My Crazy COVENANT Theory--Possible Spoilers

Well who knows about the symbolic meaning of the name Covenant. Remember the metaphor of Prometheus hasn't even been fully explained yet. After all who punished who and why. Regarding the Covenant title, it might just be a nod to Alien and how the Nostromo got its name (it is a ship from the Joseph Conrad novel Heart Of Darkness, one of Ridley Scott's favorite books) And Covenant is the name of a ship in another novel: Robert Louis Stevenson's "Kidnapped". It seems the screenwriter, Joseph Logan chose it.

So David with his sayin "look on my work ye mighty and despair" he does not mean the engineer like people on the ground. He actually says that to higher being.

About David being a more positive character, I have my doubts. It seems the way Ridley Scott feels about artificial intelligence lately is not very uplifting. Far behind are the days when he dared to invite the audience to empathize with the replicants and their quest for more life. He recently produced Luke Scott's film "Morgan", where sentient robots are a very bad idea, and cites HAL9000 from "2001" as a big influence.  I was even surprised when I watched the AMD commercial with David: wouldn't an ad featuring an evil robot be a disservice for the company? Of course we are still very far from the "singularity" and this is "just a movie"... I wonder if Ridley ever read Isaac Asimov's robot stories, or if he is familiar with the Three Laws and the Robopsycology. After all i guess a robot would be as good or as bad as we make it, no need to make it into a monster.

interesting thoughts. "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". 

regarding david and the covenant

i reckon that the covenant would of been somewhere around the final planning stages before prometheus embarked.

so potentially david knew about the weyland yutani colony ship, covenant.

did he set of the distress call knowing that it is procedure to investigate?

is his plan to:

send a signal that covenant would respond to

get the drop ship to land

infect the ground crew

impersonate walter to help access to the main ship

if this happens david (as walter) now has an army of  2000 potential hosts.

then alien: awakening (from cryo) IF its a sequel

but it might just as easy be walter under weyland yutani orders we can only debate.

that was my theory however im not so sure now.

however the story pans out, it will be more about what is revealed in this film for me.

Perhaps David is able to see something is wrong with Shaw after he puts her in Cryosleep. He can speak their language use their technology, surely the cryo chamber would have some kind of alert to ones health or if a serious condition existed, perhaps he has left her in Cryo due to her situation. he does hate humanity but he respects Shaw and pehaps he is working for a cure for her somehow.....by any means necessary 

joylitt, I'm sure Ridley is familiar with Asimov's Three Laws, but it seems that his films don't hold AI characters accountable to them. Roy Batty and Co did, after all, butcher 23 people in their escape from bondage offworld, and then go on to wound Holden, nearly freeze (or successfully freeze?) the Eye Maker, and flat-out kill Tyrell and JF Sebastian.

The wonderful thing, to me at least, about the Replicants is their moral ambiguity. We empathize with Roy's desire for more life and quest for freedom, but he's still a villain. He's still the bad guy that Deckard needs to stop. Sure, Roy's desire to gain more life for himself and his companions is noble, but his methods are not.

Interestingly, Deckard, in my opinion, is more of an anti-hero than a hero. He "retires" Replicants even though he wants to be done with the business, and his casual killing of them is more horrifying to the audience than the knowledge and witnessing of the cruelties carried out by Roy and his companions.

I think David will be similarly portrayed. As alienjunkyard noted, "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions." We know David brings death to the Paradise inhabitants, and his experiments with the Accelerant will cause further horrific death and suffering to the unlucky Covenant crew.  Destroying untold thousands of Paradise inhabitants and probably most (if not all) of the Covenant's crew just to save ONE person is, to a rational human being, as irrational as it is horrible.

However, David is not human, and indeed what DOES motivate an android? Especially one who is developing his own emotional responses? David may well have convinced himself that saving Shaw, the one being who has ever been kind to him, is something that must be done at all costs. Perhaps this won't even bode well for Shaw in the long run--what if in order to save her, she has to be modified by the Accelerant? I'm pretty sure that's not what she'd want, but David is an android, and again, how does an android with emotions or proto-emotions think?

Sure, David the bad guy that needs to be stopped. But I have a feeling Ridley will make us think twice about writing him off as simply evil. Just a hunch.

