When you first meet David in 2012's Prometheus , you may peg as one of the classic Alien synthetics who eventually betrays his crew. And, well, you wouldn't be wrong about that. But David is much more than that, acting as one of the key characters in the Alien universe as the creator of the Xenomorph and the reasons the powerful company Weyland-Yutani knows about the creature.
Who Is David? David, also known as David 8, is a Weyland Corporation synthetic in the Alien universe played by Michael Fassbender. He was created by the Weyland Corporation with the purpose of serving Peter Weyland . He is Weyland's ultimate creation in the tech innovator's long career of trying to cure disease, cheat death, and achieve immortality. Thus, David is the legacy Weyland will leave behind, much like a "son.
David, on the other hand, almost instantly sees Weyland as a flawed, mortal individual whose endeavors raise questions about the human race as a whole. And if a flawed creator can make something perfect...then what does that mean about the act of creation itself? This "glitch" in David, his immediate contempt for servitude, could be because the David model was rushed.
During his time serving Weyland, David develops some interesting ideas regarding life, death, and the human race. He starts to see humans as inferior, especially compared to him. Later on, he develops another obsession: creation. Specifically, the creation of perfection.
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Michael Fassbender as David in Prometheus
David becomes consumed with creation, striving for it even though it was the one thing that synthetics weren't designed or programmed to do. His ideas regarding creation and the flawed nature of humanity form a dangerous combination in David's mind that rear its ugly head during the doomed USCSS Prometheus mission, and especially after the death of Peter Weyland.
Weyland ironically dies in 2012's Prometheus after meeting his maker specifically to find a way to stave off his rapidly approaching death. This releases David from his shackles, making him a free synthetic able to do whatever he wants. This freedom gives David the chance to dabble in all of the disturbing ideas he had been exploring in his mind.
David conducts a range of biological experiments involving Black Goo and old Engineer plans, eventually culminating in the creation of the Praetomorph species. His goal is to create the perfect organism, which humans and Engineers , of course, are not. He also acts out of a misguided sense of "love," using the one human who was ever kind to him, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw , as a crucial part of his alien experiments, killing her in her cryosleep on the way to Planet 4 .
AI Characters (Synthetics) in the Alien Movie Franchise This is a list of all the Synthetics (Artificial Humans) from the Alien movie franchise, from 1979's Alien to 2024's Alien: Romulus. Ash (played by Ian Holm)<br> Movie: 1979's Alien <p> Ash, science officer on commercial towing spacecraft Nostomo, is Weyland-Yutani synthetic - a Hyperdyne Systems model 120-A/2 - who was placed on the Nostromo by the company in order to secretly facilitate the discover, capture, and transport of alien specimens relating to the Xenomporh and its life cycle. <br> With the rest of the crew believing Ash to be human, and without ulterior motive, Ash is able to manipulate things from behind the scenes, even going against clear quarantine rules by letting a Facehugger on board under the guise of saving executive officer Kane's life.<br> After Kane, engineer Brett, and the Nostromo's captain, Dallas, are killed, warrant officer Ellen Ripley, now in charge, discovers the truth about this side mission and confronts Ash. Ash attacks Ripley and tries to kill her, but is stopped by navigator Lambert and chief engineer Parker. <br> The surviving crew learn that Ash is a synthetic and ask him questions before they torch his body. It's here that Ash reveals that he admires the Xenomorph because it's a perfectly designed survivor lacking the weakness of emotion. Bishop (played by Lance Henriksen)<br> Movie: 1986's Aliens and 1992's Alien 3<p> Lance Bishop is a synthetic - a Hyperdyne model 341-B - acting as executive officer of the Colonial Marine vessel USS Sulaco, and modeled after Weyland-Yutani bio-weapons division executive Michael Bishop. in 2179, Bishop accompanies the 2nd Battalion Bravo Team, Weyland-Yutani's junior executive Carter Burke, and special advisor Ellen Ripley to the LV-427 colony of Hadley's Hope after communications with the colonists go dark.