Alien Origins - What Happened on LV 426?

More explenation of the Space Jockey pilot is suggested by what happens to the ENGINEER in an early PROMETHEUS draft. _________________________________________________________________________________ PILOT CHAMBER The war party passes the empty pilot’s seat. NAVIGATION CHAMBER Watts leads the war party to the Orrery. Momentarily even the soldiers forget their wariness, staring in astonishment at the myriad spheres of light. But if they are impressed, Watts is thunderstruck. She sees the Orrery in its full glory: a stunning panoply of light and energy. Stars and planets pulsing with information. Reluctantly Watts tears her eyes away. Leads the war party through the second door - the door she saw DAVID open. HIBERNATION CHAMBER An immense mausoleum. The war party enters stealthily, Watts in the lead. An Engineer lies on his back on a complex mechanical table, his body one with the machinery. Jacked in. Interpenetrated. Fused with the slab of the table itself. Unlike the other Engineer bodies the explorers have seen, this giant is not withered or mummified. He’s full-fleshed and muscular. Sustained by the machinery he’s fused with. He is bare-headed - his face the face of an Adonis. DAVID stands before this giant Sleeper. To the naked eye, he seems to be conjuring with his hands in the empty air. But Watts sees a dazzling console of runes and mandalas, pulsing with biological rhythms. The Sleeper lives. Ray and Shepherd draw beads on DAVID. DAVID glances calmly over his shoulder. DAVID Dr. Watts. (notices her goggles) You’ve seen the light at last. He turns back to the Sleeper. DAVID (CONT’D) The Engineers’ ships travel farther than ours. Across the galactic disk. This is their hypersleep. DAVID makes conjuror’s passes in the air. Through her Engineer’s lens Watts sees DAVID manipulating a complex interface of light. The pulsing life-signs of the Sleeper begin to change. Vapor rises from the Sleeper’s body. WATTS Stop. DAVID Let sleeping gods lie? (scornfully) You were braver before. The Sleeper wakes. Opens his eyes. Draws an endless breath. Shunts and catheters withdraw from the Sleeper’s flesh. His body cleaves from the table. The machinery opens like a grotesque biomechanical flower. Releases him. The Sleeper rises from his ancient bed. The humans back off, terrified. DAVID watches with shining eyes. The Sleeper towers over them. A giant carved from ivory. A bulky girdle around his hips, seemingly one with his body. He stares at DAVID and the others. Eyes like black agates. The soldiers and crew stand warily, guns tracking from DAVID to the Sleeper, uncertain of their ground. Watts is in awe. The Sleeper speaks. A low rumbling sound. Unintelligible. Vickers is beside herself with terror. She takes Shepherd’s arm. Pulls him silently away. Back into the Navigation Room. Behind the Sleeper, a raised platform of dark machinery is accessible by one of the Juggernaut’s odd curving ramps. The Sleeper ascends - and the ramps’ odd design is explained. The ramp comes alive, reaching up with a hundred mechanical arms and lifting him aloft like a sea-god borne by the waves. Atop the platform the Sleeper moves from one device to the next. Each comes alive: he is a wizard in his own kingdom. Watts sees haloes of light dancing in the air around him. But what he learns from his machines does not comfort him. He grows distraught. Keening to himself in near-subsonic tones. DAVID steps forward. Calls to the Sleeper in the tongue of the Engineers. The Sleeper turns in astonishment. He looks down at DAVID and answers in the same tongue. He is angry, accusing. He points at DAVID, at the humans. Tones of accusation. DAVID cajoles, soothes, pleads. The Sleeper descends toward DAVID. DAVID spreads his arms in welcome - undeniable emotion on his face. Joy. The Sleeper lays his hands on DAVID’s head as if blessing him. DAVID is rapturous. The Sleeper speaks a single phrase - and tears DAVID’s head off. _________________________________________________________________________________ PILOT CHAMBER The Sleeper settles into the pilot's chair: it fuses with him, coming alive. A vast display wraps around the walls - revealing the hangar outside, the stars, the horizon.A mystic view that renders solid matter translucent, painting the fabric of reality in raw information. PILOT CHAMBER DOOR Watts pounds in futile rage against the door. WATTS No! The Juggernaut shudders as its systems power up. _________________________________________________________________________________ INT. JUGGERNAUT - PILOT CHAMBER In the Juggernaut's pilot chair, the Sleeper sees them coming. His thoughts quicken. An explosion of light. _________________________________________________________________________________ INT. JUGGERNAUT - PILOT CHAMBER On the floor, DAVID’s eyes open. With his jaw he hitches his severed head around. Gets his eyes on the Sleeper. In the pilot chair, the Sleeper convulses. An ALIEN erupts from his chest. Big as a wolf even at its birth. Dark gray, armored, lethal. More hideous than any chestburster we've seen. An ULTRAMORPH! It wails hideously. The Sleeper dies. The Alien slithers free. EXT. JUGGERNAUT (IN FLIGHT) - ABOVE THE STORM The Juggernaut emerges from the stormclouds into the clear upper air - but loses momentum. Staggers through the upper atmosphere, control lost. INT. MAGELLAN (IN FLIGHT) - BRIDGE Watts, at the Magellan's controls, stares as he Juggernaut falters and falls. WATTS Janek. Look. A crackle on the ship’s comm. DAVID (V.O.) (filtered) Dr. Watts. The Engineer is dead. You have a few seconds before the Juggernaut’s computers take over. WATTS (astonished) DAVID. She seizes the precious moment: centers the Juggernaut in the Bridge window. Slams the throttle forward. EXT. JUGGERNAUT (IN FLIGHT) - ABOVE THE STORM The Magellan hurtles out of the storm. RAMS THE JUGGERNAUT. A colossal impact! The Juggernaut tumbles from the sky like a stone - intact but crippled. _________________________________________________________________________________ This suggests that the ENGINEER was indeed ALREADY INFECTED prior to his entering into suspended animation/hibernation and the chamber that kept him alive all of this time! It just serves as a guide, hint or insight as to what fate/life events befell the Derilict Juggernaught's ENGINEER pilot. Perhaps he was infected before he got into the pilots chair and thus flying off to then have is deadly fate befall him. It's also possible that hurtpangs got him while he was in-flight and thus the ship crash-landed where it did upon LV-426 and as he sat in a flu-like slumber, knowing what was coming, he set the warning beacon in motion and sat there to face his ultimate fate from within for which he possibly knew was coming to greet him from within himself ( the xeno embryo/hatchling )

