Holloway and His Eye

Maybe some contaminated condensation dripped into his eyes from the ceiling of the temple(?)......

Hydrus, my thinking exactly as soon as that dope took his helmet off ;) What kind of a scientist does this?

@HybrisVigor Like 28 Days Later? Never thought about that, and it would be discreet enough to not gain attention from the other crew.

Movie scientists...

Like the other dopey scientist who wants to touch the Cobra Looking Alien..."Hey guys...it's okay! He's cute! I'll think I'll pet him in the name of science..." Those crazy movie scientists....!

This and his "inter-galactic" adventure... He deserves his flip-flops delivered hammerpede-style. Kudos to the actor (L M-G) for impersonating such a douche, it takes some guts.

something must've dropped into his eye or perhaps he touched something and then rubbed his eye... b/c the others remove their helmets and don't become infected..although I do suppose it is possible that he could still be the only one infected that way..I'm inclined to think that he did something though that caused this given the nature of his character...arrogant and careless..

Mostly - That's a good point. If it were in the air then more would be infected.

When you look closely at the scene again there is moisture in the air so HybridVigor your theory seems right on. But, yeah they appear far too naive to be so willing to expose themselves to an "alien" environment. Hell, the trips to our own moon were sterilized weren't they?

Honestly, I would probably have done the same thing if there were oxygen there. Imagine working your whole life trying to prove something and it is at your fingertips AND it is intelligent life in the universe...right in front of you and all around -- protocols would be damned. Truckers on the other hand... I think Holloway's infestation may not be just a single organism. If there is something in the air then he could be filled with those things and one made an appearance in his eye. It reminds me of malaria.

Plenty of trailers show most of the crew members not wearing helmets in the temple. In fact, I the think that the first screen cap you show of Holloway has Shaw looking at him and she is not wearing a helmet. There has been two thoughts on Holloways infection. one is he touches an ampule and some black goo and this causes his infection and the ampules to start to leak. The other theory is david opens an ampule and infects holloway. I dont think the air has anything to do with it, that is not to say i dont think its stupid to to take your helmet off, though, wearing a helmet sure id not save mohawk guy or Milburn.

So who was the guy we see getting help to the spaceship? Was it him, already being infected?

Egg: It is Holloway who Vickers burns. The theory that he touches something goes like this: they go to the temple on the first trip, he touches something and he starts a slower infection process. that is why you see the screen cap of him in the mirror, he is back on the ship. They go to the temple for the second time and all hell breaks lose. the cobra Huggar has arrived, he attacks Milburn, mohawk guy is attacked or infected. Holloway is transforming and infected. That is why Vikers is so adament that no one is comming back on the ship if infected, they see and know that milburn, mohawk guy and could be several others are dead.

I remember him saying somewhere that he's infected because he takes his helmet off...

I remember seeing a trailer / tv spot where Holoway pans round with a touch and lights up a domed plinth with what looks like a cup/saucer on it i think the scene with his damaged eyes is after he picks up the saucer and partakes of whatever is in it....... i also think that the audio bit with Holoway saying " tell me you can read this" is linked to it. Finally i have an idea that this is the prometheus moment - Holoway takes something he shouldn't and whole barmy chain of events folds out after that one step too far. I will dig around to find the actual spot i saw the clip in. if this idea has been done to death apologies !

Thereyou are Jonsey" The screen cap you are looking for can be found on page 4 second row middle, in the gallery section. We know that Holloway makes two trips to the temple. the first he saves Shaw in the sand storm, the second he comes back and gets burned by Vickers. We also see him in his cabin, looking in a mirror and that is the scene with the thing in his eye. So, he touches something on the first trip, or as others have postulated, david infects him with the black drop of goo right after he states his now popular line, Big infections have careless davids...whoops. Sounds something like that.

Some kind of parasite, perhaps (probably) the same as Fifield. I would not be surprised if Holloway's 'transformation' doesn't figure in the last ten minutes

Thanks Mostly...

Trying to take all the current information (even if it is speculation) into account. if the interview with the actor who plays one of the engineers is true than i think it is safe to assume that Holloway is infected by the water i lets drip on his face when he takes off his helmet (this was mentioned some months ago, that holloway takes his helmet off and lets water run down his face) this may be the very reason that his mutation is delayed.

I remember reading in an obscure web site that we touch our face and eyes something like 150 times a day. There is a screen cap of a index finger and a thumb, pulling apart and in the middle of those fingers is a gooey substance. I guess I always thought of that as the black goo and may just have been Holloway who is the person who is touching it.

whoops sorry for the dbl post.

