ALIENS VS PREDATOR Timeline Explained - 2026 Update

Earth was once a lifeless planet until it was visited by ancient beings from the stars. To seed the habitable planet with the ingredients for life, one among them was chosen for sacrifice. They drank of the black substance. It tore them apart from the inside until all that remained of the higher life form were building blocks. DNA, the first steps of an evolutionary process that over billions of years, one day leads to the emergence of homo sapiens. They are smaller and more primitive, but unmistakably created in the image of those ancient visitors who gave the planet life. And when humanity forms its first civilization, the planet is visited again, not by the ones who gave it life, but by something else. They call themselves Yaocha. an alien species of hunters who pride themselves on turning the most formidable prey into trophies. They teach the ancient people to build pyramids and become gods to them. Gods who demand sacrifice. To these hunters, the ultimate prey is a species humanity will one day call the xenomorph. A terrifying creature that requires a living host for gestation. Every hundred years, the hunters return to Earth, and humanity offers a few of their people to be used as hosts. These people are impregnated by a paricettoid, and soon xenomorphs burst out of them. Once that ultimate prey is born, the hunters battle the great serpents and prove their worth. But if the hunters lose that battle, they have a failafe. Self-destruct. Everything in the area is destroyed, ensuring nothing survives, wiping out entire civilizations overnight. And whether the hunters know it or not, those parasettoids are quite special. Not only for their ability to birth great killing machines, but also because inside them is a black substance, an accelerant like the one used to plant life on Earth. Perhaps this is how humankind's creators obtained it from within these monsters. In 841 AD, one of those hunters visits Earth again, not as part of their 100red-year cycle and not to battle xenomorphs. This one comes in search of other game. A human fighter worthy of hunt. They find her in the Viking warrior Ursa, the Sea Queen. a warrior on a quest for revenge against Zoran, leader of the Crivich tribe. The man who held a sword to her throat when she was only a child, and commanded her to kill her own father. She held the knife. Her father grabbed it and sunk it into his chest with a last plea that she avenge him. Today, she does. She fights through Zoran's guards before her son, Anders, takes the honor of removing his head. That's when the alien hunter who's been watching makes himself known. He attacks them and turns off his cloak. With sheer size and strength, augmented by technology, a powerful gauntlet. He kills them all except the one who holds her own, Ursa. She takes the fight underwater beneath the ice, and employs a clever tactic. Watching closely in this battle, she's seen how that gauntlet works. She activates it, then shields herself against the blast as the momentum of it launches the Predator backwards, impaling his skull on an anchor. With the battle won, she finds her son gasping his final breaths. As for her, she is abducted onto a Yaoucha ship and frozen in stasis, added to their collection of worthy prey. Centuries later, they return in search of another for their collection, this time in Japan. Koshi, a shinobi seeking revenge on his brother. The bitter end of a rivalry born 20 years ago. Their father commanded them to fight for the right to succeed him. Koshi refused to fight his own brother. Kenji did not. He put a scar on Koshi's cheek. Koshi continued his refusal and retreated into exile. Now in 1629, after their father's death, Koshi returns from exile for a rematch with his brother, now Lord of the region. Come nightfall, the cloaked Yaucha watches Koshi as he covertly fights through guards to reach his brother, and he watches Kioshi defeat his brother in combat. He does not kill his brother, just returns the scar on his cheek, but the railing behind him gives out and Kenji plummets from the tower. Only then does the Yaoucha reveal himself. Unlike his predecessor who used a gauntlet, this one favors a spear and chain whip. Koshi does not disappoint the extraterrestrial hunter. Where the Yaoucha cloaks himself with technology, Koshi uses the stealth of a trained Shinobi. He uses the terrain to his advantage and turns the enemy's own tactics against them. When Koshi plunges into the water below, he finds Kenji alive. Moments later, the Yaucha puts a couple wrist blades through Kenji. He fights through the wounds alongside his brother, and finally, Koshi severely wounds the alien with one of its own disc bombs. Then, the two brothers slice what remains of him to pieces. Finally, they sit to watch the sunrise before the wounds from those wrist blades catch up to Kenji and he collapses before Koshi is beamed up to the Yaoucher craft and put in stasis. Another one for the collection. In 1719, another Yaoucha comes to Earth. The first to witness his arrival is Naru, a young Comanche woman who spots his light in the sky. Though that is the second strange thing she sees that day. First was the fur trap which caught her dog's tail. She'd never seen a metallic contraption like it before. The monster's arrival serendipitous in some ways. Naru has always wanted to be a warrior like her brother Tabe and she's been waiting for her Katamia where one proves themselves by hunting something that's hunting them. At first, no one believes there's anything strange in their midst. They ascribe the large footprints