Gary Christie was the gunman of the Betty, the smuggling ship that delivered kidnapped hosts to the USM Auriga in Alien: Resurrection, played by Gary Dourdan. As Captain Frank Elgyn's right-hand man, he carried two pistols on hidden rigs strapped to his forearms and used them to win a shootout with the ship's soldiers. When the cloned Xenomorphs broke out and Elgyn died, he took charge of the survivors and carried Vriess on his back through the flooded kitchen. On the ladder shaft above it, acid burned his face, and he cut himself loose from Vriess and fell to his death so his friend could live.
Biography
Earlier Life
S. D. Perry's 2014 Alien: The Weyland-Yutani Report gave Christie the first name Gary, a birth year of 2346, and the serial number F8539. He had flown with Elgyn, pilot Sabra Hillard, Johner, and Vriess longer than anyone else on the Betty, and the five of them had worked as mercenaries before Vriess was paralyzed. A. C. Crispin's novelization describes him as a massive, handsome man with mahogany skin and a mane of dreadlocks who made any room look small. Elgyn admired him as the kind of man worth having at his back.
On Kawlang, a swampy world where the crew fought as mercenaries, shrapnel lodged in Vriess's spine, and he begged the others to leave him behind. Elgyn refused, and Hillard tied the wounded mechanic onto Christie's back for the escape. Christie packed his friend out through the swamp, telling him over and over not to die and to keep watching his back. The group was nearly clear when an ambush cut open Johner's face. The Weyland-Yutani Report dates that job to 2377, and the crew later called this way of carrying Vriess the Kawlang maneuver.
Arriving On The Auriga
As the Betty closed on the Auriga, Christie stood in the cockpit strapping his gun rigs onto his forearms. He grumbled about the army food waiting for them, and Elgyn helped him tighten the last strap. Christie picked up on what his captain left unsaid and asked whether they expected trouble. Elgyn admitted only that it was better to be on guard with General Perez, and Christie asked nothing more. At the airlock, a United Systems Military soldier checked the crew with a scanning glove, and the guns on his arms went undetected.
Christie and Annalee Call unloaded the cargo, cryotubes holding kidnapped sleepers, and moved them across the ramp into the Auriga. When Call asked whether Elgyn knew what Perez wanted them for, Christie assured her that the captain cared only about the general's cash. He took her arm with surprising gentleness and told her that Elgyn paid them not to think about such things, and Call was touched by his brotherly concern. Christie then rejoined the crew, reported every sleeper unloaded and signed for, and asked whether Elgyn was still with the general.
The Gym Fight
While the crew waited out their stay, they found Ripley 8, the clone grown from Ellen Ripley, shooting baskets alone in the Auriga gym. Johner came on to her and tried to take the ball, and she knocked him down. Christie came to his crewmate's aid and struck her in the head, but she absorbed the blows without flinching, tore the weapon out of his grip, and overpowered him. In the novelization he swung a pedestal punching bag at her, and she crushed his jaw in one hand until he collapsed. She then caught Johner again, and the scientists called her away while Vriess held Call back.
A Night Of Home Brew
That night Christie, Call, and Johner passed around Johner's thermos of home brew in front of a shopping channel. Call asked whether Johner put battery acid in it, he claimed it was only for color, and the two men cracked up and slapped palms. Later Johner spilled the brew over Christie, who complained that he now smelled like it. In the novelization, Christie was about to tell Johner that he was tired of the brew and the company when United Systems soldiers burst into their suite. He kept his hands away from his body and went along quietly.
The Mess Hall Standoff
After Call slipped away to kill Ripley 8 in her cell, Dr. Mason Wren and his soldiers confronted the crew in the mess hall and accused them of smuggling a terrorist aboard. Christie clasped his hands behind his back and flexed his forearms so the guns slid into his palms. When Wren swore that the whole crew would die with Call, Elgyn spoke Christie's name as the signal. Christie spun and shot down the soldiers around him in seconds, and in the novelization he hit four of them in the heart and dropped a fifth without even turning his head.
A soldier got behind Christie, pressed a rifle to his head, and ordered him to drop his weapons. Christie raised his hands and explained that he could not, because the guns were attached to him. He then angled one barrel at the ceiling and fired a shot that ricocheted down into the soldier's helmet and killed him. That left only Wren and the soldier Vincent Distephano standing. The novelization adds that Christie had never worked out a quick way to release the guns from his rigs, because he never expected to face a moment like that one with Elgyn's crew.
Taking Wren Hostage
Christie seized Wren, pinned the doctor against his body, and pressed a gun to his head. When Distephano ordered him to release Wren, Christie answered with an insult, and Johner disarmed the soldier. Elgyn wondered how they could get off the ship in one piece with the doctor as their hostage before more troops arrived. Before he could decide, the Xenomorphs in the labs broke out of their holding cells, and the alarms spread across the Auriga. The crew set out for the Betty with Wren and Distephano as their prisoners, sure that the soldiers would soon be busy elsewhere.
