Russ Jorden was a wildcat prospector at Hadley's Hope on LV-426, the husband of Anne Jorden and the father of Tim and Rebecca "Newt" Jorden in Aliens. In 2179 the colony administration sent his family to coordinates that Carter Burke of Weyland-Yutani had passed down after Ellen Ripley described the ship she found in 2122. Russ found the derelict, went inside with Anne and came back with a Facehugger on his face. The Chestburster that later tore out of him in the colony medlab made him the first host of the outbreak that destroyed the colony before the Colonial Marines arrived.
Biography
Early Life And Family
Alien: River of Pain, the Christopher Golden novel from 2014, had him and Anne move out from Earth because, as Russ put it, there was no work at home. Their son Tim was born first, and Newt followed at Hadley's Hope on 15 March 2173, delivered by the colony doctor Theodora Komiskey. Russ earned the family's living as a wildcatter who drove the wastes looking for mineral claims, and he often took Tim out prospecting with him. The novelization of Aliens described him as weather-beaten, with the look of a man who had spent more than his share of time on Acheron.
By June 2179 the marriage was under strain. Captain Demian Brackett arrived with the new Marine detachment on 10 June 2179, and Russ learned that the officer had loved Anne on Earth before she married him. He made no effort to hide his jealousy. In the same month his friends Otto and Curtis Finch died after a storm at Processor Six, and the novel noted that Russ and Otto had talked about leaving the colony together. Russ and Anne had a loud fight in front of Tim, although Newt saw that her parents squabbled often and loved each other all the same.
Orders From The Company
The trip began with a decision far from Acheron. After her hearing, Ripley told the company where she had found the derelict, and Burke had the coordinates passed to the colony. Operations manager Lydecker told administrator Al Simpson that a mom-and-pop survey team wanted to know whether a find in that grid would count as their claim, and Simpson answered that anything the prospector found belonged to him. Ripley later read the colony log and confronted Burke with a directive dated 6/12/79 and signed by him, which proved that he had sent the family out without a warning.
The novelization by Alan Dean Foster had Simpson ask for volunteers to look for radioactives on a high plateau past the Ilium Range, and some guy named Jorden put up his hand. In Aliens: Newt's Tale, the administrator said that the orders came from some company man in a cushy office on Earth and that he had only passed them on. River of Pain made the choice personal, since Simpson found Russ in the bar on 19 June 2179 with very specific coordinates from the company. The sources disagreed on whether Russ volunteered or was picked, but in every version he went for the money and brought his children along.
The Trip To The Derelict
In River of Pain, the Jordens left Hadley's Hope on the morning of 20 June and crossed the plateau toward the coordinates. At 08:12 on 21 June, Lydecker relayed Russ's request to have the claim confirmed, and Simpson agreed that it was his. Russ drove the six-wheeled tractor while a magnetic scanner tracked a huge reading ahead of them. In the novelization he tapped the display and called it a fat, juicy magnetic profile that was his, all his. Shortly after 11:00 the horseshoe-shaped hull came into view, and Russ told his family that they had scored big this time.
The novel also explained why nobody had found the ship before them. Anne doubted that a ship of that size could have gone unnoticed for so long, and Russ answered that the mountains blocked the colony's detectors and that the hot air from the Atmosphere Processor masked any infrared signal. When Anne asked whether they should call it in, he told her to wait until they knew what to call it in as. Newt's Tale gave the warning to stay in the tractor to Russ, while the film and the novel gave it to Anne, and the comic also had Newt name the hull a big weird thing.
Exploring The Derelict
Russ and Anne left the children in the tractor and climbed toward the derelict. In Foster's novel the two walked up the rubble to a dark gash in the side of the ship. Anne thought that the opening looked like part of the design rather than damage, and Russ answered that he did not care what the builders liked and that they were going in. Newt and Tim waited in the tractor for hours while their parents were inside. In Newt's Tale the children saw only the hull through the windshield, so neither account described what the Jordens found inside.
