Alien: Covenant promised to explore the mysterious and goopy lineage of the xenomorph species
that we all know and love.
But in many cases, it just left the entire Alien franchise open to even more questions.
Let's burrow into Covenant, stick our ovipositors down its throat, and see how many answers
are still waiting to hatch.
And, of course, spoilers are hatching beyond this point.
So cover your face, okay?
Who are the Engineers?
More than anything else, Covenant needed to explain just what the heck its prequel Prometheus
was all about.
Prometheus introduced us to the Engineers, an alien race who inexplicably started life
on Earth.
We don't know exactly why, and that's what the crew of the Prometheus sets out to discover.
"What we hope to achieve, was to meet our makers—to get answers.
Why they even made us in the first place."
However, once the android David actually finds the Engineers and all of the answers are within
reach… he slimes them.
An entire city of Engineers is destroyed by David's stock of evil black goo.
We never learn who the Engineers are, why they do what they do, or where they came from.
And thanks to David, we may never know.
Why did David kill the Engineers?
The motivations of the Covenant's human crew are pretty straightforward: just don't die.
However, the Alien franchise's androids tend to be a little harder to read, and none are
more confusing than David.
It becomes clear in both Prometheus and the introduction to Covenant that David sees himself
as superior to humans, and even expresses the bizarre idea that all creations want to
kill their creators.
"Kill all humans, must kill all humans."
Sure, you might be mad at mom for not letting you borrow the car on a school night, but
that's pretty much the extent of matricidal rage that most people reach.
So why exactly does David wipe out the Engineers?
It's possible that, as mankind's implied creators, David is just taking his murder plot one step
deeper into his ancestry, but there isn't a whole lot of meaning there.
And he definitely doesn't do it to protect Earth from the Engineers.
So what's the deal?
What did the goo do?
When we meet David again in Covenant, he leads the crew into the derelict city of the Engineers,
through masses of their dead bodies.
Of course, they're all dead thanks to David's goo.
But what exactly did this goo do?
As far as anyone can tell, it mutates any living animal it comes into contact with,
but we never find out what it did to the Engineers.
If the goo did what goo usually does, the entire Engineer planet would be swarming with
xenomorphs.
So where did all of those potential xenomorphs end up after ten years?
What happened in the five minutes after the goo drop?
Why was the Engineers' planet lifeless?
The planet that the Covenant lands on is ideal for life, but inexplicably, the crew can't
seem to find any.
No birds, no bugs, just silence.
As David tells his guests, the virus he dispersed was made to seek out hosts, so all of the
meat on the planet became an immediate target as soon as he dropped his payload.
But none of the 'morphs that would have resulted from his attack seem to still be around.
Nothing is.
Ultimately, trying to comprehend what goo can and cannot do is a job best left for Ridley
Scott's pulsating nightmares.
But that mysterious decade where David was left to his own messed-up devices leaves too
many mysteries for the continuity-concerned.
For now, let's just say it was Predators.
What's up with those spores?
The crew of the Covenant gets their first taste of alien madness when a couple of dinguses
brush against some plants, suck in some alien dust, and after a little while, have monsters
bursting out of their giblets.
It's basic science.
Except human DNA and Engineer DNA are, allegedly, nearly identical.
It wouldn't make much biological sense if the Engineers' planet was rife with a virulent
strain of murder-monster mushrooms.
So these balls of alien death-confetti must not have always been there.
Instead, they must have been caused by David's use of the goo.
The goo can mutate every animal it comes in contact with — so why did it very selectively
choose one plant to turn into a vehicle for the species?
Arguably, it's not a plant at all that shoots out those spores, but that still leaves questions.
Were these pods part of David's later experiments?
And if so, why are Facehuggers treated as a superior form of alien evolution?
The spores' method of propagating the species is only a million times more efficient than
the alien egg pods.
The choice is simple: your species propagates because an idiot actively agitates a giant,
ugly egg and waits for its terrifying contents to attack and shove an egg tube down their
throat...or your species lives on because something gently brushes against a small pod
with their toe.
The more efficient method is clear.
So what makes the eggs more evolutionarily sound than the spores?
Is David the xenomorph whisperer?
It's easy to argue that aliens aren't overly interested in androids because they don't
really have a lot of delicious edible parts.
So if you're a synthetic being, you pretty much get a xenomorph hall pass.
But why are the xenomorphs David is cultivating strangely loyal to him?
At the very least, they seem to see him as one of the only living things that's not worth
immediately killing — which is really saying something when you're an animal designed only
for killing.
We know xenomorphs don't imprint on the first thing they see like many Earth animals, so
how does David automatically have this dominion over the beasts?
Maybe we'll learn the answer in a sequel.
And while we're on the subject of synthetics...
Is Walter still alive?
Alien is a franchise that relishes showing the audience every gory detail of nearly every
bloody death.
So when someone dies and you don't at least see their viscera-strewn corpse, you know
something might be up.
During the first phase of the big fight between David and Walter, we see that Walter has the
ability to heal himself.
While he takes a few minutes to reboot, it seems like he can recover from some pretty
deep cuts.
"Now stand aside, worthy adversary!"
"'tis but a scratch!"
"A scratch?
Your arm's off!"
"No, it isn't."
After the second phase of their big battle, we learn that David comes out on top and switches
places with Walter.
We never learn Walter's fate.
But when even an earlier android model like David can survive decapitation, we can assume
that Walter is still alive.
Or can we?
Everyone knows that you can't keep a good 'droid down.
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