'Alien: Covenant' bridges the gap between Alien and it’s kinda-prequel Prometheus.
The series timeline spans all of human history, from alien Jesus to scheming androids.
With all the sequels, prequels and alternate cuts, things in the Alien universe
can get a little confusing, so we’re going to break it down for you with our
'ALIEN: COVENANT' TIMELINE PRIMER.
This is going to contain SPOILERS for the entire
Alien franchise except for Covenant, so be warned.
For now we’re starting wayyy back in
THE ANCIENT ERA
That’s when the Engineers leave Earth.
The Engineers are an ancient race of advanced
aliens that look suspiciously close to humans.
They’re these guys, from 'Prometheus.'
They hang around on ancient Earth for a while.
When they leave, one of their race stays behind to sacrifice himself.
He drinks some black potion and dissolves into
a waterfall, seeding the planet with his DNA.
This is the origin of all life on Earth, and why the Engineers resemble humans so much.
They created us, WHICH IS WHY we’re genetically identical to them.
The Engineers spend thousands of years observing humanity and guiding from afar.
Eventually, they don’t like what they see.
In response, the Engineers decide to kill off their creations,
but their vengeance would have to wait another 2000 years.
Now, there could be a lot of Alien Vs. Predator stuff here, but it’s not
really canon anymore due to all the contradictions with Prometheus.
That means we’re jumping forward to
THE PETER WEYLAND YEARS
Peter Weyland is born on October 1st 1990.
He’s the founder and namesake of a company that becomes Weyland-Yutani, the
impossibly huge megacorporation that basically owns the entire Alien universe.
The next 100 years involve Weyland inventing all
the sci-fi stuff that makes Alien possible.
He kicks off industrial spaceflight and ends global warming by 2015.
He even cures cancer in 2022.
And by 2025 he creates David, the first in a series of androids that would develop into Michael
Fassbender’s David 8 in 'Prometheus,' Walter in 'Covenant' and other androids we’ll see later.
In 2031 we start terraforming the moon.
A few more Weyland breakthroughs later and we’re colonizing deep space by 2039.
That’s the same year we discover the planet where the Alien action happens.
Well, two planets. And they’re not so much planets, they’re actually moons.
It’s kind of an Endor situation.
The first moon, LV-426 is where the Nostromo crew
discovers the derelict Engineer ship in 'Alien.'
It’s also where Weyland-Yutani establishes the
colony of Hadley’s Hope, the setting of Aliens.
The second moon, LV-233, is central to the events of
THE PROMETHEUS SAGA
In 2089, two scientists, Shaw and Holloway, find an ancient star map.
It points to LV-233, hinting that humans were created by ancient aliens.
Shaw and Holloway plan a trip to meet their makers
which is funded by an extremely old Peter Weyland.
He thinks the Engineers will somehow make him immortal.
The ship Prometheus departs in 2091, with Weyland himself hidden on board.
But before we really get into Prometheus and get you caught up
to Covenant, we’ve got a very special birthday to shout out:
Ellen Ripley, the iconic hero of the Alien franchise,
is born in a Lunar colony on January 7, 2092.
We’ll get to her soon..
The Prometheus expedition arrives in 2093.
The crew, including Weyland and a David 8 android, find statues, a bunch of
dead Engineers, and stone cylinders filled with this weird black liquid.
This liquid is actually a bioweapon.
The Engineers are super salty
so they whipped up a genetic supervirus to wipe us all out.
It turns people into raging mutants.
David purposefully infects Holloway, so that when he and
Shaw have sex Shaw is impregnated with an alien squid baby.
And while the infected crewmembers are trying to
kill everybody, David discovers a living Engineer.
He wakes it from stasis, but the Engineer attacks instead.
It kills Weyland and decapitates David before hunting down the rest of the crew.
Shaw surgically removes her interstellar STD in the sickest scene in the movie.
The squid baby forces itself into the berzerk Engineer,
and out pops a primitive version of the Xenomorph.
Then, Shaw escapes in an Engineer ship along with David’s still-functioning head.
Together, they set out to find the Engineer’s homeworld.