River of Pain was the first story to follow them in. Russ argued that he wanted to see the ship before Dr. Mori, Dr. Reese or some company man did, and Anne agreed to give it half an hour and no more for the sake of the children. Searching for a cockpit or an engine room, they found melted scars and holes blown in the walls by some kind of weapon. A spiral cleft led them down to a level where the walls were coated in a black, ribbed, chitinous crust that looked like a mix of insect cocoon and volcanic rock. Anne thought of a hive.
At the bottom of the spiral they found the first of about 20 dead Xenomorphs, with armored carapaces faded from blue to brittle gray. Further on lay the remains of a nine-foot crewman in a techno-organic suit, and Anne asked where the rest of the crew had gone. After about 35 minutes inside, they photographed the bodies and turned toward the center of the ship. Around the next corner a larger creature with a blue crest lay locked in a death embrace with a crewman, its tail through his body and his arm in its jaws. Anne called it a queen, and Russ said that he wanted to finish up and leave.
In The Space Jockey Chamber
Their last stop was a domed chamber with the giant pilot in its chair, the Space Jockey that Ripley's crew had found decades earlier. Russ guessed that a weapon had killed it, but Anne saw that the bones of its chest had burst outward. Below the platform, under a low, glowing mist, lay dozens of leathery eggs. Anne climbed down and reached toward one, and Russ urged her to take pictures and leave the rest to Simpson. When an egg began to peel open behind her, he grabbed her arm and hauled her back, which left him standing in front of it as the Facehugger launched.
In River of Pain the eggs lay in a recessed floor around the pilot's platform under the glowing mist, while in Alien the egg chamber lay on a lower level reached through a shaft. In that account Russ did not stumble into the eggs by accident. He became the victim because he pulled Anne away from the opening egg and took her place in front of it, an act of protection toward his wife. In Foster's novel she somehow dragged him all the way back to the tractor, where Newt saw him sprawled on his back on the rocks with the creature on his face.
Dark Horse's first Aliens comic, written by Mark Verheiden and drawn by Mark A. Nelson, had shown the chamber before River of Pain. In a flashback in the sixth issue, Newt recalled how the corporation sent her family after a magnetic surge on Acheron and how her father, Russ, called the find the mother lode. Inside, she described a grotesque form of empathy with the dead pilot, and Russ knelt before the eggs and told Anne that something in them was moving before the creature leapt at him. The recolored 1996 edition, retitled Aliens: Outbreak, renamed the girl Billie, her mother Sarah and the world Rim, and neither version printed a family surname.
The Facehugger Attack
Newt and Tim were playing in the tractor when Anne came back alone and hammered on the glass. She dragged Russ to the vehicle with the creature wrapped around his face and its tail around his throat. Newt screamed as her mother grabbed the radio and called, "Mayday, mayday, this is Alpha Kilo Two-Four-Niner calling Hadley Control." Her call reached Hadley Control, and the colony sent help across the plateau. The novelization followed the same beats, and Newt's Tale repeated the call almost word for word before its next page jumped hours ahead to the colony, where the children learned that their father was awake.
River of Pain dated the attack to the afternoon of 21 June 2179 and dropped the last word of the call, giving it as alpha kilo two four nine. Anne wrapped Russ as well as she could and waited with him outside the vehicle so that the children would not have to share the cabin with the creature. Brackett's Marines reached the site in the early hours of 22 June and carried the family back to the colony. There the Weyland-Yutani science chief, Dr. Bartholomew Reese, looked at the creature on Russ's face and smiled, and Brackett sent a squad back to guard the ship.
Medlab In Newt's Tale
Newt's Tale followed the children into the medlab after Russ woke. After hearing that their father was awake, Tim, Newt and their friend Aaron crawled through the colony's air ducts and looked down into the medlab through a vent. Russ was awake on a table with Anne at his side, while a doctor named Kent refused to release him because the creature had been wrapped around his head for over twenty-four hours. The doctor added that the colony had sent men out to the site the night before to learn more about the ship.
