Dom Vriess was the chief mechanic of the Betty, the smuggling ship that delivered kidnapped hosts to the USM Auriga in Alien: Resurrection, played by Dominique Pinon. Paralyzed from the waist down after a mercenary job on Kawlang, he got around in a motorized wheelchair he had built himself, with guns hidden in its frame. When the ship's cloned Xenomorphs broke out, he fought one off alone, crossed the Auriga on Christie's back, and lost his oldest friend on the ladder shaft. He then flew the Betty down to Earth with Johner as one of four survivors, and he returned in A. C. Crispin's novelization and in Aliens: Original Sin.
Biography
Earlier Life
S. D. Perry's 2014 Alien: The Weyland-Yutani Report gave Vriess the first name Dom, a birth year of 2340, and the serial number USME3891. He worked as an engineering technician at a United Systems Military shipyard until he was discharged for repeatedly failing to stay sober. In 2375 he joined Captain Frank Elgyn's crew on the Betty as its chief mechanic.
Before his injury, Vriess had worked as a mercenary alongside Elgyn, Christie, pilot Sabra Hillard, and Johner, the four people who had flown with him longest. The novelization calls him John. On the swampy world of Kawlang, shrapnel lodged in his spine. He begged the others to leave him, but Elgyn told him to shut up, and Hillard tied him onto Christie's back. An ambush hit them on the way out and cut open Johner's face, and Johner blamed Vriess for his lost looks. The report dates the Kawlang job to 2377.
Arriving On The Auriga
As the Betty closed on the Auriga, Vriess lay on the dolly setting of his chair under the ship's failing stabilizer, working with the new mechanic Annalee Call and whistling a tune the two had picked up in a bar. Johner dropped a knife into his thigh from the catwalk above. Vriess only noticed when Call stopped whistling, swore at Johner, and threw a wrench at him, and Call pulled the knife out.
The crew docked to sell its cargo of kidnapped sleepers to General Perez and Dr. Mason Wren, and soldiers searched them for weapons at the airlock. Vriess asked the soldier whether he wanted to check the chair, and the search passed him by. Elgyn told the military that Vriess would want to pick up a few spare parts during their stay. When Ripley 8 beat Johner and Christie in the gym, Vriess held Call back by her shirt and told her to stay out of it.
Alone In The Stores
Vriess spent the stay in the Auriga's stores, a maze of bins full of new, high-end parts that the novelization calls mechanic's heaven, and he packed everything he wanted into the hidden compartments of his chair. He was still there when the Xenomorphs broke out. He heard explosions and screams and started back toward the Betty, sure that Elgyn would wait for him and that Johner would not.
Something moved above the ceiling grid. Vriess pulled two pipes off his armrests and a trigger from behind the seat and assembled a shotgun in three moves, then winged the creature. Drops of its acid blood ate into his leg, and he only noticed when he smelled his own burning flesh. He fired again and again until the creature fled, and the acid left burns on his leg and ear.
Rejoining The Crew
Elgyn had already been killed when a warrior pulled him through the deck. Johner wanted to head straight back to the Betty without Vriess, and Hillard refused to leave anyone behind. When the survivors reached the freight elevator, they found Vriess sitting inside with a shotgun raised, trembling and sweating, and both sides nearly fired before they recognized each other. Call ran to him. He asked if they had seen the thing too, said that he had thought he got them all, and Christie noticed the acid burns on his leg and ear.
Johner said they should ditch the cripple to make decent time, added "no offense," and Vriess flipped him off. He then unsnapped a whole arsenal from his chair, told Christie that they never check the chair, and tossed Call a small gun suited to her size. When they found Larry Purvis with a Chestburster inside him and Call refused to leave him, Vriess called him a bad risk and reminded her that she had come aboard to keep the creatures from spreading. When Call and Johner squared off over who was in charge, Vriess got between them.
The Flooded Kitchen
The route to the Betty ran through the flooded bottom of the ship. Christie told Vriess they had to lose the chair, and Vriess pulled coils of rope from a hiding place in its frame. Christie called it the Kawlang maneuver, and Vriess laughed bitterly that it was just like old times. Tied back to back with his friend, he waded through the cooling tower guessing that someone had opened the valves on the cooling tanks.
Wren said the route went down through the galley and up a service shaft about twenty-five meters away, all underwater. Christie asked his partner if he was ready to get wet, and Vriess asked him not to do the backstroke when they came up on the other side. The group swam the galley holding their breath. Two swimming Xenomorphs came after them, Johner blew one apart, and the other took Hillard. At the far end, a web covered the pool under a nest of eggs. When Call kept calling for Ripley after they surfaced, Vriess told her to pipe down before she brought the creatures on them, then touched her shoulder from his perch on Christie's back.
