Thor is the main antagonist of the 1959 Tom Graeff film Teenagers from Outer Space. He is a teenage alien soldier serving as a crewman aboard a warship that sought to relocate alien monsters known as Gargons to Earth, and volunteered to chase after Derek, a defector in their ranks who wanted to protect Earth. Like Derek, Thor wore a jumpsuit-like military uniform with two downward-pointing white triangles on his chest, and a belt for his focused disintegrator. Like the rest of his species, he is identical to a human, both externally and internally, as a human surgeon was able to operate on him with no difficulty.
He was portrayed by Bryan Grant. This character has no relation to the Norse god of the same name.
Biography[]
Thor served an alien regime, and like the rest of his race, he was the result of artificial insemination, grown in a lab and raised by select members of society. When he became a teenager, he entered the service of the alien military, becoming a starship crewman by 1959, developing a drive to kill foreign lifeforms. Around 1959, the alien leader wanted to relocate Gargon herds from their planet to another world, as while the Gargons were a food source for the aliens, they were also dangerous to the general population. Thor was assigned to an adult captain and a crew of three other teenagers: Sol, Morro, and Derek. Their expedition was codenamed Expedition Zeal-6, and they took off to find a suitable world for the Gargons, carrying a single small Gargon aboard their craft.
After finding several uninhabitable worlds, the aliens came across Earth, and landed in an empty field near a small town in the United States, where a dog from the town, named Sparky, ran to the ship and barked at them. Thor, wearing a helmet and the first alien to exit the ship, quickly vaporized the dog's flesh and muscle with his disintegrator. Removing his helmet, Thor reported the scans of the planet to be hospitable, and the rest of the crew disembarked. Derek, seeing that Thor killed Sparky, took Sparky's tag and realized that only an intelligent being could've written it. He attempted to get the captain to call off the expedition, knowing that the Gargons would surely kill any Earth natives, but Thor angrily demanded to know why foreign beings mattered. Derek berated Thor for killing Sparky to satisfy his bloodlust, although Thor wrote off the dog as nothing more than an insect. The captain refused to call off the expedition, prompting Derek to pull his disintegrator on the captain and Thor, before revealing himself as a dissident of the alien regime, showing a book he had that was passed down from generations of dissidents. The captain managed to trick Derek into handing over the book, giving Thor the opportunity to disarm Derek and use his own disintegrator to hold him at bay, with the captain declaring that the aliens were the supreme race, and that no other beings could stand up to them or the Gargons. Thor then held Derek captive as the other aliens took the Gargon out of the ship, smugly telling Derek that he should be made to see the Earthlings destroyed by the Gargon herds for his treachery, imagining the size the Gargons could grow to in the atmosphere alone. Meanwhile, the Gargon first appeared to thrive, and then suddenly went limp, with the crew believing that the higher nitrogen levels of Earth's atmosphere killed it.
Thor and Sol were ordered to bind Derek so that he may be returned to their homeworld, while the captain informed the Alien Leader of the events that unfolded, where he discovered that Derek was the leader's son. Thor went to get the bindings, leaving Sol to guard Derek, but Derek managed to escape while Sol was distracted trying to help Morro pack up equipment. Thor saw Derek running off, and tried to shoot him, but was narrowly stopped by the captain, who made Thor shoot a tree instead and told him of Derek's heritage. The aliens then noticed the Gargon reawaken, realizing that the atmosphere merely shocked it, and that it would now surely thrive. With that, the captain reentered the ship to ask the leader on a new course of action, with Thor listening in, hearing that the best man of the crew was to be left behind to capture Derek, or eliminate him if need be, along with any natives who aid him. Thor promptly volunteered to stay behind, but secretly resolved to kill Derek, refusing to accept a dissident as the heir to the alien regime, as he knew the High Court would pardon Derek if he was returned alive. As the other aliens left the planet, Thor walked towards the nearest town, the direction he saw Derek running to, coming across a human man on the road who thought he was a hitchhiker. Deciding that the man could be useful in learning about Earth and finding Derek, Thor accepted the ride, and confused the driver with questions about the car's workings, which were unlike anything on the alien homeworld. The man then pulled into a gas station, where the attendant noticed Thor's uniform and asked if some sort of military convention was in town, as he had previously met Derek, who was still wearing his uniform. Realizing that, Thor demanded to know where Derek went, pulling his disintegrator on the humans, getting the attendant to give him the direction Derek went to, which was the address from Sparky's tag. Thor then disintegrated both humans when they tried to escape, commandeering the car and driving off.
