Newborn Deacon size

Did you see the size of his mummy and daddy?

His size is due to overpriced theater concessions.

I watched the movie last night for the first time since June and I noticed it seems to grow almost immediately, I don't think it was just opening its mouth, it was changing before our eyes. We are definitely to understand this will be a much bigger creature than the original. And possibly even more horrible.

The prop Deacon that came out of the Engineer actually fit inside the prop Engineer so people who have beef with it being too big to fit inside can drop that complaint. And it does grow pretty fast. People seem to have a problem with how much time has past during a few scenes. The scene when the Prometheus goes thru the atmosphere is one. Some said it was stupid that they found the Engineer's installation so quickly. In the commentary Scott says it was hours after they came thru the atmosphere before they found the place to set down. In the film it does only seem like seconds. To me the birth scene has soft, fade-to-black cuts that infer that some time has passed between him hitting the ground, starting to move and finally standing up. It obviously grows at an accelerated rate in that time, much like the trilobite.

Well said Engineering.

Also notice that it's born much differently and begins to move differently than the chestburster in Alien, which still resembles a serpent much more than what's going on here. It almost slithers away. Consider how a fawn, a giraffe, a horse, a wildebeest etc is born. They come into the world ready to stand on all fours. It's literally such a short time before they're up and running that it's astounding. In the wild they have to be able to get up quickly to instinctively start working towards being able to protect themselves from any danger if the parent should disappear. Anything could happen, and in the wild species don't take care of their young for as long. Certain species like humans have developed a much different method of care-giving. We're much more geared towards conscious thought rather than our base drives and instincts. Because of this the brain needs a very long time to develop in complicated ways to absorb early knowledge and to create neural pathways for new knowledge to continue building the child's entire life. Babies are pretty much defenseless at first, their one instinct is to cry for help/anything. If left in the wild now without a parent (after all our evolution and even the way we evolved)-- it would not survive because it could not even have a chance of learning how to fend for itself unless someone found it crying. Certain species like the wildebeest do actually come into the world ready to go, should their parents be absent. They stand up almost immediately because they're guided by instinct much more than logic or true intelligence, and even their genetics code for this sort of early development. Human babies are learning all the things they will need later in life like how to communicate, because it's very important for us as a species. They can start picking up linguistic clues earlier than most think and it can lead to having very intelligent youngsters. This is why psychologists encourage people to speak in complete sentences to their babies, and not in baby talk. They pick up language much faster because they're consciously and subconsciously able to absorb so much information early on in life. With species in the wild, instinct comes into play much much more than any form of true intelligence, although some creatures like apes and dolphins display this. In this case the Deacon is almost immediately learning to stand, unlike in the Original alien-- a further clue this is nothing like the old species. In this case its a strange hybrid left in the wild alone and has a backup method of survival/reproduction should the eggs and the queen be absent. Left alone in the desert... in a new environment. This thing is born with legs that are already developed and it's getting ready to walk-- not slither away like some giant serpent type thing (the serpent thing is really important to this movie symbolizing knowledge, wisdom, medicine and science-- but also deceit and cunning). The creature is quickly getting up and running, growing at a much more rapid rate than the original after being born in the fetal position. So they're more like a human in some ways and they may retain some of the intelligence of the original species. But they're also unlike the original species and seem to be driven much more by a form of genetic instinct rather than intelligence-- making them appear much more chaotic. These things are genetically geared to get up and going faster, or have somehow inherited that trait along the way (possibly from the Engineers who may have altered their x chromosome and increased testosterone/other hormones). They're driven by instinct more than intelligence, but like Shaw will be a weird hybrid mix of each that leans more on instinct. The creature in the original would then lean more towards intelligence, and only uses the morphing cycle in the deleted scene... Geared towards the egg/queen cycle, but still containing a backup survival plan. The Deacon is the inverse... Mostly male... No eggs... No true face-huggers... Sexual dimorphism in the species... A more chaotic form of life based more so on the ability to survive without others... Not a queen but a King. The opposite of what we were expecting. Lindelof and Ridley may have purposely taken eggs and facehuggers out of spaight's script to take this in a new direction. Something that is superceded and made useless once the more logical safe and organized approach of the queen's hive comes back in. The queen can defend herself once her servants arise and are all in place to protect her and allow her to stay stationary while reproducing... The Alien species would then get a lot more complicated because it could imply non-hybrid Kings have always been around we just never saw them before... This would be a special sort of hybrid, gargantuan King who goes on to morph into what could be called an Emperor Alien before one of the Queens of the story puts a stop to it. Before that the King/Deacon class needs to be able to reproduce alone (spawning the King-- deacon becomes servant) and allowing it to develop based on instinct and a form of the morphing cycle... However we have to get to the links to the original movies. Eventually the genetics start going back towards the female side of things... A queen arises and dethrones the King, then we get a new understanding of how the morphing cycle in the original Alien and the Jockey's story may have went down. Plus a greatly expanded mythology on what happens if a single Alien is alone without a queen or hive. Not yet a king or a queen, and has to use the egg morphing cycle sometimes. Our perspective on the original Alien would be morphed because of what's going on in this story. Making the original Alien almost a hermaphroditic creature. Implying that if it had gone towards the male side more than the female side, a female-leaning one would eventually arise and morph all the male-leaning young-- consuming and morphing the morphing xenomorphs into eggs... Killing the King/male like a black widow or Preying mantis and using all of the genetic material they leave behind to produce her hive and offspring... The eggs in the derelict could have been something else that was originally semi-biological in nature and morphed by a rising Queen. So a King/Emperor-morph only "has his reign and then he dies... it's inevitable". And this becomes a prophetic statement by Vickers about the nature of the Aliens' sexual organization, and absence of Kings in the series so far while Queens were a dominant feature (we never got to see any short reigns of a King before a queen arose in the original movies because the hive is never shown being built and in resurrection it is too female leaning-- having Ridley's full reproduction system. Right now Shaw's infertile egg has become part of the genetics... But there's no clear Queen yet so we don't know how the Deacon will reproduce. We may even see the word Praetorian come into it to describe one of the female-leaning early queen stages. Only because this word, the King thing, and the Emperor thing may have been carefully selected and morphed from their original concepts in the comics to fit in with the themes about Kingdoms and Empires in this movie and Lawrence of Arabia. We also have a decidedly male element running through the film, and a lack of female engineers so far. The word Praetorian relates to the Roman Empire, and the 2000 years ago stuff is directly related to the Roman Empire and some would say their actions against jesus. However, I think it's the idea of Empires and the actions of the Romans that the Engineers were really mad about. Their parents run an Empire which their kingdoms rebel against...

