5. What Happened To The Engineers On LV-223
Some time 2000 years ago the Engineers were preparing for another visit to Earth. What we do know is that the black liquid that they were carrying to use on Earth's inhabitants was unleashed on the group of Engineers on LV-223. At least one Engineer was initially infected- we see this on board the Prometheus when the decapitated Engineers head is reanimated by Shaw and Ford. This calamitous outbreak resulted in several Engineers being impregnated and having
Alien-style chest-bursters emerge from them- evidenced by the mound of dead Engineers that Fifield and Milburn find with holes in their heads and abdomens. We can picture a resulting manifestation of total chaos and, in the carnage, I suspect that several Engineers tried to escape by going into cryogenic stasis. In the map-room we can see several cryo-pods: the inhabitant of one of them was not infected (the living Engineer that is awakened by David later). However, the other Engineers that tried to escape in this way were infected we see this because, if you look carefully at the cryo-pods that are shown in the map-room, three of the four are damaged and show holes around their chest sections. This is down to newly born xenomorphs (not the same as the pure form of the revered xenomporh since these ones are derived from the black liquid)... The Engineers are running from these newly created xenomorphs in the holographic replays. Only the Engineers would be shown in any future replays since they are plugged in to the network via their bio-suits. Non-Engineers would not be displayed- which makes the absence of the antagonists in the replay scenes all the more eerie and disturbing. The burning question then is
how did a race of supposed super-beings find themselves screwing up in such spectacularly catastrophic fashion? The Engineers presumably possess vastly developed intellects, and what occurred here is a screw-up of monumental proportions. So what exactly happened there to set this chain of catastrophic events in motion? The answer
Deception. One of the LV-223 Engineers resented the mission to go to Earth to change the course of human history. He was probably a member of the group that had interacted with humans in the past (and been depicted on the Lascaux-style cave paintings we see early on in
Prometheus). He therefore caused the mayhem as a way of preventing something that he did not agree with, and what he did with the black liquid resulted in the outbreak and the associated cataclysm on LV-223. And this brings us nicely to the tie-in to the events of
Alien.