[img]http://api.ning.com/files/hWn-*rtyHsZ6sxN6KtC3fi8bL7ZiureKu7U29EOTf43xWFrLiHG9HvOyGkcmpAV5HnkT7xiOMwf3pg3XxsORefgYGu-zAs-E/reproduction.gif?width=271[/img]

I had something in regard to the production of the eggs. The way I see it is that the hammerpede has a lifecycle and a short life span to reproduce. It’s quite clear that the xenomorph evolved from worms; worms are hermaphroditic, they shed skin, they lay eggs, they have no eyes, they sense light and will move away from light...Newborn xenos are worm-like in morphology indicating their worm/hammerpede ancestry and xenos are well known to be afraid of fire. Notice how the hammerpede had acid for blood? Notice how it strengthened its constriction around Milburn’s arm when it was touched? Quite obvious clues there, aren’t they? There is enough for one to infer that over time the hammerpedes mate or self-reproduce, lay eggs and the progeny could very well be the facehugger eggs we're familiar with. Why not? So now we know what came first; The Queen or the Egg? Neither; it was the black-goo, worms and hammerpedes. The hammerpede is an example of the ‘Chekhov’s Gun’ trope. I surmise that it is all implied right there in the film, and we see a deviation of the process where the black goo is used on human intermediaries, resulting in an uber-facehugger, the Trilobite and a deacon ‘ultramorph’. Red herrings perhaps? The way I see it, using human intermediaries is quite inefficient and prone to failure, using worms however is a far more efficient and deadly solution. Why do newborn xenomorphs have worm-like morphology? – The answer is because they descended from Worms/Hammerpedes. Indeed, all organisms are palimpsests of evolutionary history and within their bodies and morphology hold clues to their ancestry, indeed, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. When the worms are infected with the black-goo, it triggers a rapid metamorphosis. First the worm mutates and molts – now it’s a hammerpede. By the second stage the hammerpede finds a warm host and feeds on the host’s innards. Soon the hammerpede is a fertile adult and possibly larger, now it either creates sperm and eggs internally or reproduces with male hammerpedes. An unusual feature of worms, well unusual to human eyes, is the nature of its two sexes, where we have hermaphrodites with two x chromosomes and are capable of self-reproduction but may still need a male to fertilise the eggs. If a worm uses self-fertilization, its offspring will tend to number around 300, whereas if a hermaphrodite has sex with a male worm (which is a relatively less common mode) the number of progeny can be up to four times greater than that...Looks like the engineers stumbled on quite the bio-weapon, eh? The hammerpede’s progeny will be the eggs and the facehuggers we know. [img]http://www.scienceworld.ca/pdf/110402-worm.gif[/img]