<br> Everyone on the mission knows Bishop is an android except for Ripley, who reacts with hostility and mistrust when she discovers that he's a synthetic due to her violent conflict with Ash aboard the Nostromo decades earlier. Bishop, unlike Ash, proves to be a loyal member of the team during the Xenomorph massacre that occurs, first volunteering to crawl to a satellite and remotely pilot a Sulaco dropship, and secondly waiting until the very last moment in the dropship for Ripley to emerge from the Atmospheric Processing Station with Rebecca "Newt" Jordan.<br> Back on the Sulaco, Bishop is ripped in half by the Xenomorph Queen, but remains "alive" enough, in his top half, to save Newt from being sucked out of an open airlock.<br> After the events at Hadley's Hope, Facehuggers cause the Sulaco to eject Ripley, Newt, Corporal Dwayne Hicks, and Bishop, in an escape pod, all while in cryosleep, crashing down on penal colony Fury 161. Ripley eventually finds Bishops body and reactivates him, having him access the Sulaco flight recorder, getting him to confirm that there was a Facehugger on board that caused the fire that ejected the EEV. He also tells her that Weyland-Yutani knows about it since they have access to all flight data. Call (played by Winona Ryder)<br> Movie: 1997's Alien Resurrection<p> Annalee Call is an Auton - a 24th Century synthetic model from a project that failed after the synthetics violently rebelled - who joins a mercenary crew on smuggling vessel the Betty, under Captain Frank Elgyn. Programmed to "care" about humanity, and seek justice, Call acts as a sleeper agent, delivering kidnapped human test subjects to the USM Auriga in the year 2381. Her secret plan is to kill a cloned form of Ellen Ripley, which United Systems Military scientists are using to try and reproduce a Xenomorph Queen.<br> Call is too late, however, and the new cloned Queen has given birth to cloned Xenomorphs, which escape their containment and attack everyone on the Auriga. Call's Synthetic identity is discovered when she's shot by Doctor Mason Wren and survives. Ripley 8, the most recent, and only successful Ripley clone, has Call connect to the Auriga's mainframe, "Father," and set the ship on a collision course for Earth, with hopes of killing everything inside it.<br> Call is one of the final survivors who make it to the Betty for escape, though she's almost killed by the Newborn, a Xenomorph/Human hybrid creature born from the cloned Queen, who saw Ripley 8 as its mother. After the Newborn is killed and the Auriga crash lands, Call and Ripley bond over the fact that neither one has either been to Earth. David and David 8 (played by Michael Fassbender)<br> Movie: 2012's Prometheus and 2017's Alien: Covenant<p> The original David model android is commissioned and built by Sir Peter Weyland, in Weyland's attempt to create life, foster a son, and bask in some measure of immortality. Though, almost immediately, and passive aggressively, David sees himself as superior to Weyland because he cannot die and becomes slightly annoyed when obeying orders.<br> Years later, a David 8 model is approved for Weyland Industries' Prometheus expedition in 2091 to LV-223. The purpose of the mission is to find alien beings who left a star map behind on Earth, which is seen as an invitation to find them and get answers to questions about humanity's creation. David is there to assist in the trek but also secretly serve Weyland himself, who is hidden on board the ship, now an elderly dying man who hopes to talk to the "Engineers" about a possible secret for extending his life.<br> It's clear that David acts with contempt toward his human companions while also becoming dangerously fascinated by the alien findings on LV-223, even going so far as to steal a black goo from a temple and poison archaeologist Charles Holloway with it, resulting in a tainted alien impregnation of Holloway's lover, archeologist Elizabeth Shaw. David and Weyland revive a living Engineers inside the LV-223 temple, only to have it violently turn on them, causing mass destruction and for Shaw and a mostly destroyed David to flee the planet in the Engineer's ship, in search of the Engineers' home world.