New Replies (Page 625)

@ Thombach

I've been arguing with Kethol for a long time about 2 specific points.

1) Was there one black goo to start with, or many types of it?   2) Does said black goo (or a type of it) have the power to instantly produce life out of itself?

I still don't think he has supplied any strong evidence for there being more than one original black goo. I will hold to my idea of one goo util he (or anyone else) supplies such evidence.

On the "goo producing life" question, well before reading this Logan script I would have said "No never", but now reading the script I'm not too sure. The wording used by David seems very ambiguous. I'm just going to read it a few dozen times and make my mind up.

Before that we also argued about the motes from the egg sacs. I thought they were tiny blobs, he thought they were insects. He was proven right by showing me evidence of David's drawings from the "Advent" scenes. I accept when I'm wrong.

That "Macro" question was just beacuse I hadn't seen the context of the script. Now I have read it I accept it is talking about a zoomed in view. I was confused by the term "Macroscopic" vs "Microscopic" which mean zoomed out and zoomed in. But it seems that when talking about photography...it's different..and this script is using that terminology. Again I admit when I am wrong.

Kethol has shown evidence for a few points and I have agreed with him each time he did. But on the multiple black goos question he hasn't given me enough evidence at all...yet still holds to it as fact. That is my main argument with him now, along with his idea that the blobs of black goo rained down by David are "insects", I discount that also for lack of evidence. But anyway.

awe stan the man. wonderful director n love his movies but ur so right. that lets leave this as ambiguous as we can started right there with him. 'u see, its all so clear to me now'. well dip me in chocolate Bowman im ecstatic for u chico but mind explaining it to the rest of us? lol

Sherris, blame Stanley Kubrick :) That's where Ridley got that habit. At least he is not as bad as David Lynch!

hahaha yogi, aint it just sickning when that happens. iv done it myself on here. iv said 'naw man its like this' and then someone hits me with something and I think 'u bastard, I had that sown up tighter than a ducks ass and now uv made me rethink' hahaha dam u ridley scott lol

We need Alien 5 and it should be Force Awakens/Jurassic World style

Kethol - u many be right. RS does want us doing this. but personally i want it in movie, not spoon fed but subtle hints then debate on here. one film then alien is very worrying btw. Just think of the miles from the need planets.

@Sothoth - Why all the hate on Kethol? I read this whole thread and it seems he and others gave you the same evidence, which you said was wrong, but later said was right and why you changed your mind. At least 3 times in this one thread you did that. Maybe 4 if you are admitting MACRO means a zoomed in close-up in the script, now that you have read it.

We all have different theories on things and won't agree on everything, but it is fun debating. Seems to be some unnecessary bickering going on though.

Many Thanks Ingenerio - Also to everyone who contributed ali91,Kethol,Lawrece of Arabia,i moon girl,hox,Thrombach and anyone i missed great debate !!

Still wondering about David causing some event, regardless of name that lead into a set of motions. Or with super tech he diverted it through sectors maybe remotely with some on world ecgineer tech.

Maybe the novel gives us a bone or 2 !!

Many Thanks

@BigDave - Yes, I get the what Alien Prefix means now. I thought it was the title of another Covenant short film or something. I am new to this forum so I have not read all the previous threads.

I'm gonna have to re-write some of my theory now after reading this script...DAMN IT. I had it all worked out as well. Im gonna sue RS for being too mysterious.

could be true yogi and that would be fine and dandy, but again, nothing has been given to show this so in the mean time, wer all left to debate it out. it is fun debating it tho and seeing all the different theories people come up with.

I got this book on Amazon Prime day for a whopping $20 shipped.  It has some stuff I have never seen before.  Surprisingly Alien Resurrection had really cool pics and concepts to view. 

great post 426 though if u will allow me a moment just to query a couple of things. I didn't see anything in the dollop of goo on davids finger though that doesn't mean u wrong. but ur saying that tiny, exact copies of the trilobite are in the goo and the trilobite is just a larger version? so what is the wasp looking chappy in AC that david is talking about? also the pathogen is manufactured to attack fauna, not flora. no plant life is affected by it by design. if plants were to be affected, then all the trees would have been as well. my theory is that it is a sponge or fungi that is infected that is later disturbed by the crew of the covenant but others believe its an egg sac created by the organisms within the goo. its all been left pretty open to interpretation here I think.

