Mac is the Thing

I’m just going to get right down to it: who is the thing at the end of The Thing (1982)? Mac or Childs? Are neither of them things? Are either of them things? I’ve had this debate once or twice over the years and I’ve always held firm that Mac is the thing because I just don’t trust him. I may be going out on a limb here, but I’m going to say it anyway. It seems like everyone basically agrees that The Thing, whoever it was at the time, planted Mac’s shredded jacket in the snow, but that seems a little convenient. After all, it is Mac that makes the observation that The Thing tears the clothing when it over takes someone (so does this mean The Thing can replicate someone’s clothing too?). And when they find the jacket in the snow, he uses the fact that Fuch’s glasses are there to cover up the fact that it’s his jacket.

We also can’t ignore the fact that Mac disappears in the snow for a while and just happens to reappear without using the guide rope, which parallels with Childs disappearing out into the snow at the end. So if you assume that during that time Childs became a thing, it’s fair to assume that Mac became a thing earlier in the film. 

The only problem that I run into, is the fact that they do the blood tests and Mac passes with flying colors, but (bear with me) we don’t know much about the nature of The Thing. Mac is the one that states that he thinks they are all parts of a whole and that the blood would react like that, but what if this is just part of The Thing being able to deceive people? If The Thing is some advanced alien species, could it not be deceiving them by revealing one part of itself, while living on in the form of Mac. I may be giving The Thing more credit than it deserves, but I don’t think you can just disregard that we don’t know much about this thing and a lot of our information comes from Mac’s astute observations. 

Even if you think you disagree with my argument, some part of you probably sees it to some degree. Why else would the ending be so ambiguous? If the blood test was so conclusive, why do we not know who is a thing by the end of the film? Earlier in the film, Childs even wonders if a person would know that they were a thing. Maybe Mac is unaware that he is a thing that whole time.