(5 of 7)
Two members of the party carry a heavier symbolic weight. Bishop (Lance Henriksen), an android who proves himself a distinct improvement over the traitor robot of the first film. Bishop offers a prejudice Ripley has to overcome and, in the end, some surprising heroics for the audience to cheer. The other outsider is a different case. Burke (Paul Reiser) is a junior executive in "the company," the monopoly that has all of space to profit from. He has absorbed its corporate culture all too well. In Alien, of course, company leaders, without warning employees of the danger, callously ordered them to bring an alien back alive, hoping it could be domesticated for use in the weapons division. Now Burke, who has the insinuating manner of an inside trader, is trying to do the same thing, but merely to advance his sleazy career. Perfectly capable of reminding Ripley and Hicks of "the substantial dollar value" of the space station when they propose blowing it up in order to rid the universe of aliens, he is a wonderfully observed, comical version of the mid-'80s yuppie.
The largest function of all these people is to provide a bustling background for Ripley's quieter, more intense development. In the first film she was a smart, self-contained careerist, essentially a reactive character, desperately fighting against something but not for anybody or anything except her own life. The sequel gives her something, someone wonderful to fight for.
This is little Newt, the only survivor of the human colony. The role is endearingly played by Carrie Henn, 10, winner of a talent search among American girls living in England, where Aliens was filmed. She looks like a Dickensian waif and turns out to have the soul of one as well, brave and clever but never self-sentimentalizing. She is discovered as a silent little creature, scuttling through air ducts too small for the aliens to penetrate, living an almost rodent-like existence. Her plight would be enough to touch anyone's heart, but in this context, only Ripley has the time and the wit to appreciate her.
Ripley's bonding with Newt is inevitable, as Hurd says, "because they were both survivors of their own particular group's encounter with extraterrestrial species. They knew what they were up against, and the others didn't. In Alien, people had to fight or die. Now Ripley could save herself but chooses to fight to save Newt." It is, in part, the unexpectedness and depth of her feelings that give the film its propulsive power, fueling the final hour to at least two more heart-stopper endings than the average thriller has.