Alien TV Series From Noah Hawley and Ridley Scott CONFIRMED

[[cancerblack]]

To add on to my above post, and to recontextualize it in the wake of Covenant – I obviously now no longer see the pathogen as the distilled form of the capital-A Alien, but rather, it is the raw material in its creation. I don't know if the Engineers created the pathogen, or if they found it thousands of years ago, but either way it is an ancient and mysterious biological matter and, in their time with the pathogen, the Engineers seem to have experimented and discovered properties that lead to the birth of the Deacon and other similar creatures, which are what the Engineers have depicted in the LV-223 installation's mural. The process through which the pathogen infects and changes lifeforms seems to be randomized, unless guided by an outside force, but with several dominant, consistent traits that can be harnessed and shaped to yield a desired result (acid blood, the elongated head, the gestation period inside a living host, etc). David, through his own experimentation with the pathogen, created his own perfect organism with a more rigidly defined lifecycle, the Alien that we know from the original films, and in a sense became a god/creator in a way that transcends what the Engineers before him had managed to achieve in their own experimentation with the pathogen.

I don't think the specific nature of the relation to Big Chaps et al changes my take on it, those are just what the PervBot9000 did with it.

[Nightmare Asylum]

To add on to my above post, and to recontextualize it in the wake of Covenant – I obviously now no longer see the pathogen as the distilled form of the capital-A Alien, but rather, it is the raw material in its creation. I don't know if the Engineers created the pathogen, or if they found it thousands of years ago, but either way it is an ancient and mysterious biological matter and, in their time with the pathogen, the Engineers seem to have experimented and discovered properties that lead to the birth of the Deacon and other similar creatures, which are what the Engineers have depicted in the LV-223 installation's mural. The process through which the pathogen infects and changes lifeforms seems to be randomized, unless guided by an outside force, but with several dominant, consistent traits that can be harnessed and shaped to yield a desired result (acid blood, the elongated head, the gestation period inside a living host, etc). David, through his own experimentation with the pathogen, created his own perfect organism with a more rigidly defined lifecycle, the Alien that we know from the original films, and in a sense became a god/creator in a way that transcends what the Engineers before him had managed to achieve in their own experimentation with the pathogen.

I don't think the specific nature of the relation to Big Chaps etc al changes my take on it, those are just what the PervBot9000 did with it.

The only thing that's really changed for me since the Covenant release is that I had it in my head was my original idea circa 2012 that the Big Chap form pre-dated the pathogen; nowadays, like you said, I see the Alien as what David did with the pathogen, and recognize the pathogen itself (as the raw material) had been used to spawn similar, but not quite the same, entities in the past a la the Deacon.

The pathogen itself now takes the place in the franchise as the ancient, eldritch form so much larger and more complex than anything that we can truly comprehend, with which Engineers and humans and androids alike merely play with without understanding the full nature of.

[judge death]

How do we know its that old and ancient and bigger than engineers/humans etc? Thought the engineers invented the pathogen and its mostly fan theories that speculate its from big chap and being super old and predating everything etc, could go either way from my knowledge, although your idea is the more interesting one.

if this is told in the cold forge or the newest novel then I have missed it

[Nightmare Asylum]

How do we know its that old and ancient and bigger than engineers/humans etc? Thought the engineers invented the pathogen and its mostly fan theories that speculate its from big chap and being super old and predating everything etc, could go either way from my knowledge, although your idea is the more interesting one.

if this is told in the cold forge or the newest novel then I have missed it

We don't know if the Engineers created the pathogen, or if they found it. Until a source says otherwise, I'm inclined to think that the Engineers stumbled upon the pathogen and began to harness it in their experiments, the seeding of life, etc. without ever truly understanding it fully.

We do, however, know that the pathogen is not derived from the capital-A Alien, since the Alien as we know it from the original films isn't created until Covenant.

[Immortan Jonesy]

How do we know its that old and ancient and bigger than engineers/humans etc? Thought the engineers invented the pathogen and its mostly fan theories that speculate its from big chap and being super old and predating everything etc, could go either way from my knowledge, although your idea is the more interesting one.

if this is told in the cold forge or the newest novel then I have missed it

Plagiarus Praepotens is the genetically resequenced pathogen, according to Alex White:

Is the mysterious Plagiarus Praepotens the same as the Black Goo from Prometheus or Alien: Covenant?

Alex White: Yep. Same stuff, re-sequenced by David, Linnaeus-style.



Plagiarus praepotens (plagiarus linesteres in the case of praetomorphs) is a mutagen agent introduced by a facehugger into the host to create an Alien embryo.

[Nightmare Asylum]

The idea of the pathogen being able to be "coded" in these various fashions, as presented in the prequel films and the Alex White novels, is one that intrigues me immensely – one that I also feel could go hand in hand with the biomechanical self-augmentation of the Engineers (thus allowing them create/shape a member of their species into the Space Jockey, as well as likely serving as the source of the potentially "living" biomechanical Derelict).

[Immortan Jonesy]

It's like an artificial intelligence or biochemical machinery that David reconfigured.

The Space Jockey is an Elder Thing transformed by Yog-Sothoth? 