Taken from the article on Empire magazine: "As the group spread around a dark hole that leads God knows where to who knows what, Holloway, without warning, reaches up and takes his helmet off, despite Shaw's anguished pleas not to. 'Outside the structure, the air is lethal,' explains Marshall-Green, 'but our suits tell us that inside the structure it's reasonably similar to our atmosphere on Earth. So I leap before I look, and taste the air.' He stands, lets water drip down from the ceiling onto his face, then inhales deeply. Rather than breathing his last, the scientist finds that, somehow, he can respire in here. Letting out a whoop of joy, the others follow suit. Rapace's Shaw, with an almost imperceptible nod of admonishment at her lover, continues on and out of the frame, until a satisfied Sir Ridley Scott calls, 'Cut!'"

I highly doubt they use the exact scene from 28 days later and it just drips in his eye. That sounds so lame I hope it's not true. I think he gets infected by a different means then him touching his eyes or letting water drip on them. Why doesn't anyone else become infected when they take their helmets off in the same place he does?

Why doubt it? There are already a number of things done in this film that we have seen before. The stuff with the origins of man is DIRECTLY out of AVP. Other plot points seem to mirror Alien and or the StarBeast script. I don't think that really makes a difference. It's all about the execution. Heck some of this film smells like the Carpenter's The Thing. Granted, all of these stories share a common origin and inspiration; Lovecraft. It could also be the case that Holloway get's infected as a result of the Cobralien (Hammerpede) jumping from one person to another. I forget the redshirt's names. To that point, NONE of these names seem to have any sticking power. I can retain Vickers, Janek, Weyland, and that's about it. Could they not have come up with a better mix. Cain, Dallas, Ash, and Ripley - those are easy. They are short and have hard sounds. The names in this movie are easily forgettable. Unless they are going for a Thing like paranoia...

My money is on David infecting him after he gets him drunk.

I think the contaminated air theory is a good one Hydrus. I haven't thought about it much in a while. However, I brought it up on another site a long time ago when I started suspecting that characters were going to be undergoing transformations for part of the movie, ala that one unused Alien 3 script. The one that has the Alien virus miniaturized, the facehuggers turned into spores; and of course has them end up in the ventilation system when a scientist gets infected, and the nanospores start to spread all throughout the station. There was a way of knowing who was infected or not that was really lame, that comes into play eventually. I figured they might resurrect this idea just to get the ball rolling on how they get infected before facehuggers and chestburster-type things show up. Because, way back then Lindelof was already hinting that we wouldn't see these in the film; I was just trying to think about how they would get around that and still have a link to the alien DNA. Maybe the Jockeys have already taken the alien virus and miniaturized it in the past, millions of years ago, and it eventually turned out just as bad for them as the scientists in the unused Alien 3 script. We know they're genetic experimenters and possess forms that could very well be related to the xenomorphs, and other various biomechanical creatures that they may have some amount of control over.

They were trying to use the xenomorphs like the company does much later. And were running into problems (LV-426 in the past); so they found a way to hybridize the creatures. And they diluted the genetics in an attempt to better control their pets, much like their other pets in the murals. The experiments were conducted on LV-223, I believe. They thought they'd accomplished something. However it backfires. The alien virus is just too deadly to attempt to control. They were playing with fire and they got burned. The engineers fear/worship the full form of the alien genetics because they've also derived certain medical benefits from their post hybridization experiments. Although these engineers were previously able to obtain and use many specimens they were dieing off and this was a desperate move against a race they were coming to fear. As well they thought they could contain them for a while (possibly a long while), diluted them and controlled them more effectively for a time using methods that had kind of worked before. They started creating forms of the Xenomorph they thought they could control, but as I said I think it backfires big-time and the virus finds ways to adapt to get back to it's full form. In Alien we stumbled on a representative of the full form of the creature, and the eggs the engineers were procuring (they sometime had trouble doing this, which led to hybridization of their existing samples like in the Alien 3 script). That unused Alien 3 script kind of went back to the morphing idea, and also talks a little bit about the genetic makeup of the creature when the scientists minaturized a sample they found. One that Bishop, unknowingly, brings to the station with them before he finds out what they're doing and runs around with Hicks and the new characters. Edit: To clarify I don't think this is an exact copy of that unused script, or even the ideas by any stretch of the imagination. I just think Hill and Giler (who are still involved since the days of that unused script) fed some similar ideas to the screenwriters to work into Ridley's vision, because mutants and an airborne infection are obviously only one small part of what's going on. However, the idea I have about them thinking they could control the xenomorphs effectively and failing; it carries similar themes to that unused script, and the broader themes in Prometheus, the myth + what we've seen, and even the alien series as a whole. The ambition to use the xenomorph as a weapon, but not knowing the cost. The lesson about what happens when you try to overreach through science and genetic meddling.

Dripping into his eye is just so damn lame haha why isn't anyone else infected by that? Or is that seriously how they're almost all done in......laaammmeee I think Ridley has something better than that In store is all

David gives Hollway something from the urn into his champagne. That's why David asks Hollway "how far would you go?" Simple.