What Happened to the Engineers on LV_223?

Going back to the original question of the thread- I think the engineers wanted in the ampule room because something about it's "atmosphere" caused the black goo to become dormant. Every single one of them was wearing a suit, when they obviously didn't need them to breathe in the rest of the temple... Obviously that could have been an attempt to avoid infection, BUT the goo was not shown to be an airborne contaminant. The "head" recovered by Shaw was already infected, as I suspect the rest were. It popped in the scanner after being removed from the helmet. Re-animating the brain may have also been what "awoke" the stuff as well. The ampule room would have been the only place they could stop the affect of the goo until someone figured out what to do. That room alone, was cryo-stasis for the goo itself...

Ok so here is my take on the situation. Somewhere near the end of the movie they ask David why the engineers hate us so much and he replies something along the lines of "in order to create, you first have to destroy". Now you jump back to the start of the movie with the lone engineer and you notice there is no other life around him except a saucer ship. He drinks a bowl of black stuff that seemingly brakes him down to his basic DNA except it gets partially corrupted. I think what he drank was meant to create life, specifically recreate his own species. But why?, because they're a highly advanced race that is dieing out. They don't have the numbers to repopulate through regular means so they must recreate themselves. This is why seemingly no one comes back to reclaim the base on LV223 or the ship on lv426. Their simply is no one left to reclaim it. So at the beginning of the movie we witness the creation of human life after they've used the xenomorphic goo to destroy the dinosaurs. Further reinforced by the design of the ship at the beginning of the movie. It's a saucer not a horse shoe, indicating that it is a much older design. So test experiment started, they leave a map in hopes their creations will one day find their origins. They come back every few generations to inspect the progress. However if you noticed at the beginning of the movie the DNA broke down far to much creating humans, which are similar but not the same. What happens when your science experiment fails? You decontaminate the work area and you start anew. This is why the engineers where loading up to kill us with xenomorphic goo, we represented the failure to save their own species. The base on lv223 was their last ditch effort to save themselves. "In order to create, you first have to destroy".

Ok well i have a few sugestions for some of the plot holes and unexplained things... And why the movie may link with Prometheus myth and what Prometheus 2 could be about.... My theory would answer... 1) Why the Engineers created us to wipe us out. 2) Why the Engineers from the home world, never bothered to check on why they may have had no communication with LV 223 after 2000 years, surely if they wanted us wiped out they would have wondered why they never heard from outpost LV 223. 3) If the Engineers in general wanted to wipe us out and LV 223 was their Bio Weapons plant to create something to wipe us out, then why 2000 years after something goes wrong are humans still on Earth? Surely Engineers would just send one of their ships to finish the job. 4) How come in Alien and Aliens no one never comes across LV 223? Imagine if the Engineer race wanted to wipe us out, and that the Engineers on the homeworld are part of this plan and know about it.... why have they not gone to find out what became of LV 223 and that out posts mission... If they wanted us dead, then surely Prometheus 2 would be a bit pointless, i mean if the Engineer in Prometheus was upset at us and soon took it upon himself to kill us off, then get back into his ship to finish the job off. If Shaw and David arive at the homeworld and these Engineers feel the same, then how is Shaw and David going to deal with them? surely they would be killed off as fast as Weyland and Co was and then the Engineers would set off to destroy Earth etc.... Nope..... Here is the deal.... Those Engineers on LV 223 created us, but those Engineers did not let the others know, basically the Home World Engineers or there creators did not maybe know about LV 223 or the creation of mankind. A bunch of Engineers decided to take off and set up a out post so they can practice and experiment with the Black Substance in the Urns, that they had taken away with out the knowledge of the Home World. Effectivly these Engineers Stole the Fire from their creators or higher Engineer cast.... They used it for many things including creating mankind.... But there must have been a point when they realised that if they get caught playing with that fire, the Engineers or creators from the Home World would find out at some point and punish them... As they have created life on Earth without there consent.... so what do they do? Well if they wipe out life on Earth, then they destroy the evidence of the no good they got upto (create life in their image). This would explain why after the downfall of that outpost 2000 years ago, no other Engineers from the home world bothered to see what happened, because they dont know. I would assume thus, that Shaw and David turn up, the Creators/Engineers then figure out that they (Shaw) was created by the Engineers on LV 223 and also the no good that those engineers was upto with the Black Substance. If they knew about our creation and wanted us dead like the Engineers on LV 223 then Shaw and David would not be around for long, basically they would get ripped apart within 5 minutes of landing and the Engineers would head off to Earth... So the Engineers they find must not be that hostile, they may want to put a stop to the outpost on LV 223 so as that no other Race, be that Engineers or Humans and no experiments or creations from that planetoid would be left, they would destroy that out post so that no one can misuse and abuse the Black Substance in a way that the Engineers on LV 223 did and that Mankind would should it obtain it. Thus maybe after Shaw contacts which ever beings are on the Home World the Home World send in a clean up operation to infestigate what ever the Engineers created on LV 223 (Temples) and then they would destroy that outpost (this would explain why Weyland Corp in Aliens timeline never came across LV 223 as its not there or its baron). But maybe after they do their clean up/destruction operation, there ship ends up with a uninvited passenger and this Ship then ends up crash landing on LV 426 and thus explains Alien? Maybe this is just a posibility?

