I can't believe we all missed it. (Spoilers)

@Fuquan now that is the scariest story I've heard in a while. Don't need that kind of stress in my life! Then again... I'm a male. Doesn't matter with arcturians, though.

Why would he take pictures, as you would assume he has a photographic memory? And what did he take the pictures with? no other than me question things like that?

@chris he drew them. They aren't photographs

@Phallic Jaw it's all open to interpretation. There was just this AHA moment that my wife got too when she looked at the pictures. The drawings could just be David's fevered dreams, but that wouldn't fit with most of the other drawings. He also did "cut away" drawings on other things where he conceptualized the layers.

It's all inference and no hard confirmation, but I had to express it.

Myriddin365, I wondered the same thing when I saw the pictures.  Are they just David's thoughts put on paper, or were they actual pictures of different experiments?  There was no picture of her with the open chest/abdominal cavity and "crown", yet that is how her physical body is shown.

Time will tell, hopefully.

There was a picture of her being eviscerated almost methodically, but no picture of the final product, yes. The rest of David's drawings we're observation or explanation from what I saw. It would stand to reason that these were as well. 

It's some creepy shit either way.

Hmm - cloned Shaw?  i guess there is Canon for that as it was done to Ripley.  That might be a way to save this train wreck if she were to team up with Walter to set things straight. Might also explain the multiple egg pods.  But I doubt it will happen.

Just seen it. Meine Fresse... Rarely watched a movie that was so hard to make sense of... Can't even say if I like it or not...

As for the pictures, maybe they're shown in the wrong order time-wise. The "missing jaw" was the lowest in the stack and therefore the oldest? It further looked more realistic. The left eye appears to be bruised. Might just be an impression though.

no way in a life time that Shaw survived and when Daniels asks David he tells her that he did it and she is next.

This is part of science, just look at World Wars. Same principle and to achieve perfection you have to do grotesque things. I doubt a Human or Engineer could even go so far.

But David is clearly insane and you even see it when Walter and David have the talk about changing one tune in a symphony and the whole picture is distorted, meaning his creation.

The first time I saw it, it didn't click for me either.  It hit me on my way home from the second viewing.

I also got the impression that he did the experimenting after her death.  I figured it was something probably more fleshed out in scenes that were cut.

And yes, he told Danny that he was going to do to her what he did to Shaw and the possibility exists that he didn't kill Shaw directly, but maybe his actions led to her demise.

There was a point where quite a few folks had the opinion that he actually loved Shaw, and were shot down/chastised because he couldn't feel emotions and that portion (him feeling emotions) was pretty much torn apart in this movie.

At this point with the plot holes in the prequels and retconning going on that we really can't rule anything out.

He thought humans were asshats, came to learn about the engineers and more than likely thought they were asshats as well.  He loved Shaw - this could all be a way of destroying the humans and giving Shaw the children she couldn't have.  Children that by proxy were also "his" so to speak.

Does anyone have concrete evidence of how/why the ship crashed after the bombing?  I know Ridley and Fass have said a lot in interviews that haven't 100% panned out/made sense, but it was noted in more than one interview, by both of them that Shaw and David lived there together for a time.  Hell, David could have bombed the hell out of the folks on that planetoid on their way out. 

There is seriously so much in the air and as directions have changed so much, it's really hard to pinpoint the details of what exactly is going on.  I am not going to rule anything out at this point and I am sure others feel the same way.