The Alien series is an often bloody affair, with plenty of gruesome deaths throughout eight movies and numerous video game and comic book tie-ins. Going all the way back to Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien, the Xenomorph has proven to be a truly lethal force to be reckoned with -- often dispatching its victims in brutal but straightforward ways.
While none of Ripley's crewmates in Alien have anything that could be described as a "peaceful" demise, the production process came up with many different ways to dispatch Lambert -- changing the method of her death multiple times, even during the film's post-production.
How Lambert Met Her Demise in Alien
Joan Lambert -- played by Veronica Cartwright, who'd actually read for the role of Ripley before Sigourney Weaver was cast -- is one of the crew members of the Nostromo in Alien, serving as the ship's navigator. Lambert is among the group that ventures onto the mysterious planet classified as LV-426 and proves to be the most panicked when an alien lifeform bursts out of her crewmate Kane. Lambert is eager to escape the ship with the escape pod and is ultimately one of the last three crew members left -- but her attempts to reach the Nostromo's lower decks to collect supplies for the escape lead her right into the path of the Xenomorph. Her crewmate Parker does his best to help, but both are promptly killed by the alien, largely off-screen -- leaving Ripley to find Lambert's corpse hanging from the ceiling.
How Lambert's Death Changed Throughout Alien's Production
Lambert was never going to survive the events of Alien, but her death went through several different iterations during production. As explained by Strange Shapes, the script was altered many times -- but in each of them, Lambert met her demise, often in evolving manners. In the script's early drafts, Lambert -- at that point named Melkonis -- was supposed to get her neck broken as well as her head ripped off by the Xenomorph. Later drafts saw her captured by the Xenomorph and left to gestate in a cocoon in the Nostromo's hold -- similar to the fate suffered by Dallas in deleted scenes from the film. In a tweak on that idea, the script at one point had a cocooned-but-conscious Dallas tell Ripley he'd seen the alien eat Lambert.
In another version, she would be killed by Parker in his efforts to rescue her, caught in the line of fire from his flamethrower. One idea was that Lambert wouldn't be killed by the Xenomorph at all and would instead die after being sucked out into the vacuum of space through a hole in the Nostromo's hull (a concept other films in the franchise would play with). Even her on-screen death doesn't play out like it was originally intended -- with Cartwright explaining in interviews that the final script suggested she'd die from the sheer fright of encountering the Xenomorph, suffering a heart attack in the moment. But running out of time while filming, her death was instead re-edited to happen off-screen, directly at the hands of the alien.
However, even this resulted in some audiences inferring a different kind of death for the Nostromo navigator. The re-edited sequence re-used a cut clip from the death of Harry Dean Stanton's Brett earlier in the film -- specifically of the Xenomorph's tail movie in-between and up the victim's legs. Repurposed as part of Lambert's demise, the shot led some viewers, including Cartwright, to believe that the Xenomorph had actually sexually assaulted Lambert during the attack -- a particularly dark interpretation, given Lambert's quiet place as one of sci-fi's earliest canonically transgender characters. Lambert was never going to survive Alien, with even Ripley only barely making it out -- and even that was a change from the film's originally darker ending, which would have seen the Xenomorph kill Ripley and then duplicate her voice as a means of luring others into its path. But the sheer volume of deaths Lambert almost went through can come as something of a surprise even to long-time fans of the film.