Robert Morse was an inmate at the Fiorina 161 Class C Work Correctional Unit in Alien 3, played by Danny Webb. He was one of the prisoners who stayed after Weyland-Yutani closed the facility, and the only man left alive after a lone Dragon was born there in 2179. Commandos under Michael Bishop shot him and took him into Company custody. Morse later wrote Space Beast, an account of that outbreak that Weyland-Yutani banned.
Biography
Previous Life
Alan Dean Foster's Alien 3 novelization put Morse in his late twenties and already looking older, because Fiorina aged the men who could not leave. He wore a run of gold-anodized teeth from earlier crimes, and the gold colour was a cosmetic choice rather than a prison mark. He was jumpy as a matter of habit. In younger years he had been a man of action. On the rock he became a spieler, trading stories instead of finding new trouble, and he never missed the lack of viewers and other cheap diversions.
Morse was serving a Class-C sentence on Fury as one of the double-Y caretakers who stayed after Weyland-Yutani shut the mine and left a handful of inmates on an honor system with no guns. He wrote that the sentence was easier than people thought, because Superintendent Andrews tried to be fair and keep the men from killing each other. Andrews always called him Mr. Morse, never Robert, and squeezed a handball when he gathered the hall for rumour-control speeches. Andrews would not use first names. If he had, the prisoners could have called him Harold and treated him as one of them. Morse worked the leadworks with the rest of the remaining crew, ate in the old supervisors' mess, and waited out supply drops on a coastline that offered nowhere to run. He wrote that none of them were getting off the rock.
Like the other converts he had taken Dillon's millenarian faith, including a promise of celibacy that barred women from the colony. When Morse later wanted to sit out the foundry hunt, Dillon mocked him as the man who had made a deal with God to live forever. Morse was the prisoner who lived. Michael Bishop later called him a murderer. Morse wrote that he had killed men with guns and pipes, which matches the kind of sentence that put men on Fiorina, though the film never names the original charge.
Morse Objects To Ripley On Fiorina
Superintendent Andrews called the men together after an EEV crashed on the morning watch with one living passenger, two dead, and a smashed droid. Morse leaned over the upper railing and recited the celibacy vow in front of the hall, then treated a woman on the rock as a break in Company policy and in the harmony Dillon used so the brothers would stay sane. Aaron treated Morse as a cheeky bastard. Dillon stepped in and turned the complaint into a request that the outsider stay out of their routine. Andrews promised a pickup inside a week from a ship bound for Motinea and told them to leave Ripley in the infirmary until that crew arrived.
Morse Sees Andrews Taken
The Dragon, a Runner, killed through the vents and the kitchens, and Morse was in the mess with Dillon, Aaron, Ripley, and prisoner Arthur when it dropped onto Andrews and hauled him out of the room in front of the hall. Morse blamed Ripley for bringing the creature, mocked Aaron as 85, and listed what Fiorina did not have: no guns, no freezers, no ice cream, no women. Dillon shut him down for the moment. Morse wanted someone to kill the thing before a Company ship could claim it.
Morse Frees Golic
The theatrical cut jumped past the waste-tank capture. The Assembly Cut and Foster's book restored it. After the brothers used quinitricetyline and bait to lock the Dragon in the toxic store, Aaron sent Morse to watch the infirmary drugs and the one prisoner tied there, Golic. Morse sat on a cot with a viewer. He had seen the creature take Andrews, treated it as big, fast, and ugly, and refused to cut the jacket because Aaron and Dillon would come down on him. Golic talked him around with hunger, dead arms, and old cigarettes. Morse undid the straps. Golic hit him with a fire extinguisher and walked to the waste door to see the dragon again.
Morse came to, ran for Dillon and Ripley, and reported that the thing was loose. They found Golic dead at the waste tank. Aaron punched Morse in the nose for letting it happen, and Dillon had to pull the acting superintendent off him. Morse wanted panic and a run for the beach. Dillon sent him to gather the rest of the men in the assembly hall instead, because the waste tank was finished and the foundry was the next trap they had.
