Why Did The Last Engineer Die At The End?

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.