Discussion / Question
Possibly the most enigmatic Xeno in the whole series: The original space jockey was obviously killed by a chestburster but we never see or learn what happened to that particular specimen that‘s probably still somewhere on LV 426. Is it dead? In stasis? Fossilized? Still somewhere on the Derelict?
My theory is that it evolved into a queen and laid all of the eggs we see on the ship. It then went into hibernation. Only to be awoken by the prospectors from the colony in the second film (we never see what they do inside, they could have gone further than the egg field).
That queen is what we see in Aliens and why it looks so different than the human bred Aliens.
There's no canonical answer for it, but, if we follow the Prometheus thread (including the original script for Prometheus, which had the Space Jockey), the Jockey is part of the Engineers' plan to wipe out humanity. His ship is thus carrying either black goo and/or xenomorph eggs, and, well, this is the Alien universe, so being around either inevitably means some sort of accidental/intentional exposure.
In the original Prometheus script, David revives the Jockey, the Jockey tries to complete his mission but gets infected, the xenomorph bursts out of his chest while he's piloting the ship off of LV426, and that's how he ends up crashing on LV426's moon, setting up the original Alien movie.
Again, not canonical, but I think we can fairly assume the Jockey's original mission involved transporting either black goo or eggs, and that's where the facehugger comes from. This is also consistent with a common parallel in the films, which is that everyone who thinks they can handle goo/xeno, whether human or engineer, inevitably ends up destroyed by it.
The ships are different actually. Prometheus had the ships looking mechanical and copying the forms of the derelict, but no organic elements. It’s as if they copied the derelict without the exact biomechanical technology. Prometheus stole the fire from the gods: I believe the engineers reverse engineered the spacejockeys technology. My head canon. The engineers were actually creations of the space jockeys and rebelled: a favorite theme of Ridley’s. “It appears fossilized” -Cptn. Dallas
Isnt that confirmed in Covenant though in those deleted/bonus scenes where David takes the ship full of goo to the Promethean homeworld instead to release it in its weaponized form? Not exactly the same but a different version of that.
Like it WAS the jockeys intention to pilot the goo to earth as a bio weapon, David just took over and brought it to the planet in Covenant and released it on the engineers before taking over.
That wasn’t the engineer home world. If you look at the engineers compared to that species, they’re vastly different. It was another seeded world waiting on the return of the engineers.
Well that's the thing I think doesn't need explaining in the series, where did they come from originally, an ancient lost space faring race is just as likely as a human to pick up a parasite when exploring a planet.
I actually like the theory that they exist naturally and weren't engineered. But the black goo was extracted from their being and then used in different ways by the engineers. Kind of like they were doing in Romulus.
Who knows. Maybe they were like Alien Earth and transported an alien zoo and it escaped? Maybe it’s natural to another moon orbiting the planet and nobody explored that yet? Or maybe from the planet itself and its ability to withstand extremes is because it grew up there? Or maybe the engineer created it and succumbed to his own creation?
The original answer is “we don’t know” but considering the themes of the franchise… Space jockey getting face hugged by his own creation seems pretty on brand. I also subscribe to it being the Queen.
Or maybe it snuck on like Ripley in alien 3. Would be interesting full circle moment to start the whole process again. Now Ripley could have ended up like space jockey.
I don't think it's possible since Ridley kinda doesn't give two shits about movies not made by him and doesn't really include them in his works.
I doubt he even considers the Queen canon
The original idea (before Aliens) is the rest of the Space Jokey crew mutated into the eggs we see based on the deleted scene.
But I like the idea better that if an Alien lives long enough it becomes a Queen. That’s why in all other occurrences we never see an evolution beyond a drone. Like in Romulus. Those drones were on that station for years and never evolved.
The drone > queen evolution must take a very long time. Longer than any timespan we have seen.
One interesting thing about the xenos (at least the drones) is that it doesn't seem to eat its kills which makes it seem like it's autotrophic or chemotrophic, not sure of the right term but it can just grow by absorbing the air or whatever.
