While Alien: Covenant resolved some of the questions we had after watching Prometheus, it threw up plenty of its own. Here are the ones we're still thinking about long after leaving the cinema.
1. Are the Engineers Really Dead?
At the end of Prometheus, David promises to take Elizabeth to the Engineers’ homeworld. But upon arrival, he proceeds to eradicate our creators, dropping thousands of canisters of black goo on them.
David acts like he’s eradicated an entire species, but are we supposed to believe this relatively small city is the full extent of such an advanced civilisation?
I mean, this is a species capable of intergalactic travel, and seeding life across the universe. They were, effectively, our gods.
Is this really the end of the Engineers in this story? Shaw went in search of answers – why did they want to destroy us, their creation? If David really has wiped them out, we might never know the answer to Prometheus’ biggest question.
2. Why Is David Creating the Xenomorphs?
Covenant reveals that David is the designer behind the xenomorph.
He regards it as his masterpiece. But why is he doing this? Through the events of Prometheus and his decade-long isolation on the Engineer’s planet, David has clearly come to regard himself as a superior being, not only to his creator, Peter Weyland, but also to the race that created him, the Engineers.
Through his experiments with the black goo, David is composing a symphony with DNA. Becoming a new god. When asked what he believes in, he replies, “Creation.”
But still, alone on a planet, it’s unclear what he hopes to achieve? What’s his goal?
Perhaps it’s simply boredom. Or an aesthetic pursuit: creation for creation’s sake. He can’t reasonably expect a suitable host is just going arrive. Even Ridley Scott told us it was pure chance the Covenant received Shaw's message.
So maybe it is as simple as idle hands being the devil’s workshop.
But towards the end of the movie there’s a suggestion that David’s programming is unraveling. After all, for such an accomplished and cultured being, it seems strange that he’s confusing Shelley with Byron. It’s a line that definitely foreshadows David’s creation spiraling out of control in future movies.
3. What About the Alien Queen?
If David created the facehugger eggs, which are capable of creating something resembling the xenomorph from the original Alien, it’s really unclear where the Queen Alien fits into all of this.
There doesn’t appear to be a trace of a Queen within David’s workshop. His experiments seem to have led him towards the facehugger.
The Queen Alien was created by James Cameron and Stan Winston to up the ante in the sequel Aliens, without Ridley Scott and H.R. Giger’s involvement. It’s possible he’s ignoring it, which seems strange for such as established and popular part of alien’s lore. (Line on Giger's ORIGINAL Design.)
Or perhaps it’ll be explained as an evolution of David’s original design once the species takes control of its own life-cycle. But right now, we have no idea.
4. What about the Eggs on LV-426?
After watching Covenant, the discovery made by the crew of the Nostromo on LV-426 becomes no less of a mystery. If anything, it unearths more questions.
If it's to fit with the events of the original movie, within the next twenty years or so, another one of the Engineers ships has to crash onto a planet carrying thousands of David’s recently-created facehuggers. (Unless time travel is introduced to make matters even more convoluted.)
Despite his communication at the end of Covenant, David probably isn’t taking the colonists to Origae-6.
Now this is just idle speculation, but what if David wants to wipe out humanity, just as he’s done to the engineers? He clearly regards himself as the superior being now at work in the universe. To do so, he’d need a more sophisticated ship, a war-like vessel, and the means to multiply his deadly creation.
It seems perfectly logical he would return to LV-223, the planet where the events of Prometheus take place.
He knows it functioned as a military base for the Engineers; there are likely more spacecraft – superior to the Covenant – buried beneath the surface and additional black goo to experiment with.
Perhaps David uses the materials here on the remaining colonists aboard the Covenant, refining his design even further, before placing a biological arsenal into one of the Engineer's ships and heading to earth to meet his makers. Furthermore, it puts us closer to LV-426.
This ties up lots of loose ends, except...
5. Who’s the Space Jockey on LV-426?
If David has successfully wiped out the Engineers, who’s flying the ship? Who’s that in the Engineer flight suit with a chestburster wound?
In the original movie, Dallas says it looks fossilised, but he’s probably referring to what we now know to be the design of the flight suit. We’ve seen Elizabeth flying the ship without wearing one of these suits. Are the Engineers not really dead? Even though facehuggers have so far ignored inorganic life forms, is it possible this might even be David?
Bear with me on that one. That theory hinges on this next one...
6. Why Doesn’t the Xenomorph Look Like the Original?
This leads on nicely to the final big question. Why doesn’t David’s xenomorph look like the one in the original movie?
The eggs are much bigger, the chestburster looks totally different, and when fully grown a lot of the biomechanical details are missing. The xenomorph in Covenant is much more organic and smooth in appearance. It’s close, but what if David’s design is yet to be perfected? What if David figures out a way to make the black goo react with inorganic matter, incorporating himself into his own creation?
It would certainly mirror the Engineer’s act of sacrifice at the beginning of Prometheus, and explain the origin of those mechanical elements.
Daniel is IGN's UK Managing Editor, and is about to put on some Wagner. You can be part of the world's most embarrassing cult by following him on IGN and Twitter.
