Summary. The Thing's ending sees Kurt Russell's MacReady and Keith David's Childs as the only survivors, with the final scene not providing a definitive answer as to which one is the eponymous alien.
Blair-Thing transforms into an enormous creature and breaks the detonator, but MacReady triggers the explosives with a stick of dynamite, destroying the station and the monster. In the final scene, Childs returns as MacReady sits by the burning remnants, saying he became lost in the storm while pursuing Blair.
The eye light theory states that humans were marked with a light in their eyes by the film's director of photography, Dean Cundey. At the end of the film, Childs does not have the eye light, and MacReady does.
Cundey suggested that throughout the film a specific light gleam can be seen in the eyes of whichever body is currently inhabiting the alien. A light gleam can be seen in Childs' eyes in the final scene, which would mean he's infected with the Thing under Cundey's theory.
The ending of John Carpenter's The Thing remains ambiguous, leaving audiences unsure of which character is infected with the alien and who can be trusted.
THE THING (1982) Breakdown | Ending Explained, Why Childs Was A Thing, Theories & Hidden Details
Does anyone survive in The Thing?
After some destruction, both Gary and Nauls are killed by The Thing, but MacReady seemingly manages to take out the threat with a series of massive explosions. After finding any kind of cover from the explosions and cold, MacReady finds himself toe-to-toe with Childs, who'd gone missing a bit earlier.
You've read the other theories, now bask in truth: MacReady is infected and has been throughout the film. Carpenter wants you to assume Childs has been infected while off-camera during the climactic finale, hence MacReady's questioning as they sit amongst the warm flames that engulf what's left of their outpost.
Russell stars in the film as MacReady, one member of a doomed Antarctic research team, who faces off against a shape-shifting alien being. The final scene of the movie famously sees MacReady and Keith David's Childs as the only survivors, though it's not revealed which one is actually the alien.
However, since Carter was the one who knew the location of the Soviet base this seems unlikely. In addition, the film's writer, Eric Heisserer, revealed in an interview with the website Bloody Disgusting that in the script he wrote, Kate did not survive.
MacReady then hands Childs the bottle of whiskey. He drinks from it and MacReady smiles to himself. Now the popular theory is that Macready had filled the bottle with gasoline. As Childs drinks from it and there is no reaction this is why the pilot is smiling.
The movie's ending is famously ambiguous, with Kurt Russell's MacReady and Keith David's Childs the only two men left alive. It's left up to viewers to decide whether the alien lives on in one of them.
As predicted, the vast majority of the prequel's characters are dead by the time credits roll, though Winstead's Kate has managed to (at least temporarily) stop the monster from escaping Antarctica in its spaceship. The Thing 2011 ends on an ambiguous note for Kate, though the original script made his fate very clear.
The most debated aspect of The Thing concerns its two survivors, MacReady and Childs. The events of the film see every other person in Antarctic Outpost 31 killed, and the horror movie's final survivors are left in the impossible — but practically inevitable — situation where neither man knows if the other is infected.
There are existing stills of an alternate death for Fuchs. Like in the film, exactly what happened would be ambiguous and open to interpretation, but rather than finding his corpse being found burned in the snow, he would have been found in a greenhouse impaled by a shovel. The scene has never been released.
MacReady returns in the 2002 video game sequel to The Thing to assist the U.S. Rescue Team investigating Outpost 31 in destroying The Thing. MacReady's survival is never explained, though the game is set 3 months after the events at Outpost 31.
When the movie was finally released, it received mixed reviews and was a box office flop, with some blaming the poor computer effects, and others simply for the story and characters being inferior to the original.
Kate is poisoned by Polonium-204, which the movie seems to suggest is more deadly than Polonium-210 (the more common isotope), but this is wrong. Polonium-210 is an alpha-particle emitter, while Polonium-204 is a beta emitter.
With no other choice, Childs sacrifices himself to destroy the creature by blowing himself up while MacReady escaped the sub in a capsule. However, it would be later revealed that Childs was assimilated by the creature, who would later reveal itself to MacReady in Argentina.
The novella concludes with the humans clearly victorious, but concerned that birds they see flying toward the mainland may have been infected by the Thing. Carpenter opted to end the film with the survivors slowly freezing to death to save humanity from infection, believing this to be the ultimate heroic act.
Blair was eventually assimilated by the Thing and secretly constructs a small UFO underneath the shed where it plans to sleep through the winter until the rescue team arrives.
The most common read on the ending of "The Thing" is that Childs is most likely a Thing, and there is some logic to that line of thinking. Childs disappears for the entirety of the finale until the very end when he comes back with a pretty bogus excuse of why he was gone.
Norwegian Passenger with Rifle : [in untranslated Norwegian] Get the hell away! That's not a dog, it's some sort of thing! It's imitating a dog, it isn't real! GET AWAY, YOU IDIOTS!
Does the dog die? First off, the dog the HuskyThing had assimilated is dead but had died before the start of the movie. There were (more or less) nine dogs in the kennels when the HuskyThing arrived.
