Explain Alien Covenant to me!

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I feel like if the xenomorphs are that recent, it kinda diminishes them. Maybe that's just me.

It's not just you. Fortunately, it doesn't makes sense that they are, given the mural in Prometheus.

 

[pukunui]

In Alien: Romulus, we are explicitly told how Weyland-Yutani learned about the xenomorph that the Nostromo encountered. They may have known about them before that (in the non-AVP fork of the timeline) but there's no evidence to believe that at the moment.

Oh OK. I haven’t seen Romulus yet.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

But I thought it was clear that David was doing experimental bioengineering and created the xenomorphs (eventually after a whole string of 'specimens') in that cave of his? He said he'd created the 'perfect organism'.

David's an unreliable narrator. He may believe he created the xenomorphs and be wrong, or he may be intentionally lying. (He freely lies about Shaw's fate, for instance.)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Really? I struggle to get on board with that as an explanation.

That was always my assumption.

However, there is a canon issue—Eidkey Scott only considers his movies canon. He doesn’t even consider Aliens to be canon—no Queen. He didn’t write Covenant with AvP in mind.

I don't think many people consider AVP to be canon.

But if he doesn't believe in alien queens, he somehow missed that there's a big one on the wall in Prometheus.

We can make up our own head canon to say David was just lying, but I don’t personally find that satisfying.

I think the most likely answer is that David didn't realize just how programmed the black goo is to create something like a xenomorph. He "created" them in the same way that a gardener "creates" a new form of life by getting seeds in the mail and planting them in what turns out to be optimal growing conditions. (Which still makes him a good gardener, just not someone creating new forms of life.)

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I’ve mentioned this idea before in a different thread. The mural seen in Prometheus represents the perfect life form, and the engineer’s god. The engineer set out to create their god by creating the black goo, and creating the human race for them to grow in.

Whist they waited for humans to evolve the engineers had a civil war, with one faction seeking to prevent the creation of god by destroying humanity. Mostly, they destroyed each other.

The predators and David have just been playing with the engineers build-a-god toolkit.

It’s possible humans haven’t evolved far enough for the xeno to be perfect. When it does the xeno will be super-intelligent as well as just deadly, and destroy all other life in the galaxy.

So maybe David is onto something after all…

 

[Paul Farquhar]

On the Alien cut scene: The fastest way the xenos can reproduce is with a queen. However, in the absence of a queen they can secrete the black goo, which can rewrite the genetic code of an infected organism to turn it into a queen egg. This had already happened off screen in Aliens.

 

[Haiku Elvis]

I just re-read my old Dark Horse Aliens comics and pretend everything movie related after Aliens was all just a dream.,

 

[briggart]

I just re-read my old Dark Horse Aliens comics and pretend everything movie related after Aliens was all just a dream.,

 

[Epic Meepo]

I think the most likely answer is that David didn't realize just how programmed the black goo is to create something like a xenomorph. He "created" them in the same way that a gardener "creates" a new form of life by getting seeds in the mail and planting them in what turns out to be optimal growing conditions. (Which still makes him a good gardener, just not someone creating new forms of life.)

You explained my point much better than I did. David is trying to claim credit for creating a life form someone else created for him. He's like someone taking an existing painting, running it through a couple filters, and claiming he's "created" a new painting.

Although I suppose one could argue David created his Xenomorphs in the same way a prompt engineer creates longer text with ChatGPT. In this analogy, incubating aliens is prompt engineering and the black goo is ChatGPT.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

On the Alien cut scene: The fastest way the xenos can reproduce is with a queen. However, in the absence of a queen they can secrete the black goo, which can rewrite the genetic code of an infected organism to turn it into a queen egg. This had already happened off screen in Aliens.

I believe bees and ants do something similar, although with a different color scheme.