Sora Matsushita was a Weyland-Yutani surgeon who landed on Fury 161 in Alien 3 with Michael Bishop, and the film credits list him only as the Company Man. He offered Ellen Ripley a short surgery for the Queen embryo in her chest. She stepped into the furnace and took the embryo with her. In 2184 he advised the Midnighters on LV-991, and Captain Kylie Duncan had him burned after the nest assault in Alien: Into Charybdis.
Biography
Arrival On Fury 161
A hidden egg on the USS Sulaco started a fire after the mission to LV-426. The ship ejected an EEV with Ripley aboard, and that lifeboat crashed on Fiorina 161 in 2179. A second host on the prison produced the Runner the inmates called the Dragon. Weyland-Yutani read the crash report and the escape-pod scan that showed the embryo, then sent the medical frigate USCSS Patna with Bishop, a science team, and commandos in sealed suits. Matsushita walked beside Bishop through the prison corridors in a translucent plastic suit, a hood, and dark goggles, while Bishop wore a coat and scarf and the same face as the wrecked android Ripley had disconnected.
Prison officer Francis Aaron met the party at the lock and sent them toward the furnace, where Ripley and the last inmates had the Dragon, and where she was carrying the embryo. The Patna had a surgical theatre ready for that embryo, and Matsushita was the doctor in the landing party. The commandos were outfitted to take a live creature back to the ship. They went down into the prison with no report that she was standing on the furnace grate.
The Lead Works
The prisoners had killed the Dragon with molten metal and quenched the body before the Patna team came down into the lead works. Ripley stood on the crane platform over the furnace, where that heat was the last trap they had, and Robert Morse was at the controls that moved the platform. Matsushita waited at the chain-link fence in the plastic suit, with commandos in padded armor on either side of him, while Bishop went to the grate.
Aaron took Bishop for another droid like the one Ripley had known on the Sulaco, swung a pipe into his head, and tore the left ear. Red blood ran down the side of his face, with no white fluid and no wiring under the scalp, and he shouted that he was not a droid and that he had designed the Bishop android from his own likeness. The commandos shot Aaron dead for the strike. Matsushita remained at the fence, and the offer to Ripley went on with Bishop bleeding.
Ripley's Refusal
Bishop offered to take the Queen out of Ripley aboard the Patna, destroy the embryo, and leave her alive afterward. Matsushita supplied the medical terms beside him: a quick procedure, no pain, a couple of incisions, and about two hours unconscious. She refused when the promise to destroy the embryo rested only on Bishop's word. She shut the crane gate, Morse rolled the platform out over the furnace, and a commando shot Morse in the leg when he tried to hold the controls for her.
Ripley broke away from Bishop and stepped off the grate into the molten lead, so the Queen in her chest went with her and the commandos left with no live specimen from the furnace or from her body. Morse, shot in the leg, was the last prisoner they took off the rock. Matsushita returned to the Patna with Bishop, and Company men shut the prison down after the party left.
Advisor On Hasanova
In 2184, Weyland-Yutani put Matsushita aboard the Colonial Marine assault carrier USS Benning in cryosleep, as advisor to Duncan's Midnighters. She woke him about two weeks before the unit reached Hasanova, Iran's data colony on LV-991, and she sent Lance Corporal Russell Becker to bring him out of the chamber. He came from the staff around Bishop and the company's robotics line. American officers had approved the secret raid Cannery Grim in December 2183, and Duncan's orders were to lock the colonists down, cage any Xenomorphs, and take the McAllen tow ship USCSS Gardenia.
On the resin-coated Seegson hull UAEV Blackstar, Becker and Gunnery Sergeant Hubert Lee pinned a large black creature that had a speaker box and lighted finger rings. Matsushita identified it as the speaking Xenomorph that used the name Blue Marsalis. He wanted that body more than the frozen eggs the Marines took from the cryo lab. A marine Bishop unit rode with the platoon until he shut it down with a company override, before Duncan opened the storehouses.