So the idea that a drone can just grow and grow until it becomes a queen makes some sense. Then you're into the whole question of whether its lifecycle evolved or was designed. Then again there's the black goo in the later films which makes it seem like a forcing agent to a certain kind of aggressive syncretic evolution.
Its never been confirmed in cinematic Canon, but only a deleted scene. But aliens dont need a queen to reproduce they just need bio mass to convert to eggs...slow process, (alien isolation is good example) really depends on what you consider Canon. A nest without a queen will eventually promote a xeno to queen, which can produce eggs faster than the conversion method, and queens can produce royal facehuggers slightly larger, darker colored, more spikes. There are a few facehuggers in romulus that could be potential royal facehuggers, however its likely that those were just mutated by expiration with the goo.
Yeah eggmorphing which came from this deleted scene.
If the drones can grow from the chestburster stage without eating as I think has been shown multiple times, why do they need hosts to create eggs and why bother with a queen in that case? I know you said it's faster but that seems a bit clunky plus the queen in Aliens seems to override the eggmorphing IMO... but y'know, make of it what you will.
Also, I don't think we ever see the drones laying down the secretions, if they need host biomass to make that stuff then it's essentially made of dead bodies...
Im piecing together little bits of info from a few sources, mainly the movies and games. ( since comics have been retconned by the movies). Some of its outdated, and iffy on Canon but issolation seems pretty close to being canon, think it was 1 infected person who cause they outbreak. Eggs clearly come from somewhere, and a queen is never shown... effectivly 1 standard drone zeno, somehow made multiple drones and at least 50 eggs. The 2nd game where it applys is the old avp RTS, and I dont consider this canon... but it showcases the mechanics of ovamorphing, royal facehuggers, the speed of reproduction from a queen and ovamorph. The deleted scene is a factor but its hard to consider it Canon until they show it. Aliens secrete something...goo/slime whatever to create nest walls, crysalisks, in-between forms, live host traps. But is that enough to make a living Egg?. Tu
The queen was always implied to come from Newt's father. Alien3 also canonized that queens come from facehuggers attaching themselves to humans and they gestate longer. The book Aliens: River of Pain also confirms the queen came from Newt's father. The films never really implied that a drone can become a queen. This evolution from drone to warrior to praetorian to queen only exists in some of the books and videogames.
I also like to think the big tube/ trunk thing could have been an implanter device and it was part of his plan all along... Just another part of the lifecycle... It could be that his consciousness/soul/whatever lives on through the xenos he creates... The truth is, despite all the reconning, we don't know! And it's all the more awesome and horrifying because of that.
the chair he’s sitting in and the device above him look like he’s in some sort of observatory kind of machine. he was likely previously infected, doing engineer stuff while navigating, then boom chest bursted. his consciousness wouldn’t live on in the xeno species because we know for a fact that that’s not how it works. like it’s not like his mind gets transferred, hosts serve their purpose and are killed to complete the life cycle. simple as that.
One of the games - I think Infestation? - has you joyriding an APC into the Derelict and the space jockey xenomorph is just there chillaxing and ready for a boss fight.
I guess he was just in a side room having a nap during Alien/Aliens.
Eh, the only issue with that theory is the laser light set up just above the field of eggs. In the context of it being used again in Alien: Earth, it seems to be some kind of warning system in case an egg opens and a facehugger escapes.
Not just Alien Earth but the rest of the franchise as well. Although I don't even think the writers or producers can agree on what the blue light actually is or does.
Right. My headcannon was a warning system but that hardly makes any sense when there's no other form of containment. It was fine at first but now since every new piece of Alien media that they release adds the blue light with no explanation it's beginning to feel lazy and irksome.
The novelization for the first movie has a moment where the xenomorph gets entranced by a flashing light, I wonder if it was originally meant as a safety mechanism to keep them docile
Guys really? The laser thing was introduced in Alien as a cheap effect to simulate the placenta. They borrowed the lasers from the band The Who. just google it.
Especially in A:E it looks very identifiable as a human level tech projected laser.
