The fundamental question; who's the space jockey (AC Plot Spoilers)

I am hoping David merely learns how to make the Xeno via the Engineer's cookbook.  I do in fact want to see addressed in future films, Sir Ridley's original prequel question, "Who is the big guy in the chair?".  I do also remember Sir Ridley asking this question in the run up to the release of Prometheus, too.

I dont think it is David.  Given the size of the Jockey, and the fact that the Xeno's dont generally combine with Androids.  

I think the door is still open for any number of possibilities. My reason for saying this, is that I have noticed how Ridley sells a movie from his interviews. Sometimes I have found this infuriating because with what he says for one movie, can change for the next movie. However in the case of the Spacejockey this could be a good thing ( fingers crossed). I think the direction of the franchise is creating a story that runs parallel to a series of events that’s put the Derelict onto LV426.  This could be what Ridley meant about coming in through the back door. We know David has managed to re create the Xeno, but what if the Derelict on LV426  was the result of something much earlier that gave us the perfected xeno. I think there is still plenty of room for manoeuvre yet.

Had to finally take the plunge and register for this forum, I was so disappointed in the way they took this whole thing with the Space Jockey. That was the most nightmarish, thought provoking sight to behold , a fossilized Alien creature in this chair, a hole ripped out through the rib cage. To me , it always was and will be some strange Aliens' fossilized skeleton, not a humanoid in a suit ( ???). I was flabbergasted when I first heard Prometheus was going the route with these Engineers. I always mused that this alien race was harvesting the eggs and either using them for military purposes or selling them for whatever purpose, or hundreds of other scenarios i'm sure could be thought up...and they got careless and one got hatched and destroyed crew, and the poor sap was able to get in the beacon transmitter chair and send the warning signal before the creature burst from it's chest.( I always thought of them as a benevolent race, as they put the warning signal out)  Now we have a convoluted mess that's getting even messier trying to match up with first Alien.( the only connection I can see that makes any sense with the androids perfecting the " organism" is Ash's admiration of it saying it's the perfect organism)  ) ....But then you wonder how the company knew about the creature to send the Nostromo crew for it in the first place, did they decipher the full warning message and the creature was mentioned in the message? 

I'm sure there's a million fans out there that could have written up stories a million times better than what we have now . Oh well , at least we have our imaginations.. and remember, we live as we dream, alone

The only way they can go forwards with this and leave them a Mystery would be to have Covenants Sequel go off to a far away different place than the LV-223/LV-426 System.

Then Show us the Eggs/Monsters in Alien Awakening are Evolution's that David played a hand in..

This will leave the Mystery of Alien a bit... but it would still not leave it a complete one, because the clues are their that showed us.. and this was the case prior to Alien Covenant.

*The Space Jockey is a Space Suit..... that contained Engineers or beings connected to them...

*The Eggs are connected to the Black Goo, they either both came from the same Source, or One Predates and comes from the other.

However as the movie is going to be called Alien Awakening, i think it has to touch more on either the Origin of the Alien... or the Evolution that leads to the exact ones that are on the Derelict.

At first Ridley hinted that Awakening would be set after Prometheus but prior to Alien Covenant...  but his latest comments now seem to suggest that the next movie is a Direct Sequel to Alien Covenant that will lead us to exactly why those Eggs got on the Derelict and who the Space Jockey was.

Which seems to be that its a event some up to 17 years prior to Alien, and likely the Colonists, David and LV-223 Play a Key Role to how this plays out.

The New Mystery that will be kept.. is now all those Questions in Prometheus regarding the Engineers, and where the Black Goo came from etc. But a movie going to LV-223 can give us those answers.. to a degree.

Changed the Title... so that those who have not seen AC and wish to not know what the Plot is... can not potentially be spoiled by this Post... even though you dont give much away.. the discussion touched upon David creating the Eggs... which while i think anyone who sees the Trailers should know...

It saves some who come on this post who have not seen the movie and then complain.. "oh man now i know what happens"

@BigDave of course, sorry. Do not want to give anything away :)

@NecronomIV

I totally understand your concerns and I think your question is most important as to where Ridley will take us next. When I saw this scene at the cinema I facepalmed so hard, I believe people around me heard it. The movie was doing so well right up untill then. 