<br> David studies the Engineers and their Xenomorph designs, killing (and sometimes mutating) the Engineer inhabitants of Planet 4 with the ship's payload of black goo (Chemical A0-3959X.91 – 15) when he and Shaw arrive. David kills Shaw after the protests the genocide and then spends a decade studying the effects of the black goo trying to perfect the Xenomorphic result, developing an egomaniacal god-complex in the process. When the Weyland-Yutani colony ship USCSS Covenant arrives on Planet 4, David sees the crew as test subjects and finds an opportunity to continue his barbaric research. He uses the captain, Chris Oram to create his perfected Xenomorph - a "Praetomorph" and then kills the Covenant's Synthetic, Walter (a later model android, modeled after David) and secretly takes his place on board, effectively hijacking the ship for himself. Walter (played by Michael Fassbender)<br> Movie: 2017's Alien: Covenant<p> Walter One is a Synthetic assigned to the Weyland-Yutani ship USCSS Covenant for its mission to colonize the planet Origae-6. After the disastrous Prometheus mission a decade earlier, the Walter android was created to correct the mistakes of the rushed David model, resulting in a more even tempered, friendly, and loyal Synthetic caretaker and facilitator. One year into the Covenant mission, a stellar blast damages the ship, kills the captain in his cryo-pod, and forces the crew to seek refuge on a nearby habitable planet, Planet 4, which unbeknownst to them is the world where David has annihilated all the Engineers with their own bioweapon and killed Elizabeth Shaw.<br> The planet proves to be dangerous, with deadly black goo spores decimating Private Ben Ledward with a Bloodburster erupting from his back, creating a Neomorph, and the crew also finding David, the synthetic from the lost Prometheus expedition. David is drawn to Walter like a brother but remains curious about why Walter cares about humans. <br> Walter eventually learns that David has lied about how everyone on Planet 4, including Shaw, was killed. Walter, in an attempt to protect chief terraformist Katherine Daniels, fights David, refusing to join his progenitor's mad cause. At the end of the story, we discover that it was David who actually won the fight and has now, with dyed hair, disguised himself as Walter, taking control of Covenant for himself. Prometheus David does embody the classic Alien trope of the AI inevitably turning on their crew as per the orders given to them by their superiors , usually focused on the preservation of alien species rather than the humans on their ship. The interesting thing about David is that he follows his own cold and detached volitions instead of those of his superiors.
The Prometheus story begins with David exploring the ship while the crew is in cryosleep. We see him busying himself by studying things like art, music, and ancient human language until the rest of the crew wakes up.
Things with David appear normal until they reach the rock they were searching for, a moon named LV-223 . There, the crew finds an abandoned Engineer bio-weapons lab, where the ancient species was conducting experiments on a substance called Black Goo.
The Best Alien Universe Books Here are the books we recommend in the Alien Expanded Universe... ALIENS: PHALANX (2020) <p> This violent, tense triumph comes from author Scott Sigler, all about a Medieval planet called Ataegina and the surviving sect of humanoids' gory clash with Xenomorphs. It has a sequel story, "Another Mother," in the AVP anthology Aliens vs. Predators: Ultimate Prey (2022) ALIEN: THE COLD FORGE (2018)<p> Written by Alex White, The Cold Forge is an awesome, nasty look inside a Weyland-Yutani Xenomorph research facility and the conflict that arrises between a cold-hearted auditor, a scientist trying to cure her own debilitating disease, and a secret saboteur unleashing ferocious monsters on everyone. It's followed by sequel Alien: Into Charybdis in 2021. ALIEN: PROTOTYPE (2019)<p> From Tim Waggoner, this sequel to acclaimed game Alien: Isolation features comic heroine (and Amanda Ripley pal) Zula Hendricks as she uses her tough-as-nails Colonial Marine skills to not only deal with a deadly Xenomorph but also a lethal alien plague. ALIENS: CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE (2008)<p> S.D. Perry pens this fascinating, outside the box-style Alien tale about a small world, Fantasia, that's ruled by a drug kingpin and a pilot, Tom Chase, who accidentally stumbles upon crime lord's ruthless operation. Xenomorphs do play a role, but it's a supporting one in this realm of debauchery and death. ALIEN: INTO CHARYBDIS (2021)<p> Alex White follows up the excellent Cold Forge with the crazed, calamity-filled Alien: Into Charybdis, about a Xenomorph rampage causing a diplomatic crisis between the U.S. and Iran - and the Colonial Marines and scientists caught in the middle. Many fans see this as the "Aliens" to Cold Forge's "Alien." Black Goo is a genetic mutagen capable of both creating and destroying life. In the case of the Engineers, they were eventually planning on using the mutagen to destroy life on Earth, which they also happened to create in the first place.