Morse Hunts The Dragon In The Foundry
Ripley and Dillon lined the remaining prisoners as bait, each man to sprint a corridor, slam a gate, and pass the Dragon on until it reached the mold. Morse first wanted to sit the chase out and wait for the Company. Dillon treated him as the man who had made a deal with God to live forever, then offered to fight with Ripley and leave the rest sitting. Morse joined the hunt after that.
One of the doors Morse was meant to close jammed partway, and he leaned through the gap looking for the creature. He yelled that it was in tunnel B, then lost Kevin, Gregor, and the rest of the runners in the dark. He collided with Gregor, both of them laughing for a second because each thought the other was the Alien, then watched the Dragon bite through Gregor's neck. He later grabbed Jude's scissors in another near-miss. By the time the chase forced the creature into the mold, only Dillon and Morse were left from the team.
Morse Pours The Lead
Morse hit the last door behind the Dragon and climbed into the gantry crane while Dillon stayed in the mold to hold the creature. He hammered the controls until white-hot alloy poured. The metal coated both Dillon and the Dragon. Dillon died in that chamber. The Dragon climbed out of the mold anyway, burning hot and smoking. Morse shouted for Ripley to hit the sprinklers. Cold water hit the hot shell, and the thermal shock blew the creature apart.
Company troops from the USCSS Patna reached the observation platform during the pour, led by Michael Bishop. He offered to cut a Queen embryo out of Ripley. She refused, and Morse rolled the crane away from the stairs so she could jump. A commando shot Morse in the leg with a pulse rifle to stop him helping her. Foster's book and the later comic put that same bullet in his shoulder instead. Morse was on his feet in time to see a Chestburster tear free as Ripley fell into the furnace. Company biotechs bandaged him while the rest of the team shut the leadworks down.
Morse Leaves Fiorina
Morse left Fiorina as the last prisoner after Aaron died under Company fire and the furnace went cold. Company troops walked him out between them. The prison was closed and sealed, the refining gear marked for scrap, and Morse taken aboard the Patna for questioning. He looked back one last time. When a soldier shoved him toward the pad, Morse answered with "Aw, fuck you!" In the Dark Horse Alien 3 comic he also recited Dillon's line that the dead had moved higher.
On The Patna And Later Events
In T. R. Napper's Aliens: Bishop, Michael claimed to the rebuilt Bishop android that Morse had attacked him on Fury 161 and been shot. That was a lie. Morse was alive in a barred cell, bruised by the twin combat synthetics Orthus One and Orthus Two, and writing everything that had happened on Fiorina into a notebook. He introduced himself as Robert Morse, showed Bishop the bruises under his shirt, and treated the torture as the thing that had forced the novel out of him. He called that book Space Beast and would not accept Xenomorph as the better name.
Morse also pointed Bishop at a wall of lockers. Behind those doors hung burned Bishop copies and a spare head, proof that Michael was building more than one of him. When Marines from the Il Conde boarded the Chinese warship Xinjiang, Private Karri Lee and Bishop destroyed the last of the Orthus pair and cut Morse free. He grabbed a facemask and a gun off dead Chinese troops, fired at an adult Xenomorph in a side corridor, and helped haul wounded Juan Cortazar toward the escape pods while the air thinned. He made the pod with medic Xuan Nguyen. On the Il Conde afterward the Marines locked him in the brig, where he went on writing and asked for ice cream.
Writing Space Beast
Space Beast is Morse's own account of Fiorina 161. He started it in the Patna cell while Bishop's twin combat synthetics, Orthus One and Orthus Two, beat the story out of him, then carried the notebook through the Xinjiang escape and into the Il Conde brig. He used space beast as his name for the Dragon and treated Xenomorph as a critic's word. The printed copy in S. D. Perry's Weyland-Yutani Report runs his words together the way he talked, and opens with Morse calling himself a criminal who would not lie about a monster eating his fellow prisoners.
The company packed him off to another C-Max prison and banned the book. Morse wrote that he no longer prayed, because Dillon had been wrong about God and the end came for all of them. Alien: The Roleplaying Game dates a 2183 printing. In Alien: Resurrection, Annalee Call had read that banned account before she reached Ripley 8 on the Auriga. The Church of Immaculate Incubation later used the pamphlet as scripture, and on Torrin Prime, in Alien: Perfect Organisms, a street preacher sold Bloch a stapled copy under the same title.