Climbing The Ladder Shaft
On the ladder up from the kitchen, Wren shot Call, and Vriess screamed as she fell past him. A swimming Xenomorph climbed after Christie and spat acid into his face, and in the novelization Vriess's gun jammed when Christie needed it. Christie lost his grip, and Vriess caught a rung with his powerful arms and held both of them while the creature took hold of Christie's leg.
Johner shot the Xenomorph from above, but the dead creature stayed clamped to Christie. As Vriess's grip slipped, Christie cut the rope tying them together and fell with it, and Vriess shouted at him not to do it. Vriess pulled himself up the rest of the way, and Purvis and Distephano hauled him into the corridor at the top. When Call came back with white fluid in her wound, Vriess realized she was an Auton. The novelization has him look at her like a man who had lost everything, though he still reminded her that she could patch into Father by hand.
Taking The Helm
Johner carried Vriess to the docks after a warrior pulled Ripley 8 through the floor near the nest. As they carried him aboard the Betty, Vriess felt a pang of homesickness, then grief at the signs of Hillard and Elgyn everywhere in the cockpit. He took the copilot's seat and tried to fly a ship he had barely ever piloted. The crew had always relied on Hillard or Elgyn, with Christie as backup, and Vriess told himself that today he was a pilot because he had to be. When Wren took Call hostage, Vriess could only spin in his seat and watch. Once the Chestburster inside Purvis killed Wren, Vriess tossed the crew rifles hidden under the command console.
Ripley 8 came back, shoved Johner out of the way, and took the second pilot's chair, telling them the ship was older than she was. Vriess could not get the Auriga's docking doors to close, then found that the hydraulics had lost pressure. He knew the Betty was in poor shape, because he had never managed the repairs he had scheduled. During the escape a hose ruptured and Vriess yelled at Johner to patch it through the servo. Johner yelled back that he was not the mechanic.
Landing On Earth
The Newborn got aboard and killed Distephano, and Ripley 8 left the controls to deal with it. Vriess fought the shaking ship alone, with Call's voice counting down over the speakers, and felt crippled and useless until Johner threw himself into the empty seat and wrapped his hands around the mechanic's to lend him his strength. The Betty broke clear before the Auriga hit Earth. In the novelization the warship came down in the empty Australian Outback, and Vriess checked that no towns lay below because he knew Call would care.
Once they had the ship under control, both men howled with relief, and Johner kissed Vriess hard on the mouth. Vriess grinned like a fool, then glanced nervously at Johner and asked how they were supposed to put her down. The theatrical cut ended with the ship descending through the atmosphere, and the Special Edition landed it outside a ruined Paris, with Vriess and Johner at the helm.
After Resurrection
Aliens: Original Sin opened with the Betty on a beach in New Zealand. Vriess sat in his chair beside Ripley and Call watching the sunset and wondering how someone like him would fit in on Earth. When Johner came back from the forest amazed that there were no towers or roads, Vriess complained that he had hoped to get drunk in a revolving restaurant and throw up, and the two men laughed in each other's faces. Call marveled that not long before, Johner had used Vriess for target practice and Vriess had threatened to kill him in his sleep.
Years later Vriess still kept the old ship running under Ripley 8, alongside Call, Johner, the young Krakke, the engineer Rama, and the pilot Bolero, who became his lover. He shared quarters with Johner and hated it when Johner sat on his bunk. On Byzantium Station, a camera hidden in his chair fed Bolero video of a brawl Johner started, and Vriess dropped haulers with a palm-shocker. On the way out, a secret compartment in the chair spilled stolen parts, and the guards chased the "thieving little cripple" to the ship.
At the garden colony Domes Epsilon, Vriess burned a hole through the reinforced dome with a laser torch from the side of his chair so the crew could drop in on cargo chains. He stayed aboard to watch the hole and blamed himself when Rama and the reporter Simoni slipped down after the others. When a botanist named Cody attacked Bolero in the cockpit, Vriess shot him twice with a rifle and found that he was an android. Asked why he did this work, he said it was for Ripley, and for Johner's moonshine.
After Ripley destroyed the colony, Vriess drank to Rama with the others. He nearly went for Johner over a crude joke about him and Bolero until she calmed him down, and he fell asleep snoring at the table. The novel ended with him alive aboard the Betty with Ripley 8's crew, still haunted, like Johner, by the Xenomorphs they had fought on the Auriga.
Personality And Traits
Vriess was usually cheerful and hardworking, and Call liked working with him because he was inventive and focused. She never stared at his legs or saw the chair, and Elgyn remarked that Vriess somewhat pined for her. He met his paralysis with black humor, flipping Johner off when Johner called him a cripple, and the novelization notes that only a fool would have thought him helpless.
He was closest to Christie, who had carried him out of Kawlang and died to save him on the ladder. Learning that Call was an Auton left him looking like a man who had lost everything, though he was still the one who reminded her she could patch into Father. Original Sin showed him and Johner bickering like old roommates over poker and moonshine, and Bolero knew there was no better shot on the ship than Vriess.