Losing Elgyn
Christie took point as the group crossed the corridors toward the dock, with Elgyn bringing up the rear. When the others stopped, he ran back and saw his captain dragged down through the floor, and Elgyn came up dead with a hole through his chest. A warrior rose and came for them until a rifle fired from beneath the deck blew its head apart and Ripley 8 climbed out of the hole. Christie asked Wren whether the creature that killed his partner was his experiment, and the doctor admitted it was, and that more of them were loose.
Taking Charge
With Elgyn gone, the survivors looked to Christie, though he did not want the job. Call warned that Ripley 8 had been the host for the creatures and wanted her left behind, and Johner agreed. Christie ruled that the clone came with them whatever she was, told the group they would stick together until they were off the ship, and said he trusted no one. In the novelization he handed Elgyn's rifle to Distephano. When they found Vriess in a freight elevator, Christie noticed the acid burns on his friend's leg and ear, and he smiled as Vriess unpacked an arsenal from his chair.
The group then found Larry Purvis, a worker the Betty had kidnapped, with a Chestburster growing inside him. When Call asked Wren to stop it, Christie said there was no time for that. In the novelization he quietly offered Call to kill Purvis painlessly with a shot to the back of the head. Call instead chose to bring Purvis along and freeze him aboard the ship, and Christie warned the frightened man that any sudden moves would get him shot. At the cloning lab, he pressed Ripley 8 to keep moving.
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 its frame. Christie called it the Kawlang maneuver, and the two men laughed that it was just like old times. Tied back to back with the paralyzed mechanic, he waded through the cooling tower at the head of the group. Wren said the way went down through the galley and up to a freight elevator about 25 meters away, all of it underwater, and Christie asked his partner whether he was ready to get wet.
Before the swim, Distephano asked whether Christie's guns would fire underwater. Christie explained that they were disposables that could take the water, with twenty rounds and split points that made a good hole even at a small caliber. He added that hitters liked them because they threw the guns away after a job, and nobody liked throwing away a weapon he was attached to. The joke fell flat with a career soldier. Vriess asked Christie not to do the backstroke when they surfaced, and the crew swam the galley holding their breath.
Two swimming Xenomorphs came after them, and one of them took Hillard. At the far end, a web covered the surface under a cluster of Xenomorph eggs. In the novelization, Christie aimed his grenade launcher at the eggs' reflection, bounced a grenade off a pipe and onto them, and kept firing until the cluster was destroyed. He then signaled that it was safe to surface. Once the survivors broke through the web, Christie warned that the second creature was right behind them and ordered everyone up the ladder before it caught them.
Climbing The Ladder Shaft
Near the top of the shaft, Wren shot Call and escaped through the hatch, and Vriess screamed as she fell past them. A swimming Xenomorph climbed after Christie, who hauled himself and Vriess up the rungs hand over hand. Vriess's gun jammed, and in the novelization Christie could not fire low enough with his friend on his back. The creature spat acid into his face. Christie screamed and lost his grip, and the two men dropped until Vriess caught a rung with his powerful arms and held them both.
Death
The Xenomorph seized Christie's leg as Vriess struggled to pull them higher. From above, Johner hung upside down from the ladder and shot it in the head, but the dead creature stayed clamped to Christie's ankle as a dead weight. In the novelization, Christie thought back to Kawlang, when he had begged Vriess to keep watching his back, and decided it was now his turn to watch his partner's. With his face and eye burned and Vriess's grip slipping, he knew they would both fall if he stayed tied on.
Christie pulled out his knife and cut the ropes that tied him to Vriess. Vriess shouted at him not to do it, and Ripley 8 yelled his name from above. In the novelization, he was surprised that she even knew it. He and the dead Xenomorph fell down the shaft, struck the metal beams and the edge of the pool, and slid under the water. Vriess pulled himself up the rest of the way, resolved to live as a tribute to the friend who had died to save him. The Weyland-Yutani Report dates the Auriga disaster to 2381.
Personality And Traits
Christie was the steadiest member of the Betty crew. He was as ruthless as the others when a job turned violent, yet he was also the one who took charge when Elgyn died and held the group together, even though he had no wish to lead. He trusted nobody and followed his instincts when things got tight, which was why he insisted on bringing Ripley 8 along. He showed Call a brotherly gentleness when the cargo troubled her, and he offered Purvis a quick death rather than a painful one.
