Paul Church was a Colonel Doctor in the Colonial Marine Corps and the lead scientist on the Innominata research station in Aliens: Labyrinth. He was born in space to terraformers and never saw Earth until he was six. At twenty he spent forty-three days in a sick Xenomorph hive, then cut a dead Chestburster from his own chest. The Company later granted him a biomechanical makeover, and he spent the following decades studying the species on the Innominata. He ran public maze tests under Admiral Thaves, hid a second laboratory of altered human bodies, and survived an attack by Lieutenant Sharon McGuinness.
Biography
Earlier Life
Paul Church was born in space and never saw Earth until he was six. His parents were terraformers, and his early years were spent on ships and genesis camps. Their ship, the Incunabulum, felt like an unnatural life for a young man, though he later said he did not mind. He remained close to his parents, Jason and Lucian Church, and he wanted to be a scientist, securing a small government grant for immunization research at the age of nineteen.
That crew included three men, Taylor, Hewett, and Johanson, who did most of the heavy work, and Judith, a synthetic who kept those men happy and was also programmed as a botanist. Scientists Quentin and Louise Clark had come aboard with their daughter Rebecca, whom the ship was transporting to a research post. Church grew up in that closed household, far from Earth, long before he ever saw a Xenomorph.
Captivity In The Sick Hive
The Incunabulum set down to make what should have been a short stop. In the novel, that stop was a time-box pickup on a moon his parents had terraformed fifteen years earlier, a world officially off-limits to general travel. They found an unexpected ship near the Genesis station, then walked into a sick Xenomorph hive that had already taken that other crew. The Aliens were ill, but they still took the Incunabulum team alive. Church was forced into the bowels of the hive and separated from the others.
He spent forty-three days among them. Bloated, mutilated bodies hung in the chambers, and he later believed that some of them were still breathing. Judith was destroyed when she tried to stop the Aliens, and Taylor died in a grenade attack that killed only two drones. The living drones were weaker than he had been raised to expect, and they kept Church alive, even forcing rotting flesh into his mouth. He survived by watching, and later by acting as if he belonged among them.
Experiments In The Hive
Church gathered whatever organic samples he could find and hid them in a small recess. He tested those substances on the captives and on one another, including a solvent-like colloid secreted by leechlike creatures the Aliens seemed to cultivate as a kind of medicine. He also observed a black mold that produced toxins capable of destroying the Aliens, and he used that mold to poison the hive's living medicine factories.
Thoughts of escape became secondary to the results of the work. He used what remained of crewmates for crude labware, including skulls as dishes, ligaments for string, arteries for tubing, and skin to form vessels. He later said he had more knowledge of the Aliens than anyone else alive. He came to believe they were vulnerable, analyzable, and conquerable, and that he could bring about their extinction in the universe.
Escape And The Dead Chestburster
The Aliens eventually took Church to his mother. Lucian was still alive inside the cradle, her arms and legs torn or bitten away, and they wanted the two of them to mate. Church killed her with his hands, the only thing he later said he could do for her. A diseased Facehugger was then forced onto his face, and its probe was shoved down his trachea and into his chest. The sickness had reached the eggs themselves, and the creature had needed help to complete the attack.
Church later escaped the failing hive and reached the Incunabulum, where a calendar showed that forty-three terrestrial days had passed. After transmitting a distress call, he spent four hours cleaning his body and then performed a Chestburster removal on himself, a seven hour operation that cut a dead Chestburster from his chest. A rescue party arrived a month later and found him an atrophied mess. The debrief identified the other ship as belonging to smugglers, aspiring bug farmers, and the hive was destroyed before Church could report the toxic mold. The Company granted him a biomechanical makeover meant to make him look far older than he was.
Research On The Innominata
Admiral Thaves later placed Church on the Innominata. Church's official cover was space-borne virus typing, and a viral tent he developed had saved Thaves's own daughter, a debt that let Church write many of his own rules on the station. Behind that cover he ran unofficial behavioral and biochemical tests on Aliens in a maze and a pit, work that also belongs to the wider history of Xenomorph taming. He kept adult specimens in semicryogenic kennels, isolated from their clan, and said he had to get all he could from them.
Colonel Doctor Anthony Crespi was sent to inspect the illegal side of the operation. Church gave him a tour that included a casual offer of chocolate, a warning that the pit was not harmless, and demonstrations of how starving Aliens chose to attack an armed enemy rather than take food. In the novel he also showed Crespi a drug called FITR, a telepathine that could let a human's will make an Alien pause, and a cranial organ he called the creatures' psychic receiver.
Mortenson's Funeral
When a scientist named Mortenson died, Church spoke at the funeral and then stopped the body from being sent out of the station. He said Mortenson had signed an organ-donor release, and that the remains could still serve research, including spare retinas. An officer on the scene called the delay a breach of protocol, but Church would not let the body go. The official story became that Mortenson had been jettisoned into the void, until Crespi and Lieutenant Sharon McGuinness found what was left of him in Church's hidden laboratory.
The Control Demonstration
To show Crespi that an Alien could be handled, Church took a specimen called Trixie for a walk through the station corridors. He used a shock prod and spoke to the creature as if it were a dog, scolding it for scaring a bystander and telling it not to stop at every hydrant. Crespi drew a weapon and threatened to arrest him on the spot, asking what in the holy hell Church thought he was doing. Church said he was just taking the Alien for a walk, then claimed he had only been making a point.
