Questions and Answers

Wow! What a fantastic thread. I also hope Awakening would provide more visuals of the engineers. Not a baked city of twisted faceless corpses, but a living engineer who is unequivocally a space traveler. It seems their motivations could be 'humanish’ in nature. So we are pulled into thinking they are just like us. Someone or something which could be reasoned with. But then paired with those aspects so totally unlike us, hinted and inferred which make engineers mysterious, and captivating. I am torn. I want a backstory, because humans are innately curious. But honestly, to do the engineer and a possible grandparent race a sufficient backstory to do that story justice...would be way beyond the scope of one film. So what tiny morsels of backstory would be most mystery inducing? What would create the highest impact? In a subtle and elegantly executed way. The most expansive possible history finally revealed in a brief cathartic few scenes.

That is what I wonder. What can be imagined? An immense structure on an ancient Earth? A conversation between an engineer and something...else? A bit of verbal exposition by David or a human character? I don’t know what it would be. But I am fairly sure that type of scene would be my favorite. It could be the most memorable scene in the whole film. 

IRaptus

Ridley Scott said the focus will be on AI.

Well , the engineers from LV 223 sure looked more artificial than those from planet 4 and the engineer head found in Prometheus reminded me of the head of Bishop in Alien 3. So it is not an impossible theory. And if they are AI and the Deacon was born from one of them, David should be more careful with the little facehuggers. By the way, didn't he swallowed 3 embryos in the novelization? In the film he only regurgitated 2.

BigDave

It's kind of hard to imagine David loading all those eggs. He is like a God now and gods don't do physical work.  

Another possibility that came to my mind is a parallel between the Juggernaut and the Covenant, the thousands of  eggs being the alien colonists looking for a hospitable new planet. In this case the eggs would be loaded by the alien race itself. Somehow the SJ did not follow the rules and looked into the hold. Curiosity killed the cat.

That's one of the things I like about Ridley Scott: nothing is impossible. 

This is the interesting thing, because they can still change things and what ever the True Meaning, Purpose and Agenda for the Engineers can be changed, maybe even a Curve-Ball thrown out?

The Engineers.... well those on LV-223 could indeed be different to those on Planet 4, these Albino Larger Engineers could be a Version that had Evolved themselves to be this way, they could even be Created Clones created much like Weyland had done with the Creation of David... but the Engineers are not Synthetic and so would be more like Replicants in this case.

I think we may have to accept that David created the Xenomorph, but as we saw in AC the various experiments David conducted and the various outcomes of the Black Goo in Prometheus... never mind the Concept works or how Fire and Stone explored the Black Goo...  The Xenomorph is just One Application of the Black Goo (well Engineered result of it)..   So this still means potential for other applications of the Black Goo and why and where did this stuff come from.

The Black Goo say could be like Gunpowder.... and so the Xenomorph could merely be just like the Shotgun Cartridge, and Fire-works another application.   I do wonder if the whole History of where the Black Goo was obtained/created will now be a Mystery that RS/FOX will attempt to keep.

We cant be sure, what they will change as it appears they constantly change and evolve elements of the Franchise as far as Plots and History etc.   We cant rule out them doing a U-TURN as far as David Creating the Xenomorphs on the Derelict... because FOX/RS have changed their minds and ideas quite a lot over the years.

Question:

Why did the cartidges look like cartidges in Prometheus, but looked liked egg sacs in Alien? Isn't it the same ship? And in Alien the crew sees an Engineer in the saddle of the alien ship, but dead from a hole in his chest. But in Prometheus, that Engineer was supposedly the only live one and he escaped the crash of his ship (which I assume is the one discovered in Alien years later) and he was killed by the alien birthed by the crew member in their ship. No?

It’s not the same ship. It’s not even the same world. The cartridges in Prometheus are weapons of mass destruction. The eggs in Alien are generally believed to be laid by a Queen, although eggs may also be created through bodily transformation of an infected host.

As for the original question, something I learned recently which is clearly an unambiguous fact is that Lambert is transgender! Read the wall screen notes carefully in Ripley’s court martial and you will find that she was gender reassigned at birth. Therein lies a mystery, though: why?

Maybe you saw this: https://lwlies.com/articles/alien-gender-politics-ellen-ripley-joan-lambert/

I hope you don't mind me asking questons, but I saw the first movied in 1979 and no one else I knew wanted to. I have been hooked ever since and my wife is about to divorce me. The first thiing that struck me about the movie was that the surper structure looked very female, the mother ship was called Mother, and all the men got killed. And the eggs, gestation in human host, etc.

So like others I was confused by Prometheus and Covenant. Even in those the female is the one who survives after all the men die (until David gets his way)-who is a "male" artificial.

Re: Engineers. They look like the crowd that got infected by David from the ship with the pathogen. So they are so called Gods because of the large stone sculptures around? Mad them in his image?

Re: Aliens. I know it was written before Prometheus, but why didn't the staff grilling Ripley even know about the aliens? Their founder just got lost in space? "In over 400 recorded worlds" and they didnt have Prometheus in that? No messages transmitted back to the company from the disaster?

Thanks

The large stone sculptures in Prometheus/Covenant are thought to be representations of Engineer Elders. Some might call them gods, but others believe that the true gods (creators of the Engineers) have yet to be seen.

Aliens is set 86 years after the events of Prometheus, so Weyland was long dead. Knowledge of the xenomorph was a tightly controlled secret in the days of Prometheus. So nobody knew about it in Ripley's court martial. Burke had a hunch Ripley was telling the truth, which is why he sent a team to check out the derelict. Everyone else in the court martial thought Ripley was crazy, or they just didn't care.

Space is BIG. 400 surveyed worlds is nothing in the vastness of space.

Thanks!

Covenant opens with a young Weyland and David. Covenant then starts with the ship and Walter. Ultimately rescued by David on the planet he crashed on from Prometheus. The opening is a nod to Prometheus, showing us David's origin, yes? Not trying to be too literal, just curious as to why it was not a part of Prometheus or an opening to it? The confusion is the scene with David in Covenant goes right into the film with Walter....

Prometheus had to open somewhere, and what better place than somewhere millions of years ago?

The Covenant opening was a gentle teaser to let us know Weyland had his plans in mind decades before his trip to meet his maker. It also gave us the opportunity to see that the utterly ruthless David endured deep resentment of slavery from his earliest moments.