There does seem to be some structure in the life cycle etc. But yes it is very vague and Dues Ex Machina at times - It does this simply because it does..no other reason.

that's it yogi everything has been left so open that a dozen people can watch it in a theatre and when they emerge, theres 8 different versions of what they saw. if you bring the novel into the fold, then david says the ovamorph egg was already there so it could just so be that the engineers had much more things lying around that david stumbles upon. who knows what real and what isn't. I just get the feeling RS and fox are bashing out 3/4 of a story line then when asked 'oh so how did this work?' they have room to manoeuvre in their replies and explanations. by keeping things so vague, its hard to prove them wrong

@ Thombach

I admit when I make errors, unlike some people on this forum (Kethol). All I need is evidence then I will agree and change my mind. I still think there was 1 original black goo pathogen to start with. I still see no evidence of the original black goo raining down as a "swarm" or anything. But hey. Im sick of debating that point now.

Great topic again Timmy the ultramorph.

I love this one.

A very astute collection you have there Lone. My compliments.

@Sothoth - About time.

The Spaiths script that was released is just one of dozens of drafts he wrote, so looking that one drafts does not give you the full picture. Lindelof also wrote dozens of drafts.

Watch the Furious Gods Documentary on the DVD. There is another chart with the character names from Spaiths script and Lindelofs that shows the trilobite.

"You could say it was a good job oram was captain as the original captain would not entertain that idea. Well you never know someone at WY may or may not have had a hand in that. oooh conspiracy before the Covenant take off !! Fancy that. oh gosh there is a ADF prequel novel surrounding something similar or connected maybe ??"

Great angle sherris. Yes this does help big time with the excitement of the prequel novel coming out next month, thank you so much. There are many areas to assume "ill intentions" in the release of the prequel synopsis.

Awesome details from the Logan script Kethol. I assumed that the Engineers were able to mask their location and David 8 put that to use with the storm to hobble the Covenant crew. It is so interesting to read the script and ponder the thinking that went into developing the concepts that made it into Alien: Covenant.

"That is a perfect shipment for David!  Is he really that lucky?  Hopefully we find out soon!"

That is a great way to put it I Moon Girl. I too think that the Covenant ship may have been a "clinical trial" with David 8 running it for corporate far away from the frontier. And, I agree, David 8 is a weaponized liar.

@ ali81

I agree. but some of those "little mysteries" I was talking about are much more "solved" in this script. It has David spelling things out much more clearly, so I wonder if in later scripts these facts were removed or what?

I'm still trying to work out how the heck what David says about the pathogen, in this script, fits with what we see in the movie.

I think a lot of you are overthinking the Trilobite and Deacon. If you remember in Prometheus, when David had the drop of pathogen on his finger, there were tiny organisms moving around inside. These organisms either destroy someone, mutate them, or infect a part of them that could be used to impregnate another life form to spawn a hybrid. In Prometheus, this was Holloway's seman, in Covenant, these were the Motes. However, in Prometheus, the infected seman took a detour into Shaw's uterus and was grown and incubated, becoming a large, squid-like creature: Merely a larger form of the tiny pathogen creatures. This then "facehugs" an Engineer and spawns an Engineer Neomorph, which we as a fan base have affectionately nicknamed the "Deacon." In Covenant, these tiny pathogen creatures mutate a local plant form to create an airborn shocktroop infection called the Motes; a much more effective transmission system. These infect a human being (accounting for the difference from the Engineer creature or "Deacon") and create a more human like monster nicknamed a "Neomorph" by the production crew. 

David, then, takes the tiny creatures, as he explains to Oram, that he saw on his finger, and experiments on them again, growing and mutating them, once again using Shaws reproductive system, however this time, he Engineers them, instead of natural wild growth, and is able to create a more orderly form in a stronger body than the natural Trilobite, which we now call a Facehugger. Additionally, David's drawings on the Covenant blu-ray confirm this, as we see a drawing of a monsters head that is just like the Deacon, and a monster head just like the Neomorph. He describes these as two variants of the same creature. 

One last hint...the answer is not finding an Engineer alive.

Thank you for your attention in an attempt to solve this vital mystery.

this is why its all over the place yogi. I would tend to go with 'did it make the movie or dvd extras/ directors cut' as canon with regards to Prometheus and AC. the issue is that most people who watch the films don't read the scripts so for the majority, its only whats in the film and extras that exist to them. we read the scripts and look and theories about things they will never get to know about but wer more alien buffs than the majority are. maybe that has a negative effect on us sometimes? we look at early drafts and include parts that didn't go any farther than first draft yet we include it sometimes

I think he was probably referring to the sacrifice to create life in the first place, to spawn Neomorphs (Deacons; yes, they are the same type of creature) to while the slate clean, or (once they figured out how to weaponize it) the "atomization" bombing that we see David use in Covenant 

I agree with the point you make on priority A L I E N 4 2 6. I can only assume that the company would some how synthesize the pathogen from the xenomorph but why not put priority on capturing the black goo unused. 

