Charles Dance wears an unidentified watch

There is exactly one person on the prison planet Fiorina 161 with a bedside manner, and he is not technically a doctor anymore. Charles Dance plays Jonathan Clemens in David Fincher's Alien 3 (1992) as a disgraced physician working off a sentence. During a long shift he went on a bender and gave eleven patients the wrong dose of painkiller, and all eleven died. He served seven years, took the prison's bar-code tattoo on the back of his skull, and stayed on afterward as the medical officer of the same foundry where he had been an inmate. For half the film he is also, improbably, the closest thing to a romantic lead the Alien series has ever had. Then the creature takes him in the infirmary, mid-sentence.

Look at his wrist in those infirmary scenes and you can almost make out a watch. What you actually see is a dark band, a cover over the dial and not the dial itself.

That is the puzzle solved. The watch-spotters who have catalogued every Seiko and Casio in the first two Alien films point out that the inmates and staff of Fury 161 wear what look like World War II leather watch covers, the flip-lid protectors a soldier once used to keep a crystal from cracking, and that the watch beneath is never shown clearly on screen. The stills bear it out. On Clemens, as on the others, there is a dark leather shape where a watch should be, and no face to read.

It is a cheap piece of costuming and a clever one. Fiorina 161 is a place the supply ships stopped visiting, where the prisoners scavenged a religion and reused everything down to the boots, and a watch hidden under old army leather says all of that without a word. You cannot identify it. You were never meant to.