Nathan Adler
MemberFacehuggerJun-13-2017 12:08 PMMy *impressions*, off-base as they may be, go something like:
I don't know if the Lucifer/Prometheus Engineer is a goodie or a baddie...but whether as punishment or mission he is dropped on a sterile world and then he gets infected with the black goo, then dies in the water and his DNA goes everywhere. This is the world the Black Goo made, when there was no other life around for it to contaminate. That's certainly enough to explain the Engineers' interest in observing it, and their interest in us as the technological species produced by its biosphere. A thought occurs, and I don't think it really adds up perfectly, but the thought is that it might have been of some interest to the Engineers to see what would happen to the life the Black Goo made if it were *newly* infected with the black goo. What would a new black goo infection *do* to it, what would be created? On the planetoid, the stuff has many different effects, I would say that in the context of Prometheus you could explain away the greater size of the Space Jockey just by saying the goo infected him and it wanted to spread itself off-planet. It does like to spread, and it'll take any available avenue to do so! It'll change the host's body in many ways, and it'll turn into just about anything, seemingly randomly. Later on the xenomorphs are just the aliens we know, all the same: the "offspring" of Kane, to the very last one. KANE. But on the Prometheus planetoid they're polymorphous, because the raw Black Goo is *virulent*. Different host, different form! Actually the aliens we know aren't just Kane's products but the products of the Space Jockey as well, the xenomorph must indeed have been massive, it laid a *ridiculous* number of eggs and then at some point just must've died of hunger or old age or something. So Engineer DNA is in the original facehugger, and human DNA is in the "original" facehugger-spawned xenomorph. The black goo works FAST, and does ANYTHING, and we have to figure the black goo is what the Space Jockey got infected with. But how? Or, maybe more interestingly...
...WHY?
Where do the multifarious xenomorphs *come* from, that kill all the Engineers? How does the infection break out in the first place? You have to figure they knew what they had, and took precautions. Was it a rebellion? There are a few different potential stories there. We don't actually see what the Engineers were fleeing from.
The planetoid that the Nostromo visited wasn't one the xenomorph's progeny could leave. The Space Jockey's last act must've been to set the distress beacon blaring. Why? Did the black goo make him do it? Huh, here's the problem with the black goo, when it first infects a host it uses that host's own abilities to spread itself around, but WHEN IT DOES the resulting xenomorph doesn't retain many of those abilities. Perhaps some intelligence? I'd consider that an open question, but I'd still draw the line at the xenomorphs using any human or Engineer *machines* in an intelligent way. The first host of the Black Goo, however, seems to retain some agency as long as it survives.
Hrm.
What you have here, perhaps, is just the Black Goo's "attempt" to create LINEAGES: aggression, infection, exploitation of reproduction systems. It's liquid, it lives in water and warmth. I don't think the Engineers do a whole lot of reproducing in their spare time, do you? It hits an Engineer and it has to go parthenogenetic. The Engineers are clones! Wait, does that answer everything? The Engineers are clones. The ancient Prometheus is the only one that ever produced "children"...except for the Space Jockey. Okay, how about this:
The Black Goo gets out -- somehow -- and it starts turning Engineers into monsters that pursue other Engineers to infect them, the idea being that the black goo "wants" to get into a sexual reproductive system. But the Engineers are sexless, so this doesn't work. The black goo could have been designed to operate this way preferentially, and the Engineers being clones would have been a biological cordon on it, just as the sterile landscape of the planetoid is. All the black goo can do is just change the Engineers' bodies, infect more, change more, infect more, change more...these are technically hosts for the infection, but they're crap hosts, none of them can generate lineages of monsters, only one-offs that can't themselves begin a process of reproduction, can never INCREASE THEIR NUMBERS. Maybe this is it? The surviving Engineer in a cryogenic pod like Ripley -- the escaped one is the one where the random generation of monsters has finally produced one that uses the same reproductive system that the Engineers do, even though everywhere else the biological cordon holds. Somewhere along the line of serial infections the black goo "figures out" how Engineer reproduction happens, maybe it finally comes across an Engineer about to generate a new clone as offspring. Hey, who knows, the Engineers may die giving "birth" to the new clones, they may emerge from their chests for all we know! If a new Engineer emerges fully-formed and fully-grown, would that not mean the parent Engineer must grow in size? The escaped Engineer crashlands, sets the distress call, and then does the parthenogenesis thing, not knowing the process has been hijacked, not knowing "he" has been very recently infected. Then BOOM, out comes an Alien, and it lays a bunch of eggs that are all the same. Forgive my rambling while I'm thinking, here, of the Aliens we know of, only ONE came from Kane, and that one's dead -- Ripley killed it. All the others come from the Space Jockey, via human hosts. Okay, right, this may indeed work...
So the Black Goo gets into an Engineer about to undergo parthenogenesis, perhaps one already intending to leave the planetoid, if that's so its ship might have been actually SHOT AT, and damaged, to do the crashlanding thing. Inside this Engineer, the new Engineer has been co-opted, and its reproductive system finally comprehended and seized. Once the original xenomorph is out, it lays eggs, because it can't actually just genuinely reproduce *as* an Engineer, only *like* an Engineer. Inside the eggs are the facehuggers, intermediate stages ready to transmit the xenomorph's form into hosts. if they ever encounter hosts with Engineer-like physiology. Every one of the facehuggers is the same, every one of the resulting xenomorphs will be a clone of the original xenomorph, plus just a little bit of DNA from the hosts. As it turns out, once human DNA becomes part of the mix, sex-based differentiation sets in: only a xenomorph that emerged from a female human will be able to lay more eggs. And now here's a thing:
LAMBERT WAS BORN A MAN.
That's canon, from 1980 or whatever. Lambert was a trans woman.
I merely mention it.
Anyway, who knows what happens in a group of xenomorphs with several "females" after a couple decades, this is all new. Only one Queen? WHATEVER. Of more interest to me is what happens to Shaw, whose reproductive system is co-opted *without* any Engineer DNA being involved, except at a remove of a few billion years. Essentially this is the black goo infecting the Black Goo, with very little in the way, and it is FAR WEIRDER than the old Giger xenomorph-forms, and it could become a lineage and just work through sexual reproduction, provided it had another human-derived "partner"...which of course it won't.
But if it did?
Well, that would be very curious.
OH!
Yeah, the "molecular acid" for blood...I can't explain that but I can offer a maybe-workable guess: it's gradually derived from the toxic atmosphere of the planetoid visited by the Nostromo, over the 33,000 years that the eggs just sit there exposed to it. These eggs are BRAND-NEW THINGS, created by the interaction of the Black Goo with Engineer DNA, and they sit in a very weird place for a very weird length of time. That planetoid can't support life! Can't produce life. But the eggs, doubtless gas-permeable in the long run, already have a powerful adaptive agent inside them, that co-opts the atmosphere as it co-opts everything else.
Overall, it's an interesting idea. What kind of agent could mimic a morphology that only evolution should be competent to produce? In Alien, the face-hugger is clearly not "new", its tail coils around Kane's throat when they try to pull it off him, without the facehugger being an evolved organism and part of a species this can only be due to some sort of "intelligent" recombination of evolved traits taken from elsewhere? Has to be, then, that somewhere in the evolutionary past of the Engineers there were at least something *like* facehuggers...
Yet my theory would actually be that the Engineers are parthenogenetic because they themselves were MADE from some DNA somewhere...made by creatures who reproduced sexually jut as we humans do, and thus as above, so below, and it's turtles all the way down...they made weapons they could fight their creators with.
But who made the Creators?
