Quote from: PsyKore on Jan 08, 2024, 09:29:31 AMDoes anyone think Covenant retroactively changes things? I kinda think now Ash was deliberately put on board because there already is prior knowledge of the Alien handed down by David. Perhaps Ripley and Parker's assumption about Ash is correct?
It changes viewers' perceptions of the first two movies but probably also explains what happened in the first movie. That is,
In the first movie, Ripley doesn't allow Dallas and the others back on the ship because of ICC regulations, and later, she tells the others that the company probably needed the organism for its bio-weapons division. Both of these imply precendence. That is, companies had been caught smuggling what turned out to be dangerous organisms, and the government had to impose regulations to stop that, and W-Y had come up with a bio-weapons division to exploit such organisms.
With that, one can argue that W-Y had been exposed to such organisms in the past, and that's revealed in the prequels. This explains why the W-Y report states that the reason why the company came up with the special order was because of what happened during the prequels.
As an aside, what about the spores and all that in the prequels? It was later revealed that there deleted scenes in the first movie referring to such organisms, which means the writers and Scott were considering them. In this case, the same director introduced what was deleted in the same prequels.
Some say the prequels also explain why they were able to partially decode the signal from the distress beacon easily, which is why the company decided to have the Nostromo rerouted to the coordinates of the beacon.
Meanwhile, even without the prequels, discrepancies already appear in the first two movies. For example, if the company instructed Mother to reroute the Nostromo to the new coordinates, then that means that the company had the location of the beacon. That means it would not have had to wait to recover the information from Ripley's lifeboat flight recorder decades later.
And yet for some reason the company did not bother to investigate the coordinates for the next few decades, not even when it set up a colony on the same rock.
Finally, if Mother operated that way, i.e., send information to the company automatically, then if it's a machine that can essentially operate the whole ship and everything inside it even as the crew is in cryo-sleep, then it would have been able to gather a lot of data on what happened inside the Nostromo and sent them to the company.
One more thing: given such a find (intelligent life and the probability of an alien craft) and the presence of a bio-weapons division that would have potentially profited incredibly from such, I would imagine the company pestering the Nostromo crew, asking them what happened to their expedition and so on. It's even possible that they knew enough to instruct Ash to follow the special order.