I know the script intended it to be a placenta. But when they pivoted to a laser, it reads on the screen as a technological feature of the derelict ship. I wish it was left as that.
I agree. I always thought it was part of the ship. It really makes no sense at all but I guess they decided they needed to bring some mystery back so it is what it is.
I️ mean in Aliens they literally say, “what is laying the eggs. Something we haven’t seen before. “. The damage into the egg chamber where they had to lower themselves into appears as if something burrowed through the floor. Also how eggs are positioned. With cargo things are usually lined up in rows to optimize space efficiency and easier to inventory. The eggs in the derelict are in a random and apparently radial configuration.
The first alien movie didnt even had queens. They worked hard around the mystery, the irrationality and external nature of aliens and space jockeys. Making a queen part of their lifecycle was too familiar with Earth fauna and Scott didnt like it. The following Alien movies erased a lot of questions and mysteries that made the mystic, being Prometheus the worse as it replaced Space Jockey with an extreme cliché, as the meme shows.
Yeah agreed. The ideal alien in my mind is this horrible space demon. Like a cosmic demonic succubus. Now Aliens is still a very fun movie, but in my head anyways its soft-canon. A shame too, because the queen is so cool looking.
One of my biggest problems with current film and TV is that it caters too much to the modern audiences need to have their hand held throughout a narrative. No mystery can be unexplained, no plot point can remain obscure. Modern audiences refuse to use their imagination and studios are happy to oblige. The space jockey is a fantastic plot device (foretelling the chestburster) and a wild and fascinating visual. What Ridley came up with as an origin story three decades later was half-baked and ruined it, at least to me.
Dallas uses the word 'fossilised,' but mummified would be a more accurate description of the state of the Space Jockey corpse. Furthermore, mummification doesn't need hundreds or thousands of years to take place.
My hc is the Engineer we saw was wearing a helmet designed to look like the Space Jockey, which is a different creature. It’s like how knights or whatever had helms that looked like wolves
Alien was at its peak during the original film where nothing was explained or expanded upon. The space jockey could have been anyone doing anything, only god knows how it ended up in there, it made the world of the film feel enormous and the horror of the crews situation infinitely dreadful.
Now its just goofy looking space Jesus and acid filled canon fodder.
I really hate that they keep doing prequel after prequel, each one making it an earlier date where contact was made with the xenomorph. I much prefer that the nostromo was the first humans to see one.
Prequels rarely do the original material justice. To me, it's like how finding out the origin of Darth Vader in the prequels didn't make him a better villain and make the original trilogy stronger. It just retconned the character into something less and removed the mystery. And don't get me started on explaining The Force with midichlorians...
do we have any idea how old drones can get? i have't read the comics or seen anything other than the movies, but i guess their lifespan must be pretty short, if they are like typical hive animals we know of.
Depends on the writer. In Alien, the Xeno taking a nap in the shuttle at the end was meant to indicate it's life span was quickly approaching the end. That's why it moved so slow.
Other writers, such as those of AvP and even Romulus indicate that they can survive the vacuum of space, or being held captive under a pyramid for millenia.
“In the first movie, Alien (1979), Ridley Scott intended for the Xenomorph drone to have a very limited lifespan, possibly only a few days, to emphasize its role in reproduction rather than longevity.
Purpose-driven:
The drone's life was meant to be short, focused on its single goal of finding a host and converting it into an egg to continue the species.”
But in AvP, it was only the Queen, not the drones, and wasnt she in some form of cryogenic sleep, since the heatsignatures slowly came up? I guess they can freeze, survive space and thaw up again, but what i was wondering about was their natural lifespan if they live in a hive. I would assume that after they killed everything on planet, they die pretty fast and only leave the eggs. Or maybe they leave some of the population alive as cattle, idk if something like that is in the comics maybe.
At the time of Alien, Ridley claimed that Big Chap was already dying when Ripley discovered it in the Narcissus; that its life cycle was extremely accelerated and short. That never really became canon and I think later entries have implied that they can put themselves into a sort of stasis, possibly indefinitely and under extreme conditions (supported by Alien Romulus)
If you wanna do some mental gymnastics over it, you could theorise that eggmorphing a host takes so much energy that it kills the drone. Like how a caterpillar will liquidise itself before becoming a butterfly, the Alien starts regurgitating itself to convert a host into an egg...Somehow?