How do we know its that old and ancient and bigger than engineers/humans etc? Thought the engineers invented the pathogen and its mostly fan theories that speculate its from big chap and being super old and predating everything etc, could go either way from my knowledge, although your idea is the more interesting one.

if this is told in the cold forge or the newest novel then I have missed it

We don't know if the Engineers created the pathogen, or if they found it. Until a source says otherwise, I'm inclined to think that the Engineers stumbled upon the pathogen and began to harness it in their experiments, the seeding of life, etc. without ever truly understanding it fully.

We do, however, know that the pathogen is not derived from the capital-A Alien, since the Alien as we know it from the original films isn't created until Covenant.

Dan O'Bannon predicted it 

"Alien went to where the Old Ones lived, to their very world of origin ... That baneful little storm-lashed planetoid halfway across the galaxy was a fragment of the Old Ones' home-world, and the Alien a blood relative of Yog-Sothoth."

[[cancerblack]]

[HuDaFuK]

I havent read cold forge but prometheus and covenant and fire and stone and other material seem to me just make the pathogen to a: it does whatever the story writer wants it to and not much logic to it.

That's my big issue with it. It's just f**king random with no apparent rules or internal logic.

[BlueMarsalis79]

It does have an internal logic though it just excludes the stuff that did not interprete it correctly prior to Prometheus' sequel.

[TC]

I havent read cold forge but prometheus and covenant and fire and stone and other material seem to me just make the pathogen to a: it does whatever the story writer wants it to and not much logic to it.

That's my big issue with it. It's just f**king random with no apparent rules or internal logic.

Without the rules or logic having been explained to me (I haven't read Cold Forge either), it feels like it's crossed the boundary from sci-fi to magic, like a Harry Potter spell to transform into a wolf, or Tony Stark nano-tech that morphs his armour into anything else he needs at the time. Even the Force is reinventing itself with new powers as the need arises.

TC

[Nightmare Asylum]

I don't really see the Iron Man nano-tech armor as being magic. That's science in the same vein as the T-1000's abilities in Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Silly movie science, absolutely, but still science for all intents and purposes. The Force, on the other hand? Definitely magic; Star Wars has been a fantasy story dressed to look like sci-fi since day one.

As for the pathogen, it's hard to put so fine a point on it because, even with us now knowing more about its properties and applications than we did in 2012 with Prometheus' release, we still don't have a full comprehension of it, nor do we know its origins, and each new writer seems to be able to add new abilities to its wheelhouse of applications under new circumstances.

Is the pathogen magic or science or some weird hybrid of the two? Well, how would one describe any given eldritch horror in a Lovecraft story? Some kind of mixture of both? Do those labels even matter at that point? It just is what it is, I'd say.

[Voodoo Magic]

I havent read cold forge but prometheus and covenant and fire and stone and other material seem to me just make the pathogen to a: it does whatever the story writer wants it to and not much logic to it.

That's my big issue with it. It's just f**king random with no apparent rules or internal logic.

It's

[Immortan Jonesy]

I havent read cold forge but prometheus and covenant and fire and stone and other material seem to me just make the pathogen to a: it does whatever the story writer wants it to and not much logic to it.

That's my big issue with it. It's just f**king random with no apparent rules or internal logic.

Without the rules or logic having been explained to me (I haven't read Cold Forge either), it feels like it's crossed the boundary from sci-fi to magic, like a Harry Potter spell to transform into a wolf, or Tony Stark nano-tech that morphs his armour into anything else he needs at the time. Even the Force is reinventing itself with new powers as the need arises.

TC

I am missing the organism (possibly with acidic blood) growing from 50 cm to 2 m in less than 24 hours, not to mention the food source for the already impossible process for a vertebrate organism of that size.

[Nightmare Asylum]

It's always funny to me when people claim that the prequels washed away anything "Lovecraftian" about the original film when, really, those two films (love 'em, hate 'em, whatever) mostly just open up a whole new can of worms that emphasize the weirder elements of the original Alien (the rapid growth and the ability to bond with and take traits from the host's biological matter, for example) that I would certainly describe as follows:

Lovecraftian horror, sometimes used interchangeably with "cosmic horror" is a subgenre of horror fiction and weird fiction that emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible more than gore or other elements of shock.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovecraftian_horror

We don't completely understand how the pathogen came to be, where it originates from, or the full extent of what can be done with it; we do know, however, that it has built in traits that can be honed and expanded upon, allowing for any entity experimenting with it in tandem with different biological matter to uniquely create or release something as primordial as the Deacon or, in the hands of one who considers himself a rather expert artisan (and a god, all the same), David's "Perfect Organism" that we all know and love from the original films. But those are just seemingly two ends of a rather diverse spectrum of creations, in which a multitude of other "unknowable and incomprehensible" iterations can and presumably do exist, just waiting for a new set of hands to shape and guide the pathogen in a unique, creative way. That's where something like the result of the experimentation in Into Charybdis becomes really interesting to me...

The division between "science" and "magic" does indeed start to blur, but the pathogen does function, in a sense, like a biomechanical nano-technology, capable of being both reprogramed and grafted onto biological material in such a way that it can yield all manner of "unknowable and incomprehensible" eldritch horrors.

We humans were created by the Enginners simply because they could. Our creation, an android that was created with a similar nonchalant intent, then picked up the pieces left by those old spacefaring gods and surpassing humans in order to create something he deems to be beautiful and perfect. Where does that leave us humans, insignificant pawns navigating this dangerous universe in which we have no true place or cause?