Equipment
Vriess built his own motorized wheelchair. At the touch of a lever it folded flat into a mechanic's dolly so he could work under machinery, then snapped back up into a chair with the seat raised and the leg rests folded. Parts of a shotgun hid in plain sight as decorative pipes under its armrests, with the trigger mechanism behind the seat. Rope, the crew's other weapons, and the small gun he gave Call were stashed in its frame, and the chair carried all of it past the Auriga's search.
By Aliens: Original Sin, the chair had become a toolkit for the crew's heists. During the brawl on Byzantium Station, Vriess dropped haulers from behind and went down the line applying a palm-shocker to each of them, leaving them twitching on the floor. He also planted remote vidcameras in recessed bulkhead slots as he rolled past them, and a camera hidden in the chair itself sent Bolero a rear view of the fight and later of the crew's retreat to the ship.
The chair had a secret compartment where Vriess stowed things that were not his, such as parts the ship needed, solid ammunition, or spares for the chair itself. Sometimes it opened on its own, and on Byzantium it spilled a trail of stolen machine parts behind him, so station guards chased the "thieving little cripple" to the docks. At Domes Epsilon, a remote control built into the armrest ran several of the Betty's systems, and with a few taps he opened the cargo bay doors onto the docking collar. He then took a Wal-Mart 2000 deluxe laser torch from its slot on the side of the chair. He had only used it for repairs, but on a higher setting its red beam burned through the colony's reinforced dome in long cuts until Krakke could pull out a square a meter wide.
Vriess In Comic Books
Dark Horse's two-issue Alien Resurrection comic, scripted by Jim Vance from Joss Whedon's screenplay and drawn by Eduardo Risso in late 1997, followed Vriess through the outbreak and showed him pulling his gun together from the frame of his chair. Its last page put the survivors on a snowfield on Earth, with Johner carrying Vriess on his back behind Ripley 8 and Call. Risso caught Pinon's Vriess well, with his swept-back hair, heavy brow, and lined, sweating face clearly recognizable as he snapped his gun together. Johner came off less well: on the final page he is a small figure in the background who bears little resemblance to Ron Perlman.
Behind The Scenes
Dominique Pinon played Vriess for director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who had cast him in Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. On the DVD commentary, Jeunet called Pinon the perfect actor and said that he had not hired him himself: Sigourney Weaver and the studio asked for him. In a 2022 interview with TroisCouleurs, Pinon recalled that Jeunet phoned him from Los Angeles while he was about to rehearse Brecht's Mother Courage at the Comédie-Française, and said Weaver, who was also a co-producer, wanted him in the film after seeing his work with Jeunet. He left for about five months of filming that began in November 1996. He also thought Jeunet had probably shaped the role in his favor. Whedon's character had no first name on screen, Crispin's novelization called him John, and the Weyland-Yutani Report later named him Dom after the actor.
The wheelchair was designed by Marc Caro, Jeunet's co-director on his earlier films, and was built around a six-wheeled radio-controlled industrial robot called a "mule" because Fox said it would save money. Pinon said it looked as if he drove it, but it was operated by remote, and the heavy rig had to be handled with care on the cramped sets. The plastic gun parts he assembled from it broke two or three times. Filming opened with the underwater chase, before Pinon had the chair. After breath-hold swimming training, the cast spent ten days diving through the flooded kitchen set, with a prop man in frogman gear releasing fake kitchen utensils around them. Pinon said the last complex take, a crossing of nearly twenty-five meters there and back underwater, left him in a total panic. The 2003 Special Edition added a scene in the cargo bay where Vriess told Call a dirty joke before Johner dropped his knife, had him hurl a screwdriver at Johner, and gave him a closing line about associating with a better class of people.
Famous Quotes
- "Johner, you son of a whore!"
- "You wanna check the chair?"
- "Who were you expecting? Santa Claus?"
- "They never check the chair."
- "What has two thumbs, one eye, a pink tongue, and screws like a god?" (Special Edition)
- "It's about time we started associating with a better class of people." (Special Edition)
- "Hey, Christie, do me a favor. When we hit the surface on the other side, no backstroke, OK?"
Conclusion
Vriess was the paralyzed mechanic of the Betty, a former mercenary who built his own wheelchair and filled it with guns. He fought a Xenomorph alone on the Auriga, lost Christie on the ladder, and flew the Betty to Earth with Johner. He survived with Ripley 8, Call, and Johner, and Original Sin ended with him still keeping the old ship running.
Appearances
- Alien: Resurrection (1997)
- Alien: Resurrection novelization (A. C. Crispin, 1997)
- Alien Resurrection comic (Dark Horse, 1997)
- Aliens: Original Sin (Michael Jan Friedman, 2005)
- Alien: The Weyland-Yutani Report by S. D. Perry (2014)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Lore | Xenomorph Encounter Survivors