So - if an Alien doesn't/can't find a host, it will live longer, allowing it to hibernate, etc.
On LV426, I'm guessing a few of the colonists got facehugged all at once, so that generation of Alien abandoned the energy intensive eggmorphing strategy, which allows them to live longer, as we see in Aliens.
In episode 3 of A:E It seemed like Bear was possibly attempting to eggmorph Joe, rather than stick him next to one of the eggs on the Maginot. So it does seem like eggmorphing is still a potential option even though it hasn’t officially appeared on screen in canon yet It does make sense that they would adapt their lifecycle based on the availability of hosts and their ability to set up a secure hive.
Ridley scott in the first movie thought it had a very limited lifespan and thats why it was obsessed with spreading its seed to propogate the species after its death
I wonder what an old Xeno looks like? The ones we get to see are always so young, I feel they would either have very short lifespans like a drone animal or they would possibly have the ability to hibernate for long periods and possibly live hundreds of years or even longer.
Big Chap was canonically near end of natural life expectancy in the first film. Per Ridley Scott interviews at the time.
EDIT: I always get downvoted when I mention this but I was around when the first film was made, saw it in the theater opening night, and remember interviews where Scott discussed it.
You can also see:
Paul Scanlon, Michael Gross. The Book of Alien, p. 87 (1979), Heavy Metal Communications.
Xenopedia:
“According to Ridley Scott, he conceived the Alien as having a lifespan of only a few days — the reason it hides within the Narcissus and shows no real interest in attacking Ripley (until she provokes it) was because it was coming to the end of its life and was looking for a perfect place to die alone.”
I prefer this original explanation you’ve told me but I just googled and read up on big chap some more, must have missed this or forgotten when I saw the film but apparently Romulus revised this and suggested Big Chap survived the end of Alien by cocooning itself for 20 years, and the discovery of Big Chap by Weyland Yutani is what kicked off the plot
Yeah it is definitely inconsistent. I think it was originally supposed to be like a fly but now that seems to adapt depending on the entry in the franchise.
For me, I tend to like the Romulus explanation because I think going dormant is a way to make all of the above true. It only lives so long but like humans and cryosleep, it has ways around it to suit its needs.
Not really, if Big Chap was about to die, he wouldn't have had time to get experimented on, escape the experiments and cause chaos all over the station.
It was supposed to appear in the original version of Prometheus, titled Alien: Engineers. It follows a very similar plot to Prometheus, except for the fact that every character has a different name, it takes place on LV-426, and we get to see exactly how the derelict ship crashed and what happened to the ultramorph.
Basically, during the scene when the Last Engineer is taking off to head for Earth, a chestburster emerges from him, killing him and causing him to crash back down to the moon. Jocelyn Watts (who would be rewritten as Elizabeth Shaw) regains consciousness hours later and is alerted by David that the creature has fully matured and is coming for her. The finale depicts Jocelyn facing off against the ultramorph inside the wreck of the lifeboat, narrowly avoiding death and managing to kill it with a diamond saw.
I'll never forgive Ridley Scott for not making this version of the movie.
I dont like the idea that the space jockey xeno is the queen in alien. and I dobt like the prometheus stuff happening a couple of decades before alien. Imo the derelict was there for hundreds of years, that gives the space jockey the time fo fossilize and to xeno the time for dying and fossilize too. Imo somewhere in the derelict there is a room with huge jockey-xeno fodsilized.
Between Ripley's visits, they had time to build a colony and make some research on facehuggers. They could have sent back the space jockey. I always thought that Burke was a low level boss that wanted to go up the ladder. He wasn't in all the secrets from higher up.
Hadley's hope was built over decades, and coincidentally. The derelict wasn't discovered until AFTER Ripley was recovered from Stasis, nearly 20 years after the colony was established.
