Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-review by Professor Popinjay

SPOILERS! But not for Romulus… if I ever get to it.

Now we come to Prometheus, chronologically taking place long before Alien. Pretty sure I had to sneak and watch this on my laptop in a hole somewhere to keep from traumatizing the kids and triggering their mother. There were alot of people who did not realize this was an Alien film. Ridley Scott, who finally got back into the directors chair on this one, said he regretted not calling it Alien: Prometheus, but I kind of agree with the decision not to. This is meant to be an origin film for the Xenomorphs and as such you don’t see anything remotely resembling one for a long time. To call it Alien: Prometheus would have created an unfair expectation.

Prometheus answered a few of the questions left hanging by the first film but it also opened up a whole bag of new questions. We learn the giant humanoid in the juggernaut pilot seat in the first film was an Engineer, a giant race who colonized not through digging their heels into planets and just trying to survive but rather they add their dna to the natural evolution of life already on each planet by drinking a delicious black goo. Where does the black goo come from? Great question!

Prometheus also introduced an elderly Mr. Weyland himself, founder of the infamous Weyland-Yutani company, there to find a key to longevity. No big deal.

My takeaway from Prometheus was this: The Engineers are basically responsible for spreading life across the universe, including progenerating the humans of earth, by way of the black goo that is highly mutagenic mixed with their own dna. David, an android who works for the infamous Weyland-Yutani company, has taken this black goo and slipped it into a crew member’s meatball sub. Thus we have our perverted parallel to the Prometheus story in Greek mythology: We have the Titan (Android David) who took fire (black goo) from the gods (The Engineers) and gave it to humans (A dude named Halloway). I assume this was not how the black goo was meant to be used and when Holloway, handsome and rugged, impergnates a female human shipmate (Elizabeth Shaw) she gives birth a few days later to a beautiful bouncing baby super-facehugger which instantly grows to the size of a Buick LeSabre. If Holloway hadn’t been roasted to death by flamethrower, I’m sure his vest buttons would just be bursting with pride. (Hmmm, perhaps not the best choice of phrasing there.) The Engineers seem to know about this kind of thing happening as they have murals in their ruins depicting face-huggers and something that looks curiously close to a xenomorph. This multi-legged beasty gets ahold of an Engineer and impergnates it with what bursts out and reveals itself as a sort of Proto-Xenomorph complete with top hat and cane, singing “Hello, Ma Baby!”. No wait, that was the parody in 1987’s Spaceballs. Sorry, I get mixed up.

Still following? Suddenly the biological gobbledygook has an explanation. This black goo makes things evolve and adapt rapidly and, when misused, it generates monstrous results.

So Android David thought all that was just cool as shit! And can’t wait to start doing all sorts of weird godless experiments with the black goo, and eggs, and humans or any other being he can get ahold of. Thus we come to Alien Covenant.

In Covenant we learn Android David was not just a happy helpy robo boy but was in fact a direct link to Elon Musk, I mEaN mR. wEyLaNd, and was tasked with finding the answer to life, the universe and everything. The answer, David decided, was to use the black goo to reverse engineer resilient infinitely adaptable perpetually reproducing psychopathic kill-monsters with acid for blood. Everyone needs a hobby, I guess.

Thus we have this interesting and ironic evolution: The Engineers create us, we create androids, an android prefects the Xenomorphs, the Xenomorphs breed like scary H.R. Giger rabbits and gradually all life is assimilated into the indomitable xenomorph biology. Each player along this path is attempting to play God and manifest their own convoluted definition of sacrifice, rebirth, creation, a legacy, survival, and even eternal life.

This is my educated conjecture based on what I’ve been able to contrive from deleted scenes and supplementary materials. There are other theories just as plausible.

Permit me to digress a bit here. To avoid a major plot hole we could assume one of three things: Either Android David goes back to the original Engineer Juggernaut and leaves a bunch of his eggs on it or a Queen who lays the eggs to later be found by the crew of the Nostromo in Alien OR The Engineers had a bunch of eggs already for wiping out the humans of earth because humans became too violent (deleted scenes from Prometheus hint at this and Ridley Scott himself attests to this) OR the original Engineer crew of the Juggernaut got morphed into eggs (a process hinted at in a deleted scene from Alien which personally I found kind of silly). Unfortunately Ridley Scott has a tendency to film an explanation for things and then cut out said explanation resulting in a more mysterious movie about which nerds on the internet may write excessively verbose dissertations.

Also, how the heck did the Engineer get back to the juggernaut pilot seat after he clearly died on the Prometheus ship? Well, here we have the result of another director getting involved and making changes that lead to continuity problems. This means the story gets retconned so the Engineer juggernaut in Prometheus is no longer the same Engineer Juggernaut found by the crew of the Nostromo. Who cares!?! Ridley Scott’s original intention was for it to be the same Engineer juggernaut ship in both films so THAT’s what it is. I’ll just chalk it up to Grandpa’s poor memory and how all his stories change details every time he tells ‘em.

It’s speculated the answers to these questions might have come with Scott’s fourth Alien project titled Alien: Awakening but sadly that project was canceled and Romulus would take the story in a different direction. I am less optimistic as I am certain, in true Ridley Scott fashion, we might have been given a few answers but also a bunch of new situations that just make it more complicated. He’s such a rascal!

(To be concluded in part 3 or 3)