Personality And Traits
Morse was jumpy as a matter of habit. Foster put him as a man of action in younger years who had become a spieler on Fiorina, trading stories instead of finding new trouble. In the film he talked first and loudest, cynical and confrontational, reciting the celibacy vow from the railing and listing everything the prison did not have. He treated Ripley as a break in Company policy and as the person who had brought the creature, and he wanted her head through a wall until Dillon made him drop it. He was frightened enough to want out of the foundry hunt and wait for Company guns. When Dillon pushed him, he joined anyway and stayed in the fight.
Morse had taken Dillon's millenarian faith with the other converts, then wrote that he no longer prayed, because monsters like that existed and Dillon had been wrong about God. The same stubborn streak kept him on the notebook. Michael Bishop's twin combat synthetics, Orthus One and Orthus Two, beat the Fiorina account out of him on the Patna, and he went on writing anyway. Weyland-Yutani banned Space Beast. Copies reached Call, a street preacher on Torrin Prime, and the Church of Immaculate Incubation.
Morse In The Alien 3 Comic
Dark Horse's three-issue Alien 3 comic, written by Steven Grant and pencilled by Christopher Taylor in June and July 1992, mixed the theatrical cut and the Assembly Cut. On the page Morse wore a black t-shirt and was drawn more muscular than in the film. The Company bullet hit his shoulder, not his leg, and he left the rock alive as the named sole survivor, ordered to stay silent and warned about the penalty if he talked. A Company lander sat on the pad while a line of tiny figures walked him toward it.
Behind The Scenes
Danny Webb played Morse for David Fincher at Pinewood Studios during the 1991 shoot. The finished credits list the part only as Morse. Later licensed work, including Aliens: Bishop and Alien: The Roleplaying Game, supplies the first name Robert. Webb has said the table-read script did not match what they shot, because new pages arrived by fax from Hollywood as characters and scenes dropped out. Paul McGann's Golic was written as a much larger part. The infirmary scene in which Golic talks Morse into cutting the jacket, then clubs him and frees the Dragon, was removed from the theatrical cut and put back in the 2003 Assembly Cut.
Fincher asked Webb to stay extra weeks when the studio moved to cut the picture, after Webb had brought his family to the shoot. On-set stills put Fincher with Ripley and Morse in the leadworks during the crane work. The gold teeth are a makeup choice that Foster then wrote as gold-anodized caps. They show when Morse grins or shouts. The 1992 Star Pics Alien 3 card set numbered him card 69, Morse.
Famous Quotes
- "I just want to say that when I arrived here I took a vow of celibacy. That means no women. And no sex of any kind."
- "We all took the vow."
- "Fuck!"
- "What 85 is trying to tell you is that we ain't got no entertainment center, no climate control, no video system, no surveillance, no freezers, no fucking ice cream, no rubbers, no women, no guns. All we got here is shit."
- "Oh, what the hell are we even talkin' to her for? She's the one that brought the fucker."
- "Ripley, it's burning hot! Hit the sprinklers! Douse the fucker!"
- "Aw, fuck you!"
Conclusion
Robert Morse was the Fiorina 161 inmate who outlived Andrews, Dillon, Aaron, and Ripley. He poured the alloy that finished the Dragon, left on the Patna as the last prisoner, and wrote Space Beast in the cell where Michael Bishop held him. Weyland-Yutani banned that book. In Aliens: Bishop, Morse was last seen in the Il Conde brig with the notebook, asking the Marines for ice cream.
Appearances
- Alien 3 (1992)
- Alien 3 novelization (Alan Dean Foster, 1992)
- Alien 3 comic (Dark Horse, 1992)
- Alien: Resurrection novelization (A. C. Crispin, 1997) (mentioned)
- Alien: The Weyland-Yutani Report (S. D. Perry, 2014)
- Aliens: Bishop (T. R. Napper, 2023)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Lore | Xenomorph Encounter Survivors