Notice the plural on what David says about everything wanting to kill its parents. This ties into some of the Freudian stuff and the suppression of one side over the other. It could eventually explain more about the molting process and how warriors/drones are suppressed from becoming other Queens. This thing would eventually move past the King's temporary suppression over the Deacons and Warrior-types. It would only bear some of the characteristics of the Praetorian from the expanded universe and would not be a true Praetorian-- but similar to the concept. Things broken down and recombined with other unused concepts like the morphing cycle to create something new... At first it would be the male side of the Alien genetics repressing the female side-- like what we may have going on with the Engineers, Weyland's preference for a son, the med-pod designed only for the selfish male king, and the Davids being all male. The King is in charge of and suppresses the other Deacons(similar to an advanced drone class) until a form of a Praetorian emerges from the genetics that can overthrow the King/male side. The Deacon passes on the suppressed female side of the genetics (shaw's infertile egg completely morphed by the infected sperm) and the Deacon secretes a type of signal that suppresses the other Deacons from having the ability to evolve/morph/molt past the King's reign at first. The King also has his own ways of enforcing his rule but they are undermined when a Praetorian type morpher is able to become a Queen that can morph at first... (almost fully male unsuppressed Deacon that goes on to switch to the female side of things through a series of morphs and molts). I know this is mainly a concept from AVP but the overall franchise and owners to the comics kept attempting to address how a young Queen develops, I think Ridley found the solution by adding the King in also and expanding on his morphing cycle and later molting-- tying it to many of the themes in Prometheus: "Praetorians serve as guards to the Queen. There is speculation on how Warriors evolve into Praetorians. One possibility is that warriors evolve when the queen selects them. The warriors would produce a pheromone that would cause the hive to turn against them. If they could escape until they stop producing the pheromone, their skin would become bullet-proof. They would then return to their hive and guard their Queen. In AVP 2010, the praetorians upper jaw protrudes out ever so slightly, giving them an overbite. They seem to be as fast and agile as smaller Xenomorphs. Some have speculated that a praetorian is in fact a young queen, Aliens versus Predator: Extinction has the queen molting from a praetorian and depending on how one sees it, Number six was seen briefly at the end as a praetorian before molting into a queen or was perhaps already a queen then but just molting. It could be possible that when a queen molts from the Chestbuster stage, it mid-metamorphosizes into a Praetorian, and fully metamorphosizes into a queen later on. A Warrior-turned Praetorian might have the capacity to turn into a queen if there is no Queen available: i.e., Number six." Now as I said if this is what happens it won't be taken lightly. It would be extremely different from Praetorians as we know them because this would be a Deacon-type that escapes the King's reign and becomes a Queen instead of staying on the male side of things. It's possibly only being brought in because new ideas are being formed by breaking down and combining these concepts with Ridley's morphing cycle and the vision for the Engineers and their wars. In the process mixing them in with all the other themes and making them a comparison for where the female Engineers have gone... In short more Aliens may be needed to take part is a massive battle involving many Davids, Engineers, Elders, the true gods, and humans... Something so destructive that it continues to rage behind the scenes of the original trilogy- covered up by the company as they try to acquire the bio-weapon to win the war and fight fire with fire. However, Ridley has said the original design has been all used up-- it's not scary anymore. These things would be familiar, yet new and morphed by the Engineers influence on the genetics and how the story between David, the Engineers, and the Elders develops. They would resemble things from the original Aliens + some mostly unexplored concepts from the comics and Ridley's original ideas/Star-beast. Approaching them in a different way and connecting it all in the end to give us a new spin on the Alien as we know it through the Deacon's hybrid line which prefers the male side.

THis is an excellent post. For me it requires a few more readings to better grasp the contents. On a recent viewing I too was amazed to see the size of the Deacon as it emerged from the Engineerr., The Deacon's head alone seemed to filled any cavity that the Engineer might have. I had not thought about any time lapse that was involved from the birthing to standing uprignt and 'smiling'.

If you -really- want to nitpick about something, how about nitpicking about how Cuddles (trilo-octopus-thingy) grows so much, without any food being present. (We even see into the medbay when Shaw looks through the door, the medpod is still spinning virtually undamaged; so basically, she left the medbay with tiny squid, and found the medpod in the same condition, with a big squid inside). That said, it's been established in previous films that Xenos can make organic matter seemingly from nowhere. They must metabolize plastic or something to get from tiny chestburster to full on xeno, and all that slime they coat the walls with must be a pain to secrete. Whatever they use, it's not food as we know it.

Their injesgion and secretion capabilities maybe weeks or months, even years as compared to our roughly four hours until an average human body has digested its food/dinner.