Ive seen the movie before dozens of times and one thing about the movie still bugs me.
Why did the alien even bother trying to assimilate the men out in the cold winter where they kept destroying the assimilated men/alien copies with flamethrowers and dynamite?
And if its intentions were trying to go back into outer space then why go after the men?
The Thing apparently came to Earth in a titanic spaceship. It also seems to have made a bad landing a very long time ago. Presumably as soon as it absorbed it's first humans it discovered how long ago, and the fact that its ship was now destroyed. It seems reasonable in the context of the movie that what it built under the shack was not a proper interstellar spaceship but something to get it to a more populous part of the Earth. That seems too have been it's only intent, to get to a survivable part of Earth. To do this it needed to use or kill all of the humans. I think it had a strong preference for taking them over rather than killing them because that was it's reproductive drive. Thing reproduction is absorbing and copying.
shareWhy did the alien even bother trying to assimilate the men out in the cold winter where they kept destroying the assimilated men/alien copies with flamethrowers and dynamite?
The thing was assimilating everything.
Why assimilate men? Because the men and the few dogs they kept was the only biological matter that was close at hand.
There were certainly easier ways to infect the whole few. We for example see that the thing can conjure squirting bits and shower a subject several meters away in infecting goop. Just walking around spraying everyone would take them all in no time. It could probably go with airborne spores or something like that too...10 million small fleas instead of assembling into big creatures.
shareSo many assumptions ITT. Funny how some of the assumptions seem only to exist in order to fill in blanks that lead to it "not making sense."
My assumption is that it is like a virus or cancer and that wasn't even its ship. Just a ship of some other race that crashed because its crew was overrun by the Thing.
Maybe it feels good to assimilate. Like having sex even tho your not trying procreate
shareIn the movie , MacReady said "This thing doesn't want to show itself, it wants to hide inside an imitation. It'll fight if it has to, but it's vulnerable out in the open."
1. Its mentioned (here) that it likes to hide.
2. Its vulnerable in the open.
In the movie, it seems to take time hour / hours to consume and copy.
Second, maybe it just likes to hide among other organisms.
Maybe it wants to just have some spare meat around.
(If it takes over all of the organisms at the base - what is left to eat ... ? )
Maybe it is used to living among smarter / tougher organisms, so it needs to hide among them.
It's a virus. A virus wants to spread. That's all it wants to do.
I believe the ship it was building was so it could get itself to more populated areas.