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David gets hold of the Black Goo and begins to conduct his own experiments, starting with frenemy Dr. Charlie Holloway . David spikes Holloway's drink with Black Goo, setting off a horrendous chain of events that resulted in Shaw bearing a whole new alien species, the Trilobite .
Shaw does manage to remove the Trilobite via C-section just before the team heads down to the last remaining Engineer to ask if it can give Peter Weyland more life. The Engineer turns hostile, ripping David's head off, using it to bludgeon Weyland, and moving on to attack everyone else in the room.
Shaw escapes, making her way back to the ship where she lures the Engineer into the Trilobite's path. The Trilobite manages to capture the Engineer and impregnate it, creating a new species dubbed the Deacon .
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Michael Fassbender as David's head in Prometheus
Shaw heads back to the Engineer's ship, thinking all is lost. David, however, tells her about the existence of another ship that they could use to escape. This prompts Shaw to pick up David's disembodied head and secure his body, taking him to the ship to repair him — giving him another chance, not yet knowing what he would become.
The movie ends with the pair heading off to Planet 4, the Engineer's home planet.
Prometheus: Cast of Characters Here's a quick look of the characters from 2012's Prometheus. Some spoilers follow... Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (played by by Noomi Rapace)<p> Archeologist Elizabeth Shaw and her lover/partner Charlie Holloway join an intergalactic mission to LV-223 based on their research of ancient Earth star maps, and convincing CEO Peter Weyland that the maps are an "invitation" for humans to seek out their galactic creators, the Engineers. <br> Investigating a Pyramid on LV-223, Shaw and company discover that the Engineers were all wiped out by their own bioweapon. David, Weyland's Synthetic "son," sees fit to poison Holloway with Black Goo harvested from the Pyramid. Tainted with the alien substance, Holloway and Shaw make love, which results in Holloway mutating (and being killed by Weyland exec Meredith Vickers) and Shaw experiencing a rapid alien pregnancy. <br> Shaw removes her alien fetus - the Trilobite - using a surgical MedPod and then discovers that the elderly Weyland has been on board the Prometheus ship the entire time, with hopes of talking to an Engineer and convincing it to grant him immortality. Shaw accompanies Weyland, David, and others back into the Pyramid, to an underground Engineer ship, to awaken a hyper-sleeing Engineer.<br> The Engineer kills everyone (dismantling David in the process) and starts up its ship, attempting to finish what it started which was the extermination of life on Earth. Shaw escapes the Engineer's ship, narrowly escapes that ship crashing down to the planet (when Prometheus pilot Janek uses the Prometheus as a battering ram) and makes her way to Vickers' lifeboat pod. There she watches as the now-grown Trilobite defeats the Engineer (who survived his ship's crash). <br> Shaw then finds David's parts, forming an agreement with him to fly a different Engineer ship to the Engineer's origin planet to find out why they wanted to kill off humanity. David (played by Michael Fassbender)</p> David is Peter Weyland's Synthetic creation, the first of his kind, and a type of surrogate son for Weyland. While the Prometheus crew is in cryosleep, David minds the ship, practicing ancient Earth languages, spying on Dr. Elizabeth Shaw's dreams about her late father, and watching Peter O' Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. <br> David is dutiful, but ultimately is operating at the behest of the elderly Weyland, who's secretly on board the ship, hoping to meet a cosmic Engineer and discover the secret to immortality. David also holds humans in slight contempt, and gets into small passive-aggressive exchanges with Dr. Charlie Holloway. <br> David, unbeknownst to others, harvest Black Goo from the Pyramid on LV-223 and then spikes Holloway's drink with it, just to see what happens. Holloway has sex with Dr. Elizabeth Shaw soon drinking the substance and it results in Holloway being poisoned, mutated, and killed while Shaw becomes pregnant with a Trilobite fetus. David informs Shaw she's pregnant and suggests she enter cryosleep so that her "baby" can be removed back on Earth but she takes matters into her own hands and removes it via MedPod.<br> Previously, in a bit of side exploration in the Pyramid, David uncovers the Engineers' ship and found out that one Engineer was still alive in cryosleep - and also that the cosmic creators' plan of action was to fly to Earth and release the Black Goo pathogen on the populous, wiping out all life (while also mutating a portion of it). Knowing all this, he still brings the old and dying Weyland to meet the Engineer. The awakened Engineer destroys David, kills Weyland, and resumes its mission to annihilate all life on Earth.