The thing how does it end

The two men eye each other warily, wondering if somebody is hiding an extra set of jaws underneath his jacket. Unsure, MacReady hands Childs a bottle of alcohol, and the mechanic takes a swig.

Is he still human? Or is he now a shapeshifter? Of course, if the fan theory is correct and Childs really is a Thing, then perhaps this is just a mistake. After all, actor Keith David has to breathe. Whenever the Thing absorbs one of the Antarctic researchers, it always rips through their clothes, leaving their shirts and pants torn to pieces.

How is this significant to the ending? Well, according to Ager, throughout the entire film, Childs is sporting a dark blue jacket. Or is this simply a trick of the light? Further complicating the issue are the alternate endings. Are radio communications always so bad that weeks go by without anyone hearing from anyone else? It's possible, and it sets up the isolation in the film that ultimately leads to its rather dark ending, but it's also possible that something else is at work here.

The Thing infiltrated the Norwegian station because they dug it up, but what if it somehow managed to infect other stations as well, either through other crafts or because its ability to divide itself means it can somehow travel? We simply don't know enough about how the creature works to completely rule such a thing out. The alien spacecraft that contained the Thing, even if it was in some kind of stasis, has been present on our planet for millennia. The movie gives us no sign that there's any more than one ship, but it also doesn't give us the entire history of the creature.

That means it's entirely possible that this has happened before, either with another spacecraft or with the same spacecraft encountered by other people. A lot has changed in , years. The craft wasn't necessarily always completely buried in the ice.

What if there is alien DNA out in the world right now, because someone many centuries ago has already encountered it? Again, the film succeeds by leaving such questions unanswered, and by dialing up the paranoia over what the Thing is and does. It can infiltrate and assimilate seamlessly if it wants to, so who's to say it hasn't already? As the paranoia over who might be infected by the Thing sets in, the men of the station begin to turn on each other.

This starts to reach a fever pitch when Nauls T. Carter tries to leave MacReady out in the storm after finding his torn jacket outside, suggesting that he may have been attacked. MacReady eventually makes his way back and ultimately takes command of the survivors, conducting a blood test one of the film's most famous sequences just a little while later after he holds the others off with dynamite. One thing that's particularly interesting about this plot point is how quickly it seems to be passed over by other events.

MacReady, of course, forcefully asserts himself back into the group, but there's still the matter of that tattered jacket. Is there a logical reason for it to be there? Is it really proof that Mac was already assimilated and the organisms controlling him are just extremely good at hiding it, or is something else going on?

The film leaves that question unanswered, but it feeds into the famous final scene in a major way. The most memorable gore effect in the entire film comes during the defibrillation sequence, when Copper Richard Dysart is attacked by the thing in the form of Norris, who had just seemingly suffered a heart attack during the confrontation with MacReady.

As the group fights to incinerate the creature, it rips off Norris' head, which then pulls itself across the floor and sprouts legs and antenna. This means, according to MacReady, that the thing is not just one organism — it can divide itself, and each part has its own form of sentience. The head was trying to survive on its own when it knew the rest of Norris' body would be burned. This, of course, raises a bigger question. We've seen a lot of infected bodies burned after encountering the Thing, but how do we know every piece of those bodies was burned?

How do we know there's not still something crawling around the station, or even the Norwegian outpost, just waiting for its moment to graft onto another Earth life? For all we know, even the final explosion didn't kill every living thing left in the station. No one does it quite like Carpenter. Horror film junkie, burrito connoisseur, and serial cat stroker. WhatCulture's least favourite ginger. Want to write about The Thing?