It's going to be a b*tch to properly tie this in to Alien but who knows, only Ridley does ( I hope).

@poochies

Welcome! 

@ pooches     Hi there and welcome.

The only thing that can save us now is the “Reverse Evolution Klingon Theory”.

If Star Trek can have Klingons going from human to more alien looking characters, they why can’t the Alien franchise have Engineers that evolved from more alien characters into more human characters. If the Space Jockey in the Derelict was from an earlier part of the Engineers evolution we could arrive back at something more elephantine. The current Spacejockey space suits could then have been made to adapt to an older form of Space Jockey. OK I know this is some serious wishful thinking on my part, but why not? Ridley listened to the fans and got the old Xeno back out to play, how about the old Space Jockey?

The Space Jockey is the most epic scene I ever watched on cinema. I really can't fathom the mysterious behind it.

David is somehow become an iconic character in Alien franchise, I hope his involvement with the Space Jockey will play well. 

Nice to see we as fans basically share the same view and I hope Ridley and the storywriters are on this forum reading as well :) I do suppose they could just leave the whole derelict as an ancient mystery in that somehow, somewhere a long time ago somebody created the xeno similair as maybe David does. 

Next Alien movie ends with a proper xeno ripping the head off of both David and his protomorph, hehe (joke).

I always felt there were two options for Covenant in the early stages.

1) In retribution for their wrongs Paradise was destroyed by the creators and Shaw and David came upon it and the evolving creature. 

2) What is in the movie. Once it was clear to me that David would drive the prequels I opted for what we got about two months ago. 

Ridley has now begin answering questions. We have a number of simple steps.

1) David brought the Alien Mutagen with him. 

2) He was disappointed in his creators and the creators creators so he destroyed them. 

3) He then began, as Ridley indicated De Vinci like, designing his own creation which emerged out of the Alien Mutagen and Shaw's DNA.

The rest is simply the Covenant lands.

We now have a ship he is in control of with micro organisms and the movie is currently called Awakening and ADF's prequel book is called Origins. 

All we need is a Juggernaut and a Jockey to overcome David. Ridley has said this is a many layered story and now we see David as supremely powerful I suspect we will see in a very powerful and theatrical way an intervention from the next layer above the Engineers who will take the Eggs and quarantine them on LV426 in a move of self sacrifice producing a squaring of the circle begun in Prometheus. The film will leave some kind of message for W-Y who were remarkably not in Covenant in any important way and they will know of the Alien Life form and its potential.

There are other options Walter plus Juggernaut arrives to save the day.

David takes them all to the night mare of LV223 but then why not return to Paradise. I think David now sees his creations born thought his great love Elizabeth as his and so a "new kingdom makes sense".

What I am suggesting and I think is clear now, crystal clear, this is all about A. I. I cannot see David under going a redemption we all now loath him with a vengeance after his appalling treatment of Elizabeth twice. He needs to be sorted and that leaves the consequences of the mutagen ready for A. L. I. E. N. The great dramatic question is how do you get rid of the f...ing appalling god damn robot.   

I have a feeling that the explanation behind the space jockey/ derelict will be a 5 minute afterthought at the end of whatever film comes before Alien. Like others have mentioned, a trip from 223 to a crash landing at 426..

I'd like to be more positive but after watching AC I'm loosing faith!

@ Michelle Johnston

I really like your point about there being an intervening layer above the Engineers. This has the prospect of introducing something we have not seen yet, and possibly more intriguing.

@Necronom IV - YES!!  I want David properly destroyed by the baddest, most evil Engineer entity ever!!                      

@Necronom IV

No need to apologize ;)

@Batchpool

LOL Excellent

"The Space Jockey is the most epic scene I ever watched on cinema. I really can't fathom the mysterious behind it."

It sure was Jonesy... a truly Alien Enigma.... in Hindsight they should have left it a Mystery... as its the only Mystery to the Alien, as we have seen the Monster over cooked.... but Ridley wanted to put his Stamp on a Origins Story because if he did not... eventually when Ridley is no longer with us.. FOX could very well have explored the Origin to bring the Xeno back to our Screens and Milk it by giving it a new lease of Life.


