A thought about how Prometheus joins on to Alien

[andrewducker]

Presumably Liz Shaw leaves LV-223 in 2093, failing to realise that the cargo of the ship she's taken is more active than the casks she'd previously seen. En route to the Engineer homeworld she is impregnated by a facehugger and dies, crashing her ship into LV-426.

(No, not necessarily. It actually seems more likely that the vessel in Alien is just a different crashed Engineer ship. But it would be amusing if the navigator form from Alien was actually Dr Shaw all along.)

Comments

[miss_s_b]

I think it's a different crashed Engineer ship.

[andrewducker]

Oh, almost certainly. I just find the idea of the mysterious pilot being a human delightful.

[miss_s_b]

Well 1, genetically the engineers ARE Human and 2, Dr Liz would have to grow a lot to be the person who's been chest-bursted.

[andrewducker]

They're kinda-human. Their skin doesn't look very human to me. They may well be humans who have been modified, of course. They certainly have the technology for that.

Good point about the height. She'd have to be wearing very long heels for it to be her inside that suit.

[miss_s_b]

You missed the bit of them testing engineer DNA and the result coming up 100% human, then? They did show it TWICE... What they look like can be explained by environmental factors. Like, lower gravity would make them taller and different light factors would affect skin colour and stuff.

[andrewducker]

I didn't miss it. I found it so scientifically preposterous that I refuse to accept that part of the film.

[miss_s_b]

Really? Why? I mean, there were lots of preposterous things in it, but I didn't think that bit was particularly unbelievable. There's a huge variation in sizes shapes and colours of humans; I didn't think it was that far-fetched to have a bit more variation for ones that grew up on another planet.

[andrewducker]

Not the difference in skin - I could accept the difference there. The idea that humans originated off-world, while somehow sharing DNA with every other lifeform on this planet, and having clear ancestors here is beyond preposterous.

(I also refuse to believe the machines in The Matrix were using humans for energy. During these scenes an emergency filter kicks in in my brain and shuts down my ability to perceive, to prevent my brain kicking its way out of my ears and storming from the cinema.)

[miss_s_b]

I think that bit is possibly something explained in the director's cut. Because it's not clear if the guy at the beginning is seeding life or seeding death.

If he's seeding life then that makes sense of the "buggers up Darwinism" comment - he seeds life with his DNA and everything else on the planet is a more or less corrupted version of it, so bacteria are REALLY corrupted, chimps less so. This also makes sense of the floating bits of DNA at the begining, someof which were breaking down and altering and some not.

However, given the colouring and stuff it looked to me like he was seeding death by drinking the black goo, so...

And yeah, humans would be pretty inefficient batteries, but I rationalised THAT by imputing motives of revenge; YOU enslaved US for centuries, now we're going to do it to you.

[andrewducker]

Except that we see him doing it on a planet already covered by plants, which means that it's already also got animal life on it. So unless the individual cells are smart enough to hang around for millions of years, slowly guiding DNA into the right shape by selectively killing off animals until we end up with humans (and, during this time, the Engineers don't evolve either) it doesn't seem workable to me.

Couple that with the way it's dealt with in the film, the "I choose to believe" line that I wouldn't expect from any real religious person with any intelligence - in my experience they always have arguments to back up their belief - and I just threw up my hands.

I'm blaming it on Ridley Scott/Damon Lindehlof just not having any background in science/having thought about it sufficiently.

[miss_s_b]

I'd be more inclined to blame it on scrip and editing (for which, see my blog post which I have been composing for three days and counting and might get posted soon)

[andrewducker]

I shall look forward to it!

[andrewducker]

Also:
""NASA and the Vatican agree that [it is] almost mathematically impossible that we can be where we are today without there being a little help along the way... That’s what we’re looking at (in the film), at some of Erich von Däniken’s ideas of how did we humans come about."

http://www.alexandrosmaragos.com/2012/03/prometheus.html

[miss_s_b]

Nasa and... THE VATICAN? WTF?

[andrewducker]

If you were to ask me for two organisations less likely to endorse Von Daniken I'd have a hard time...

[davegodfrey]

While I know the Vatican thinks that some kind of superior being helped things along a little, I'm pretty sure they'd disagree that it was aliens. And NASA, so far as I know, don't support any kind of intelligent design/aline meddling nonsense either.

[davegodfrey]

Every time any SciFi does the "humans are aliens" nonsense I want to stop whoever wrote it from ever being allowed near any form of creative media ever again.

[andrewducker]

I found it acceptable when I was 12, and reading classic Scifi from the 50's. It really should have died out then, along with the first people to have the smart idea that the final two survivors of the apocalypse would be called Adam and Eve.

[cheekbones3]

That's fair, you'd probably need many billions of people to power the UK, although I suspect that the Matrix also made judicious use of renewables. Then again, how much power would they need?

... and to Bladerunner

[frandowdsofa.livejournal.com]

Is Vickers a replicant?

Re: ... and to Bladerunner

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

She showed emotion when being propositioned by Janek.

[andlosers.livejournal.com]

I'm really fascinated by that other link you posted, where they talk about Space Jesus and (essentially) human sin changing the nature of the primordial soup. It completely changes the nature of the whole saga, and not in ways I'm comfortable with. Definitely thought-provoking.

[andlosers.livejournal.com]

Oh, and my point to this was, then the other engineers are fleeing earth with tainted cargo too, following mankind's revolt against them. Which turns Alien into a movie about corporate interests manipulating people to acquire the fruits of the worst of human nature. Fascinating.

[andrewducker]

There's _something_ fascinating going on there. We know that something bad happened to The Engineers just as they were about to attack Earth. And we have no idea, at this point, what it might be.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Here's the thing - the Aliens killed God.

Now she's taking them to where God lives - which implies that in the sequel the Aliens are going to destroy heaven.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Just rewatched the original Alien last night and think that the navigator has to be Dr. Shaw.

They go to that planet because they receive a distress signal in a language their computer can understand.

Given that the engineers had not been to Earth in 2,000 the only logical person to send out a modern language distress beacon is Shaw.