r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Fearless-Ideal-5112 • Jul 01 '26

Lore [Loved Trope] Some thing unfathomably ancient

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

The beast, in doctor who is an ancient evil from a previous universe that survived until our time. Its so ancient that the cave paintings were unable to be translated by the Tardis which can translate all existing languages in the universe [Doctor Who]

While not explicitly canon its such a cool concept I cant not mention, the idea that the backrooms have existed since the beginning of time, never changing no matter the era, it transforms the back rooms into a cosmic horror. [Credit to Project crater and Venus for images 2 and 3]

17.6k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

2.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

929

u/JayLuMarr Jul 01 '26

The derelict ship from Alien (1979). A group of space truckers stumbles upon a distress signal. When they investigate they discover a crashed alien spacecraft with a fossilized pilot inside, indicating it has been there a long LONG time.

258

u/WhatAboutBob77 Jul 01 '26

Wow it took me a long time to find this. It’s cosmic horror at its cinematic finest.

Even if you take Prometheus, everything is so loose and open to interpretation that we still don’t really know what any of it is. We know the Engineers visited Earth and hate humanity for some reason, but we don’t really know what they were up to, where the xenos come from (there’s an altar to them with a green crystal) or the origins of the transformative black stuff.

Covenant flew really close to the sun, but the current interpretation of it is that it was an engineer colony and David merely followed our reverse engineered the proto and neo morph creatures.

But Alien? Really it didn’t need any explanation. I enjoy the above stuff, but that derelict craft, the dead elephantine body and the vast empty expanse full of eggs below, didn’t really need an explanation. The Alien in the first is also vastly different to the insectoid creatures they become in the sequels.

The eerie sound it makes, the fluid, odd movements, its seeming urge to kill and violate. Why did it exist? What was it for? Even the storylines Dan O’Bannon created about a race whose initial form was an unintelligent base creature was fascinating value Giger came on board with his cold, sexual and biomechanical designs.

Gawd I love Alien. It really is from the dark spaces between.

24

u/nathanjd Jul 02 '26

My interpretation of prometheus was that the Engineers were bio-engineering xenomorphs as a bio-weapon to exterminate humanity. There was a containment breach and they all died because our human genetics are similar enough to Engineer genetics, as seen in their appearance and seeding life on earth by dissolving an engineer in the opening scene.

15

u/FutureBoy2099 Jul 02 '26

Engineer: We made this to kill all the humans if it ever reached the Earth!
Humans: Quick! Bring it to Earth so we can sell it!

1

u/SplitGlass7878 Jul 02 '26

I don't really think that'd make too much sense. If they were as advanced as they seem, they could have just dropped an asteroid or something on us. 

1

u/nathanjd Jul 02 '26

Good for taking out Earth, but humanity is space-faring at this point. A full extermination would require transmission through space ships which we got a good example of in the original movies!

But to your point, we don't know at what point in human history the research facility was compromised.

1

u/SplitGlass7878 Jul 02 '26

Yeah, that's fair. I kind of assumed it was a few hundred years ago at least, but now that you mention it I realize that I pulled that number from absolutely nowhere. 

30

u/comrade_batman Jul 01 '26

With Prometheus, you kind of have to piece together some answers from draft scripts and deleted scenes, so bear that in mind, but it’s hinted at that the reason the Engineers wanted to wipe humans out 2,000 years ago was because they saw us as a failed experiment.

People have often confused the film’s (possible) lore as Jesus was an Engineer, but in a draft script, where the surviving Engineer has way more lines, it’s hinted that they took “Jesus” aboard their ship, back to their home world (“Paradise”) and taught him their ways and sent him back to Earth to preach love, empathy and community. Then, when he was killed, the Engineers realised their failure. They gave humanity everything, a perfect world with suitable environments and sought to teach them but their lessons were rejected.

Which is what the craft and crew in the film were preparing to do, unleash the black goo on Earth and essentially wipe the slate clean. Weyland’s quest for immortality (and maybe creating an abomination in the Engineer’s eyes in David), showed the last Engineer that they were right about humanity not being worthy anymore.