<br> After the Engineer's ship is downed and the Engineer himself is killed by the grown trilobite, David, now just a head, contacts the surviving Dr. Shaw, offering a deal to fly them both away if she recovers his body. She agrees, but says she wants to go to the Engineers' home planet and demand answers. Dr. Charlie Holloway (played by Logan Marshall-Green)<p> Archeologist Dr. Charlie Holloway and his lover/parter Elizabeth Shaw join an intergalactic mission to LV-223 based on their research of ancient Earth star maps, and convincing CEO Peter Weyland that the maps are an "invitation" for humans to seek out their galactic creators, the Engineers. <br> Charlie is thrilled to meet the Engineers, the creators of humankind, but it upset to learn, from Weyland exec Meredith Vickers, that he and Shaw are not to initiate any contact with the alien beings. Holloway becomes even more dejected when he finds all the Engineers dead inside of a mysterious Pyramid. During his time on LV-223, Holloway also trades gentle barbs with David, Peter Weyland's Synthetic "son," teasing him about being a robot. This is probably the reason why David chooses Holloway as the one to test the Black Goo on, tainting Holloways drink with a Black Goo drop while the archeologist is on a bender. <br> Not knowing he's been infected, Holloway then has sex with Shaw. The next morning, back in the Pyramid, Holloway starts feeling himself painfully mutate. They rush Holloway back to Prometheus, but Vickers refuses to let him on board due to quarantine rules. Holloway knows that he's dying, or at least changing into something else, so he sacrifices himself, walking toward Vickers, telling her to use her flamethrower on him. She obliges and torches him to death. Meredith Vickers (played by Charlize Theron)<p> Meredith Vickers is Peter Weyland's actual child, his daughter, though it's clear that he never wanted a daughter and favors his Synthetic "son" David over her. It's sticking point that's made Meredith not only use a different last name, growing up in the shadow of David most of her life, but also one that makes her hope that the Prometheus mission is a failure - and that her father's precious Engineers either don't exist or turn out to not have the answers to immortality like he hopes. Weyland's desperate grasp for an extension to his life has caused him to fall and falter in her eyes. <br> Vickers is cold and obsessed with mitigating risk, causing some on board, who don't know she's Weyland's daughter, to think she might be an android herself. Meredith is there to follow her father's wishes, but also surprises him with her presence when he's awakened from cryosleep, as he only wanted David to accompany him on this mission, not her. Vickers passes the time leading up to New Year's Day 2094 by bossing people, having casual sex with Prometheus' pilot, Janek, and regretfully killing Dr. Charlie Holloway with a flamethrower when he's infected with the Engineers' Black Goo and begins mutating.<br> Towards the end, Vickers escapes the doomed Prometheus in an escape pod but once she touches back down on LV-223 she's crushed by the Engineer's ship as it falls from the sky. Janek (played by Idris Elba) Janek is the pilot of the USCSS Prometheus, and though he has a casual, flirty demeanor his first priority is the safety of his crew...and then eventually the safety of all life on Earth<br> Janek is never on any Away Mission to the Pyramid on LV-223, instead monitoring Pyramid dangers from inside Prometheus. When scientists Fifield and Milburn get lost and left behind in the Pyramid during a violent dust storm, Janek doesn't notice them being attacked by a Hammerpede, as he's away from his post and having sex with Weyland exec Meredith Vickers. Later, Janek heads down to the cargo bay to help his crew fight off and kill a mutated Fifield when he returns to the ship as a homicidal monster. <br> Confiding with Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, after the deaths of Fifield and Dr. Charlie Holloway, Janek informs her that he'll do whatever it takes to make sure nothing from LV-233 makes it back to Earth. When an Engineer is woken up and inadvertently set back on its mission to destroy Earth, Janek - with his co-pilots Chance and Ravel -- decide to use the full size of the Prometheus as a battering ram, launching their ship into the Engineer's ship, killing themselves and sending both ships crashing back down to LV-223. Alien: Covenant 2017's Alien: Covenant is where David really goes off the rails. While we see glimpses of David's strange behavior when he spikes Holloway with the Black Goo in Prometheus things take a turn for the much worse in Covenant.