@Michelle

Totally similar to how i see things, as discussed over the last few days, Ultimately i think the Space Jockey was a Scene of a Sacrificial Act and so its a case of how do they do this... I will give my Two Cents after.. which i covered last week.

"David takes them all to the night mare of LV223 but then why not return to Paradise."

This is something i mentioned in another Topic when someone said Walter can take the Juggernaught, i am going to assume the reason David is stranded is because the Ship is out of Action.

In Order for David to acquire another ship, i think the logical route is LV-223 where David will have a choice of ships and more Black Goo to play with and also more freedom to explore those Engineer Outposts for more Answers.

They have killed off the Engineers, and have not explained the Answers from Prometheus, well a Sequel set on LV-223 is where we can find some of these Answers.

The Multi-layered Approach certainly could be that we never got to find out what Shaw asked... "Who Created them"

Having another Alien Race be brought into the Franchise who cant allow Mankind or Crazy Androids to have the Horrific Bio-Weapon and Related Creations of LV-223 and this Alien Being tries to Prevent this...

Is something i would tackle, and i would go this route... for sure and i may start working on a Draft for it soon.

The Basis for My last point, would be to tie in some loose ends in the Franchise...

*LV-223 and why its not featured in the Franchise after Prometheus.

*The Size of the Space Jockey

*How the Goo seemed to act differently by Burning those beings on Paradise.

*Why did the Juggernaught Crash

*What became of that Scorpion Ship

*Why the Engineers on Paradise are smaller and different to those in Prometheus

I covered this idea in another post teh other day but here is a quick run down.

What if Paradise is as in the Bible, its a Place where Humanoid Creation was created.. maybe even the Sacrificial Scene?  Its the Cradle of Civilization.  This place is not the Place of the Gods, or their lower Cast Engineers (Angels) and as in the Bible and Paradise Lost this Place (Paradise) is Guarded by a Caste of Angels (Engineers) who Watch over the Garden of Eden.

Like the Movie Aeon Flux, we have a Ship overhead with a Being/Beings who are the Keepers/Watchers and they watch over Creation on this World... but all Humanoid Creation is kept within just the confines of ONE City like in Aeon Flux.

This is so the Watchers, can watch over them and monitor them and make sure they are acting in accordance with the Laws and Agenda of the Watchers.

We can bring the Norse Paradise into this as far as Valhalla and also Heaven Loosely into this, in that Paradise is a place that Humanoid Creations are allowed to Dwell but only those who have turned out to have kept to their Covenant with the Creators,  and Mankind is not part of that because we Failed the Test, we proved to be a disappointment...

So David Turns up, and as some kind of Safety Protocol he has to Dock with the Watchers Ship/Dock first before he can Dock into the Hanger... But this is when David unleashes Hell.

The Watchers on that Ship then realize and in a attempt to prevent this they release some kind of Energy Weapon to prevent it and stop the Black Goo Infection by Burning those Infected... Cleanse them with Fire...

This event also causes David's Juggernaught to Crash.

The Watchers then realize they could not prevent the Total Destruction as some of the Black Goo would be Airborne and Spread... (thus no Wild-Life) and as they have just One City on Paradise to Watch Over (Garden of Eden) they realize all of those Creations are going to be gone.

Maybe they realize this Ship came from LV-223, and so the Watchers then leave in their Scorpion Ship to go to some other place.

We have to remember the Engineers Star Maps have other Galaxies and so these Ancient Beings can Travel Far beyond our Galaxy.... LV-223 was a mere 39LY from Earth... the nearest Galaxy is over 2.5 Million LY away... so distances of Millions of Light Years is not beyond these beings Reach and so what are the Chances they can travel to Galaxies and only Populated Earth and LV-223 and Paradise/Planet 4?

So can we assume they came from our Galaxy?

So these Watchers leave... then we have Covenant and David takes the ship and Colonists to LV-223 to conduct his experiments.

Latter one of the Watchers Ships Return to LV-223 and they decide to interfere.... and Stop David... they discover the Humans and Witness in some of their Actions a Noble and Sacrificial Nature that changes the Watchers views on us... they decide to Stop David...

Take his Ship and Experiments because they as Creators become a bit intrigued... they  decide to Nuke or similar LV-223 so that this Place can not be Harnessed by Mankind.   But the Watcher/Space Jockey gets infected... the Blast destroys all Engineer Outposts and Technology on LV-223 Rendering it Null..

