Ricardo

"I'm not trying to persuade you out of this, Rip. I'd just like it if you didn't die."

―Ricardo (from Alien: Isolation)

Ricardo
Biographical Information
Rank	Deputy
Affiliation	Office of the Colonial Marshals Sevastopol Station
Status	Deceased as of December 11, 2137
Physical Description
Species	Human
Gender	Male
Hair color	Black
Eye color	Brown
Other Information
Portrayed by	Syrus Lowe (likeness and motion capture) Richie Campbell (voice)

Deputy Ricardo was a member of the Office of the Colonial Marshals on Sevastopol Station. When a lone Xenomorph was unleashed on the station by the crew of the USCSS Anesidora in 2137, Ricardo and his fellow officers struggled to keep order. He was encountered by Amanda Ripley when she arrived on Sevastopol to recover the USCSS Nostromo's flight recorder, which had also been brought there by the Anesidora.

Ricardo was subdued by a Facehugger while he helped Ripley to arrange an escape from the station, and she was forced to leave him to his fate.

Biography

The Trigger

Marshal Waits contacts Ricardo in Prisoner Processing and announces that he's supposedly found the Drone's location in an unspecified part of the station, and instructs Ricardo to meet up with him as fast as he can and to lock down the area before leaving. As Ricardo exits the safe room, Wait's lead is proven false as the Drone stalks the area which Ricardo is in. Despite the Drone, Ricardo was able to collect prisoner tags on deceased inmates, collecting visitor registration data and locking the armory before exiting in an elevator to Seegson Synthetics.

Waits informs Ricardo about a fellow Marshal, Gardiner, who was supposed to have delivered a package had suddenly stopped reporting in. Requesting Ricardo to go find him, the Deputy heads to Synthetic Storage and finds the "package" to be explosives. Taking it from a table, Ricardo discovers a message sent from Nina Taylor to Waits regarding the Nostromo's flight recorder in Sevastopol's possession. Heading towards an elevator, it's revealed to be dysfunctional and Ricardo is forced to revamp power to the area, activating numerous Working Joes in the area that begin to hunt for him in the perimeter. Activating an alarm to lure the Alien to where he'll set the explosives, Ricardo calls for an elevator and escapes.

Under the duress of the Alien, Ricardo manages to send a conformation message to Waits updating him about his progress and activates an evacuation alarm, advising all remaining survivors in the area to flee. Ricardo plants the explosives and leaves through an elevator before presumably heading for Marshal Waits' location.

Torrens crew arrival

After the crew of the Torrens arrived on the station on December 11, Waits and Ricardo found Christopher Samuels and Nina Taylor. During an argument between Waits and Samuels, Amanda arrived with medical supplies for Taylor. Waits explained to Ripley that the Alien was brought on board the station by Henry Marlow, the captain of the Anesidora, the ship that found the Nostromo's flight recorder.

The group went to the Colonial Marshal bureau. Ripley asked for Ricardo to which Waits replied with that he was "prepping our next move". Ripley spoke with Marlow, who was being kept in a cell by Waits because of his refusal to follow quarantine procedures.

After Ripley finished talking to Marlow, she joined Waits' plan to contain the Alien by attempting to trap it in the Lorenz SysTech Spire. Amanda later met up with Ricardo and the two kept in contact with each other over Ripley's headset. As she finished locking down all the escape routes and initiating the emergency lockdown, Ricardo was unable to get the exit door open, ultimately sealing Amanda inside the area with the Drone. Ricardo eventually resorted to overriding the lockdown to open the exit and save Ripley, at the expense of allowing the Xenomorph to escape.

With "Plan B" failed, Waits suggested that Ripley takes the elevator to a remote location of Sevastopol, the Gemini Exoplanet Solutions lab, to lure the Drone there in a second attempt to trap it. However, once the Alien was contained, Waits ejected the module from the station with Ripley still inside. Amanda was eventually able find an EVA suit and eject herself from the module to return back to Sevastopol, while the Alien was left behind in the jettisoned module as it fell into KG348.

As Ripley made her way back to the bureau, Ricardo contacted her, surprised that she survived and apologized for his botched efforts with the lockdown. She unenthusiastically accepted the apology.

