Ok, this is a little stream of consciousness without too much of a self edit, I have something in draft to post my thoughts of the film as a whole, but I wanted to address @Warlords comments in respect to the “Alien”. This is the way I saw it.

Firstly let’s talk penises. HR Giger who is responsible for the original Alien design is quite fond of them. They, and selected orifices, are through a large body of his work including his designs for Alien. The design for the facehuggers eggs originally didn’t split open into 4, it was into 2 and was quickly knocked back as it was clearly a vagina. The guy has some unresolved issues; a genius, but a little broken. I have three pieces of his work sitting on my desk here at the office and I can count four penises and two orifices. So anything penis like is extrapolating Giger’s original vision.

Ok, the ‘monsters’. As I said these are my thoughts after only having seen it once and know zero about the film going in.

The worm ingests the substance and turn in to the ‘snake’. It doesn’t have DNA beyond the worm to be structured with more complexity than that, but the key to its propagation is the ability to gestate inside a host. Any early iteration is going to feature something like what we see open up. On the ‘snake’ it is too small and ineffectual to subdue the guy so it goes down his throat. It starts to interact with the guys DNA and we end up with the couple of guys who are a little put out, but as I said is fairly limited to what it could achieve. Between the worm and the man it didn’t have enough to work with so we end up with a guy who still has it inside him messing around. The result is the ‘zombie’ who is aware enough of what is happening to asks to be killed. With his fiery death that whole line of evolution ceases and has nothing to do with the alien as we know it. It’s an evolutionary dead end.

Now, that we have seen what the substance can do, we get to the one that matters.

After being roofied by David the substance first takes from Charlie and then Elizabeth and has enough DNA to produce something with a little kick. It gestates in her womb and grows very fast. We have seen this in Alien. From chestburster to fully grown can be measured in hours.
Elizabeth’s bundle of joy is squid like with powerful tentacles. It is an unrefined facehugger. Unlike the ‘snake’, this has the ability to latch on to lay its love child. It grows fast because it needs to be able to take down its prey to survive. It grabs at the body, the arms and legs trying to overpower the Engineer. They have a candlelit dinner and we get the smaller proto-Alien (Scott refers to it as The Deacon), which kind of skips the chestburster state as we know it. Its size comes from Charlie and Elizabeth, and the look based on what it took from the Engineer. Think of the Dogbolter in Alien 3

Adaptability is it strength and it starts to refine over a number of iterations, over who knows how long. Not long I imagine. The facehugger becomes much smaller with a tail to spring right at the face. It’s fast, no need to fight, no need for teeth, get on and paralyse them. It slims down to the chestburster so it can gestate quicker and get out faster and then grows quickly rather than be locked inside a host growing to full size. Once it knew it prey it adapted.
To lay eggs it has to have taken some kind of reproductive cycle, either from Charlie and Elizabeth or as a later encounter. I really like the idea that the core of it comes from them as it means we even more heavily involved in putting angry black penises in space.

Whether the tradition starts on this planet or not, they would have no need for the ampules of the black substance, in fact they would pose a very clear threat to them should something else grow from it bigger than they are, and replaces them with eggs which serve the same purpose but is only perpetuating themselves.

Ok, as I said I'm just free balling the idea. It may not be completely water tight, I may have missed something, or it isn't Scott’s intention, but I think it is in the ball park.



This is probably the most I will ever use the word penis on this site, but stay tuned ;)