Samuel Brett was an engineering technician on the USCSS Nostromo in Alien, played by Harry Dean Stanton. He backed Dennis Parker on the bonus clause and stayed aboard to weld the intakes after the landing on LV-426. The adult Xenomorph took him under the chains in a landing-leg bay while he was looking for Jones. Lambert and the others went on without him. The Alien Legacy file names him S.E. Brett, and the Gateway inquiry filed him as Samuel Elias Brett.
Biography
Earlier Life
The hidden crew file on Fox's 1999 Alien Legacy DVD listed him as S.E. Brett, engineering tech, born 13 July 2069 in Houston, Texas, in the United Americas. From 21 June 2085 to 10 May 2094 he worked as a mechanic in the family shop E-Z-FLY Spacecraft Repair in Houston. Solari Energy Corp then took him as a hardware specialist at a solar plant in Osaka, and that contract ended in December 2095. In 2096 he piloted high-speed cargo vehicles for Ridton Corp through the Iranistan war zone until that work was suspended, and he took treatment for alcoholism at a Ridton medical facility in London.
He graduated from the Houston School of Astrophysics and Interstellar Engineering in October 2101. From July 2108 to November 2111 he was assistant engineer on the waste ship USCSS Corazon Oscuro under Captain Speight. A failed blood-alcohol test on 10 November 2111 suspended his flight status. On 9 January 2112 he underwent a cerebral detox at a Weyland-Yutani medical facility on Titan, with complications the file placed under brain damage, and he stayed in therapeutic recuperation there until March 2113. He passed a company exam that April, and flight status came back.
From April 2113 to October 2117 he was an assistant engineering tech at the Weyland-Yutani fusion reactor on Titan. He then served as engineering tech on the cargo ship USCSS Nonnabo under Captain Keeney from 3 November 2117 to 1 September 2120, on the same hull as Parker. On 10 September 2120 both of them moved to the Nostromo under Captain Dallas.
The Aliens inquiry file later shown on Gateway did not match that career, though the initials did. It listed Samuel Elias Brett as engineering technician, born 9/2/91, with a Tech 3 degree from the ICC Engineering Trade School on the Earth campus after he left Nicholson Public High School in Hawks, West Virginia, without graduating. Earlier work on that sheet was the tug USCS Hurd for the American Gothic Company, then the USCS Terminator into Titan Drydock. The file closed when the Nostromo was lost on 2/17/34.
The remarks sent him into company work from the U.S. Federal Rehabilitation Program For Displaced Youth after a level 8 felony at 17, then to the ICC trade school on the Mars campus, and they barred promotion until a review. A Steiner/Korngold test scored a passive response to violent childhood memories, and the file named his friendship with Parker as the reason he needed no outside treatment.
Waking From Hypersleep
Alan Dean Foster's novelization brought the engineers out of hypersleep into the cold of a ship on the haul home from Thedus, with a refinery in tow. Brett stayed in Parker's shadow. Ripley lifted the cat out of another tube while the two engineers treated the wake as one more Company economy. In the film he was the quieter of the pair from the first meal, in his cap, and he said the pay lines himself.
The Bonus
Mother cut the run home and woke the seven-person crew over a garbled transmission from an unlisted system. Dallas came back from the computer with a signal nobody at the table could read as human, and Ash recited the contract clause that forced an investigation or cost them their pay and bonuses. Parker wanted the money settled before anyone called the stop a duty, and he pressed for a full share if the landing party found anything valuable. Brett told Dallas that he and Parker felt the bonus had never been equitable, and that everybody else got more than they did.
Down in engineering he told Parker they drew a half share because their time belonged to the company. When the signal came in he asked what it mattered, and he later told Ripley he would not do any more work until the shares were straightened out. He also answered Parker's points with "Right." Dallas held them to the clause and treated the detour as Company work.
Landing On LV-426
The descent onto LV-426 went through a dust storm that tore shielding off an intake, packed grit into the lining, and started an electrical fire in engineering. A shock ran through the hull when the landing struts hit, the screens failed, and Parker and Brett lost a main cell and full ship power for a stretch. In Foster's book, pipes burst in engineering after dust poured through the intakes, and the two of them fought that fire on the deck. Brett was the technician under the chief engineer for that work, not a second voice in the argument about whether to land.
Repairing The Intakes
Dallas took Kane and Lambert out to the beacon and left Parker and Brett on the tug with Ripley. The landing had torn the intake linings. Parker put the remaining work at 17 to 25 hours, and he said some of it needed a drydock they did not have. They closed what they could while the party was outside, and Ripley sent them back to it under the same contract.
Kane Comes Back
When Dallas and Lambert brought Kane back with a Facehugger on his face, Ripley held the inner hatch for the quarantine period. Ash opened it from inside the ship anyway. Parker backed the warrant officer, and Brett stayed with him rather than with Lambert, who blamed Ripley for leaving them outside. Once Kane was inside, Dallas took the ship off the moon with part of that intake work still unfinished.
