Why Did The Last Engineer Die At The End?

its because the Deacon grew so much bigger - it consumed more of the internal organs for its own growth. it must have occupied the entire chest cavity

Good point, Centurian- and actually, I just remembered another point. There was a sac attached to The Deacon when he popped out. Kind of reminded me of a placenta and I got the impression this was feeding him. So maybe the Engineer's body is used up to a point and then the placenta-type keeps the process going since obviously that big Deacon is going to squish everything... LOL

That seems a very good observation. The Engineer did appear to be dead. Even if it was suggested that he wasn't dead, the spike-headed thing was huge, yet the Engineer did not have a huge pregnancy bump so, presumably, all the space occupied by most of his internals was taken up with spike-headed thing - in which case, he'd have to be dead. Furthermore, the whole point of a parasite is that it requires the host to live, it doesn't consume organs during that process - and how would an Engineer live if he was hollow. A person could try and explain it all away by suggesting that the spike-headed thing grew to a certain size until it decided to eat him to death from the inside to make more room for it's big, spiked head but even then it still seems pretty badly thought through.

Another tangent would be why do all the face-huggers die including this big one - surely going around impregnating more than one host would be much more efficient!

my 2 cents goes to the fact that Deacon ate Bob's insides.... eventually Bob got bored and died. lol

@ crabfart, then there would be no need for the Queen, if the Facehugger was able to produce an unlimited number of embryos.

its ok that the facehuggers all expire quickly. they're setup as a one-shot ovipositor. plenty of things like that in nature. it uses itself up.

I thought the scene when the Deacon exits the engineers body, which I believe the engineer was dead btw, the Deacon was way to big.... The Deacon look as if he was 60% or more the size of the engineer, why? What was the purpose for such a large alien at birth? The size of the Deacon's head alone could have been the size of the alien. All of the other xenomorphs at birth were proportional to Kane and the dog in Alien 3... 1st time when I saw that scene, I thought the Deacon came up thru the floor thru the engineer, 2nd time around I realized it came right out of the engineer, once again why such a large alien?

Yer but with all the super abilities of these ultra beings you'd expect at least a few impregnation's or maybe at least a week out of a face hugger ! Just seems a bit weak...

It makes you wonder how long a time difference there was with this version of the species Proto-face hugger to Alien Deacon. I'm talking from the time the Engineer got attacked, Shaw and David-Head blasts off the planet then we cut back to the Engineer and the birth of the Deacon. It is interesting to speculate how long a timefram it was from first attack to birth. Perhaps this liniage is different slower, faster? Who knows???

IMO, the Engineer was quite a bit larger than the humans -- so the Deacon would be larger, too.

Some good points here. I consider the Deacon to be a "newer" organism than the xeno. Consuming more of he host, and being more capable to fight/survive by being larger/more developed at birth would be a slight edge over a somewhat susceptible chest burster. IMO

We can think about many possibilities. I consider the following the most plausible: 1-Like some of us have said, the deacon ate the engineer's insides to death 2-The only point of using a host as the place of birth of a alien/deacon is that the alien/deacon need to eat in the beginning of their lives to reach full-size and hosts are a good source of food. And it's easier to eat a dead host than a moving one, so, the trilobite killed instantly the engineer in order to make it easier for the deacon

I agree with HyperNova, we aren't actually shown, in real time, impregnation to birth. Remember in Alien , the face huggers, I guess, are the product of eggs, from an alien than came from an engineer. Those facehuggers (face sized :) ) produce the 'little' alien in humans on impregnation. In Prometheus 'cuddles' comes from an alien infection in a male via a human female. I would guess a bigger 'facehugger' would produce a larger offspring, in a larger host as well (the engineer).

Hmmm... as usual, great ideas abound in this forum. So: [b]"Older" Xeno[/b] - Smaller chestbuster relying on living host for sustenance. Less resources available as we must keep the host alive while also providing sustenance to the xeno (though this may be irrelevant as the entire organism is not needed for the smaller burster). The baby xeno would also be more vulnerable to attack after emerging from the host. [b]"Newer" Xeno[/b] - Larger chestburster able to fully utilize internal organs/blood for resources, thus no need for keeping the host alive; downsides are that development (may) have to be accelerated as organs soon begin to decay after 24 hours. But this just magnifies the point that allinamberclad brought up: the Deacon cannot really be a parasite in the traditional sense, since this buffet will be "eat once" only; it is actually a classic [i]parasitoid[/i]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitoid Thus making Cameron's insect template for the Queen-based lifecycle a little more acceptable.

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@ aurorian - 6 days???

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- Text at start of film says 21st december - Both Janek and Holloway state "It's Christmas", which usually people only say on Christmas Day. Which means they landed on the 25th, also meaning the footage of David was over 4 days. - 2 nights tops were depicted in the film. 1st being Milburn and Fifield meeting their fate and Shaw and Holloway getting some. 2nd being when Shaw was doped up. - 2 nights equals 3 days... day 1 - 1st night - day 2 - 2nd night - 3rd day... if 1st day is 25th then 3rd is 27th... ...thats what 5 days until 1st Jan

maybe the Deacon is a 'Queen' , still not fully developed , remember this could be the first 'experiment' that had female DNA involved... Is 'Deacon' an official name for this alien? I only ask in case it was a reference to John Deacon,of Queen :D

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The more interesting question for me is why did Cuddles eat the two unaccounted-for crew members instead of impregnating one or both of them? My assumption must become that Cuddles was designed with an instinct to impregnate only Engineers with the Deacon. There is NO WAY that Cuddles could have grown to that final size from birth weight in that amount of time without consuming a LOT of nourishment. I can believe that two good-sized men could provide just about that amount of fat and protein, but I wonder if the scene of "the consumption" was ever blocked out and filmed. I doubt it. But, if it had been, it would definitely be gruesome... It's difficult for me to imagine a tiny little original ’79 facehugger overpowering an Engineer without getting him in his sleep. Cuddles must have needed to be that big to function properly (as an Engineer impregnator). Even with that tentacular strength, the Engineer put up quite a fight (and that was after being in a rather epic shipwreck and with other injuries to boot—not to mention right after the 2k years of hypersleep). Clearly the Deacon consumed the vast majority of the soft parts of the Engineer and I suspect that such would be his/her normal neonatal diet.

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We just don't know enough about the Engineers’ belief systems or civilization or history to know how the Deacon plays into the picture, but there are 5 strong clues in the Ampule Chamber that there is a [u]traditional[/u] relationship between the humanoids and xenoids. 1) The big head 2) The Deacon relievo (with larger facehugger at lower right) 3) The Emerald Offering 4) The Mural (with subservient? xenoid) 5) The urns and ampules They are all in the same room and all come with religious (holy) symbolism. It's a little over-obvious, but there is also the black vs. white aspect. It is common in earth religions for "angels" to be white and "devils" to be black. Both are typically necessary to complex the dogmatic tapestry. That said, it's pretty clear from [i]The Art of Prometheus[/i] that Arthur Max's team did not seem to be following anything in the script too strictly in coming up with these elements. The eventual "back story" may need to be reverse engineered to fit the visual canon instead of the other way around.