@BigDave But the engineers themselves are engineered, as clones, all to serve a puropose for their master. Life from death springs life eternal. All this has happened before and shall happen again.

All, I look forward to seeing this movie, but I have some reservations regarding the logic, premise behind the background story as so far speculated upon here. A. Why would any culture advanced or not have anything to do with such an apparently dangerous cargo being flown around in their ships either biological superweapons or horrendously dangerous species like the zenomorph? If an interstellar race had interstellar space travel technology, it also goes that they have the automated manufacturing technology to replicate biological or non-biological items at the target site, or near it. B. Why would an space fairing culture use a biological weapon to destory another intelligent species? That is so pre-21rst Century Soviet-American. Assuming they did not require the planetary environment of the species they wished to destroy or the mineral wealth of the crust, why not just launch a relativistic weapon at either the planet or the parent star causing it to go prematurely nova? How about a nano-tech attack that destroys the surface of the planet? I hope the movie and the sequel do not take what seems a genuine literal hint that is buried in our shared human history and then anthropomorphize the thinking and or methodologies of a culture thousands of years more technologically advanced than ours is. Whether or not Engineer culture mimics human nature and weapon technology, when Shaw does reach the Engineer homeworld, I hope she discovers philosohical truths about us that put all of us into a plausible state of wonder and satisfaction, if not horror, too. Funny how Shaw and David are in a funny way opposite to Cortanna and the Masterchief of Halo... - strangepeade

Be careful projecting human virtues on those that are Alien from us, or even sensibilities. David is programmed by humans to be able to do things that humans find unethical or grotesque. David..now armed with his pebble seeks the universal Goliath. The exception is that his pebble is the "fire" of the Gods that was stolen, as no fire burns brighter or stronger than that of life itself...in whatever form that may be.

Thats why i said maybe these Engineers stole the fire from their homeworld and created us as a experiment.... then because of doing so would enrage the other Engineers on the home world or their creators... They then tried to then wipe us and all life on earth out so as to cover their tracks and pretend that they never messed about with the stolen fire... I think the Engineers or their creators that Shaw finds will be very suprised at the creation of mankind and then plans to cover that up by our destruction.

Just another unique observation but; isn't it unusual that the helmet that the engineers use/wear look fantastically similar to a face hugger-almost intentional. The trunk of the helmet looks identical to the tail of a face hugger and the overall helmet hugs the face with tentacles identical to a face hugger. There should be some sort of connection there- for reference, just look at the "Prometheus Gallery" image/thumbnail at the top of this page-

Concerning helmets from the engineers: did someone noticed that the last engineer must be without helmet running from his crashed spaceship to the ship where Shaw was with the "monster", thus in the air which is not breathable? Or do you think he had removed his helmet before entering to Shaw's place?

They ate some bad shellfish...

