Frank Elgyn was the captain of the Betty, the smuggling ship that delivered kidnapped sleepers to the USM Auriga in Alien: Resurrection, played by Michael Wincott. He sold that cargo to General Perez for cash, bargained for two days of bed and board, and kept his crew in line until Call was caught trying to kill Ripley 8. When Dr. Wren accused the crew of terrorism, he gave the signal that started the mess hall shootout. Soon after the cloned Xenomorphs broke loose, a creature dragged him down through the floor, and he became the first of the crew to die.
Biography
Captain Of The Betty
According to The Weyland-Yutani Report, Elgyn was born in 2344 under registration number F828-1. His mother was Beatrice Martin, nicknamed Betty, and he later gave that name to the smuggling ship he captained. The in-universe dossier places his death in 2381 aboard the Auriga, after the Betty delivered its cargo of kidnapped sleepers to the United Systems Military. Those details sit outside the film credits, which list him only as Elgyn, and they fill in the early record the screen story never spells out.
The film credits him only as Elgyn, and A. C. Crispin's novelization supplies the first name Frank. It describes him as a reedy, angular man in his mid-forties whose dark eyes and prominent nose gave him a predatory look. His pilot was his lover, Sabra Hillard, and the two of them had flown with Christie, Johner, and Vriess longer than anyone else aboard the Betty. All five had worked as mercenaries together before Vriess was paralyzed, and Elgyn trusted that old core of the crew far more than any newcomer he hired.
That history went back to Kawlang, a swampy world where shrapnel lodged in Vriess's spine during a mercenary job. Vriess begged the others to leave him behind, and in the novelization Elgyn snapped at him to shut up rather than abandon him. Life aboard the ship ran on very few rules, though the pilot always got to pick the music. By the time of the Auriga run, Elgyn had hired a new mechanic, Call, and the old ship needed repairs that he hoped the army would help with by handing over some spare parts.
Docking At The Auriga
As the Betty approached the Auriga, a young soldier asked for an authorization code, and Elgyn answered with a crude joke instead of a number. Hillard brought the ship in on the descent he ordered, and he told her to hold thrust until about 600 meters to give the soldiers a little scare. In the novelization, she played a video game while she flew, and he stroked her cheek before he left the cockpit. He then told Vriess and Call to lock down because they were about to dock.
Elgyn found Christie strapping his gun rigs onto his forearms and helped him tighten the last strap. He promised a taste of the general's hospitality, which Christie greeted with a groan about army food, and said it would do until the ship was back up to spec. When Christie asked whether they expected trouble, Elgyn doubted it from Perez but admitted that they had been in such places before. The novelization adds that he hesitated a moment too long before he answered, and Christie asked nothing more.
Greeting Perez On The Auriga
At the airlock, the ship's computer Father ordered a contraband and weapons search, and United Systems Military soldiers scanned every member of the crew. A sensor caught Johner's metal thermos, which he passed off as his own home brew. Elgyn spotted Perez and complained about the welcome, asking whether the general feared that six of them would hijack his ship. Perez replied that he worried one of the crew would get drunk and shoot a hole in the hull, since they were in space. Elgyn shrugged off the jab with a crude reply and asked how he had been.
The novelization shows the arrival through the general's eyes. Perez thought the Betty crew a ragtag group and could not imagine how Elgyn got any of them to follow even basic orders aboard such a ramshackle ship. On a closer look, he saw that each of them carried a real toughness and would kill if needed, even the small newcomer in the middle. He privately called them thieves and murderers, reminded himself that he had hired them, and noted that their captain had never mentioned taking on new crew.
Selling The Cargo For Cash
The cargo was a load of cryotubes holding kidnapped sleepers, and Perez paid for it with stacks of bills that he said had been very hard to come by. Elgyn answered that the cargo had not been easy either and asked whether the general meant to plead poverty. Perez explained that very few people dealt in cash anymore, and Elgyn pointed out that the only ones who did were people who kept no business records, the general included. When Perez offered him a drink, Elgyn joked that he drank constantly, and the novelization makes it a good scotch.
