We have just uploaded the 202nd episode of the Alien vs. Predator Galaxy Podcast (right-click and save as to download)! Corporal Hicks and RidgeTop are joined by special community guest Christian Matzke and subject expert Alex White, the author of fan favourite novels Alien: The Cold Forge & Alien: Into Charybdis (as well as writing the recent Alien: Rogue Incursion) to discuss the black goo & prequel lore.
We discuss internal consistency, macguffins, retcons, cosmic horror and plenty more!
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This never made any sense to me and Fede appears to have walked it back during his interview with AvPGalaxy:
So the idea that the Engineers come from the Pathogen is a hypothesis that Rook and the other scientists came up with, apparently. But its based on their limited knowledge of the situation.
Alex White is so interesting to listen to. Love his thoughts on it.
I quit.
I wish he'd return. He was the person that put in the "Engineers created us" plotline that Scott and Fox has mostly ignored since.
Well, if we only go by the films and take the David-as-creator route, then yes.
If we take the Engineers-as creators route... then again, it's yes; it's confirmed outright in Building Better Worlds that the Engineers created both.
Exactly, I took it to be just that the black goo brought out the Engineer side of our ancestry in Kay's child. So the black goo makes things look more like their ancestors and/or gives them some Alien traits? Well, hear me out... What if both of those things are the same?! The more ancient the creatures, the more Alien like they are? So the Aliens maybe are ancient after all by Fede's vision? Fede did mention that he saw the black goo as the origin of life almost, or something like that. So, we'll see what he does next with it, if he still wants to touch upon the goo in his sequel.
But I'm also for dropping the goo altogether, if possible, which I know it isn't at the moment.
What if humans are some kind of Offsprings for Engineers? This is a good reason to destroy Earth.
Imagine, you are dealing with a dangerous things, meeting some mutants and should to wipe results of experiments. Then you wake up and see a few of small offsprings around you. They want something, they demand it, they have a weapon, they build robots and travel through space.
Humans are Engineers. DNA match.
Makes it seem like they used the goo to upgrade themselves like Rook wants to do for humanity.
He has that silly engineer face.
Going frame by frame it looks like growths or tentacles are bursting out of them, like the fruiting bodies of a fungus. To me, it looks like they are experiencing a roided out version of what Holoway had happen to his eye. Completely out of control mutations.
Holoway gets a drop of the Pathogen and as it mutates him he experiences this:
https://www.alien-covenant.com/aliencovenant_uploads/holloway_mirror_copy.jpg
Engineers under the explosion get a fatal dose of the Pathogen and they get this:
https://www.alien-covenant.com/aliencovenant_uploads/7890987898989.jpg
Funny, I'd say
Spoiler
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/843437600446480432/1342306453003833424/Aliens_Vs._Avengers_003_2025_Digital_Shan-Empire_00019.jpg?ex=67bb220d&is=67b9d08d&hm=d8e55f4013d3b94172f26a87cbe2100fe12acd84a01cb63cd307328cceecafa4&
YES REALLY
Long are the days when Alien was about Xenos, now it's about the goo.
Imagine wathcing the original movies and thinking, "These movies are pretty good, but i now how to make them better... add in the goo".
However, out of the last three I find Prometheus to be the least entertaining and the least satisfying to watch.
Nope, just the last one.
Yep. And that's why the last three films have been rubbish.
The F&S and Call uses of construct are very different.
That's right, I remember that too. But I don't take that as being intended to be as a significant way of saying Elden's something different. We often refer to the white substance from our normal synthetics as just android blood. Though you are now making me wonder if that's ever said in any other entries because I can't think offhand!
Thank you! I was sure that had come up in the past. But it also just adds to the frustration, as Elden is clearly not depicted as anything other than a typical synth with baubles and white blood. I would have much preferred him to be some sort of replican to justify the black goo's reaction.
Though checking back over our interviews with the Fire and Stone team, it is still all quite muddled. Paul Tobin suggests he's got actual blood.
Chris Sebela seems to go down the "meat" route, saying he was constructed from the dna of animals.
Alex, as insightful as ever, and Christian, an inspired guest. His presence and gravitas is sorely missed on the PO podcast. More Christian please!
Its been forever since I read it, but yeah, there is a moment where prior to injecting Elden with the Pathogen Francis says something about "Filtering the Pathogen through a Construct's engineered blood".
Here is the part where he's referred to a Meat robot:
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Is this actually defined in the comics that they're biological, though? I distinctly recall them explaining that the Geryon has two types of artificial beings onboard - synthetics (which looked like the crash-test dummies) and Constructs (of which Elden was one) according to the first explanation. But I don't remember them ever actually explaining that Constructs were meant to be a more advanced/alternative/biological form of artificial people (because I thought it'd have made far more sense if they were supposed to e like Replican's or something). Especially when we see him mutating, and he's got all those glass baubles and white blood. If I'm not mistaken, they also eventually refer to Elden as just a synthetic at later points anyway.
