What really happened
A lot of people are wondering about what happened in the beginning of alien 3. Well, due to script problems a lot of things happened. In the movies there is a lot of mystery to it about what happened but I can tell you what really happened. When Ripley, Newt, Hicks, and Bishop went into hypersleep, little did they know that there was an alien onboard. Maybe a drone snuck it on, maybe the queen put it onboard but that is unknown. When they went into hypersleep the egg opened up and a gigantic facehugger known as a super facehugger came out. It is capable of holding two aliens. The facehugger got on top of Newt's cryotube and tried to get in. It cracked the glass and cut itself and acid dripped on the floor. The acid ate through electrical wiring and started a fire. The facehugger got on newt and put the queen alien inside of her. The fire tripped the sprinklers, because of the crack in the cryotube, newt drowned due to the water from the sprinklers. When they went into the eev, so did the facehugger. They were evacuated and when they crashlanded on fury 161 the EEV went underwater. During that time the barely developed queen went out Newt's mouth and into Ripley because Newt was dead and Ripley wasn't. Card 2 of the alien 3 card set shows the picture of Ripley with a crack in her cryotube. When the eev hit the water originally Clemens found Ripley on the shore and brought her inside as shown in the trailer for alien 3, but that was later revised. Then the script showed that oxen pulled the eev to shore, and because of the oxen not cooperating this was changed too. In the final print of alien 3, inmates pulled the eev out of the water. Hicks was dead and newt was drowned. Ripley was alive and her cryo tube was untouched. This was just a script error. But that is what happened. I wrote this to put a rest to all the confusion.
-Reese