Warning! This article contains spoilers for Alien #3Fans of the Alien franchise are well aware of how it started, and how the Nostromo’s one little seemingly impromptu trip to LV-426 gave life to one of the greatest science fiction series to date. However, in the latest addition to Alien lore, everything fans thought they knew was flipped on its head as one sentence seemingly changed the franchise’s mythos forever by potentially confirming one fan theory surrounding the Xenomorphs’ origin.
In the film Alien: Covenant, it is seemingly confirmed that the Synthetic, David, created the Xenomorph species through experimentation involving the Engineers’ black goo and a human’s reproductive system (courtesy of the corpse of David’s former human partner, Shaw). However, it isn’t totally clear whether David created the Xenomorphs or simply reverse-engineered the species to create his own strain, so many fans prefer the latter explanation to keep the mystery surrounding the Xenomorph species alive–but that doesn’t take away from the fact that David may have very well created the Xenomorphs, and one new Alien comic seems to confirm that he actually did.
In Alien #3 by Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Julius Ohta, a team of Synthetic spec-ops known as Steel Team have infiltrated a planet overrun by Xenomorphs and have aligned themselves with its human survivors. When one of the humans brutally murders a Xenomorph in front of Steel Team, one of the Synthetics says, “David wept” in response. This comment was presumably a play on ‘Jesus wept’ with ‘Jesus’ swapped with ‘David’ since David potentially created the Xenomorphs–making him their ‘God’. It seems like the Synthetic who made this comment essentially confirmed that David created the Xenomorphs–but how would she know that? Well, the answer could change the franchise’s lore forever.
David Doomed the Nostromo, & Steel Team Knows It
A widely popular fan theory floating around the Alien fandom–one which was sparked from a deleted scene in Alien: Covenant–explains that, after David took control of the Covenant ship, he contacted Weyland-Yutani and told the company about the Xenomorphs he just created and gave them the coordinates of a world (LV-426) where they could be obtained. So, Weyland-Yutani responds by programming the villainous Synthetic, Ash, to find and bring back a specimen at the expense of the transportation crew of the Nostromo. Obviously, there are many gaps in this theory that need further explanation–including why an Engineer ship was overrun with Ovomorphs and why David was nowhere to be found when the Nostromo got to LV-426–but the broad stroke timeline actually does make a lot of sense. At least, it makes more sense than the Space Jockey race (Engineers) contacting Weyland-Yutani before the events of the movie with this information (which is what some extended-universe stories indicated in the past). Plus, if David did contact the company, it would make sense that Steel Team would know all about it.
Before the events of this series, Steel Team worked for the United Systems Government, and the government has long-viewed Weyland-Yutani as its greatest threat. Weyland-Yutani cornered the market on space travel and terraforming, so much so that it could almost be considered a dictatorial government in and of itself. The United Systems saw the company as a threat to its established governmental system, so Steel Team would absolutely have been privy to every one of Weyland-Yutani’s dark little secrets by order of their military-intelligence bosses, especially if it had something to do with Xenomorphs. So, if David did contact Weyland-Yutani about the Xenomorphs he created–which presumably gave them reason to send the Nostromo to investigate–Steel Team would have known about it. This means that this throw-away line about David seems to not only indicate that Steel Team knows David created the Xenomorphs (because of the ‘Jesus’ reference), but that David was responsible for the Nostromo’s contact with the Xenomorph in Alien–a potential truth that utterly changes the franchise’s lore with one sentence.
Alien #3 by Marvel Comics is available now.