by the crew, was chief engineer of the Kelland Mining Company freighter DSMO Marion in Alien: Out of the Shadows by Tim Lebbon. The story is set around 2159, in the years between Alien and Aliens, about 37 years after Ellen Ripley escaped from the Nostromo and 20 years before the Sulaco mission. After a Xenomorph outbreak on LV-178 reached the ship and killed Captain Lucy Jordan, Hoop took command of the damaged freighter. He later worked with Ripley, sent her back into hypersleep, and was the last survivor when the Marion broke up.

Kelland Career And Family

Hoop had been in space for seventeen years by the time Xenomorphs reached the Marion. In his early twenties he spent a year on Callisto hauling ore from miles below the ice, and later told himself that none of those earlier digs had matched the monsters he had imagined as a child. On the LV-178 contract he was the engineer who could hear a sticking door or a worn duct seal in the ship's background noise, and he believed no one else on the job was better at keeping a hull alive.

The Marion belonged to the Kelland Mining Company, which sat under Prospectia and San Rei and, above them, Weyland-Yutani. Hoop had already spent three years over that storm-scoured planet, making money he had no chance to spend, and at the end of every fifty-day surface shift he still promised himself he would go home to the wife and two boys he had left seven years earlier. By the time he later went back into the mine those sons were already adults, and he had sent them nothing on birthdays or at Christmas.

Lucy Jordan

Captain Lucy Jordan was Hoop's closest friend on the Marion. Hoop and Jordan had been involved about a year before the Xenomorph outbreak, then stayed close after the affair ended, close enough that he saw a side of her the rest of the crew did not. Off-shift they played pool in the rec-block bar that communications officer Josh Baxter ran as BeeBee's, because the ship was too far from home for any useful contact with families.

After the surface mine stopped answering, both dropships came up from LV-178 carrying infected miners. Jordan took security officer Cornell down to the docking level so the Samson could come aboard, even though Hoop argued that a contaminated ship should stay outside. He was still on the bridge when Delilah, already overrun, crashed into the Marion's port docking arm. The impact killed Jordan and Cornell and knocked the freighter out of stable orbit, which left Hoop as senior officer on a ship that had started to fall toward the planet.

Delilah And Command

The Samson still made it into an intact bay on automatic docking, with four infected hosts inside who later grew into adult Xenomorphs. Hoop sealed that bay, the airlock, and the vestibule so the creatures could not reach the rest of the ship, then spent the next eleven weeks keeping the damaged Marion alive. The crash had destroyed two lateral dampers and three of seven starboard sub-thrusters, vented several decks, and wrecked the long-range antenna, so Hoop and the crew still alive could only broadcast a repeating local distress call. By the time another ship answered, eight people were still alive and Hoop judged they had less than fifteen days before the hull started to burn in LV-178's atmosphere.

Ripley And The Narcissus

That distress call was picked up by the Narcissus, the shuttle still carrying Ripley and her cat Jonesy about thirty-seven years after the destruction of the Nostromo, around 2159 and still about twenty years before Aliens. Ash, surviving as code inside the shuttle computer, diverted the Narcissus to LV-178 and burned its remaining fuel so it could reach the Marion in seventy-seven days. Ripley woke believing she had been rescued, and Hoop had to tell her that decades had passed, that the Marion was a wrecked mining freighter rather than a rescue ship, and that his crew had thought her shuttle was answering their call.

Hoop, Ripley, and the other Marion survivors first hoped to leave on the Narcissus itself and take turns in its single stasis pod, but a systems check showed the shuttle's fuel cell was already spent. The only spare cells were still in the LV-178 mine, and the only craft that could reach the surface was the sealed Samson, which still held the four adult Xenomorphs.

Taking The Samson

Hoop, Ripley, and the remaining Marion crew forced open Bay Three with mining tools, including plasma torches, sand picks, charge thumpers, and cargo netting, and all four adult Xenomorphs came out of the hatch at once. After Ripley drew one off doctor Kasyanov, Hoop burned that Warrior with a plasma torch. Acid from the fight blew out a vestibule window, which took a third adult into space with engineer Powell, while the fourth killed medic Garcia and disappeared into the Marion. That left six people: Hoop, Ripley, Kasyanov, science officer Karen Sneddon, communications officer Josh Baxter, and pilot Lachance. Those six rearmed in Hold 2 with hydrofluoric-acid spray guns and chose not to hunt the loose adult through a freighter that was already falling toward the atmosphere.