Elgyn then guessed aloud that whatever the general was running out there was not approved by Congress. In the novelization the remark stung, because the project had no approval from Congress or any official military panel, and Perez could only tell himself that he was serving his country. He had little patience for Dr. Mason Wren's talk of medicines and saw the Xenomorphs as future ground troops. Looking across at Elgyn, he decided that this pirate had never even asked what the cargo was for and cared only about the money between them.
Bargaining For Bed And Board
When Perez asked about the new face on the crew, Elgyn described Call as a girl who was only playing at being a pirate. He praised her skill with a wrench, made a crude remark about her looks, and said that Vriess was sweet on her. He added that she was curious about the deal, which he admitted was very secretive. In the novelization, he picked up a stack of bills and held it to his nose as if it were a fine wine, and he explained that he had found Call looking for maintenance work.
Perez insisted that the job was a military operation, but Elgyn pointed out that army medical labs did not usually work outside regulated space. Pressed on what he wanted, he asked only for 2 days of bed and board and the chance for Vriess to collect a few spare parts, if it was no imposition. Perez agreed on two conditions, that the crew stay away from restricted areas and cause no trouble. The novelization reveals that Perez had once considered killing the whole crew after the delivery and liked having them docked while he thought it over again.
A Night With Hillard
While Elgyn was still with the general, the rest of the crew went to the mess hall and met Ripley 8, and in the novelization she beat Johner, Christie, and Hillard after they tested her. That night the crew found different ways to pass the time. Hillard lay on her bunk moaning with pleasure, and the scene revealed that the man responsible was Elgyn, who was massaging her aching feet. The novelization notes that her body still hurt from the fight, and he smiled back at her as he worked.
The Mess Hall Standoff
After Call slipped away to kill Ripley 8 in her cell, Wren and a squad of soldiers rounded up the crew in the mess hall. Elgyn calmly asked the doctor what was going on, but Wren demanded to know who they were working for and warned of the penalties for terrorist activity. Elgyn insisted that nobody on his crew was a terrorist and turned to Call for an explanation. When Wren swore that the whole crew would die with her, Elgyn said he understood, spoke Christie's name, and shouted for everyone to get down as the gunman opened fire.
In the novelization, his calls for everyone to calm down and avoid getting emotional were code words that told Christie to ready the guns hidden on his forearms. Christie shot down the soldiers in seconds, and Elgyn casually stopped a sliding corpse with his boot. When Call tried to leave and finish her mission, Elgyn grabbed her by the hair and yanked her back. Call warned that Wren was breeding Xenomorphs, and Elgyn wavered between her and the doctor until distant screams and gunfire told them the creatures were loose. He then ordered the crew back to the Betty.
Lured Into A Trap
Elgyn took a dead soldier's weapon, and the group set out with Wren and the soldier Vincent Distephano as hostages. When Distephano asked him to let the doctor go, Elgyn refused until they were off the ship. In the novelization, Christie took point while Elgyn brought up the rear, and the march reminded the captain of old campaigns he did not miss. He also regretted not taking more weapons and ammunition from the dead soldiers. When Christie told him to come on and keep moving, Elgyn agreed but fell behind the others.
In the novelization, Elgyn spotted an abandoned rifle in a side corridor and picked it up, then found a second one coated in slime. A third weapon lay beyond a hole where the decking had melted away, and as Hillard called his name, he remembered baiting a box trap for squirrels with his grandfather. He sensed the danger too late. Taloned hands seized his ankles from beneath the deck, and in the film a Xenomorph warrior dragged Elgyn down through a floor grate as he fought to hold on.
Death
The others heard Hillard screaming his name and ran back as he was dragged into the floor. Johner called for Christie to help him haul the captain up, but Elgyn was already dead, and Hillard broke down sobbing over his body. In the novelization, something like a huge spear punched through his chest and out of his back, and his last sight was of a dark creature rising from the hole below him. The novel has Johner and Distephano pull him out instead, and Christie could see clear through the wound.
A Xenomorph then rose from the floor and stalked toward the group, stepping over his body. In the novelization, a rifle barrel pushed up through the hole in Elgyn's chest, tapped the creature on the head, and fired, and Ripley 8 climbed out of the floor beneath him. She took the ammunition from his pockets while Hillard shouted at her to leave him alone. The crew demanded to know whether the creature that killed him was Wren's project, and the doctor admitted it was. Hillard later covered Elgyn's face with her coat, and Christie handed his rifle to Distephano.