PulseRifle187 brings up an important flaw with respect to the injured Xeno theory, which is that the hole itself is too uniform. I also like the idea of a previous recon team having visited the Derelict and using a torch-like tool to cut the hole. If we put everything together, I think we can agree that the hole is not an original part of the Orrery's design. Lots of people also don't like the idea that the egg chamber is not part of the Derelict, but doesn't Prometheus actually support this very concept? In the original ALIEN story, they eggs are located in a pyramid structure; they later merged the Derlelict and pyramid for the final film. In Prometheus, they enter the pyramid and one of the caves leads to a cargo hold (only containing urns vs. eggs); the Juggernaut is actually down another very long cave leading a good distance away from the entire pyramid. There's a picture somewhere. The egg chamber in ALIEN is too vast, with too many twists and turns, for it to be within the Derelict. I vote the egg chamber is not part of the Derelict, for reasons of scale and also going by Prometheus' lead. OK... as to the final question concerning what actually happened to the Space Jockey. I think there is an image in the Prometheus Bluray which gives us a hint- take a look at this trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dd1VqCtJY3E#ws At 0:19 it shows a human (Engineer?) entering the egg chamber and further down lies a (possibly) dead Engineer. This is probably all from an earlier Prometheus script when they were still on the ALIEN-prequel track, but it gives us clues as to what happened to the original Jockey. If the SJ was the only crew member on the ship, he probably got face-hugged while working in the chamber, came to and remembering what happened- landed on LV-426 and activated the warning beacon before the chestburster emerged. Second possibility is that there were multiple crew members and a few Xenos got loose in the egg chamber and then managed to wreak havok throughout the entire ship. I say multiple because I doubt a single Xeno could take on an entire crew complement of engineers- they are super tough and could have at wrestled down a single Xeno before neutralizing it.

Regarding the hole in the floor near the jockey in alien . The hole does looked melted but its too square to be done by a injured/killed xeno . Also it doesn't look like a hatch and it is too small for an engineer. Maybe a visitor prior to the nostromo crew, prehaps cut by a gas torch. ( maybe P2) will answer these questions. Going by the original alien movie where the eggs are created by killed host/victims . judging by the numbers of eggs in the ship it rises some more horrifying questions.