Working Joe rampage

Once the was Alien disposed of, the situation aboard the station appeared back under control, but the station's androids abruptly began hunting down and killing the station's remaining human survivors. Eventually, a group of Joes reached the bureau and began attacking Waits and the rest of the bureau's inhabitants. When Ripley later returned to the bureau, she discovered Waits' corpse, along with the other survivors she had previously encountered that were killed by the Joes. The only member to survive was a distraught Ricardo, who had hid from the androids.

Ripley went off looking for Samuels, who had gone to consult with APOLLO. Ricardo, though still clearly in shock, stayed behind and kept in contact with her over comms, with Ripley needing "eyes and ears". In order to put a stop to the slaughter, Samuels interfaced with APOLLO. Despite Ripley's attempts to save him, Samuels was killed by APOLLO's defensive countermeasures, but not before opening a path for Ripley to APOLLO's control core. Ricardo later guided her to it, though the two eventually lost contact with each other.

With Ripley's efforts in disengaging the androids failed, APOLLO redirected her to the station's reactor core, in which she encountered a hive. Ricardo was against her exploring any deeper into the nest and urged Ripley to leave. She later destroyed the nest by initiating a reactor purge, though multiple Xenomorphs were able to escape. The purge resulted in multiple systems being reset on the station. Ricardo sought this to be an opportunity to contact the Torrens and headed for Seegson Communications, whilst Ripley went to the San Cristobal Medical Facility to pursue Marlow, who was holding Taylor hostage in the Anesidora. The two later lost contact a second time.

Marlow had initiated an overload in the Anesidora's reactor, intending to blow up the ship as well as the station. Amanda was forced to flee the ship and return to Sevastopol, with Taylor and Marlow dying in the explosion.

Death

"Ricardo? Oh God... Ricardo... Oh no!"

―Ripley, upon discovering Ricardo's fate (from Alien: Isolation)

Ripley discovering Ricardo's fate.

After Ripley had aligned the station's transmitter dishes using the Torrens coordinates, she told Ricardo that they were leaving. Ricardo began to express his relief but was cut off mid-sentence and Amanda lost contact with him. Amanda later approached the office he was using and discovered he had been attacked and subdued by a Facehugger, forcing Amanda to abandon him. He was later killed either when the Chestburster inside him erupted or when the station burned up in KG-348's atmosphere, though the latter being almost guaranteed due to the time frame.

Personality and Traits

Unlike his superior Waits or Marlow, Ricardo had a amicable disposition to Amanda, neither betraying her or having ulterior motives. He tried to help her the best he could over the radio but suffered from mild survivors guilt after Waits and the other survivors were murdered by the Working Joes. Amanda herself seemed to like Ricardo and was saddened when she discovered he had been subdued by the Facehugger.

Behind the Scenes

Alternate death

Originally, Ricardo's death by Chestburster was actually going to be seen in the game; his falling victim to a Facehugger was to happen considerably earlier, while Ripley is out of contact with him inside APOLLO (thus keeping it secret from the player). Ricardo was to wake with no memory of the event (as with Kane in Alien) and subsequently keep his fears about what may have happened to himself. Finally, the Chestburster would have suddenly emerged when Ripley meets with him after realigning Sevastopol's antenna array. The idea was ultimately dropped when the development team realised there was not enough time for Ricardo to be impregnated during the course of the game — a process that took around 24 hours in Alien — and thus the timeline of his demise was delayed so that Ripley finds him with the Facehugger on his head and is forced to leave him behind.

Trivia

• Ricardo is a playable character in the Alien: Isolation DLC The Trigger.
• As revealed in The Trigger, Ricardo is indirectly responsible for kick-starting Ripley's journey through Sevastopol, as the explosion that severs her EVA line, separating her from Taylor and Samuels, was the result of Ricardo setting explosives in the area in an attempt to kill the Xenomorph.
• In the novelization of Alien: Isolation, Ricardo's surname is given as Garcia, seemingly making him the same Garcia who is mentioned in archive logs and who appears in the tie-in prequel comic; however, Garcia is killed by the Drone in the comic before the events of the game even begin.

Appearances

• Alien: Isolation/series/novel
  • The Trigger

Gallery

Ricardo traumatized after the Working Joe attack.

Close-up of a facehugged Ricardo.

Ricardo's survivor mode portrait.

Original sketch of Ricardo by Tristan Jones.