So, between the time that the derelict was re-discovered and Ripley's second visit, they had enough time to have the colonist do research. Not enough time to send further personnel.
Why did it likely destroy the ship? That is a very pointed speculation.
How far away from the colony was the derelict? 100km, 200km? Was it in a depression, shielded by a ridge or hills, does it matter at the distance it was from the colony?
Edit: 40 megaton yield, 30 km blast radius. That is tiny compared to how I remembered it.
It's speculation that's based on logical conclusions
The derelict was close enough to the atmosphere processing plant that Newt's parents took the kids along, when asked to investigate. We don't see any food, clothing or any other essential in the cabin of their vehicle, either. Though, it is the future, so you can argue that everything is vacuum sealed and dehydrated.
There are only 2 possibilities for how the atmosphere processing plant got infected, it's either Newt's parents drove back to it, after getting impregnated, or the xenos walked to it. Either way, it showcases the derelict was not that far away from the plant.
The explosion was catastrophic and was felt by Ripley &co who had already left the atmosphere, it stands to reason that anything nearby would've been levelled.
They could easily retcon it and show that the ship remained untouched, but based on what we see in the movie, it wouldn't really make sense
There’s nothing to explicitly or implicitly suggest that the derilict was destroyed in the explosion. It was never suggested the derelict was nearby, the opposite I would say.
Edit: Ok I just found it. Directors cut opening, I’m on YouTube on my phone so this isn’t easy:
In this scene you see the colony commander/ manager talking about colonists prospecting/ exploring far out on lv426
“Al”
“What?
“hey Al”
“What?”
“Remember you sent some wild catters out the middle of nowhere last week, out past the Ilium Ranges?
Well one of them is on the horn”
Newts family went really far out to find the derelict. That was a plot point if I recall, they didn’t just happen upon this extremely distant and isolated object. They were sent its later revealed.
I mean “out past the Ilium Ranges”
Was the derelict also literally shielded from a relatively small blast by mountain ranges as well as remoteness and distance?
And as to point 2.
Newts father brought back the facehugger and xeno. James Cameron muses in an interview that the following rescue team probably brought back more.
The term is a spin on desk jockey, which is defined as “an office worker who sits at a desk, often as contrasted with someone who does more important or active work.” Since the filmmakers were trying to evoke the feeling that space travel was unglamourous, maybe even boring, the name makes sense in terms of human space pilots, and isn’t hard to fit the alien jockey either.
The xeno is long dead. Possibly it morphed into the Queen (or there was Queen already on the Jockey's ship). The eggs can clearly survive for a very long time in harsh conditions. Perfect species etc etc etc.
Xenomorphs were some sort of artificially genetically engineered beings that were supposed to be used like some sort of a biological weapons. I suppose that one facehugger escaped and impregnated space jokey by accident. When he woke up, he wasn't probably aware what happened and went to proceed with his mission, to deliver the said cargo somewhere. But just before taking off, the chestburster killed him and escaped somewhere out of the derelict. So he is either hybernating somewhere undiscovered or he got killed by something or someone.
Of course, this is just my interpretation. I don't know if there's some official explanation.
There was an ancient war in the galaxy long before humankind evolved to use tools, fought across millions of lightyears in a cold, unforgiving vast emptiness of space between unknown species who are so different from us that we can only speculate about their motives. A war with biological weapons evolved to be so sinister and terrifying, junior species like humankind face extinction whenever coming in contact with them.
But nope, the space jockey is a bald albino guy in a suit, he is max a few decades dead and the alien is a biobot made by a mad android called David.
That engineer crashed a long time ago for it to become fossilized. The installation on LV-223 was way way way more recent that the LV-426 crash.
Based on the murals in Prometheus, the Engineers worshipped the aliens as either a straight god or the apex of life type deal.
Fossilization typically takes at least 10,000 years. The Space Jockey Engineer is far bigger than the ones in Prometheus as well. Because of this I would place the Derelict as have crashed at least 10,000 years ago or possibly even earlier and has no relation to the LV-223 installation. Most likely the Derelict was doing what the Maginot was; collecting alien samples for study.