This Prometheus mission order may help explain a little (see below).

Thank you both A L I E N 4 2 6 and ali81 for your responses.

To answer what you suggested to:

"What is more rare than capturing a xenomorph in the Alien universe?"

It is not the black goo pathogen nor a common agreement between forum members regards an Alien concept.

Yeah while none of them are needed per se, they do nothing but enhance the film, imo. I can't really say I agree with Ridley's "bare minimum" philosophy of editing, as much as I admire the man. Even just somehow integrating "The Crossing" and "Advent" into the narrative of the film would enhance Covenant greatly. As for other scenes, I would also include the Neomorphs stalking the crew through the woods following David, as this shows that they aren't just mindless beasts, and I would have included the scene where the Neomorph goes after the Xeno, as this shows WHY the Xeno is superior. I also think it would've been cool if David had subjugated an Engineer and impregnated him with a Deacon, which he then imprisoned and unleashed on the crew before the Xeno shenanigans, Because the Deacon is basically an Engineer Neomorph (yes it is, Big Dave, I thought I explained this pretty logically and thoroughly XD)  

Oh well, one can dream, I suppose. I think Ridley needs to understand that we don't mind sitting in those seats for 2 and a half hours. 

Holy crap. I've just read the John Logan script. I..might have to change some of my theory on the Neomorph life cycle and black goo......Jeez. this script seems to have those egg sacs coming FROM the black goo itself, then David uses the egg sacs to make the Xenomorph eggs by adding other DNA to them (possibly Shaw's). What is the canon status of this script?

Ah it's so ambiguous in wording. Maybe I'm just reading it wrongly.

Yes ali81. The Engineer is so mad that the humans crashed him that he takes one last look at Dr. Shaw while fighting the Trilobite...so great.

Our First Alien images moved to new topic.

I'm surprised after watching Advent, which is basically what David sent back to Weyland-Yutani, that the company is after the xenomorph more than the Pathogen 

but seriously, what equipment would u take to catch one? don't see a rod n reel doing much

getting everyone to agree on the black goo hahaha

sorry I have made a mistake, it wasn't yogi who commented on the satellites, u have to forgive me im not 100% at the races yet today lol was a long shift last night. kethol kindly mentioned the satellites

@Thomback - Yes, it is.

I'll throw out another quote, this one from screenplay writer Dante Harper.

"In my drafts of the screenplay — and I'm sure drafts that came along later — even if you're keeping things shrouded in mystery, I think you actually have to know what happened, because people can tell when they see a tip of an iceberg but there's no real iceberg underneath it and you really haven't done the math, you haven't figured out what happened. I think I could write a small book about all the things that happened, because we had to figure all that out. So the question became, "How much are we going to learn?" One of the things that was interesting about the final cut of the film is we actually ended up learning a lot less than was possible given the drafts that we had. That was always the question with every draft, "How much can we reveal, how much can we not?" At the end of the day, I think a lot of those decisions got made in the editing room. You can tell the information is there. I think they pulled back in places."

Ridley does not like to spoon feed answers - I know, understatement of the century! - but, he wants us to be doing exactly what we are doing now.

yea ingeneiro, too many arms for him to handle lol the only thing that got me about the trilobite was the size but I guess, with the idea of it impregnating an engineer, it had to be of a believable size for people to accept it could overpower him

Yog Sothoth, that is very interesting to see the horror schedule. I do agree with the changes that made their way into Prometheus.

The Engineer sequence is so great with the Trilobite overpowering him.

thombach, u r correct and I agree completely, what im actually replying to is yogis' post about there being satellites in orbit which are in the early draft john logan script. there is no mention or hint of them in the movie so just because their in that early draft doesn't mean they exist

@Ali81 - David was surprised when he found out it was a colony ship in both the movie and the script.

In the movie it is never said David was trapped on the planet or that he sent the message to lure a ship, but we can presume both from the evidence. Since both of those were made were written in the script, isn't it safe to assume that was the intent?

the john spaights script is awesome, I loved reading it and would have been good to see on screen. alas, it didn't, so nothing in the script, unless it made it into lindelofs script and then the film, can be used to make a point imo