All life on Earth from single-celled to modern humans shares a common ancestral DNA. If the engineers seeded life on earth as in the panspermia theory, they would have done so approximately 4 billion years ago. This means the opening scene with the Dr. Manhattan/Voldemort-looking alien took place 2-4.5 billion years in the past in order for his DNA to have seeded all life on Earth. Fast forward to when the engineers all died or went into stasis a mere 2,000 years ago. Why does their species appear EXACTLY THE SAME? They haven't evolved at all, while humans meanwhile have evolved from simple life forms into mammals, higher mammals, apes, primitive humans, modern humans and now have advanced technology and are capable of space travel. Meanwhile, the "engineers" haven't aged a day and their technology is roughly the same as it was thousands, millions, or billions of years ago. Also, when Dr. Shaw analyzes the DNA of the dead engineer, the computer says the DNA is a "match." If the engineers only visited Earth much more recently (tens of thousands of years ago in the cave paintings) and created humanity with DNA identical to their own, then modern humans would look identical to the Dr. Manhattan/Voldemort aliens. If the DNA matched completely, humans would HAVE TO look just like the aliens. No way around it.

Why did the engineers have their suits on when running? Were they all gonna jump on board another craft? (Obviously there is one still there before the crash) I don't get the timing...but...

[url=http://www.worstpreviews.com/headline.php?id=25119&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+worstpreviews%2Fheadlines-30+%28WorstPreviews.com+-+Headlines+%2830+most+recent%29%29&utm_content=FaceBook]There[/url] u can find answers why Engineers wanted to destroy humans and i think its true :) that Jesus was Space Jockey and humans crucified him or he survived and then they took him back to the base but he was alrdy *corrupted* by the humanity and the black goo created then *death*

Assuming they weren't running away from Ridley Scott's script....... In the original Alien the characters were not full blooded scientists nor marines nor creepy politicians. They were just a trained crew of a towing vessel. We assume the 'engineers' in Prometheus all had common goals, but we don't know that. Might have just been factory workers who screwed up and mixed several vials of the biological catalyst with somethng they shoulnd't, yelled 'oh sh_t', and headed for the safest place they knew of. The computer then shuts the containment doors. The engineer at the beginning of Prometheus could have been a dedicated scientist, priest, whatever. It's motivations could have nothing to do with the engineers later one. (Had I known I would have been the central alien in such a bad movie I would have thrown myself off a waterfall as well)

It may be a perversion of the creation-motivated ritual in the beginning. Instead of creating life, the splintered group becomes obsessed in creating death, using it not only on humans but probably on the Elder Engineers who seem to designate the Younger Engineer or Slave to perform the sacrificial ritual. Put yourselves in their shoes, who wants to die repeatedly so that alien life form (Us humans) can flourish. At some point, the Younger Engr/Slave would say: "F-k this! We are not doing this anymore! Let's weaponize this Magic Liquid, and spray these Old Farts with it!" [IMG]http://i48.tinypic.com/2ufybtu.png[/IMG]

Perhaps they all dissolved in their suits? Somehow they ingested the black liquid and the same fate happened. The only reason the head was preserved was that it hadn't reached that part in time? These engineers do also seem to have a habit of fossilising however

Well, there was an alien scream at the beginning of the hologram. I would be running too. Why they were suited up? No idea. Maybe they are armored and used in warfare, but they realized they couldn't combat the alien screaming at them. They were running in a panic being pursued by an alien. We even have the alien drool that David finds. So, an alien was running loose and engineers were contaminated by goo.

[quote]Well here is my theory. I think that installation was a science research facility. They were testing this thing they found or made and something went terribly wrong. Either one of them sabotaged the installation or a canister broke and It spread towards others making them hostile like what happened to Fifield when he went berserk mode trying to kill everyone. So the remaining Space Jockey guys killed most of them and piled there bodies up. I say piled because if they were attacked or killed by anything there bodies would be spaced apart from each other. When you see the recordings in order starting when the space Jockeys enter the room that has the mural they are holding up there. Then as you continue seeing the recording towards the end the remaining 3 enter the ships area. What happened to the others? I think this space jockey was the cause of what happened in this facility. He was the remaining survivor and probably killed the others while they were in stasis. The reason being to destroy human life.[/quote] Yes ! This is exactly what I was thinking about after seeing the movie today. The Engineer in the beginning of the film had a pristine body, no augmented skin (a-la Alien-like). The Engineer in the end did have a look of Alien to him. Question: Was Shaw's baby a mutated Sperm ?