His deepest loyalty belonged to Elgyn and Vriess. Elgyn trusted him with the signal that started the mess hall shootout, and Christie called the captain his partner when he died. He carried Vriess out of Kawlang, carried him again through the flooded galley, and died to save him on the ladder. In the novelization he stood beside Johner in silent support when the scarred man found one of the crew's kidnapped sleepers in the lab. He was also a superb marksman who could calculate ricochet shots that others would never attempt.
Weapons And Equipment
Christie's main weapons were a pair of pistols on mechanical rigs strapped to his forearms below the elbows. The novelization describes the armature as a complicated system of micro-pulleys and gears of his own design, colored to match his skin so that it all but vanished under his sleeves. By flexing his forearms, he slid the guns out into his palms, which let him carry weapons where few searches ever looked. The rigs got both pistols past the Auriga search, but they could not release the guns quickly, so he could not drop them when a soldier demanded it.
The pistols themselves were disposables, the kind professional hitters favored because they could throw them away after a job. Each held 20 rounds with split points that made a good hole even at a small caliber, and the guns could fire underwater. For the swim through the galley, Christie also carried a grenade launcher from the arsenal the crew had smuggled aboard in Vriess's chair. He used it against the eggs above the pool, where his skill with ricochets let him hit targets he could only see reflected on the surface.
Christie 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 Christie and the rest of the Betty crew through the outbreak. One panel of the gym fight shows him in close-up, teeth bared, gripping a barbell in both hands as he shouts Hillard's name while the basketball flies past. Risso drew him with thick, ropy dreadlocks, a heavy brow, and rings on his fingers, keeping the look of Dourdan's Christie in a much harder, more stylized form.
Christie In The Alien Resurrection Game
Christie was one of four playable characters in Alien: Resurrection, the first-person shooter that Argonaut Games developed and Fox Interactive published for the PlayStation in October 2000. Ripley 8 contacted him at the end of Mess Hall Complex after restoring the damaged lines, and he took over for Warehouse Complex, the eighth of ten missions and the largest floor in the game. Playing as Christie, the player swam past fans to reach engineering cards and released the Betty's docking clamps so Ripley 8 could cross the Docking Bay.
Christie was the only character with two exclusive weapons, dual pistols and a rocket launcher, which echoed the wrist guns and grenade launcher he carried on the Auriga. Call, Distephano, and Christie each played a single mission with their own gear, while Ripley 8 handled the other seven missions, from the cells to the Betty. Gary Dourdan voiced Christie, and the credits list him alongside Raymond Cruz as Distephano and Steven Gilborn as Father, the only three actors from the movie who returned for the game.
Behind The Scenes
Gary Dourdan played Christie for director Jean-Pierre Jeunet from Joss Whedon's script. Before Alien: Resurrection, he was best known as Shazza Zulu, the dreadlocked student he played on A Different World from 1991, and he later starred as investigator Warrick Brown on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. In a British newspaper interview from the CSI years, he said his dreadlocks had taken eleven years to grow and that his look had kept him cast as drug dealers and pimps before that series.
Dourdan told Africana in 2003 that the role had created a lot of buzz around him, but he had traveled to Egypt and cut off his locks before the premiere. He arrived bald, people wondered whether he had even been in the movie, and he did not work for a while because nobody recognized him. He also gave archive interviews for the 2003 documentary One Step Beyond: Making Alien Resurrection, which covers the casting and the dangerous underwater shoot in the flooded kitchen set, the first sequence the cast filmed. He returned to the role in 2000 as the voice of Christie in the PlayStation game.
Famous Quotes
- "Great. Army food."
- "Can't do that. They're attached to me."
- "Kiss my ass."
- "Doctor, that thing that killed my partner, that's your pet science project?"
- "I don't give a shit what she is."
- "I don't trust anyone."
- "Vriess, we gotta lose the chair."
- "Kawlang maneuver, all right?"
- "You ready to get wet, partner?"
- "Yeah, they're disposables. They can take it."
- "Split points give you a good hole, even at the smaller caliber."
- "Nobody likes to throw away a weapon they're attached to. You know what I mean?"
Conclusion
Christie was the gunman of the Betty and Elgyn's right-hand man, a former mercenary who carried pistols on rigs of his own design strapped to his forearms. He won the mess hall shootout with a ricochet, took Wren hostage, and took charge of the survivors when Elgyn died. He carried Vriess through the flooded galley as he had on Kawlang, and when acid ruined his face on the ladder shaft, he cut himself loose and fell so that his oldest friend could live.
Appearances
- Alien: Resurrection (1997)
- Alien: Resurrection novelization (A. C. Crispin, 1997)
- Alien Resurrection comic (Dark Horse, 1997)
- Alien: Resurrection video game (Argonaut Games, 2000)
- Alien: The Weyland-Yutani Report by S. D. Perry (2014)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Lore | Alien Universe Mercenaries
