Sabra Hillard was the pilot of the Betty, the smuggling ship that delivered kidnapped sleepers to the USM Auriga in Alien: Resurrection, played by Kim Flowers. She was the lover of Captain Frank Elgyn, flew the Betty into the docking bay on a late-thrust scare, and stayed with the crew when Call was caught trying to kill Ripley 8. After a cloned Xenomorph dragged Elgyn through a floor grate, she covered his face, ruled that nobody would be left behind, and followed the survivors into the flooded galley. There a swimming Xenomorph caught her ankle and dragged her down, and she never reached the Betty again.
Biography
Earlier Life
According to The Weyland-Yutani Report, Hillard was born in 2347 under registration number F700-1. The film credits her only as Hillard, and A. C. Crispin's novelization supplies the first name Sabra. It describes her as a tall, strong-bodied woman with cropped hair and rough, expert hands who served as Elgyn's pilot and lover. She had flown with Elgyn, Christie, Johner, and Vriess longer than anyone else aboard the Betty. All five had worked as mercenaries together before Vriess was paralyzed, and that old core of the crew trusted one another far more than any newcomer Elgyn hired.
That history went back to Kawlang, a swampy world where shrapnel lodged in Vriess's spine during a mercenary fight. Vriess begged the others to leave him behind, and Hillard was the one who tied the wounded mechanic onto Christie's back for the escape while Johner complained the whole way out. 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 Hillard flew the aging freighter as she always had.
Delivery To 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 three-oh descent he ordered, told him the approach was done, and held thrust until about 600 meters to give the soldiers a little scare. In the novelization she played a video space-battle game while she flew, grinned when he stroked her cheek, and never took her eyes off the screen. She then nested the freighter under the station's underbelly while her favorite music blared through the cockpit.
The novelization shows the docking through her own unease. The Auriga's computer, which she called Pops, fed her coordinates and ordered the ship secured with electromagnets, and the size of the station made her feel as if she were being swallowed alive. She joked to herself about tax dollars at work, remembered that she never paid taxes, and shrugged the apprehension off long enough to call the crew to the airlock. Over the comm she reminded them that General Perez had banned weapons aboard the Auriga and told them to meet her there. Once the magnets locked, she left the cockpit and joined the others for the scan and the welcome from Perez.
Aboard The Auriga
While Elgyn stayed with Perez to sell the cargo for cash, Hillard went with the rest of the crew to the mess hall, which doubled as a gym with a basketball hoop at one end. There they found Ripley 8 alone with a ball, and Johner picked a fight he quickly lost. In the novelization Hillard shouted and jumped the clone herself, only to be thrown aside and hit in the gut with the basketball, while Christie fared no better with a weighted punching bag. She managed to stand under her own power when Wren and his soldiers broke up the fight, then helped Johner up once the researchers left.
That night the crew found different ways to pass the time. In the novelization Hillard lay on her bunk in their assigned quarters while Elgyn massaged her aching feet after the fight, and the two of them shared an easy private moment away from the soldiers. Elsewhere Christie, Call, and Johner sprawled in front of a shopping channel with Johner's home brew, and the novel notes that Hillard, Christie, Johner, Vriess, and Elgyn had been together longest. She did not join that drinking bout on the page, but she remained part of the same old mercenary core that had outlasted every new hire. By morning the uneasy peace aboard the Auriga was about to end.
The Mess Hall Standoff
After Call slipped away to kill Ripley 8 in her cell, Dr. Mason Wren and a squad of soldiers rounded up the crew in the mess hall. Elgyn calmly asked what was going on, but Wren demanded to know who they were working for and warned of the penalties for terrorist activity. Hillard glared at Call when the doctor tied the arrest to the new mechanic, and Elgyn insisted that nobody on his crew was a terrorist. When Wren swore that the whole crew would die with her, Elgyn spoke Christie's name and shouted for everyone to get down as the gunman opened fire.
In the chaos of the shootout the soldier Vincent Distephano got hold of Hillard, and she twisted his rifle away from him before the fighting ended. Christie dropped the soldiers around him in seconds, and the crew was left with Wren and Distephano as hostages once the alarms told them the cloned Xenomorphs were loose. Hillard worried aloud that the Betty lay all the way across the ship and asked what about Vriess when Johner wanted to leave the mechanic behind. Elgyn ordered the crew back to the freighter anyway, and she armed herself from the fallen soldiers as the group set out into the corridors.
After Elgyn's Death
Elgyn fell behind the others while scavenging abandoned rifles, and Hillard called his name as he reached for a third gun beyond a hole in the deck. Taloned hands seized him from beneath the floor, and a Xenomorph warrior dragged him down through the grate as she screamed for him. She ran back shouting for the others to get him out, and Johner called for Christie to help haul the captain up, but Elgyn was dead. Hillard broke down sobbing over his body, and when Ripley 8 climbed out of the hole and took ammunition from his pockets, she tore up the hall and shouted at the clone to leave him alone.
Hillard later covered Elgyn's face with her coat and stayed quiet while Christie took charge of the survivors. In the novelization she grew withdrawn and seemed to blame Call and Ripley 8 for his death, and Christie worried that her grief would become a liability. She then rallied. When Johner wanted to ditch Vriess to make better time, she ordered that nobody would be left behind, not even Johner, and nobody dared defy her. The group also found Larry Purvis, a worker the Betty had kidnapped who carried a Chestburster, and she stayed with the decision to bring him along rather than abandon another living person on the Auriga.
