10 Movie Characters That Suffered Unnecessarily Cruel Fates

Initially credited as “Cocooned Woman,” Barbara Coles’ Mary is doomed to one of the most gut-wrenching fates in the entire Alien franchise. Whilst scouting the processing station on LV-426, the company of marines discover the whereabouts of the planet’s colonisers: they’re all cocooned at the centre of the station, all of them dead. Except for one: Mary, the Cocooned Woman.

For a peripheral character to have such a gruesome death it makes an audience realise that nothing is off the table. And imagining what happened in the days preceding her capture makes it even more grim. Poor Mary must have watched her friends die one by one, aliens bursting from their chests as she looks helplessly on, knowing the same fate awaits her. Upon being discovered, she begs to be killed, and Apone duly obliges, torching her and the baby alien (babalien?) with her.

It’s interesting that this fate is reserved for a minor character with less than a minute of screen time. It’s even more interesting when you know that there is a deleted scene of Paul Reiser’s duplicitous and cowardly Burke meeting the same misfortune, cocooned and in agony. One character elicits sympathy, the other arguably deserves it.