Remembered After The Auriga
Hillard took the loss hard. In the novelization she grew withdrawn and seemed to blame Call and Ripley 8 for his death, then rallied and told the others that nobody would be left behind. She died soon after, when a swimming Xenomorph took her in the flooded kitchen. Back aboard the Betty, traces of the couple were everywhere around the pilot's chair, and Vriess realized that the crew had always counted on Hillard or Elgyn to fly the ship. When Ripley 8 later took the second pilot's chair to fly them out, Call remembered with a pang that it had been Elgyn's.
Michael Jan Friedman's 2005 sequel Aliens: Original Sin mentions Elgyn only in passing. It calls him the ship's owner, a razor-edged man who had been gutted by an alien on the Auriga, and notes that nobody would object if the survivors left his old ship on a beach. Vriess names him to the pilot Bolero as one of the good people the creatures killed. Ripley 8 also catches her reflection in a mirror that had belonged to Elgyn, the previous captain of the Betty.
Personality And Traits
Elgyn was a businessman first. He dealt in cash so that nothing could be traced, read Perez well enough to turn hints about an illegal project into free room and board, and never asked what his human cargo would be used for. Christie assured Call that the captain cared only about the general's money and paid his crew not to think about such things. He was crude, joking about a woman strapped into a chair and about Call's looks, and he answered soldiers with insults. Yet he also prepared for trouble and armed his gunman before the ship docked with Perez.
His loyalty ran to the people who had flown with him longest. He refused to leave Vriess behind on Kawlang, trusted Christie with the signal for the mess hall shootout, and stood up for his crew when Wren branded them terrorists. With Hillard he shared an easy affection, from a stroke of her cheek in the cockpit to a foot rub at the end of a hard day. His confidence was also his undoing. Hungry for more firepower, he wandered off alone after abandoned weapons and walked straight into a trap.
Elgyn In The Alien Resurrection Comic
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 the Betty crew through the outbreak, including Elgyn's death. One page shows him crossing the deck plating with a rifle beside an open grate, calling for everyone to hold up because he sensed something. Black, clawed hands then burst up through the grating at his boots, and he is dragged down screaming before a burst of blood frames the creature's teeth.
Risso drew Elgyn as a heavily muscled man in a sleeveless top, with short, light hair and combat boots, a bulkier figure than Michael Wincott's lean captain in a leather jacket. The page moves from a wide view of the corridor, with the rest of the crew in silhouette behind him, to tight panels of the claws at his feet and his screaming face. The final panel drops the background entirely and shows only a red splash of blood around the creature's teeth.
Behind The Scenes
Michael Wincott played Elgyn for director Jean-Pierre Jeunet from Joss Whedon's script. Born in Toronto in 1958, the Juilliard-trained actor was known for his deep, raspy voice and for villains such as Guy of Gisborne in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Top Dollar in The Crow. He had also played music mogul Philo Gant in Strange Days and worked in several Oliver Stone films. The film's credits list him simply as Elgyn, and the first name Frank comes from the novelization.
On the Alien: Resurrection commentary track, Ron Perlman and Leland Orser singled out Wincott's raspy voice and said he brought that sound to every picture he made. During the long days in Perez's office he smoked take after take while Dan Hedaya ate lemon after lemon to keep the general's sour face honest. The habit fitted a cash-dealing mercenary captain who lived by deals done off the books. The novelization added a boyhood memory of his grandfather's squirrel trap to the moment of his death under the grate.
Conclusion
Frank Elgyn was the captain of the Betty, a former mercenary who sold kidnapped sleepers to Perez for cash and talked his way into free bed and board aboard the Auriga. He shared his life with Hillard, armed Christie before the ship docked, and defended his crew when Wren called them terrorists. After giving the signal that won the mess hall shootout, he led the group toward the Betty but fell behind, and a Xenomorph dragged him through the floor, making him the first of the crew to die.
Appearances
- Alien: Resurrection (1997)
- Alien: Resurrection novelization (A. C. Crispin, 1997)
- Alien Resurrection comic (Dark Horse, 1997)
- Aliens: Original Sin by Michael Jan Friedman (2005, mentioned)
- Alien: The Weyland-Yutani Report (S. D. Perry, 2014)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Lore | Alien Universe Mercenaries