Alien: Covenant begins with the crew of the USCSS Covenant dropping their original plan to take over 2000 colonists to a new planet to settle. Instead, they caught wind of a radio broadcast David made of Shaw singing John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" and decided to go there instead, falling right into David's trap.
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Unleashing the payload on Planet 4
After Shaw and David arrive on Planet 4, David drops the ship's cargo of Black Goo on the planet's inhabitants, committing genocide before he even stepped foot on the ground. With all of the planet's inhabitants gone, David is free to conduct all the experiments he wanted to, and that he did.
Starting with Dr. Shaw herself, who may or may not have been alive to actually see Planet 4 - though David mentions her rejecting his idea of creating a new "Eden" type of paradise. David conducts a range of experiments with the Black Goo mutagen. Eventually, his experiments stop due to a lack of living hosts, which the Xenomorph species needs to procreate. This prompts him to lure in more unsuspecting hosts using Shaw's recording.
When the USCSS Covenant crew lands, David greets them, pretending to be stranded on the planet after the ship crash-landed on Planet 4, killing Shaw in the process. Unbeknownst to them, David is planning on using them all for his Black Goo experiments.
The crew arrives with their own synthetic, Walter . Walter is the same model synthetic as David, albeit a more modern version, meaning they shared the same appearance. This plays a key role later on in the film. Walter is a course-corrected version of David, designed with less improvisational idiosyncrasies that the David model had which allowed it to act more human. Thus, he cannot create.
The Best Alien Universe Comics Check out these recommendations for Alien comics! ALIENS: OUTBREAK (1988-1989)<p> The first six-issue run of Dark Horse's Aliens comic acted as a sequel to James Cameron's Aliens, picking the story up with Dwayne Hicks (now a Sgt.) and Rebecca "Newt" Jordan years after the massacre, and obliteration, of Hadley's Hope on LV-426 - as they duo Hicks and Newt find themselves on a mission to destroy the Xenomorphs' home world. Fans went wild for this superb run, which works in conjunction with both Aliens: Nightmare Asylum and Aliens: Female War. ALIENS: NEWT'S TALE (1992)<p> This two-issue Dark Horse tale shows us the 1986's Aliens from young Newt's point of view - including her traumatic survival of the Xenomorph outbreak at Hadley's Hope long before the Colonial Marines arrive to investigate. ALIENS: NIGHTMARE ASYLUM (1989-1990)<p> The Dark Horse Xeno-odyssey continued with Nightmare Asylum, tracking the survivors of Alien: Outbreak as they discover stowaway Xenomorphs on their escape craft - while Hicks and Newt encounter an unhinged General obsessed with using Aliens as soldiers. Outbreak and Nightmare Asylum are excellent Alien stories, even though they had to get reshaped in their re-release after 1992's Alien 3. ALIENS: MUSIC OF THE SPEARS (1994)<p> This offbeat Dark Horse Alien run from the mid-90s followed a drug-addled musician as he hires ninjas (it was the 90s) to procure a Xenomorph so he can record its shrieks and noises. It's a warped, wicked time in the world of Aliens. ALIENS: DEAD ORBIT (2017)<p> Diving into something a bit more recent, Dead Orbit is tried and true Xenomorph terror, akin to the first Alien film. This time its a Weyland-Yutani engineer, Wascylewski, and the crew of a desolate refueling station must contend with the carnage caused by an influx of Xenos. It's a badass, bare bones adventure. Slowly but surely, the crew of the Covenant start to drop. Some by natural contamination with the Neomorph spores from outside the ship, and some, like the Captain, Chris Oram , by David sacrificing them to his Praetomorph specimens.
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The Fassbender twist...
Eventually, Walter catches on to David's devilish machinations and the two fight to the death while Walter tries to protect Covenant terraformist Katherine "Danny" Daniels . "Walter" then returns to the Covenant crew as they prepare to leave the planet. Unfortunately, however, it's not Walter at all. It is David pretending to be Walter. With Danny and pilot Tennessee "Tee" Faris in cryopsleep, David is now free to use them and the colonists for his experiments...presumedly creating the Xenomorphs and using Daniels to make the Xenomorph Queen (as shown in the Covenant sequel short film, Advent )
David stores Praetomorph Facehuggers in the ship's storage, allowing himself the chance to continue his experiments once the ship lands.