Glad you enjoyed the discussion though! It was a fun one to record and prep for.
I also agree that there aren't multiple strains, just what you see in Prometheus and Covenant...Actually, I guess you could call the Pathogen that Rook reverse engineers in Romulus a new strain since he specifically tinkered with it so it prioritized the Alien's metabolism control as a dominate trait.
Otherwise, the films show that the Pathogen is mechanism for transferring DNA/Genes. It could be used to seed life or destroy it, but that depends on what DNA is being used. I think back on the opening of Prometheus, how the Pathogen in the cup was "blank" and needed to be "loaded" with the DNA of an Engineer before it could be used to seed the planet. I'd like to see the Pathogen used this way in future media, loading it with different DNA, and seeing the result.
Regarding what Corporal Hicks said regarding the fire and stone comics, and Elden being infected by the Pathogen not making sense... Synthetics and Constructs actually are 2 different things. The Pathogen is able to infect a Construct, but this is because Constructs are biological, as opposed to synthetics which are inorganic. The idea of Constructs in the Fire and Stone comics comes from Alien Resurrection where Call says to Ripley#8, "You're a thing, a Construct, they grew you in a f**king lab".This is why Elden is referred to as a "meat robot" (similar to a Replicant from Bladerunner).
Come on.
No, it's the one that can infect living organisms and machinery, as well as synthetics.
Is that the one that makes the Aliens with the stupid head shape that the soon to be released RPG figures use?
We see enough evidence in the films and even LV-223 is referred to as a military/bioweapon facility.
It's pretty much the same explanation as to why the company has been after the Alien since the beginning.
I agree there completely. I also don't buy it that there should be multiple variants of the original Engineer stash. That kind of defeats the point of the black goo, doesn't it? If it can make various and unpredictable mutations, why would you need multiple variants? That also feels to me like a contrived excuse for it's randomness... If it was more clearly established from the start, maybe it could've been better excepted, but doing that After Prometheus seems like a creative copout. And antithetical to Covenant which tried to make sense of the goo and slowly started giving it something resembling a logical ruleset.
My fear is that with accepting that black goo can have any variation possible, is that it opens up the door even more to the most ridiculous effects imaginable. This is kinda hyperbolic, but what's to stop a new writer coming in and saying that their black goo creates literal flying unicorns? That might seem ridiculous, right? But we already have the most generic looking Stalker thing in Aliens Fireteam Elite, that can literally turn invisible. Limitless writer's tools lose me and bore me easily. Limits make things more believable to me every single time.
I'm with RidgeTop on this one, I believe the black goo did more harm than good. Switching the focus away from the creature itself to the black goo only degrades the Alien's importance to just another byproduct or result of the "mysterious substance". I saw cosmic horror potential in the Engineer's culture (from the implications in Prometheus, not the disappointing portrayal of them in Covenant) and in exploring the now squandered potential of the Alien origin and a Gigerific planet as a setting which we'll never get on the big screen now. But from the black goo? I see no cosmic horror in a tool that's used so bluntly that it constantly reminds me of the author's hand and breaks my immersion and interest.
If the black goo had a more constrained, logical set of rules, made the creatures that spawn from it act in interesting and intelligent ways and made them look more biomechanical and less generic, people would probably complain a lot less. Instead we have a "do anything substance", dumb, simplistic creatures (except for like a few scenes with the Neomorph) plus zombies and generic fleshy looking Resident Evil mutants. I don't want Alien to turn into Resident Evil, where the big bad is a virus and the creatures are mostly generic fleshy mutants with no intelligence.
I really appreciated most of Alex White's comments and fan speculation opinions. Besides the predominant focus on the human stories and the "Aliens as a force of nature" which I'm not completely on board with, I'm very much in agreement that I'm not a fan of "Alien Kryptonite" variants which are becoming more and more frequent. I also would like to believe that once a hugger is on you, that it's a death sentence. It makes sense for a versatile organism like that to have multiple biological fail-safes. I do like the idea that if you have to have it possible for the burster to be removed, that Alex's horrific example which they also mentioned in their other recent podcast appearance, where they imagine that the host would continue to produce chestbursters, could be a horrific way to go. Imagine barely successfully removing a Chestburster, only to not realize that after a day or more it started to grow back and you burst unexpectedly falsely thinking you've been saved.
While its great to hear Alex's thoughts on the matter, not sure if it can be classed as "confirming" anything. Unless Alex does have the authority to canonically confirm something, its probably just an opinion. Granted a good opinion since the idea of there being different versions of the stuff would atleast explain the inconsistencies. Though personally I would rather there be no black goo lol
Did prefer the original Prometheus treatment to the actual film for sure, with the beluga-morph and that the cargo hold did have different versions of the creature.