Grinning & Dropping Linen, I've been thinking along those lines as well. She looks sickly in the "Crossing" clip, and Ridley did give us this particularly disgusting sequence in the Medpod scene:

Note there is a particularly blatant shot of the trilobite's amniotic fluid splashing back into Shaw's open wound.

I'm personally hoping AWAKENING is a prequel to COVENANT instead of a sequel, sherris, as Ridley has hinted it would be; I'd rather see a movie about David and Shaw than another xenomorph film, but that's just me. I'm really just looking forward to seeing what Ridley's got in store for us fans.

yes i think exploring what we have going on now, the questions in prometheus, engineers 223, the elders,tear drop, murals, etc.. is far more rewarding than another xeno movie.

there is just to much to speculate over.  i just hope the time line allows it.  im sure it will.

I don't think Shaw is sick at all, just that the temps in the ship are a little warm, plus they're usually pretty active. As well, the amniotic fluid is 100% sterile and would have ZERO effect (actually it would cleanse, not contaminate) on the wound it splashes into.

Eh. The trilobite is not human, and who knows what the Accelerant is capable of doing. Amniotic fluid contains an embryo's DNA, and that is precisely what the Accelerant works on. Since the Accelerant is so virulent, it could still be potentially hazardous even in diluted or modified form in the trilobite's DNA. Perhaps since it's already affected the trilobite's DNA, the effects of the Accelerant on Shaw won't be so pronounced or immediate as they were other victims. The Accelerant seems to work differently on different hosts. Fifield was mutating into an alien. Holloway looked like he was going to start disintegrating as the Sacrificial Engineer had. (I recall encountering a theory that suggested that one's mindset is what causes the Accelerant to have a certain effect on its victim--selflessness causes disintegration/renewal, selfishness creates monstrosity). Accelerant in spore form creates neomorphs. Presumably, if eggmorphing is canon, the process is derived from the Accelerant's mutagenic properties, perhaps retained in the xenomorph's own DNA as a means of reproduction. And it appears that David's bombardment of the Paradise inhabitants petrifies their bodies, perhaps from overloading their systems/modifying their DNA so much that it becomes unusable in terms of mutation or reconstruction.

What are thoughts about the possibility of Shaw being the Alien Queen seen in Aliens ? 

HorrorMan77. It's a popular theory, indeed. I don't think she'll end up a queen per se, but she may well end up...more than human, whether by David's actions or those of another. There was a report of a piece of concept art, seen during a reporter's set visit, of Shaw's face being connected to tubes and machinery, like something HR Giger would have created in his artwork. Of course, that could be a red herring, but as a Giger fan I'll admit that I'll be a little bummed if she didn't reach such a fate (even if that also means I'm admitting to being a sick, twisted b*stard). As I mentioned above, perhaps saving Shaw means altering her in some way? Even if those alterations are not something she'd find desirable. David is an android, and his sense of morality is almost certainly different from ours, if he's even developed one. I'd be okay with a mutated Shaw-Alien, as long as it's done well and with the appropriate amount of horror/philosophical brain-picking.

In the crossing prologue, david is fine and dandy, even falling in love with shaw, then he looks possessed and is unleashing an extinction attack on a whole planet, something  must set him off.

it may very well be some kind of deal david has made with a higher power, but does a higher power just take brutal revenge like an animal or do something more sophisticated.?

to bomb the planet is a real statement, and david either doesnt care about retaliation or knows there wont be any, does he have backup from someone pretty untouchable?

im going with his becoming unhinged on the journey and deciding to wipe them out. On the juggernaut could be archives and cultural material that convince him to launch an attack. Id like it to be a wildcard  villan who is involved but it looks like its all about david 8.

@horrorman

Shaw will not be a queen nor will there be a queen in any Ridley Scott Alien film universe movie

i can guarantee that there is an eleventy-ba-jillion x infinity x rosie odonnel's weight x whoopi goldbergs stupidity percent chance that Ridley Scott movies will be queen free

the queen was a plot device in Camerons Aliens which is an amazing movie but it did ruin many of the elements of what the Alien was supposed to be. Its not suppose to have hives or queens or be similar to insects...which made it understandable and less scary.....it is suppose to be an ancient gothic cosmic horror with lovecraftian elements

There will be no queen