Mine And Derelict

Pilot Lachance flew Hoop, Ripley, Sneddon, Kasyanov, and Baxter down through LV-178's grit storms in the emptied Samson so they could reach the spare fuel cells stored on Level 4 of the mine. Ash, who had already moved from the Narcissus into the Marion's computers and then into surface controls, interrupted the elevator ride and dropped the cage to Level 9, the lowest working level of the mine, where Baxter broke an ankle on impact. Hoop then led that same party toward a second elevator and back up to Level 4, through a hive and into a cavern he later judged at about two hundred yards across. That cavern held a buried non-terrestrial ship and the start of a ruined settlement whose dead were long-limbed dog-form mummies, later named Drukathi in other books.

When Kasyanov and Baxter melted a gallery opening shut behind Hoop and the others, an adult Xenomorph forced its head through the cooling material and stuck there, and Hoop killed it by firing hydrofluoric acid into the head until it burst. Deeper in the derelict a Facehugger sealed onto Sneddon, and Ripley burned a clutch of Queen eggs in a laboratory chamber. During the retreat, molten rock from Baxter's plasma torch burned Hoop's right shin. On Level 4 he loaded one spare fuel cell onto a trolley for the Samson and rigged a second cell to overload by disconnecting its coolant, damping, and failsafes, estimating about nine hours before the blast turned everything inside a mile into radioactive dust.

Memory Wipe And Launch

After Hoop, Ripley, Sneddon, Kasyanov, and Lachance returned to the Marion, the mine detonation left an ochre bruise on the planet, but the adult Xenomorph that had stayed aboard the freighter killed Lachance. Already dying from the Facehugger implant, Sneddon chased that adult into Hold 2 and detonated a crate of charge-thumper bolts as her own Chestburster tore free, killing herself with both creatures. Hoop and Kasyanov then put the wounded Ripley into the ship's Weyland-Yutani med pod, a surgical unit that had cost Kelland almost a tenth of the Marion itself. Ripley was seeing visions of her daughter and asked to have the Marion days taken out of her memory, and Hoop authorized the pod's limited memory-alteration protocol because she asked for it. When Kasyanov climbed into the same pod afterward, Ash seized the machine and cut her throat with a surgical laser.

Hoop carried Ripley to the Narcissus, dressed her, and put her back in the stasis tube with Jonesy, then used a company virus purger to wipe Ash from the shuttle. Ash had already sabotaged the automatic release, so Hoop had to step back onto the Marion and launch the shuttle by hand, after which he dropped the purger and crushed it under his boot, watching her leave knowing she would not remember him.

Last Distress Call

With the Marion breaking up, Hoop put on a suit, rode the decompression into the Samson with a bottle of bourbon, and watched the freighter last longer than he expected before it tore apart in a smear of fire across the upper atmosphere. Seven minutes after he blasted free he recorded a distress call identifying himself as the last survivor of Deep Space Mining Orbital Marion. He said he was alone in a dropship that was not built for deep space travel, that he was neither a navigator nor a pilot, and that he hoped to point the computer toward the Outer Rim. The novel does not follow him after that transmission, so his later fate is unknown.

Confirmed Kills

Out of the Shadows never gave Hoop a hive-wide body count for the mine. A strict reading of the novel supports:

Solo confirmed adult Xenomorphs: 2. He burned one Warrior with a plasma torch in the Samson vestibule after Ripley drew it off Kasyanov, and destroyed another by putting hydrofluoric acid into a head stuck in a melted derelict doorway.
Assists: spray-gun bursts that drove other adults back but did not kill them.
Mine burial: 1 uncounted blast. His Level 4 fuel-cell overload wrecked about a mile of the dig. The novel never numbers what died under that ochre bruise.
Eggs / Queen / Facehuggers: 0 attributed to Hoop. Ripley burned the Queen clutch. Ripley and Lachance killed the young Queen in the shaft.
Humans: 0.

Continuity Notes

Hoop does not appear in Aliens. Because he authorized the limited memory wipe and because Ash sabotaged the Narcissus release, Ripley can still wake on Gateway Station without remembering the Marion or LV-178, which is how the film can open as if she never lived that second outbreak. The Samson could not make a faster-than-light jump or put him into hypersleep, and the book ends on his unfinished distress call.

Centuries later, Sea of Sorrows returns to the same LV-178 shafts and finds that Hoop's fuel-cell blast had damaged the mine without destroying it. The buried ship and the dog-form dead are still under the black-sand stretch called the Sea of Sorrows when Alan Decker arrives.

Conclusion

Chris Hooper was Kelland Mining's chief engineer on the Marion, a civilian who took command after Lucy Jordan died when Delilah hit the docking level. He held the damaged freighter together, went back into the LV-178 mine with Ripley, buried the hive under a fuel-cell blast, and launched her on the Narcissus with a memory wipe so she could still reach Gateway. He was the last survivor, left in the Samson with a bottle of bourbon and a beacon while the Marion burned up over the planet.