Alien Franchise: What if...Story idea

Hundreds if not thousands of eggs. From Alien (1979)

In 1979, what started as a simple monster movie gathered enough speed to become one of the key movie pictures of the century - Ridley Scott's Alien. The story was expanded on by David Cameron's Aliens in 1984 and then went downhill with Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection. A few years later Scott tried to remedy the third and fourth sequels and revive the story with Prometheus. Partly, he succeeded despite glaring holes in the movie. There are still places the story can take us and I would like to discuss some of them here.

In the original we are led to a crashed derelict ship, the source of hundreds of alien eggs, emitting a warning signal. The Nostromo wakes up the crew and they go to investigate, which results in the birth of a few screams in space no one heard but everyone enjoyed the hell out of. The question here is: Why did the ship have so many eggs? Why was it only a few months from Earth? Where was it going? Why did it emit a warning signal?

The Alien (1979) Space Jockey seems larger than the one in Prometheus

Allow me a long shot. How about the dead Engineer on the ship, or the Space Jockey - whichever you prefer - was heading for Earth with the intention of waging biological war on the humans? This would've been easy considering when the ship crashed on LV-426, it was some millions of years before Ripley and crew landed there. In those prehistoric times, people were still hiding in caves most likely - easy prey for a polished predator as the alien. So it would make sense to presume that the Engineers' intentions were to attempt to wipe out humanity. The hostile intentions can be backed by the Prometheus extension of the story, some 100 years prior, where it becomes clear that the Engineers created life billions of years ago using the black goo and were bent on destroying it later before something went wrong for them.

Perhaps the warning beacon emitting a signal can tell us something. If the Engineer activated a warning signal before he crashed on LV-426 in Alien (1979), then maybe he thought his brethren would look for him and that was an attempt to warn them off, to save them from exposure to the alien outbreak. But then in this case, why would the Engineers send just one of them to oversee the operation and why would he warn them off and leave thousands of active alien eggs lying around for millions of years without destroying them? Surely if he had the time to activate the warning beacon, he could've had the time to activate self-destruction of the ship.

My guess is the Engineers could have had a disagreement of sorts. A group of them split off in a rush, set on their mission of destroying life on Earth, perhaps to turn it into an alien planet, a habitat for the aliens. But something went wrong and the ship crashed on LV-223. The pilot activated the beacon before he died. But I think the warning signal is not a warning signal but really an SOS signal intended for his friends to come and pick up the eggs and continue on their mission to deliver them to Earth. But this did not happen perhaps because they were captured by other Engineers who opposed this.

A Space Jockey juggling life like a God. From upcoming Alien Covenant (2017)

One thing that stands out is the Engineers appear in solos. They almost always appear alone. In Prometheus, only one Engineer descended onto Earth to populate it by disintegrating himself. In Alien 1979, we see only one Engineer in the control room of the derelict ship. In fact, the only time we see more than one Engineer is in the hologram of Prometheus when at least two of them are running away from something, one dies, and the other is awakened at the end of the film. The writers have so far left plenty of room to explore the actual relationships among the different Engineers. What would their communities and society be like? Is there really a split on whether to annihilate the whole of humanity or not? How advanced are they, not technologically but psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually?

Perhaps we are going to find out in the upcoming squeal of Prometheus - Alien Covenant.