Samantha Shane (portrayed by Brooklyn Decker) is a physical therapist, and the civilian daughter of Admiral Shane (Liam Neeson). She is engaged to Lt. Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) but he has yet to ask for her hand in marriage. Before the invasion, she and Lieutenant Colonel Mick Canales are taking a hike near the NASA array and find out from police officers of the threat. The two decide to investigate rather than run and team up with a scientist to try to get a warning out about the aliens use of the array to send a signal to their home planet. Samantha manages to reach Alex, now the acting commanding officer on the John Paul Jones and informs him of the threat, but his ship is destroyed before he can take out the array. While horrified by this, she is comforted by the fact that there are a lot of survivors. At Mick's suggestion, she crashes a police jeep through the alien power lines in an attempt to buy planet Earth another day as there appears to be no way to destroy the array anymore. While this tactic works, it only buys a few minutes and Samantha is trapped in the jeep. While Mick fights an alien who comes after them, Samantha escapes with the help of a NASA scientist. This happens just in time as Alex, now commanding the battleship Missouri, has the array targeted and destroyed, killing all of the aliens nearby and obliterating where she has been trapped. At a later ceremony, she watches as Mick and Alex gets medals for their actions and she pushes Alex to finally ask her father for permission to marry her. While the Admiral initally refuses, he takes Alex out to lunch to discuss the engagment.