Thor soon found the address in question, which was the house of a human girl named Betty. However, Derek had arrived before him, and had already left with her, so Thor only found Betty's grandfather. Assuming that Thor and Derek were from a military academy due to their uniforms, he told Thor that Derek and Betty went to a neighbor's pool. Arriving at the pool, only one of Betty's friends was there, as Betty and Derek had already left. When Betty's friend was unable to answer his questions on the pair's whereabouts, Thor disintegrated her. He returned to Betty's grandfather, just missing Betty and Derek again, although he found that they left a note for Betty's grandfather, saying that they were going to the local college to meet with a professor, as Derek sought to tell a man of science about his true origins. Thor reached the college first, finding the professor and disintegrating him before Betty or Derek could reach him. Derek realized that an alien crewman must still be on Earth after seeing the professor's remains, calling Betty's grandfather to tell him to get to city hall for protection, as he and Betty were going to do. Returning to Betty's grandfather once more, Thor took the man hostage before he could leave, and forced him to drive to city hall, finding out about Betty and Derek's location from him. Both parties ran into each other in front of city hall, where Thor got into a shootout with the police, disintegrating some of them, but was wounded by a shot from an officer. He managed to escape and hid in a nearby car, although the trail of his blood led Betty and Derek to him, where he held them at gunpoint and forced them to drive him to a doctor.
Arriving at a nearby clinic and stopping the surgeon from leaving, Thor ordered him to remove the bullets without anesthetic, still holding the others at gunpoint, where he explained Derek's heritage, and his motivation for killing Derek. However, he promptly began to pass out from his injuries, allowing Derek and the humans to escape. Thor tried to chase them, but fell over from the incomplete operation, and began to madly rant to the walls before finally collapsing. Later, an oblivious nurse found him and tried to patch him up, reviving him. Knowing that a fleet of alien crafts carrying more Gargons was slated to arrive on Earth due to their report, Thor decided to take the nurse hostage and wait at the landing site until the fleet arrived. Forcing the nurse to drive him to the landing site, Thor found a reporter and policeman investigating the Gargon cave, where the Gargon had grown to great size, allowing it to quickly kill the policeman. Thor then knocked out the nurse and commandeered the car, trying to stop the reporter from escaping, but the nurse awoke and made Thor swerve off-road, where he crashed and lost his disintegrator, suffering several injuries. Human authorities soon arrested him, holding him in a hospital, and his disintegrator was later retrieved by Derek, who used it to kill the Gargon after it grew to titanic size.
Realizing that he could not give humans the tools to combat the incoming alien fleet in time, Derek decided to face them alone. Pretending that Thor's now-deactivated disintegrator was still working, he pretended to turn on the humans, freeing Thor and returning to the landing site with him, claiming that he had seen the error of his dissent, the aliens being followed by Betty and her grandfather. Thor wanted Derek to kill the humans, but Derek managed to convince him that it was not necessary. Derek also managed to discretely tell Betty that he had not forgotten a promise he made to make the Earth his home, without tipping off Thor. Thor and Derek then met the crew of the first ship to land, which included the Expedition Zeal-6 captain and the alien leader himself. However, the leader accidentally revealed that his absence from the alien homeworld put the government in jeopardy, as his presence on Earth was a secret, and Derek used that knowledge to trick the leader, asking to personally guide the fleet in from the ship. Once inside, Derek sealed Thor, the captain, and the leader outside, and remotely controlled all the ships to crash directly into his location, with the humans narrowly taking cover in the nearby cave. Thor realized what Derek's plan was, exclaiming that the ships were on a collision course, and he and the other aliens desperately tried to get the ship open to stop Derek, but were unable to. Thor, alongside Derek, the captain, and the alien leader, was killed in the explosion from all ships crashing into the ground.