The Nostromo recon team only investigated a small part of the Juggernaut. Notice how the one on LV223 was fitted with 5(?) cryotubes for additional crew members while the derelict had only the chair with the sj in it. This leaves two possibilities that either he was the only one on that ship, or there was another cryochamber with enough for a crew. If that were true then we could account for the burned area in the floor due to another crew member destroying the xenomorph that had emerged from the Engineer space jockey. Of course the hole in his rib cage was pretty small so it must have been more like a traditional xenomorph familiar to the Alien franchise movies, not a deacon, which ripped a huge split down the center of the Engineer in Prometheus. There is some continuity problems between the two movies but we are coming up with some interesting and hit or miss plausible story lines to account for the elements of the derelict juggernaught of LV426. The idea that Dan O'Bannon ascribes to that the xenomorphs were native to LV426 leaves a couple of potential problems.1) they would have been hard to move without activating them as they have never been shown to exist in a dormant state - but that doesn't difinitively mean that they can't. 2) If they were native to LV426 then how come none of the colonists at Hadley's Hope ever came across them and the Gateway inquest of Lt Ripley also stated that they had never come across any indigenous life there. So Ripley layed into that inquest committee member saying "Have IQs dropped since I was away? It was a derelict space craft and we homed in on its warning beacon, you get it?" That is why I lean towards the idea that the derelict ship crashed after being face hugged and chestbursted by contamination by a xeno in its cargo hold while transporting perhaps from LV 223 where it was a more advanced experimental bioweapon. All that SJ had time to do before death by chest burster was to activate the beacon then the emerging xenomorph somehow died on the floor liberating its molecular acid blood which created the burned hole in the deck floor.

the blue mist was either: made by the jockeys to keep the eggs or any other organism in stasis made to alert the eggs for a potential host warn or alert the jockey that one of the eggs has been hatched i remember when i first watched the alien films i had always thought that the aliens/eggs originated from LV-426 and that the jockey fell victim after he found them.

Gromster, good point about the burned floor leading to the egg chamber. I forgot that fact. I think the spirit of this question is to stimulate hypotheses from posters. Of course we are aware that much is unknown but the fun is in inventing potential scenarios to account for the unknowns like you did toward the end of your post. You are right about the warning signal most likely meant for other Engineers too. By the way what does anyone make of the membrane of light covering the eggs in the chamber that Kane fell through. Do you think the engineers generated it as an alarm covering the dangerous cargo or produced by the eggs in mass. I'm guessing Engineer technology but it could be a naturally produced trigger generated by the eggs themselves, which is an especially disturbing thought. Looking forward to hearing more hypothetical scenarios.

Here is IMO what happened to the lone Engineer pilot on LV-426... 2000 years ago a Juggernaut, most likely from LV-223, deployed the deadly black liquid urns on a planet, resulting in an worldwide infestation of the Xenomoprh on the planet. With all viable hosts extinguished the Xenomorph infestation halted with the death of the Drones, Warriors and Queens, leaving behind only the eggs. A fleet of Juggernauts then arrived at this planet and collected the eggs, storing them in the lower levels of the ships; the lone Engineer pilots under specific orders to remain inside their bio-mechanical flight suit throughout the journey, for their own safety. One of these Juggernauts, once full with its cargo of Xenomorph eggs headed towards its (unknown) destination. Travelling through the Zeta II Reticuli system the Juggernaut picked up a distress beacon, which activated the platforms holographic orrery display. Unable to see the marker for the distress beacon from its seat the pilot disregarded his orders and, after bringing the Juggernaut to a halt, exited from the seats flight suit and walked over to the flashing red holographic beacon, of LV-223. Unseen by the pilot as he observed the beacon and learnt of the outbreak of black liquid on LV-223 was a flashing blue orb on the seats display (signifying the layer of blue laser-mist over the eggs had been broken). As the Engineer contemplated the distress beacon he smelt the acrid burning of melting metal. Looking around the back of the seat the Engineer saw one of the metal panels of the platform melting away. Darting his attention to the panel on the seat, the engineer noticed the flashing blue orb and hastened back into his seat furiously tapping the orbs to close the biomechanical flight suit about him as the Facehugger fumbled its way onto the platform before scurrying toward the panicked Enginner, jumping onto the Engineers face as the flight suits mask closed and sealed the pilot in place. Reconnected to its pilot the Juggernaut handed control over to the pilot, whom unconcious from the embryo implantation process of the Facehugger caused the Juggernaut to drift through the system, toward LV-426. Pulled in by LV-426's gravity the Juggernaut crash landed on the planetoids surface. Hours later the Engineer pilot awoke, the facehugger lying dead upon his face beneath his helmet and marooned on a dead, lifeless planetoid. Feeling the Chestburster move within his chest, knowing his time was short, the Engineer initiated a warning beacon before opening the door to the vessels "Fin" arm, and inputting a short program before the Chestburster ripped through his chest and his flight suit. The creature snarled and hissed before slithering towards the open door, which closed and hissed shut behind the creature.