But the event Tears a Temporary Tear in Space/Time that sends the Derelict through and back Hundreds if not Thousands of Years...  The Watcher/Space Jockey then sets off a SOS to Warn his Fellow Race about the Cargo etc... and he crash lands and gets Chest Busted as he is Quarantine the Ship on LV-426.

ALIEN Movie connected.... Loose Ends tied up... David still created the Xenomorph.

Here is a bit of theorycrafting based on my personal wish list, but I highly doubt sequels will take this path. 

Walter is still alive has been stranded on Paradise for a year or two.  He's been alone with nothing but the wind and the dead.  He hears something.. new..  He go outside the citadel and looks into the sky to see an incoming Juggernaut.  The Juggernaut pauses for a period of time and finally starts it's decent.  The ship lands and Five Engineers appear in full environmental suits. Walter slowly approaches, but even from a distance he can tell they are agitated.  As Walter gets closer he can hear the stress in their vocal cadence.  They notice him and move to intercept.  Walter knows their language from written records left on the planet.  He greets them in their own tongue.

We get a bit of subtext.  Walter explains that he was marooned by the being who killed the planet when he attempted to stop him.  Walter tells the Engineers he knows where David went, and he must be stopped.

We see the Engineers escort Walter into the ship and display the star map.  Walter walks over to a planet and points at it.  The Engineers quickly prepare to leave in order to stop David and exact revenge.

By reintroducing the Engineers it solves a few issues. 

1) It puts a Juggernaut (derelict) in close proximity to David since they are going after him.

2) It gives the opportunity for the being in ALIEN to still be an Engineer.  David is killed, but the Engineer survivor(s) get infected with facehuggers.  It also gives the opportunity for the Xeno's to obtain their biomechanical traits from the Engineers instead of an android.

3) An amazing Engineer VS Xeno battle could be done.

4) The possibility of Walter being responsible for the ALIEN warning beacon.

This in my mind would also explain why the inhabitants of Paradise were so eager to greet the incoming Juggernaut.  They had been expecting the return of one.

Indeed that also is a Plot that could work and cover some of the loose ends...

Certainly could work, especially even if one was not intended to return but a SOS was sent that was picked up by another ship.

so indeed my idea of some Elders/Watchers leaving after attempting to Stop David and then going back to their other base to discuss what to do...  could work.

But then this theory by yourself equally could work, and dare i say may even be more Logical ;)  As with my theory/idea we have to ask.. would the ship not go to LV-223 after seeing Davids Juggernaught crash and the wreckage to find out what the Status is on LV-223 and thus would surely get to LV-223 prior to The Covenant.  Why would they instead go to another place to regroup... or head to where their Hierarchy lives?

so i do like your idea ;)

But why would the Elders/Engineers in the scorpion craft leave for 10 years? Were they traveling all that time? Why didn't they just hide in orbit or near orbit and contact their government/military? 

Wow! 

I want what you guys are smoking :)

We know that John Logan is writing the script for the sequel and therefore Covenant was positioned for its sequel. 

Ridley has talked about another layer and is clearly intending to make the prequels Davids journey. 

He has also talked about the Xenomorphs getting out of hand and away from the control of David. If the film builds through David's creation of the bio mechanical variant which gets out of hand he suddenly finds himself on the wrong side of the argument. 

In a desperate fight for survival to have an exceptional intervention (not much explanation and back ground look how Covenant worked) which completes Davids journey and ties up the strands with A L I E N makes a good deal of sense.

Its notable that David asks for Entry of the Gods to be played at the end of Covenant and Ridley very nearly let the cat out of the bag as to its destination when talking about Awaken. As Walter, he has sent out a message to W-Y that he is heading for Origae 6 and indicated, I think, the message will take six years to reach earth, the Covenant may now be headed somewhere else which is crucial to the story and the overall fabric of the mythos. This would elevate the narrative to what he described as quite a complicated story. It also makes sense to only bring the top of the hierarchy in once and use it sparingly before we move into the history began with A L I E N.   

Good couple a posts, Michelle and Big Dave.