Wasn't the deacon species of xenomorphs created 2000 years before the crew of the prometheus arrived? Maybe the first deacon was what killed all the engineers on lv 223 because that was also 2000 years ago

"Could it be that the Engineers in the holographic image were running from that last Engineer, who falls and gets decapitated by the door -- because he'd been infected by the black goo and was mutating and going berserk like Fifield does later." @infidel, I think this is what happened imo....Shaw even commented while examining the head that it was changing and there appeared to be new cell growth on the head prompting Vicker's to ask "Changing into what??"...perhaps like you stated he was mutating a la Fifield..

I agree with most speculations here however everyone seems to forget a bunch of small clues that can radically alter the plot line. #1 So the beginning scene shows an engineer on a planet with a breatheable atmosphere and running water , which breaks down his dna and replicates it in the flowing water thus showing the engineers, whether on earth or not in that scene, were responsible for spreading their genetic material on haibtable worlds giving life the largest chacnces to spread. So we DO know there is a form of black liquid that CREATES LIFE as we know it #2 When the expedition crew from prometheus first enters the ampule chamber an alien worm- possibly a creature unique to lv223 is uncovered. This worm-after contacing this black liquid then becomes some hybrid monster. Now in this sealed chamber is a metal mural depecting the xeno - possibly a pictogram that this is a chamber houising the DESTRUCTIVE bio goo creating this xeno to erase unwanted life forms as a side affect of seeding it. #3 the engineer that is still alive is in the pilots chamber of the vessel surrounded by other ampules. Why would he seek refuge from a released desease that killed his entire crew in a chamber surrounded by more ampules? I suspect that these engineers jobs was to go around the galaxy terraforming and once levels of atmosphere were acceptable to seed life by distributing the fluid. And since some of the dead bodies showed different afflictions some burst chests some heads, also the zombification or engineerification of fiefield and holloway Now the unknown bits arde definitely the intentions of both david and the engineers. maybe the sole engineer released this on his crew bc he was against the plans of his leader, after all, Prometheus stole his fire from the gods, maybe he wanted to eradicate humanity and other engineers flew to earth to warn them about his intentions? But its also likely something just went awry, or david following threw with his own intentions said something to the engineer. or the engineer saw that we were creating life of our own that was synthetic, something creatures who are seeding biology would be nominally against?

or maybe this is why they wanted to eradicate humanity in the first place...we got them infected

In my new thread, "Beginning-to-end Biological Backstories", I hope people will post their complete and total breakdown of the whole thing. Why not? As far as the engineers ending up in a pile, there's no mystery: if you come to investigate, and there's a dead body, what do you do? What do you do? You stand over it going "what happened". So eventually there's two bodies lying right there. Somebody else walks up and says, gee George, what happened? Now there's three or four. Etc. As far as coming to Earth, I think they needed to gear up for war and needed some ship-building done. They had a bank of ready hosts happily overpopulating the planet the way the "gifts" of massive temples / city-scapes / agriculture / Religion would have programmed them to do "from the first times", so why not? Not like they will miss so many, which is the entire concept of war itself, which is probably what they needed more ships for.

The engineers all running to the same place and falling by the wayside are a little bit like Sperm trying to enter an egg. Only the strongest will get through. Survival of the fittest and all that. Maybe only four are destined to make it to the orrery and then it's a best out of four

@krist: with beetle larvae. [scene] Ancient Egypt / Some young boy sneaks on board the forbidden "temple" (juggernaut) and hides some beetles in a crevice of the ship. Perhaps just before getting his head torn off by one of the "Gods"! Maybe because the Gods, for ages refusing to allow any person or biology into their ship or come see their world (due to sterilization and quarantine procedures necessary for succesfully bioforming a planet along a specific lineage of potentially dangerous design) eventually bred a rebellious mistrust out of our desire to see things flourish. One day somebody notices some beetle crawls into the cracks of the engineer's flight suit. So some lad rolls beetle eggs up in dung balls, rolls them in hot sand, and hides them in niches in the juggernaut/xenomorph architecture. Somehow it resembles the xenomorph materials and the inevitable biology scanner misses them.