Duncan had packed more than three hundred colonists into those buildings and set the doors to open from the bottom, so adult Xenomorphs grown from the Blackstar eggs would kill the locked people and hide the raid. Programmer Cheyenne Hunt tried to stop the timer, and Duncan shot her. The worn McAllen synthetic Marcus later used Matsushita's keycard to free Marsalis from the marine cage. The Marines shot Marcus down, and Marsalis left with the remaining contractors.
Death In The Nest
After the storehouse killings, part of the Midnighters moved to arrest Duncan, and she treated the arrest as a mutiny. Safety lead Kamran Afghanzadeh then triggered a Halo A test, the fan array that pulled poison gas out of the lava-tube shaft the crew called Charybdis. The vortex slammed her dropship into the Spiral wall. She and Lee climbed out of the wreck and took what was left of the unit into the nest below, with Weyland's Good Boys, four-legged hunter robots, and an M56 smartgun.
Acid from the creatures burned through Duncan's cheek, sinus, and nose while she fired. Matsushita pulled the Good Boys back toward the exit during that fight. She shot him through the knee, and Lee burned him with a flamethrower on her order. She and Lee then chased Marsalis into the old Weyland ruins under the colony. Acid blood stuck Lee to Marsalis and killed him, and Duncan died later in a pathogen vault after Kamran tackled her off the catwalk.
Behind The Scenes
Hi Ching played the Company Man for David Fincher in Alien 3. The finished credits use that title and never print a personal name. His earlier screen work included the British series Widows in 1983 and the film Ping Pong in 1987, where he played Jimmy. On Fury 161 he wore the translucent plastic coat, hood, and dark goggles through the corridor walk and the furnace fence, and he had only a few lines beside Lance Henriksen.
Rex Pickett's draft of 5 January 1991 called the part Dr. Matshuita. Bishop's dialogue in that draft called him one of the finest transplant surgeons in the world. Walter Hill and David Giler rewrote the script after that polish and returned the part to Company Man #1. An earlier Hill and Giler draft killed Bishop when the prisoner struck him, then let the doctor take command of the recovery team and try to talk Ripley off the grate. Later drafts left Bishop alive after the blow, with the torn ear, and cut the doctor back to those lines at the fence.
The sealed plastic coat matches the disposable biohazard envelopes William Gibson wrote for the Deck Squad in his unproduced Alien 3 script. Alex White's novel, published by Titan Books, names him Sora Matsushita in place of the script spelling Matshuita, which is not a standard Japanese surname. In the novel he shipped out on the Benning in cryosleep as the company's advisor for the Hasanova raid.
Alan Dean Foster's Alien 3 novelization leaves the surgeon unnamed, one of a pair of biomedical technicians in sealed outfits, and gives the embryo argument to the man who wore Bishop's face. The Dark Horse Alien 3 comic does not include him. T. R. Napper's Aliens: Bishop follows the Patna in the weeks after Fury 161, with company man Walter Schwartz beside Captain Marcel Apone when the Marines boarded. Bishop grew the android's new body on the Patna in that novel, ahead of the hive on the Chinese warship Xinjiang. Matsushita does not appear in that book. His next named appearance is the Benning voyage in 2184.
Famous Quotes
- "Where is Lieutenant Ripley? Is she still alive?"
- "It's very quick. Painless."
- "A couple of incisions. You'll be out for two hours."
Conclusion
Dr. Sora Matsushita was the Weyland-Yutani surgeon credited as the Company Man in Alien 3. He landed on Fury 161 with Michael Bishop and offered Ellen Ripley a short surgery for the Queen embryo, and she jumped into the furnace with it. In 2184 he advised Kylie Duncan's Midnighters on Hasanova, shut down their marine Bishop, and tried to take Blue Marsalis back for the company. Duncan shot him through the knee in the nest and had Hubert Lee burn him there.
Appearances
- Alien 3 (1992), credited as the Company Man
- Alien 3 novelization by Alan Dean Foster (Warner Books, 1992), unnamed
- Alien: Into Charybdis by Alex White (Titan Books, 2021)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Lore | Alien Universe Scientists