There is no sequel to Alien: Covenant, leaving David in full control of the ship, and it's 2000 colonists, and the Facehugger embryos. With no official media depicting what happens to the ship after David takes control of it, we can only imagine what kind of twisted experiments he had in store for the ships and whether they even made it to Origae 6 .
Alien: Covenant Cast of Characters Here's a quick look at the characters from 2017's Alien: Covenant. Some spoilers follow... Katherine "Danny" Daniels (played by Katherine Waterston)<p> Katherine "Danny" Daniels is the lead scientist - a terraformist - on the USCSS Covenant, on a seven-year mission to colonize a prospective planet called Origae-6. During the trek, a neutrino burst from a nearby star overloads the Covenant, causing major electrical malfunctions - including the death of Danny's husband, the ship's captain, Jake Branson. <p> In mourning, and with the ship in repair, the Covenant intercepts a transmission from Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (singing a John Denver song) and the new captain, Chris Oram, decides to follow the signal to a new, better-seeming planet. Danny logs a formal objection.<br> Arriving on Planet 4, the crew thinks they have found a closer, easier-to-colonize world but things turn deadly when two crew members spawn Neomorphs, which attack and kill five overall. David, from the lost Prometheus mission saves them but turns out to be the secret architect of all the death on the planet. Danny finds out that David even experimented on Shaw, helping him produce the first Ovomorphs. When David attacks her, she is saved by Walter, the Covenant's Synthetic (who looks exactly like David). <br> A Praetomorph chases Danny, Walter, and Sgt Dan Lopé to the Covenant's cargo bay, which pilot Tennessee Faris has flown down for a rescue. Danny battles the Praetomorph on top of the cargo ship, killing it. She and Tennessee are unaware, however, that Lopé has been implanted and the next morning, on the Covenant, Lopé spawns a Praetomorph. Danny and Tennessee kill the second Praetomorph too but she discovers too late that android she thinks is Walter...is actually David.<br> David, in full congtrol, puts Danny in cryosleep and leaves with her, Tennessee, nearly 2000 hypersleeping colonists and...Facehugger embryos. His experiments will continue. Walter (played by Michael Fassbender)<p> The Synthetic Walter looks exactly like the David model of AI androids, but after the David line proved to be too unpredictable they removed the Synthetics' ability to imagine and create, making for a more dutiful service-bot. Despite having less idiosyncratic freedoms than his predecessor, Walter still seems more attached to Katherine "Danny" Daniels more than any other crew member aboard the USCSS Covenant. <br> Walter helps Danny grieve after she loses her husband, the ship's captain, Jake Branson, to an malfunctioning cryobed. He also protects her on Planet 4 from a rampaging Neomorph, losing a hand in the process. Nothing about his protocols indicate why he seems to favor Danny, so his attachment is intriguing.<br> After following a signal left by Dr. Elizabeth Shaw to a planet that seems even better for colonization than their original destination, Walter joins the ground expedition teams with Danny. When it comes to the planet, though, Walter is most curious about David, a Synthetic that had been marooned there for a decade following the disastrous Prometheus mission. David tries to convince Walter that he shouldn't serve humans since they're flawed and mortal. David wants to hep Walter break free of his program constraints but Walter winds up fighting David when it's revealed David killed off everyone on the planet, including Shaw, in order to breed the perfect alien weapon. <br> Walter is killed, or at least injured and left behind on Planet 4, at the end of of the fight, which allows David to impersonate him back on the Covenant an ultimately trap Danny and pilot Tennessee Faris in cryosleep while he pilots a spaceship filled with 2000 colonists he intends to use as hosts for his monsters. David (played by Michael Fassbender)<p> David, a Synthetic invented by Peter Weyland, was nearly destroyed during Prometheus's mission to LV-223, as Weyland searched for the Engineers. During the mission he displayed slight moments of contempt for his creator and the other humans around him while also becoming more and more fascinated with the Engineers' use of the Black Goo, which David used to poison Dr. Charlie Holloway and also, subsequently Dr. Elizabeth Shaw. Shaw