The Hidden Laboratory
Crespi and McGuinness found a second laboratory that did not appear on the official station plans. In the novel that room is called K lab and is listed as a zero-gravity facility, though most of the station's diverted power was going there. Inside were tanks and altered bodies, including what remained of Mortenson and of David Lennox, McGuinness's fiancé. Church claimed results such as a so-called time serum, then tried to convince Crespi that McGuinness had faked her engagement and that Lennox had been a willing body donor.
The Final Experiment
Church lured Crespi and McGuinness into the pit and dropped the force field. When Crespi demanded to know what he was, Church answered that he had not survived the hive. He said he was the hive, and that when he looked the cosmos in the eye, it blinked. In the novel he went further, saying his real work was the creation of an evolutionary bridge so that he could join the Alien, and that Crespi and McGuinness would contribute to that research whether they understood it or not.
McGuinness's Attack
McGuinness broke the force field and slammed Church into the railing. His head struck the metal, and blood ran from the wound as she drove him down. In the first moment he still spoke to her as if she were merely upset, even as she hit him. Trixie came for him once the field was down, and Church, still bleeding, greeted the Alien by name and asked if it missed him. He survived the attack, and the fight in the pit did not take the station out of his hands.
Crespi In The Tank
Church kept his post on the Innominata after the attack. Official recordings were used to show that McGuinness had killed Crespi with her bare hands and then assaulted Church, and the Marines took her into custody. Admiral Thaves still did not know the true work in the hidden lab, and still credited Church with saving his daughter. Church placed Crespi in a tank as another of his experiments, and as the body changed he told the trapped Marine that none of it was personal. At the end of S. D. Perry's Aliens: Labyrinth, Church was still running the station.
Personality And Traits
Church presented himself as a courteous scientist, offering chocolate and polite conversation while he measured how far a visitor would go. He could sound as if he were making a joke, then describe an Alien as a dog or a test subject in the same calm voice. The ordeal in the sick hive drove him insane. He later said that he had not survived the hive, and that he was the hive. The hive had taught him that the creatures were vulnerable, and that knowledge came to matter more to him than ordinary loyalty to the people on the Innominata.
In the novel he also said he meant to join the Aliens by building an evolutionary bridge between human and Alien. The Company makeover let him hide his true age behind a face that looked much older, a disguise that also hid how long he had been at the work. He kept official experiments in view and unofficial bodies out of sight, and he did not stop when Crespi and McGuinness found them. He still held the station at the end, and he placed Crespi in a tank as one more subject of that work.
Comic And Novel Differences
S. D. Perry's novel opens with Church's captivity, then follows Crespi aboard the Arkham. The comic collection placed the Backsplash prequel first. In the book, Church looks about seventy, but is only a little older than Crespi, his aged appearance being camouflage from the Company makeover. The novel also names a time-box stop on the way to RLW 1289, the immunization grant, and a fuller account of life aboard the Incunabulum, while the comic names a research post at Kyn/29R and reveals much of that youth in a later flashback.
The novel's hive is more of a junkyard of dead Aliens and wrecked ships, with fewer living drones than the comic shows, and it expands what happened to Judith, Taylor, Quentin, and Louise Clark. Both versions show Church killing his mother with his hands, then surviving a Facehugger the Aliens had to place themselves. The book adds the timed surgery, the month-long wait for rescue, the destroyed hive, K lab, the time serum claim, the framing of McGuinness, and Church's speech about an evolutionary bridge. The comic already has him claim that he is the hive, and the book also gives Crespi a recent lover, Cady Trask.
Famous Quotes
- "I didn't survive the hive. I am the hive. When I look the cosmos in the eye, it blinks." - Paul Church, in Aliens: Labyrinth.
- "And I will join it." - Paul Church, on his real research, in S. D. Perry's Aliens: Labyrinth.
- "I did the only thing I could for her. I killed her. With my hands." - Paul Church, in the Aliens: Labyrinth comic.
- "None of this is personal." - Paul Church to Anthony Crespi, at the end of Aliens: Labyrinth.
- "Shame on you for scaring that nice lady, Trixie! Bad doggie!" - Paul Church, walking Trixie through the Innominata in Aliens: Labyrinth.
Behind The Scenes
Paul Church first appeared in Aliens: Labyrinth, a four-issue Dark Horse series written by Jim Woodring and illustrated by Kilian Plunkett, beginning in September 1993. Plunkett also supplied the title illustration and painted the first issue's cover, which shows Church in a laboratory coat with a Xenomorph behind the glass. Matt Hollingsworth colored the comic, Ellie de Ville lettered it, and Ryder Windham edited the limited series for Dark Horse.
S. D. Perry novelized the story for Bantam Spectra in 1996, expanding Church's youth, his time in the hive, and the later work on the Innominata. A personal file for Doctor Paul Church is later deleted in Aliens: Colonial Marines issue 5, during an investigation into a figure known as the Father. Before the Disney merger, 20th Century Fox had planned to bring Church back as a collaborator of Chad McClaren in work that later became Aliens: Colony War, though the published novel alludes to a hive-surviving partner without naming him. A differently depicted Professor Paul Church also appears in the 1995 game Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure.
Appearances
- Aliens: Labyrinth (Dark Horse, 1993).
- Aliens: Labyrinth (S. D. Perry, Bantam Spectra, 1996).
- Aliens: Colonial Marines issue 5 (brief mention of his personal file).
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Universe Scientists | Alien Lore | Colonial Marine Characters | Xenomorph Encounter Survivors
