10 Movie Deaths Only Explained Outside Of The Films

9. Elizabeth Shaw - Alien Covenant

Alien: Covenant isn't half as bad as some viewers tend to make out, but it did unfortunately succumb to the annoying trope of killing an integral character off in between films. The character in question is Elizabeth Shaw, who was portrayed by Noomi Rapace in Prometheus.

Granted Covenant does heavily imply that David (Michael Fassbender) had intentionally planted a neomorph inside Shaw while she was asleep (her heavily dissected body is perforated by alien-sized ruptures), but the film never explicitly confirmed her fate. David claimed she died when their ship crash landed and released a genocidal virus, but given his determination to create the neomorphs, one would assume he had a hand in her demise.

Naturally, though, fans were still unsatisfied. Rapace was a highlight of Prometheus and the fact she only appeared in Covenant as a corpse seemed unbecoming of her role in the previous film. Turns out, however, that Ridley Scott had filmed a prologue for Covenant that confirmed her fate, which released on YouTube the weekend before the film released in theatres.

The sequence shows that Shaw put David back together on their way to search for humanity's creators. They set a course for the planet, but Shaw knows that she'll have to be put into a deep sleep to survive the journey. Given the events of Prometheus one would realise that wasn't a great idea, and - low and behold - when David promises to wake her up once they arrive, he doesn't.

Presumably that's when he started experimenting on her, but either way, the line of "and then I was alone" when the ship hadn't even crash landed confirms Shaw died before the ship landed, or even before it had unleashed its Xenomorph payload.