This may have been mentioned already but... Given the Prometheus mythology is it plausible that the engineer is, along with his comrades on lv223, Mankind's Prometheus. These Engineers decide to seed life and create it in an approximation of their own image. They leave markings to a small outpost as they are in essence heretics from the rest of the Engineer race. 2000 years ago when the rest of the Engineers discover this experiment they go ballistic and decide to punish and destroy not only mankind but the Engineers who created us. In this scenario the last surviving Engineer could have been belligerant not only to us but the other members of his race we see in the film being killed, fleeing or simply long dead. He killed them went into stasis for some reason...the theory breaks down here.

Antonio77 nailed the gig - the final Jockey had the intent to clear the facility of those who would protest the extermination of what was created, who have shown disgrace before their creators. Maybe it is tied back into biblical accounts of a war among angels, and what not. Pretty sure the last one standing was the equivalent of a Lucifer-type, wanting to dethrone what was held in high regard as the other Jockey's greatest achievement. The war in heaven as a war in the heavens? This opens up a pretty cool discussion, man.

Oh, meant to do[i] " [b]Jockeys[/b]' [/i]", not personification. Late, tired, but psyched over the chatback on the boards. This subject pretty much can reframe the initial viewing experience of the flick as a reason to watch again.

@ krist You know I thought about that too. The Engineer didn't seem to care at all that David was an android, he just treated him like the others, kill, kill, kill. So there's a couple of options there. One, he didn't know David was an android. Two, he didn't care. Three, he was struck by it, but had more important stuff to do. Four, that's indeed the reason he broke his head off. However to me it seems like a bit of a stretch that he would be so angry at humans for creating a robot, I mean, if he even knows what a robot is, he must also know that they aren't real creatures, they are not bio technology like the dangerous stuff the engineers were using. So what's the big deal there. My guess is that he knew David wasn't a real man, but didn't care. He had more important things to take care of.

So I'm sure it's been said already but the ship found on LV-426 was said to have landed there several thousand years earlier. The engineers on LV-223 were said to have died out about 2000 years earlier than the events in that movie. So isn't it possible that one of the space jockeys tried to escape the planet only to find that a xenomorph (or even more likely, a face-sucker or trilobite) had stowed aboard the craft? It certainly wouldn't be the first time that a xenomorph was able to sneak onto a ship without anyone noticing. I mean that was the climax of both the first two movies. One idea I've been stuck on since I saw the movie a couple hours ago (and again, I know I'm not the first to think of this I just didn't have the time to scour this site looking for this theory) is that the trilobite is directly related to the alien queen. In other words, while a face-sucker implants a regular old xenomorph in its victims, the trilobite implants an alien queen. I mean, the thing looks exactly like a gigantic version of the face-sucker once it's matured. It would also explain why the creature that emerged from the engineer at the end of Prometheus was larger and more developed than any of the chest-bursters in the rest of the series. At first I was thinking that the alien at the end of prometheus looked different than the aliens from the rest of the series because it came out of a engineer (the aliens combine with the DNA of their hosts before being "born"), but that doesn't make any sense whatsoever because the DNA of the engineer was said to be a match with human DNA. So any chest-burster coming from an engineer should theoretically be the same as an alien emerging from a human. The only other possibility is that the difference in the two xenomorphs had to be because of the difference in chest-bursters and trilobites. Back to what killed off engineers: Could it be that somehow the engineers lost control of their black stuff (okay I mean I guess that much is obvious) and somehow xenomorphs started to pop up all over the compound? I mean, the engineers obviously knew what the xenomorphs were and even knew that they were a result of the black liquid. The one mural in the room with the head was clearly one of a xenomorph. And judging by its size it could have been an alien queen. So my theory: Aliens start popping out of chests. One engineer tries to escape in a ship, only to have a trilobite sneak aboard and attach to the engineer. This results in the ship to crash shortly after take-off on the nearby planet of LV-426 and after the crash the birth of an alien queen. The queen then lays eggs in the crashed ship (as opposed to the idea that the ship was transporting the eggs as a weapon and one got loose) and the eggs/queen lay dormant until the events that take place in Alien and Aliens.