Some good points have been made in this post. What has most bothered me, however, is the extent to which the egg chamber occupies the space beneath the juggernaut. When Kane is dropping down out of the shaft into the open, we see a vista that curves away out of sight. Unless the laws of physics have been manipulated a la Dr Who, I don't see how this chamber is part of the juggernaut. Adding to my confusion is how a random acid-burned hole in the floor of the flight-control chamber would align with a shaft leading down into this serpentine egg chamber. Of course, I'd rather have mystery than neatly wrapped up stories, eh?

I believe Ridley Scott has actually answered this. He regarded the eggs as "cargo", and the ship as a transport. Whether they were engineered or discovered somewhere else is not made clear. The security of the cargo was compromised and obviously the pilot was face-hugged at some stage on his way to an undisclosed destination. He then made an intended emergency landing on LV246, and the ship became a quarantine area, due to the extremely hazardous cargo. A warning signal was activated by the pilot prior to being chest-bursted to inform others not to approach. It has been there ever since, most likely untouched by the engineers. It is possible that the newly born xeno may have injured itself bursting out of the (rather tough) pilot's ribcage, with its acidic blood causing the floor next to the pilot's chair to melt through. Which unfortunately for the search party from the Nostromo led to the egg chamber. The creature will have eventually died somewhere else on the ship.

you know i've been thinking about this a lot recently, some theories suggest especially from Dan'Obanon that he found the eggs and transported them to the ship and kept them under stasis for further study upon return. but then again no one really knows for sure. not to mention my alien short will revolve around the basis of this topic! :P

Well Chris, those are the million dollar questions that cause so much controversy over Prometheus. In my case it caused me to go back and watch all the Alien series again and again as well as listen to the commentaries on both the Alien series and Prometheus ( the writers commentaries as well as Ridley Scott's commentary). It also caused me to get all the available extra, alternative and deleted scenes and material and to watch 'The furious Gods' documentary, read interviews of cast and directors, and finely to join and contribute to this site in order to work with other fans to consolidate our ideas to attempt to answer these questions. And I have learned much about many many aspects of this series of movies that take place in the Weyland universe. Now regarding the question as to the Engineer crashing on LV 426, i.e other wise known as the derelict space ship, we can only speculate and use our imaginations. If I had to guess I would say that an Engineer working with the ones on LV223 was transporting xenobioweapons in a more advanced stage than those experimentally produced containers in the cargo hold of the one on LV223, when he got face hugged by a traditional face hugger like we are more familiar with from the Alien movies and it burst forth from his chest while he was attempting to pilot the ship somewhere else, possibly to Paradise for surgical removal before it erupted causing him to crash land on LV426. Thats my theory based upon what little information that is available within all the related movies and in all extra-movie material I have found. Now regarding did the Engineers manage to create a queen in the time frame between the time of experimental bioweapons research on LV223 and the crash of the derelict space craft, which we don't know when it actually crashed but I am going to suggest it was perhaps hundreds of years later than the 2000 years ago when 'things went to pot' on LV223, I am going to say it is likely that they engineered either a queen - most likely, or they engineered the eggs themselves using advanced genetics that they were obvously masters of. OK anyone else?

Ridley scott tends to fluctuate on the origin story of this particular space jockey, if any story should be considered as canon i would have to say Dan'Obanon's since after all he is the creator of the space jockey story. He had originally intended that the space jockey was a benign creature , even collaborated with Giger to design a creature that would be benign. I remember reading that Dan's original story was that the xenomorph was natural and that the space jockey stumbled upon them on lv-426 and the jockey fell victim to them i found this from a website too "Dan O'Bannon's original intention that the derelict ship stumbled upon a cache of Xenomorph eggs that already lay dormant on LV-426."