and David were the only ones to survive the expedition, afterwards traveling to Planet 4 instead of Earth so that Shaw could demand answers from the Engineers. <br> Shaw placed David back together on the stolen Engineers' ship and then David placed her in hypersleep. When the ship arrived at Planet 4, however, David immediately released the payload of Black Goo that had been intended for Earth, killing most, mutating some, and spawning Neomorphs. David continued to experiment with the Black Goo for ten years, using the Engineers' notes and records as his guide. He killed shaw at some point, perhaps never even awakening her from hypersleep, to harvest her eggs for his machinations, creating Ovomorphs in the process.<br> A colony expedition arrives on Planet 4, 10 years later, having tracked a signal left by Shaw (but sent out by David). David saves many of them from a Neomorph attack and shelters them in the capital temple of the old Engineer city. He's secretly delighted to hear that their ship, the USCSS Covenant, holds thousands of colonists, and embryos, in stasis. David lies to everyone about what happened to Planet 4 and Shaw, but when a few of them discover the truth, including mission Synthetic Walter and terraformist Katherine "Danny" Daniels, he attacks them. In a fight with Walter, David wins and then assumes his identity, tricking his way back onto the Covenant where, after the crew defeats a couple Praetomorphs (proto-Xenomorphs of David's design) he puts them in hypersleep and hijacks the entire mission for his own dastardly plans. Captain Chris Oram (played by Billy Crudup)<p> Chris Oram is the executive officer on the USCSS Covenant colony mission to Origae-6, promoted to captain after a tragic accident takes the life of Captain Jake Branson. Oram is a man of faith, which is looked down upon, or so he claims, at Weyland-Yutani and so because of this Oram tends to act out of both insecurity and a persecution complex. His wife, biologist Karine Oram, is also an the mission.<br> After pilot Tennessee "Tee" Faris intercepts a transmission of Dr. Elizabeth Shaw singing a John Denver song, Oram discovers that the signal's origin comes from a closer planet that looks more habitable than Origae-6. He orders the ship to divert from its course to investigate, under protest from terraformist Katherine "Danny" Daniels, the widow of Branson. One down on Planet 4, things looks promising at first. Quickly though, spores in the air cause Neomorphs to spawn inside two crew members, and soon, five of the Covenant team, including Oram's wife Karine, are dead.<br> The survivors are saved by David, of the lost Prometheus mission, and housed inside the Engineers' dead city. After another member of his crew is killed by a Neomorph, Oram sees the Neomorph bend to David's will. David kills the Neomorph, inciting anger from David. He demands to know what David's been doing. David obliges but tricks Oram into putting his face near an open Ovomorph. A Facehugger attacks Oram and when Oram soon wakes up he almost immediately gives "birth" to a Praetomorph Chestburster, which kills him. Tennessee Faris (played by Danny McBride)<p> Tennessee "Tee" Faris is the pilot of the USCSS Covenant. He and his wife, co-pilot Maggie Faris, are part of the seven-year colony mission to Origae-6. After an accident claims the life of Captain Jake Branson, Tennessee goes out into space to work on ship repairs. There he hears Dr. Elizabeth Shaw singing "Take Me Home, Country Roads." New ship captain, Chris Oram, orders the Covenant to investigate Shaw's planet, which seems promising for a colony. While his Maggie takes a transport ship down to the surface with an expedition team, Tennessee stays on the Covenant, in orbit, with a violent Ion Storm between them making communication supremely difficult. <br> Maggie is killed when she accidentally blows up the transport ship tring to kill a Neomorph, though Tennessee doesn't learn about it until much later, when he takes the Covenant down as close to the storm as safety will allow. When Katherine "Danny" Daniels informs him that Maggie is dead and that the survivors are in danger, Tennessee breaks mission protocol and flies the Covenant's cargo bay down to the surface, rescuing Danny, Sgt Dan Lopé, and a Synthetic he assumes to b Walter. The Synthetic, however, is David in disguise and when Tennessee helps Danny dispatch of two separate Praetomorphs, he enters cryosleep for a journey to Origae-6, unaware that David is now in control of the mission and will surely kill him to use for future Xenomorph experiments.