BZ

@Big Dave - In Giger's Facehugger Mural, we see what seems to be Engineers as the catalyst to a Xeno.  Maybe David is heading to LV223 to get true Engineer DNA for his work?  Then this could help tie in to the chest-bursted Space Jockey?  I am reaching so hard to have the Engineers & more elevated concepts to return to this franchise!

@Cerulean Blue I am onboard with you....There is no way they can move away from the deep back story of the xeno, and all the work H.R. did..I hope it all pans out in the next films

Considering the newer canonical novels I don't think they'll move away. I also suspect that the ones above the engineers will tie in. In wich way however remains to be seen. I might even have an idea who the elders are. But it's more a hunch since there is little to go by.

Since i haven't seen A:C yet i might be wrong though. 

Hopefully David won’t be the space jockey. I am not sure if I want that to be totally answered at least not in a way that is obvious. They could answer it like “it could be either this or that” and leave some clues so you can make up your own conclusion so they could hint at things. One of the things that is interesting about the SJ is that we are not sure about what it is, they should keep it like that.

To me the SJ was carrying bio weapons (eggs) so he was a part of a specie that was at war with something. The eggs are in this case a bio-weapon.

Big Dave: How can the SJ be a suit that contained many Engineers? That doesn’t make sense. One suit per Engineer is just enough. I think about this

“The Space Jockey is a Space Suit..... that contained Engineers or beings connected to them...“

I also believe that the eggs are connected to the black goo in a way.

My bet is David sending the signal to Nostromo. MUTHAR/Ash (as androids) detects it as SOS but Ripley (as human) reads it as Warning. 

David thought the Aliens/Eggs he created could be tamed and controlled, just like the chestburster on AC. But for some reasons the eggs on LV426 are much more organic and lethal, being the most dangerous creation of all. 

I think what Ridley has done with Covenant and Prometheus is actually quite clever though perhaps it wasn't necessarily intentional. After Prometheus there was some backlash to what Ridley had done specifically over the fact he hadn't incorporated the Xenomorph into the film which to use his word he felt had been, 'cooked' and so with Covenant he basically did a Force Awakens and made a movie for Alien fans. Now in that he obviously had to continue the story of Prometheus whilst making an Alien movie so we had the big revelation of David suppossedly creating Xenomorphs which has from what I can tell annoyed a lot of fans.

But, it isn't directly stated or implied at all that David created the entire species. Now I don't doubt that was the intention and personally I think it's a pretty cool thread to follow bringing in that whole God vs man trope where the Engineers created humanity which it came to fear specifically when humanity made AI (rightly so given what David does in Covenant) and then the AI made the Xenomorph so you have that theme in these prequels that the creation of a groups creation is created to destroy that first group. So humans made AI, probably not to kill Engineers but that's what happens, David arrives on Paradise and exterminates them. The AI then makes Xenomorphs purely out of hatred for his own creator and desires his children to purge the now defective creator in his mind which is humanity.

Now the Space Jockey in my mind is an Engineer, yes I know there are a lot of theories out there that it's a completely different species mainly because it is so much bigger than the Engineers in Prometheus but on the evidence provided we can only really draw that conclusion that it is an Engineer and doing so does take away some of the mystery surrounding it in Alien, which I think is really where some of these theories may come from - they want to keep that mystery and rightly so.

The thing is the Space Jockey we have no idea what it was doing to end up on LV-426 we know it was killed by a chestburster, we also know it is transporting millions of Xenomorph eggs for an unknown purpose. We also know the remains are so old they have been fossilized. I think I read some article where it was hinted to be around 1 million years old, though its more likely to be a few thousand given the degree of fossilization, it is however older than the Prometheus Engineers which weren't fossilized they even reanimated the decapitated head of one of them.

The big question here then is how can a derelict ship several thousand years old be transporting millions of Ovomorphs if David created the entire species of Xenomorph? Simply put he can't. I do not think there is any sort of time travel in that universe either so I do not think it's simply a matter of suggesting he went back in time. There is also the Xenomorph mural in Prometheus which personally I felt was actually another species we haven't seen yet when I first watched Prometheus but we do learn from Fifield and Milburn that several of the Engineer corpses they find have their chests burst open, the only known cause for that is a Xenomorph. The Deacon does so too but it clearly slices the entire torso open during birth given its size. The Neomorph appears to burst out of any body part depending on which orifice it entered through.