We don’t know the exact year of Alien: Covenant yet, only that
it’s about ten years after Prometheus. So, roughly, 2103.
The colony ship Covenant finds a world that feels like paradise.
But apparently David and Shaw got there first.
And then there’s this guy...
We don’t know what’s in store for the crew of the Covenant, but it’s
probably going to involve a lot of acid blood and exploding ribcages.
Ripley’s early life is never super fleshed out,
but we know all about how awesome she is in
THE CLASSIC ERA
The original Alien opens in 2122, as the crew of the
salvage ship Nostromo wakes up from hypersleep.
While answering a distress call on LV-426,
they stumble across an ancient Engineer ship.
Since Ridley Scott didn’t come up with the Engineers until Prometheus,
for years the giant pilot was known only as the “Space Jockey.”
Ironically, the Jockey turned on its distress beacon to keep people away from the moon.
The ship is actually carrying a full cargo of
Xenomorph eggs, possibly for use as weapons.
Ridley’s crew accidentally activates one of the eggs, and out pops
a Facehugger that does its thing with the late, great John Hurt.
Before you know it the Alien has killed everyone except Ripley and her cat, Jones.
After she blasts the Xenomorph out of an airlock, she enters
hypersleep and floats through space waiting for rescue.
She’s gonna be there a while.
Ripley is finally saved in 2179, kicking off the events of Aliens.
Her old bosses, the Weyland-Yutani company, don’t buy her story about the Xenomorph.
But soon, they lose contact with Hadley’s Hope, the colony built on
the same moon where Ripley encountered the Alien 57 years earlier.
Ripley and a platoon of Colonial Marines are sent to investigate.
They find the colony absolutely wrecked by Xenos.
Ripley rescues a Marine named Hicks, the android Bishop and a little girl named Newt.
The colony is destroyed, Ripley stomps the Queen, and they
all settle into hypersleep for the long journey home.
There’s not too much connection to Prometheus in Aliens.
Because the story of the Engineers seems to be mostly Ridley Scott’s thing.
Anyway, Alien 3 takes place in the same year, 2179.
Shortly after Ripley and crew escape LV-426, their ship
ejects its sleeping passengers after an onboard fire.
They land on a prison colony, Fiorina 161.
Hicks and Newt are killed offscreen, which
sparked a lot of outrage in the Alien fandom.
It’s also revealed that Ripley was impregnated with an Alien Queen embryo while she slept.
After a new Alien wreaks havoc on the prisoners, Ridley commits
suicide so Weyland-Yutani can’t use the Queen inside her as a weapon.
The death of Ellen Ripley was a huge blow to a lot of fans.
Even though Sigourney Weaver came back for one more movie, things never felt the same in a
POST-RIPLEY WORLD
Finally, we’ve come to the last canon entry in the series.
Everybody’s favorite...
ALIEN RESURRECTION
After resting in peace for 100 years, the U.S. Military clones Ripley in 2179.
Weyland-Yutani is long gone, now the government is obsessed with weaponizing Aliens.
The clone Ripley’s DNA is spliced with the Xenomorph Queen’s, giving
her superpowers, acid blood of her own, and empathy for the Aliens.
The scientists on the research ship also clone a fresh batch of
Xenomorphs, which obviously get loose and murder everyone in sight.
Ripley narrowly escapes the Aliens and blows up the ship before the swarm can reach Earth.
She’s even forced to kill her “son,” a human/Xeno hybrid made from her DNA.
The last we see Clone Ripley, she’s about to land on an Earth she’s never known,
a stranger on her home planet, wondering what fate has in store for her next.
And with that, we made it!
There’s some Extended Universe stuff that pushes the timeline out even further, but
as of now Alien: Resurrection is the last chronological film in the franchise.
It’s not the most complicated canon in the world, even if there are some hiccups.
Now that we’re all caught up, we’re ready to see
how Alien: Covenant is going to fit into things.
Will it answer the lingering questions about the Engineers’ motives,
and the true nature of their relationship with the Xenomorphs?
Will it bring us right to the beginning of the first Alien film, like Rogue One did for Star Wars?[h]
We won’t have to wait much longer to find out.