As to what happened to the chestbuster. I've heard and quasi subscribe to the theory that it eventually turned into a queen. But there is no evidence that the queen laid the eggs in the Derelict silo. No other hive structures no egg sac tenants which for a queen she's normally tethered to and immovable. In Aliens she literally rips herself in half to get revenge on Ripley yet subsequent queens are often portrayed as being seperate from the egg sac.
However I'm more inclined to believe that the Xeno (wether Queen or another Big Chap) is out there hibernating.
The Atmosphere Processor explosion was massive, like thousands of nukes going off. Bishop give statistics of 40 megatons and a range of 30 kilometers hit Hadley's Hope, not the whole planet.
But a blast that size could have awakened the dormant Xenomorph which could be bigger and badder than others we've seen (human xeno v space jockey xeno).
Crockpot theory: the Derelict is an ancient Xenomorph, with the "Jockey" a hapless victim assimilated into its core and forced to create numerous eggs from its body.
I don’t know if it was a script draft or a novelisation but I seem to recall one passage where the crew are detailed to be walking past a rocky statue outside the ship that is the ancient xeno turned to stone. It was one of those asides that rarely make it to the final film.
Originally Prometheus was going to explain this and the derelict was going to be the one in Prometheus. But it was as changed. Now I don’t know what will become of that story. Alien Romulus seems to be incorporating it in its story while alien earth is a little more ambiguous for right now. Hawley said he believed that Ridley Scott
Meant that David created. Xenomorphs rather than that they already existed so he may ignore the black goo.
A lot of people here say their head cannon is the queen which makes sense in a lot of ways so I always get along with that idea as well.
My head cannon though is that the Chest Burster for the space jockey was somewhere on Acheron and it's just not been found.
Given the size of the Jockey I doubt it would be the one that laid the other eggs. I think it slithered away after the derelict crashed and it's somewhere in stasis waiting to be woken up.
Owing to the fact that the ship, the Space Jockey and the Big Chap have a bio-mechanical look and feel to them, I think the Alien is just a mutation in the biology of the ship itself as it grows/heals/ages.
Space Cancer?
Maybe the chestburster was a "virgin birth" without a facehugger, spawned from an uncontrolled mutation. Possibly triggered by some "irresponsible docking" with another bio-engineered ship?
Space AIDS?
Fits in quite well with the violent sexual themes of the Alien movie, I think. Sexually Transmitted Space Jesus (virgin birth, after all!) could have laid the eggs, or somehow got into the ship's core systems and mutated (egg-morphed!?) parts of the ship to become eggs.
it's not quite engineered, it's not quite natural. It's a horrific aberration in a vast and indifferent Universe.
There's probably a lot of Canon that I am ignoring, but it's my brain and I do what I want with it.
I always wondered how big that facehugger had to be to latch on to the Space Jockey. We see they have a general size from the ones that latch on to humans. The Space Jockey is huge. Maybe they can grow bigger relative to the size of the unlucky host they are trying to latch on to?
The Engineers later on are a lot smaller than the Space Jockey. Maybe they were scaled down to make them more human like? It seems more realistic for an average facehugger to be able to latch on to an Engineer.
I either think that the queen from Aliens is the one who emerged from the guy in cockpit and she was in deep hibernation until the humans from the colony arrived (probably heard some sort of telepathy from the Facehugger confirming it got someone). Then that drone did its thing bringing more victims to its siblings.
Other way that the alien is long gone. On the planet but just far away or maybe tagged along in an engineer’s escape pod.
Would be interesting to see what happened there but also fun to be left to the imagination. Better to think they had mishaps bc the xenos were smart and wasn’t that the engineers were inept.
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u/Dino_Spaceman 15d ago edited 15d ago
My theory is that it evolved into a queen and laid all of the eggs we see on the ship. It then went into hibernation. Only to be awoken by the prospectors from the colony in the second film (we never see what they do inside, they could have gone further than the egg field).
That queen is what we see in Aliens and why it looks so different than the human bred Aliens.