The Acid Hole
In the infirmary they cut the creature, and its acid blood ate the deck, then the next deck, then toward the hull. Brett and Parker watched that drip from below and called the levels up as the metal opened. Dallas took Brett's pen and held it in the drip. The acid ate the metal, and Brett looked at what was left when he got the pen back. Dallas and Ash stopped the cut before the acid reached open space, and the Facehugger stayed locked on Kane. Parker wanted Kane frozen until a doctor on Earth could look at him, and Dallas would not freeze a man whose condition they did not understand. Brett did not add a separate argument.
The Chestburster
The Facehugger dropped off on its own, and Kane woke with no useful memory of the moon and asked for food. The crew had the refinery back on the tow and a course for Earth, and Kane took a place at the mess table for a last meal before the freezers. Brett was at that table with Parker, Lambert, and Dallas when a Chestburster tore out of Kane and ran into the ducts. In Foster's book the infant had no eyes at first, then a compact body with clawed limbs shoved Kane's insides aside and left the room before anyone could hold it.
Brett was with the crew when they wrapped Kane in a shroud and sent the body out the airlock. Dallas offered them a chance to speak, and nobody took it. The hunt for the creature started from that funeral, and Brett and Parker were the two who knew the lower ducts from the intake repairs.
Building The Cattle Prods
After the funeral, Dallas, Parker, and Brett put together a capture kit from ship stores. The weapons were cattle prods, each one an insulated shaft with a portable battery, and the charge sat at the tip. Ash built a short-range tracker from ship parts, and Parker carried a net. Parker treated the prods as useless against a body that would soon be much larger than the cat.
Search For The Alien
Dallas split the crew. Ripley took Parker and Brett, with the channels open on every deck, and the order was to catch the creature and put it out an airlock. Brett took a headset and stayed on the line with the other two. They followed the tracker through the damaged lower decks they knew from the intake repairs, and a reading put something within five meters.
Search For Jones
The signal in the locker was Jones. Ripley jammed a cattle prod into the locker while Parker threw the net and caught the cat. Jones got out of the net and ran into an equipment bay of stacked pods, replacement modules, and hanging chains, with water coming off the chains. Brett went after him alone and called the cat under those chains. While he was looking for the cat, he lifted the skin the Chestburster had shed, a pale casing left on the deck.
Taken By The Alien
Brett had almost caught Jones under the chains when the adult Xenomorph appeared behind him. It grabbed him by the head and killed him with a headbite. The inner jaw punched through his forehead, and blood ran down his face. The creature then carried him up. It was about the size of a man, and he was the first of the crew it killed.
In the director's cut, Parker and Ripley reached the compartment while the creature was taking Brett, so they saw that man-sized body. The theatrical cut leaves them in the corridor, where they only hear the attack. Blood from Brett dripped onto Parker in the restored scene. They got clear, and Parker went back to Dallas and the others and described the size of the thing that had taken the technician. The next scene showed none of that blood on Parker.
Cocoon And Death
In the director's cut, Ripley found Dallas and Brett in a nest in the hold, both sealed in the resin. Brett was further along than Dallas, his head ruined by a bite, and his face still showed out of the egg forming around him. He could not make the request Dallas made when Dallas asked her to kill him, and Ripley burned both of them with a flamethrower. There was no Xenomorph Queen on the Nostromo to lay eggs, so the adult used the alternate life cycle and eggmorphing turned Brett's body toward an egg. The headbite had already killed him, and that change still went on. The 1979 theatrical cut does not include that nest and leaves him in the landing-leg bay.
Personality And Traits
Brett let Parker open the arguments, and he answered a lot of them with "Right." He also made the pay case in his own words: the bonus had never been equitable, everybody else got more than the engineers, and a half share was what the company paid for their time. He did not split from Parker when Lambert turned on Ripley at the hatch. Foster's novelization leaves him beside Parker with almost none of those lines.
The two personnel files describe different lives under the same initials. The Legacy record is a Houston mechanic who lost two contracts, took treatment for alcoholism, and lost flight status on a blood-alcohol test before the Nonnabo posting with Parker. The Gateway sheet is a West Virginia record, a felony at 17, a youth program, and a bar on promotion until a review. The names match, S.E. Brett and Samuel Elias Brett, which Parker's two files do not. The birth date, the schools, and the ships before the Nostromo do not match. Neither file is the film.
Brett In The Comics
Brett In The Illustrated Story
Heavy Metal published Alien: The Illustrated Story in 1979, scripted by Archie Goodwin and drawn by Walt Simonson. Brett stayed the quiet technician through the bonus argument and the intake repairs. Simonson drew his death under the creature in the chain bay, and he drew that creature much bigger than Brett. A caption in that panel says he tries to scream and that the sound is not in him.