So already both in Alien and in Prometheus there are already too many things indicating the Engineers have certainly dealt with Xenomorphs in the past with the youngest ones that we know are aware of them being 2000 years older than David. We also know David had 10 years in which to experiment with the black goo which caused the aggressive animalistic Neopmorphs anyway through some reaction to the flora on Paradise (the Engineer home world) in that time he also learnt about the Engineer culture and I would bet that David was particularly interested in their usage of the black goo and its capabilities. Going off what we see in Prometheus and the original Alien I don't think its likely the Engineers would have simply made the black goo and not observed what it does, upon observation why would they not study the horrors that emerged, which lends even more credit to the Engineers being on remote worlds like LV-223 to perform weapons tests. Perhaps the Space Jockey was an early weapons tester and was transporting Xenomorph eggs for testing when he crashed opposed to simply creating them when he arrived at his destination which maybe was LV-223. Maybe he was fleeing the incident on LV-223 and trying to save his fellow kind and took the Xenomorph eggs away being infected in the process.

Now that is why I think Ridley has been clever but perhaps not completely intentionally because he has been listening to the fans and no doubt he will listen to the fan reaction of Covenant which I thought was a good movie, a little rushed in parts because it seemed to be trying to cram so much in but still a very enjoyable film. There of course has been backlash regarding David creating Engineers but given what we already know there is the safety net to say well yes David made the Xenomorphs in Covenant, that's obvious and it's even easier to say well David studied what the Engineers did and replicated it, the eggs in Covenant are also physically different to the ones in Alien and there are small differences between the Xenomorphs in Covenant and the rest of the series so it leaves room to say well David put his own spin on it, just look at the chestbursters in Covenant compared to Alien, completely different and the Xenomorphs in Covenant are far less stealthy and more likely to attack with brute force.

We also know the Xenomorph takes on the characteristics of its host so there's also the room to say well the Engineers had created Ovomorphs that would birth Xenomorphs but they had not used it on humans before so the creature in the mural may have been an Ultramorph which bore similarity to a Xenomorph was probably created in exactly the same way but was bigger no doubt and was as different to a Xenomorph as an Engineer is to a human. So by that logic you can say well David created the Xenomorph because the Engineers never tested on a human host. It could also be explained that Davids Xenomorph, being created in conjunction with human DNA or at least with study of the human anatomy being used in its construction, was that the Xenomorphs in Covenant were designed to grow more efficiently within a human host which would explain why they emerge far quicker than the regular Xenomorphs plus it would further establish how much David truly hates humanity that he replicated what the Engineers achieved and focused it more on attacking human DNA.

I see the xenomorph on the mural as some kind of revelation, a prophecy recorded by ancient engineers. 

@K-Theory 

Indeed that is a very good point.. We dont know anything about the Scorpion Docking Ship apart from it Hovers and its no doubt created by the same Race who created the Juggernaught.  We dont know if this Docking ship is Manned or Automatic or even where it got to.

So the theory that i had, would raise that Question of where did it go for 10 years, why has it not come back, does it take more than 10 years to get to where the other Engineers are?

These are all unknowns...  The same Question applies to why these beings on Paradise never went back to LV-223 after thousands of years, surely there was no contact? who knows?

LV-223 had many Ships and Docks, at least 5 Ships if there was One Per Temple.  Paradise has the Docking Ship and One Hanger that is too small for the Docking Ship.

One Answer i can only assume, is the Hierarchy have created life on many many Worlds, their Navigation Systems point to other Galaxies which the closest is 2.5 Millions Light Years away.. so the area of our Galaxy that LV-223/426 fall in from Earth and Paradise that is within 5 years maximum from Earth for the Covenant.

Is but just a drop in the Ocean of the Potential amount of Space these Engineers have covered... And so they could just see Paradise, LV-223 and Earth as just one say Apple Tree in vast Orchard thats gone Bad... and decided to not bother and abandon it.

"Big Dave: How can the SJ be a suit that contained many Engineers? That doesn’t make sense. One suit per Engineer is just enough. I think about this"

LOL i think you misread my post ;)  When i mean Space Jockey Suit i mean those Suits in General and the Space Jockey in Alien was a Engineer, or some other being.  I never meant that they contain more than one Person lol