Up until last week, the world thought it would be a couple months safer from the threat of a new Xenomorph terrorizing fans across the world. But just as everyone was about to tuck into their turkey, Fox dropped a chest-bursting surprise with its announcement that Alien: Covenant had officially been moved to May 19th, and with a stylish as hell poster to boot. And now, on the birthday of the series' proud papa and auteur Ridley Scott, a new photo from the set has been released that may point at some of the coming action. See for yourself in the image below:
20th Century Fox's Twitter was the bearer of fantastic news, as the photo of Scott on the set of Alien: Covenant was dropped in order to celebrate the many happy returns of Sir Ridley. Of course, it's hard not to notice the fact that Scott is, in fact, plotting out a scene in a Space Jockey / Engineers cockpit, which could mean one of many different things to the events of the follow-up to the project of mixed reception that was Prometheus.
One possibility is that we're seeing an Engineer in either a flashback to pre-Prometheus events, or we're seeing the cockpit of another Engineer who was either off-world or narrowly escaped LV223 before things got extremely real. Either possibility is valid, as Alien: Covenant not only will see a newly bred creature known as the "Neomorph," which was either previously created and sent out to destroy, or will be newly created by said Engineer who scrammed before Elizabeth Shaw and her crew landed on LV223.
However, with Noomi Rapace returning to reprise her role as Shaw, the scientist who was planning to bring the pain to the Engineers' home world after the events of Prometheus left her and Michael Fassbender's David as the sole survivors, this cockpit could be of the ship she hijacked in the finale. Should that be the case, the thread between Prometheus and Alien: Covenant could be that the "uninhabited" planet Katherine Waterston's Daniels and her fellow Covenant crew-members land on just might be the Engineers' planet of origin. This not only would explain why the Weyland-Yutani Corporation would send a follow up expedition to this planet, but could also explain why there will be two Michael Fassbender characters in play -- as we might have two different androids that bear his likeness.
Obviously, this is a lot of speculation based on one photo, and a bunch of information that's floating around in the ether. However, stranger thoughts have made their way into the Alien universe, and we'll be eager to see how right we are when Alien: Covenant hisses into theaters on May 19th. In the meantime, we'd like to wish Sir Ridley Scott a very happy and healthy birthday!