Death In The Flooded Galley
The route to the Betty ran through the flooded bottom of the ship. Christie tied Vriess to his back for what he called the Kawlang maneuver, and Wren said the way went down through the galley and up a service shaft about 25 meters away, all of it underwater. Hillard and Johner were the last two to submerge. In the novelization the water was clear but dim, the galley vast, and she watched Wren swim ahead without trusting him. Partway across, Johner saw two swimming Xenomorphs chasing them, fired underwater, and blew one apart. The second creature came on as the group kicked for the far end.
Hillard fell behind as her lungs burned and the others drew away. Ripley 8 gestured for her to hurry, and she kicked harder until she glanced back and saw the creature only two arms' lengths behind her. Panic made her choke on a mouthful of water. Powerful fingers grabbed her ankle and dragged her down, and Call saw that she was gone as the survivors reached the elevator shaft. The swimming Xenomorph that took her turned back toward the others, and Christie fought the egg trap at the surface while the crew climbed for air without their pilot. Hillard never surfaced. She died in the flooded galley in 2381, the second of the Betty's old mercenary core to fall on the Auriga after Elgyn.
Remembered After The Auriga
In the novelization, when Johner and Distephano carried Vriess to the copilot's seat aboard the Betty, Hillard's things still filled that board and Elgyn's marked the pilot's chair. The crew had always counted on Hillard or Elgyn to fly, with Christie as backup. Call later wished Hillard were at the helm as they fought free of the docking clamps, while Ripley 8 sat in the second chair.
Michael Jan Friedman's 2005 sequel Aliens: Original Sin never names Hillard directly. It remembers the Betty's lost owners through Elgyn, a razor-edged man gutted by an alien on the Auriga, and Vriess names him to the later pilot Bolero among the good people the creatures killed. On that escape, Ripley 8 took Elgyn's chair, so the freighter left without either of its old pilots.
Personality And Traits
Hillard was a practical pilot first. She could fly the Betty while playing a video game, held a late thrust on Elgyn's order to rattle the Auriga's soldiers, and treated big docking clamps as a necessary discomfort rather than a reason to refuse the run. She joked about taxes she never paid and called the station computer Pops, but the novelization also shows her unease at being locked under a hull that large. With Elgyn she shared an easy affection, from a wink in the cockpit to a foot rub after a hard fight, and she stayed loyal to the same small crew that had carried Vriess off Kawlang.
Her deepest rule was that nobody got left behind. She tied Vriess onto Christie's back on Kawlang, asked after him when Johner wanted to abandon him on the Auriga, and later made that rule an order the whole group obeyed. After Elgyn died she broke down, covered his face, and for a time seemed to blame Call and Ripley 8, then put the grief aside long enough to hold the crew together. That same refusal to abandon people put her last into the flooded galley with Johner, where she fell behind and died rather than cut anyone else from the line.
Hillard 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, includes Hillard's death in the flooded galley. In the comic she reaches the ladder and climbs out of the water before an Alien arm pulls her back under, while in the film she never surfaces and dies underwater. Risso also puts her in short pants and a t-shirt instead of the jumpsuit Kim Flowers wears on screen.
Behind The Scenes
Kim Flowers played Hillard for director Jean-Pierre Jeunet from Joss Whedon's script. The film's credits list her simply as Hillard, and the first name Sabra comes from A. C. Crispin's novelization. Birth year 2347 and serial number F700-1 appear in S. D. Perry's Alien: The Weyland-Yutani Report, the same in-universe dossier that records Elgyn and the other Betty mercenaries. Flowers filmed the flooded-galley work in the large tank sequence that the cast shot early in production, the same underwater set used for Christie, Johner, and the swimming Xenomorphs.
In Whedon's earlier drafts Hillard's death came later, in a botanical garden headbite scene that was cut before release, and the underwater kill originally belonged to a character named Rane. The finished film gives her the flooded-galley death instead and leaves the garden sequence unused. Her most repeated line from the shoot, ordering that nobody be left behind, became the trait later character pages and crew profiles cite when they summarize her role on the Betty. She does not return in the PlayStation game, which uses Christie, Call, Distephano, and Ripley 8 as its playable cast.
Famous Quotes
- "Darlin', it is done."
- "Come on! Let's get him up! Move out of the way!"
- "Leave him alone!"
- "Nobody is left behind. Not even you, Johner."
Conclusion
Sabra Hillard was the pilot of the Betty, a former mercenary who flew Elgyn's freighter to the Auriga, shared his life aboard ship, and refused to leave her crew behind when the cloned Xenomorphs broke loose. She covered Elgyn after a warrior dragged him through the floor, ordered Johner to keep Vriess with the group, and entered the flooded galley among the last swimmers. A swimming Xenomorph caught her ankle and dragged her under before she could reach the ladder, and the survivors who escaped to Earth had to fly the Betty without either of their pilots.
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, indirectly remembered)
- Alien: The Weyland-Yutani Report (S. D. Perry, 2014)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Lore | Alien Universe Mercenaries