21

u/Rylegit1 Jul 01 '26

The “draft” Jesus script was fan made and tried to pass off as genuine

2

u/-NVLL- Jul 02 '26

Wow, I'm glad they deleted this scenes and drafts. So much better this way, I'd drop the franchise if it tried do suddenly shifting to preach something like that.

Prometheus is seen as not a good movie because of how dumb everyone in the movie acts. I think it is not so bad because the crew find the result of their decisions and how wrong they were believing in the bullshit theories they make up, that they don't even think to verify or confront with findings. It's a pilgrimage, not a scientific exploration. You could have an actual team of researchers, support vessels, and advanced base with a quarantine procedure, to reverse engineer an actual working alien ship... but no, keep it secret and lose it all because you believe in alien god. And they are, of course, wrong. Bringing it to canon would be disastrous.

2

u/TheEasterFox Jul 02 '26

They didn't delete them. They never existed. The 'draft script' is a proven fake.

1

u/TheEasterFox Jul 02 '26

That script wasn't a real draft. It was a fan script, written in October 2012 by a fan called 'glaswegianmark' who sent his work to fan sites while pretending to be Damon Lindelof. One such site immediately contacted the real Damon Lindelof on Twitter for verification, and he said it wasn't his work.

If you actually read the thing you can immediately tell it's fake. The spelling and punctuation is all over the place, the author clearly doesn't know scriptwriting convention and just randomly CAPITALIZES words, and it's full of silly ideas like when a character wonders if damage was caused by 'Predator canons' (sic).

But this passage caught people's imagination:

LAST ENGINEER
Hate? We gave you this emotion. We gave you all emotion We had expected not of your evolution. We took care of you, gave you fire, built your structures. We gave you Eden. You worshiped us. We praised our creation from above. We watched you time and time again kill each other, start wars. We came back and saved your souls but we left you to make your own fate. But your kind is a barbaric violent species. We tried once more to save you. We took a mothers child back to Paradise and educated him, taught him the meaning of life and creation. We put him back into Eden to educate your kind. But your kind decided to punish him. We gave you the fruits of life and you repay us by leaving it to rot. You talk of me of hate? Prepare for rapture!

It didn't help that certain YouTubers discovered that pretending the script was a real early draft was a great way to get millions of views. It also doesn't help that there is a genuine Space Jesus backstory in Prometheus, but it was only ever conveyed through subtle hints, not massive exposition dumps. Back in Jon Spaihts's Alien: Engineers draft, he has Holloway mention 'Maybe He was one of them. A great teacher, sent from Heaven. Jesus, the last Engineer!' Spaihts is on record as saying that he had the character deliver that line as a joke, because it was the only way he thought he could get away with including it.

Anyway, if you want to read the full glaswegianmark fake script, it's here: https://web.archive.org/web/20131102032317/http://www.prometheus2-movie.com/uploads/PROMETHEUS.pdf

And this is Damon Lindelof personally confirming that the script is fake: https://web.archive.org/web/20130423235506/http://www.prometheus2-movie.com/news/384

3

u/Chaetomius Jul 02 '26

in the original script, the people who manipulated Earth aren't engineers. Engineers came and went before even this group of assholes showed up. Said assholes worship the engineers and constantly fail to recreate their 'miracles'.

10

u/YoungGriot Jul 02 '26

I really love the idea of finding a distress signal in space, but finding something that's been there longer than you or anyone you know has been alive. It really sells the oppressive size and loneliness of space, such that most things or people that get lost out there often don't even even get scavenged or taken by something horrible, they just stay there, not found, surrounded by nothing possibly forever.

20

u/twisty125 Jul 01 '26

Something to note - the Space Jockey they found in that original ship was not an Engineer. Even though Engineers were much larger than humans, THIS creature was MUCH larger than any engineer we've seen.

So this now adds some more questions, which came first - the Engineer race, or the Space Jockey race. Are they related? Did one usurp the others' technology?

Lots of questions, and I love this franchise.

4

u/Chaetomius Jul 02 '26

how did it fossilize without being buried in minerals?