I am all for the fourth suggestion by King regarding the blue mist: to alert the pilot of any eggs hatching whilst in the cargo hold. Most thought it was a warning triggered by anyone [u]outside[/u] the blue mist getting too close. Actually the other way round, warning of something emerging from [u]inside[/u] the egg area. The pilot probably went to investigate the warning signal from the blue mist and got face-hugged. All coming together, now! Anyway, the first part of my original post is to do with what Ridley Scott actually said in an interview a few years ago regarding the space jockey.

The hole on the floor (next to the Space Jockey's chair) is either part of the Derelict's original design that was damaged by the emerging Xeno or originally created by it's acidic blood eating all the way down to the egg chamber. I prefer the latter explanation because the former doesn't fit the scene very well. I mean, the Space Jockey in the film is too big to fit through that hole (suited or not, I would imagine) so it would not serve as a viable access point. It's important to remember that the scene exists to serve as a portent of things to come on the Nostromo; so with this in mind, it's probably safe to assume that (a) the Jockey was indeed face-hugged at some point and (b) an ALIEN was damaged enough to bleed acid and thus create that aperture. The more important question is how- the Jockey's hands are still on the control panel and we don't see any weapons laying around giving hint of a struggle. I mean, if the ALIEN was damaged while emerging from the Jockey, where is the acid damage to the chair? If neither of these things fit 100%, then we can probably flip perspectives and maybe assume that the hole was created from the bottom-up by either a facehugger or later-stage Xeno.

It's my sincerest hope is that the bicycle-helmet-headed "deacon" we see at the end of Prometheus was the result of an offshoot experiment derived from the Engineers having already found the xenomorph species. Common sense dictates that if the engineers had to break down their own DNA to create us over however many thousands of years, then they simply weren't bright enough to create something already as perfectly evolved as the xenomorphs in what little time the Prometheus movie spanned. A truly educated guess says the crash on LV 426 was a transport carrying xenomorph eggs for study experimentation and something went wrong. In this case it's obvious to say from the end of the Prometheus story line that our lone heroine and her android's head have something to do with the crash on LV 426. It's an easy jump to make in the story line and the Hollywood writers don't grind their gears too hard to make work and be interesting at the same time. Just get rid of the doctor and the android at the end of the movie. That's all they really have to do. Send them off on their journey even further or kill them off somehow. This isn't that hard to work out. On a much more serious and critical note of "Hollywood" and how the Prometheus movie handled this specific fan base ... While the "mad scientist" scenario of the Engineers is a kind of cool update to the whole mad-scientist-unleashes-a-monster scenario, Prometheus didn't take the fans where they wanted to go. This is Hollywood taking something good and making into a dime-store novella for the sake of the dimes. They can do better, and they can get back to the Geiger designs while they're at it. Those designs were integral to the success of the original two movies.

Molecular, I found the image you are refering to, It does seem to appear to show an Engineer carrying an egg while another one is laying towards the front among the eggs, but I could be wrong. Very interesting image but it was not used on the film so it is just as tease. It would open a whole new can on worms though if it were canon.

I was going to delete this post but since there is no means to do so I am instead going to change the subject to a youtube video I found that criticizes Prometheus on scientific grounds. Now mind you there are a couple of errors in this video such as the carbon dating device, which we have already gone over. It was not a Carbon 14 device, it only was referred to as a carbon dating device, so other than a few errors already addressed here, there is much that is correct about the anti-scientific aspects of Prometheus that they bring up. While I do love Prometheus and disagree with their assessments of the characters to some degree, as I did find Shaw and David, Janek and Vickers compelling, what these guys say about the other characters like Fifield and Melburn totally make sense. Anyway hopefully this will link.[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osBFSuTRTqk&feature=player_detailpage]link[/url]

i've come to to the rescue once a gain [img]http://imageshack.us/a/img11/5218/vlcsnap2012092809h38m56.jpg[/img] to zoom in further right click-view image :)