Corrected entry: Palmer is the second to be infected (if you count Bennings' being licked by dog thing), when the dog creeps up behind Palmer's shadow. And yet Palmer later says things that are inconsistent with a thing: "You gotta be f-ing kidding me," when seeing a new form of a thing as a spider. Even if this were an act in order to fit it with the humans, a thing wouldn't call everyone's attention to a thing trying to escape.
lionhead
14th Mar 2020
The Thing (1982)
3rd May 2018
The Thing (1982)
Corrected entry: When Mac, Garry and Nauls are underground, they split up and go alone to separate areas to plant the explosives. They do this instead of staying together despite knowing full well "The Thing" usually attacks a human while they're alone.
Correction: On the other hand if they go plant the explosives together one by one then the thing has plenty of time to disable the explosives right behind them. Sometimes you gotta take risks, if you want to beat this thing knowing it's trying to escape. Stopping it was bigger than their survival.
20th Feb 2018
The Thing (1982)
Corrected entry: The big burly guy with the sweater has a heart attack. When his chest is opened it is soon discovered that he has been assimilated, meaning he was no longer human at that point and would not have had a heart attack.
Correction: The alien entity imitating Vance Norris is faking a heart attack. Vance Norris was replaced by the alien a long time ago.
He definitely isn't faking. He winces from chest pains while he is in a room all by himself, just after he looks out the window and yells "Hey you guys! Come here!" The implication is, like Blair said, when the thing takes over someone it copies them perfectly and also copied Norris' bad heart. It also wouldn't make any sense for him to fake a heart attack at that moment because it caused him to reveal himself to everyone all at once and be killed.
It doesn't take over their bad traits, no need to do that, every single cell of the organism has its own sense of survival, a heart attack wouldn't threaten it. It did fake a heart attack, it's not human, it doesn't use a heart. MacReady was becoming a threat to its survival with the dynamite - the thing wanted to create chaos, and in that way kill them all and eliminate the threat. It lured people close, like the doctor, so he could attack. Besides, it had already copied itself, it was also Palmer.
The chest pains started before Macready came into the building. He definitely wasn't faking a heart attack, he was actually having one. The creature makes a perfect copy of the organism it takes over and because Norris had a bad heart, it also had a bad heart. The creature only reveals itself when it's alone or it has to defend itself. Because the doctor was hurting it with the defibrillator, it was forced to reveal itself.
So you are saying that if the creature had a heart attack alone in a room it would actually die? Why would an actual heart attack threaten a thing that is made up of individual cells that have their own survival instincts? This fact was only revealed after the incident. No, the heart attack wasn't real, it isn't human.
No, I'm not saying the creature would or even could die of a heart attack. I'm saying that the heart attack wasn't faked because the creature made a perfect copy of Norris, including his bad heart. This is all explained after the dog-thing is examined. It has internal organs that look and work just like the creatures it copies. It wouldn't need to fake a heart attack to get people to come closer to it anyway. It can just walk up to anybody it wants to attack. For the entire movie, the creature lies in wait, attacking one person at a time unless it absolutely has no other choice but to defend itself.
I know it's the official explanation given, but I just don't buy it the creature would fail its hidden state so utterly by going into cardiac arrest and drawing attention to itself like that even though every single cell has it own survival instincts. I still say it was the threat of the dynamite, to create confusion. They do think individually or else the dynamite would have worked in it's favor even. It just panicked and did it on purpose.
I think what the movie is saying is that even though each individual cell wants to protect itself, it's still beholden to what particular type of cell it is. So if it's a copy of an eye cell of someone who has bad eyesight, the thing will still have bad eyesight. It didn't know anything about the dynamite when it started having chest pains, that was before Macready even came in.
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Correction: The Thing imitates humans perfectly, in order to blend in. It doesn't care about other versions of itself, especially small ones. Not drawing attention to the spider thing would only draw more attention to itself. It has much better survival chances when impersonating a human so it will do everything that human does. This includes their way of talking.
lionhead
Also, he only says it when he notices Windows (I think) saw it.