That news angered Russ more than anything the doctor had said about his health. He shouted that the find was his claim and an authorized one, and that nobody had better get any ideas otherwise. Another voice in the room remarked that he was half-dead and worried only about his claim. Anne begged Kent to let her take Russ back to their quarters and promised to watch him herself, but the doctor answered that he was sorry and could not do it. Above them in the duct, Newt could do nothing but watch and listen.
Death By Chestbursting
At that moment the search team came back with more men wearing the creatures, and someone called out that they had brought back friends. While the staff turned to the new arrivals, Russ clutched at his stomach, groaned for help and lay back on the table. He arched in agony, and the Chestburster tore out of his chest in a spray of blood while his daughter watched through the grate and whispered, "Daddy?" The creature rose from his body in front of the doctor and Anne, hissing at the people around the table.
River of Pain told the same death in its own way on 23 June 2179. Tim and Aaron slipped out of the family quarters while a neighbor dozed, and Newt followed them through the ducts. In the novel the doctor was Theodora Komiskey, with Reese and Simpson in the room, and Reese gave the time on Russ's face as nearly twenty-four hours. Russ joked that the thing had put its tongue down his throat and that only Anne was allowed to do that. When Simpson mentioned the men sent to the site, he gave the same angry speech about his claim that the comic had used.
Komiskey quipped that he was half-dead after playing kiss-face with a lobster, and Reese refused to let him go. Russ then clutched his stomach, groaned for help and arched as Anne screamed his name. His chest burst open, and the pale creature rose from the wound, hissing, with its eyes shut tight like a newborn. The two versions disagreed on who held Russ and on whether the second team had returned by then, and when the Colonial Marines reached the colony weeks later, the medlab where he died held only specimens and records.
The Chestburster Escapes
In River of Pain the creature slid to the floor and escaped through a small grate into the ductwork, the same space where the children were hiding, and Newt began to scream. By 18:30 that evening Anne was on the floor of a small exam room with Tim and Newt huddled against her, while Russ lay dead and turning blue in the lab down the hall. Dr. Reese had taken over the medlab from Komiskey, and Anne later wondered whether Weyland-Yutani had known what waited in the ship before it sent her family there.
In Newt's Tale the family had little time to grieve. Afterward Newt dreamed of her father, and Anne promised the children that she would find them somewhere safer. The colony began to search for the escaped creature and for the men who had brought back their own parasites, while Anne held her children close. In both versions Russ's death was the first loss that Newt carried through the fall of the colony, and the last time she saw her father was through a grate in the air ducts.
Fate Of The Jordens
River of Pain gave the fullest account of how Anne and Tim died. On 26 June 2179, Anne took a pistol into the surveyors' operations center, where the last survivors had barricaded themselves, so that her children would not end up like their father. When the Xenomorphs broke in, she shot one in the head and jaw and ran to the vent where Tim and Newt had pried off the grating. Tim pushed his sister into the narrow duct and started to climb in after her, and Anne turned to fire once more before the creature's inner jaws punched through her forehead.
Brackett later found Anne's body in the operations center with Tim's six feet away, a gun in the boy's hand, and he believed Newt had died with them. Newt's Tale told it differently. There Anne pushed both children into a vent, an adult Xenomorph caught her leg, and Tim crawled back out for the pistol to pull her free before a creature lifted him off the floor and killed him. Anne died in the corridor. Aliens and Foster's novel left how either of them died unstated.
In the novelization, Newt told Ripley only that her family was dead and asked whether one of the creatures had grown inside her mother, and Ripley answered that nobody would ever know. Newt survived alone in the ducts for weeks until the Colonial Marines found her later in 2179. She left LV-426 with Ripley, Corporal Hicks and Bishop on the Sulaco, but when its escape pod crashed on Fiorina 161 in Alien 3, she drowned in her cryotube. Of the four Jordens who drove out to the derelict, Newt lived the longest, and none of them survived the creature that Russ brought home.
Patient Zero
In both Newt's Tale and River of Pain, Russ Jorden was the colony's first host. His Chestburster vanished into the ducts while the men from the second trip lay in the medlab with creatures of their own, and the infestation spread through the colony from there. Within days the Xenomorphs had cocooned most of the Hadley's Hope colonists under the Atmosphere Processor, and the rest of his family did not escape either. By the time the Sulaco arrived, the only trace of his discovery was the hive.
