6. Ellen Ripley (The Alien Quadriology)
THE QUEST To destroy the alien menace and return to Earth.
WHAT HAPPENS? Ripley encounters the alien after her ship lands on LV-426. She sees the entire crew slaughtered before she manages to destroy her vessel and blow the alien out of an airlock. Many decades later her escape pod is picked up and she (almost) makes it to Earth. Ripley heads back to LV-426 to destroy the alien threat that has arisen among the colonists living there. The marines accompanying here are picked off one by one, she locates surrogate daughter Newt, takes on the Alien Queen and...blows it out of the air lock (her weapon of choice). But she gets infected anyway, crash lands on a prison planet (loosing Newt and survivor Hicks in the process) and goes face to face with a new alien before throwing herself into a massive furnace to destroy the alien queen gestating within her and prevent the Company from getting hold of its DNA for their own nefarious purposes. Oh and then she wakes up a few centuries later, cloned and it starts all up again, resulting in a bizarre alien hybrid, and whole new alien threat that is only thwarted by the ship crashing into the Earth (and probably starting another ice age as a result!)
WHY DID SHE FAIL? Another case of almost succeeding. As bleak as it was, Ripley did destroy the alien within her at the end of
Alien 3. Only those pesky scientists got their hands on her DNA anyway and the whole menace returned and Earth kind of got decimated anyway. Stupid scientists!