Jay Faust In The Original Screenplay
Jay Faust was Brett's counterpart in Dan O'Bannon's 1976 Star Beast script, where the note on him was a worker with little to add, and Dark Horse's Alien: The Original Screenplay in 2020 used that name. Writer Cristiano Seixas and artist Guilherme Balbi adapted the script. Faust was the engine tech on the commercial starship Snark, and he died first. He told First Officer Martine Roby the creature was in the main lock and to blow it. The creature was in the lock beside him and knocked him into the doorway, and the closing door cut him in half. Captain Chaz Standard, Roby, and Cleave Hunter were left on the ship.
Brett In Crew Expendable
Alien: Isolation put Brett back on the Nostromo in the Crew Expendable mission, first shipped with the Nostromo Edition in 2014. Harry Dean Stanton returned for the voice and likeness, with Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Yaphet Kotto, and Sigourney Weaver also back. He is not a playable character, because the adult Xenomorph has already taken him when the mission starts. Ripley, Dallas, or Parker can be selected, and only the one chosen passes his body above the landing leg, over the bay where he was taken. Lambert and Ash are in the mission and cannot be selected.
Brett's body lay in a large pool of blood just above the landing leg, with a bite hole opened in his forehead and blood across the cap, the jacket, the shirt, and the deck. That corpse does not match the director's cut, where Ripley found him sealed in resin beside Dallas. The creature could have built the cocoon hive later, and that is where eggmorphing started on Brett.
Brett's Gateway Profile
In Aliens, Ripley sat at the Gateway hearing and turned to the closed crew files on the screen behind her. Brett's portrait, in the cap and quilted jacket, was captioned Brett S.E., file 9376-FGB-A, with the inquiry text in green beside it. The personal line listed him as male, with brown hair and brown eyes, at 5 feet 11 inches and 151 pounds, and he had finished Samuel Bronston Parochial School in Lula, West Virginia. The remarks opened with an I.Q. count of 4.1 and a personality count of 5.3, and near the end of employment those figures were 4.0 and 5.6.
Merchandise
NECA released a 7-inch Brett in its Alien 40th Anniversary line in the same July 2020 wave as the Parker figure, in a Kenner-style window box. The sculpt wears the baseball cap, the open Hawaiian shirt, the quilted jacket, and light blue work pants. The box packed a motion tracker, a cattle prod with a cable, and a power pack. Super7 also released a 3.75-inch Brett in its ReAction line, first as a New York Comic Con 2018 exclusive and later in the USCSS Nostromo Crew Set 2 pack with Parker and a blood-spattered Alien.
Behind The Scenes
Harry Dean Stanton played Brett for Ridley Scott at Shepperton Studios through the summer and early autumn of 1978. Stanton was born on 14 July 1926 and was the oldest of the seven principals. Scott wrote short bios for the seven actors before the shoot, and those notes were expanded into the Alien Legacy file that named the technician S.E. Brett. The inquiry screens in Aliens used the Gateway sheet and the name Samuel Elias Brett.
Walter Hill and David Giler, rewriting Dan O'Bannon's script, named him for George Brett of the Kansas City Royals and named Parker for Dave Parker of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Stanton asked for less dialogue, and "Right" became the answer he gave when Parker pushed a point. The bonus speech, the half-share line, and the search for Jones stayed in the film. On screen he wore a baseball cap, an open Hawaiian shirt, and a quilted jacket. Bolaji Badejo was in the suit for the chain-bay take, with water coming off the hanging chains. Stanton returned in 2014 for the voice and likeness in Alien: Isolation.
Famous Quotes
- "Right."
- "You see, Mr. Parker and I feel that the bonus situation has never been on an equitable level."
- "Yes, but everybody else gets more than us."
- "Same reason we get a half share to their one. Our time is their time. Same old shit."
- "Well, so what?"
- "Look, I'm not gonna do any more work until we get this straightened out."
- "Yeah, back to the old freezerinos."
- "Here, kitty. Here, kitty, kitty. Jonesy? Here, Jonesy. Come on, Jonesy. I'm not gonna hurt you."
Conclusion
Samuel Brett was the engineering technician on the Nostromo under Dennis Parker in Alien, played by Harry Dean Stanton. He argued the bonus with Parker, stayed on the hull while Dallas went out to the beacon, and died in the landing-leg bay when the adult Xenomorph took him under the chains. In the director's cut, Ripley found him sealed in the nest beside Dallas.
Appearances
- Alien (1979)
- Alien novelization (Alan Dean Foster, 1979)
- Alien: The Illustrated Story (Heavy Metal, 1979)
- Aliens (1986)
- Alien: Isolation - Crew Expendable (2014)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Lore