Marvel's Aliens: Aftermath, written by Benjamin Percy and drawn by Dave Wachter for the film's 35th anniversary in July 2021, hinted at a different fate. In 2214, Cutter Vasquez of Renegade XM went into the ruins to recover Subject Zero, a colonist frozen on sublevel F as the first known infection, and the damaged tube released a Chestburster at the end. The comic never named him, but it implied that Subject Zero was Russ, the man who had brought the infection back from the derelict. That reading clashed with the medlab deaths in the comic and the novel, so his identity remained an implication rather than a confirmed fate.
Personality And Traits
Russ was a gambler at heart. Every version of him treated the derelict as the find of a lifetime that would pay for the family's way off Acheron, and his first concern in the medlab was the claim rather than his own health. He talked about money, champagne and beating the company's scientists to the prize, and his confidence carried Anne past her doubts at the hull. The novelization made him enthusiastic and impatient, and River of Pain gave him a temper that flared at Brackett, at his wife and at Simpson.
His greed went hand in hand with a real love for his family. He brought the children along because the trip was meant to be a family adventure, and in River of Pain he pulled Anne away from the opening egg at the cost of his own life. Even on the medlab table he joked with his wife and asked about the children. Newt remembered him as the father who drove the tractor and promised a better life, and his death was the first of the losses that shaped her before Ripley found her.
Behind The Scenes
Jay Benedict played Russ in Aliens, with Holly De Jong as Anne, Christopher Henn as Tim and Carrie Henn as Newt. James Cameron filmed the approach to the derelict in January 1986 at Pinewood Studios during the last days of principal photography. The crew shot the tractor through a beam splitter so that the moving vehicle and a matte painting of the alien ship landed on one strip of film without any later compositing. The full-size front half of the white and orange tractor broke down more than once during the shoot.
Cameron's first treatment, finished on 21 September 1983, gave the colonists a longer stay inside the derelict, with a rescue party entering the egg chamber after Anne's mayday. He later said that rebuilding the interior would have cost about 1 million dollars to show imagery that audiences had seen in Alien, so he left it inferred. In editing, producer Gale Anne Hurd suggested removing reel three, and Cameron cut the early colony scenes and the Jorden family's expedition for pacing and length. The theatrical cut replaced them with a short dialogue bridge.
A CBS broadcast in 1989 restored about eight minutes of the cut footage. The full version of about 154 minutes came out on home video in the United Kingdom in April 1990 and in the United States on laserdisc as Aliens: Special Collector's Edition in December 1991, which made Russ visible to most viewers for the first time. Robert Skotak's team finished four colony effects shots for that release that had been left incomplete in 1986. Until then, readers of the novelization were the only ones who knew how the Jordens had found the ship.
Conclusion
Russ Jorden was the wildcatter who followed company coordinates to the derelict on LV-426 in June 2179 and brought the first Facehugger back to Hadley's Hope. The Special Edition of Aliens showed him only on the road and in the dirt outside the tractor. Newt's Tale and River of Pain finished his story in the medlab, where a Chestburster killed him in front of his children and began the outbreak. His hunger for a claim, his love for his family and his fate as the colony's first host made him the starting point of everything Ripley found in Aliens.
Appearances
- Aliens (1986), in scenes restored for the Special Edition
- Aliens novelization by Alan Dean Foster (1986)
- Aliens #6 by Mark Verheiden and Mark A. Nelson (Dark Horse Comics, 1988-1989 series), in flashback, reprinted as Aliens: Book One and recolored as Aliens: Outbreak (1996) with the family renamed
- Aliens: Newt's Tale #1 by Mike Richardson and Jim Somerville (Dark Horse Comics, 1992)
- Alien: River of Pain by Christopher Golden (Titan Books, 2014)
- Aliens: Aftermath by Benjamin Percy and Dave Wachter (Marvel Comics, 2021), possibly, as the unnamed Subject Zero
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Lore