to a bear. And when Puhi is attacked by a lion but not killed, no one heeds Naru's warning. The lion didn't kill him because something scared it off. something worse. They don't find that something worse yet, but they do go after the lion. This, Tab says, will be Naru's Katamia. Rather than chase the animal, she suggests they put out bait and let it come to them. Her plan works, but when she comes face to face with it, a strange noise from that visitor from another world distracts her. The lion attacks. She falls off a branch and knocks herself out. That night, it is not her, but Tabbe who returns with the lion's head. But she knows that other thing is still out there. So the next day, she goes hunting herself while that monster does some hunting of its own, going after some of the more vicious wildlife in the area. An unfair fight given his thermal vision and invisibility courtesy of cloaking technology. The next morning, she comes upon a field of skinned buffalo carcasses, the work of those who left that fur trap earlier. And soon, she falls into a trap, one left by nature itself. She steps onto some moss, only to find mud beneath, deep enough that she sinks up to her waist. Struggling only digs her deeper up to her chin. By throwing the hatchet she keeps on the end of a rope, wedging it between branches, she is able to pull herself out. The next danger she encounters is a bear, and this time she only manages to escape thanks to that monster. He tears open the bear and lifts it above his head. The blood flows onto the invisible being, finally revealing its form to Naru. She escapes downstream and runs into a group sent by her brother to bring her home. They don't believe her about what she saw until they see it themselves. It starts with three dots that appear on one of them. Laser sights for homing weapons. He dies fast and the rest quickly follow with only Naru escaping. She finds in a nearby field and they hide, but thermal vision makes them visible no matter how much tall grass stands between them and it. Naru sees three familiar red dots on his head and knows the predator sees them. They run, but it is faster. Sy is killed and she escapes into the woods until she's caught by the metal jaws of a fur trap. The monster approaches. He examines the chain then leaves. There's no sport in hunting a trapped animal. As he leaves, some French fur trappers arrive and take Naru captive at their camp where they already have her brother. Their interpreter, Raphael, asks what she knows about the monster and tells her what he thinks, that it is a creature looking for the strongest beast. The furry trappers tie her and Tabbe up as bait and wait for the creature. Once it arrives, the trappers quickly realize they're in over their heads. Their guns and traps prove worthless as it slaughters most of them. And while they're busy dying, Naru finds a way to free her and her brother from their ropes. Tabbe heads off to find a horse. While Naru goes back to their camp to free her dog. There, Raphael begs her help. He lost a foot in the slaughter. If she provides medicine, he'll give her his pistol and teach her how to use it. She accepts his terms and treats his wound while he provides the lesson. And she gives him a taste of the orange flower, something her tribe uses to cool their body temperature and slow the flow of blood. When the predator arrives and he plays dead, it works. The colder blood hides him from his thermal vision. Of course, that doesn't stop the pain when he steps on Raphael's wound. And when Raphael screams, the monster quickly slaughters him. But Naru saw it all, and now she knows how to become invisible to the hunter. That's when Tab arrives on horseback. He knocks off the predator's helmet and keeps moving. Through constant evasion while attacking, he wounds the creature. It bleeds, which means they can kill it. But Tab knows victory now is unlikely, and he knows the creature has marked him as a threat. He tells Naru to run while using his own final moments to at least slow the monster down, giving her a chance to escape. He is killed while she returns home with news of their warchief's death. That night, she hunts again using everything she's learned. First, she baits the monster with one of the few surviving trappers and makes herself invisible with orange flower. When the Predator arrives, she shoots him in the back of his head, spilling plenty of that glowing green blood. She makes off with his helmet and sets a trap, luring him into the mud pit after cutting off his arm, slicing him up, and making him bleed some more. The monster rises again and points his weapon at her, too weak and distracted to notice where she put his helmet, at the side of the pit. so that its lasers, those three red dots which guide the projectiles, are pointing right at his own head. And moments later, that's exactly where the arrow goes. As the sun rises, she returns home, adorned in its glowing blood, and with its head in her hand. Her brother is avenged and she claims her place as warchief. Sometime not long after that, some Yaucha vessels return to claim Naru for their collection, making her another warrior in stasis in their trophy room. Over two centuries later, John Torres gets a draft notice, which means in 1942, he gets his wish to fly. Except it isn't the Axis powers he faces. It's an alien hunter. Another Yaoucha. this one opting for a craft as his weapon outfitted with aerial harpoons. Torres salvages one of its hooks from a downed craft and studies it. So when he joins the tech squad in the air, he has some idea what they're dealing with. Not that it does much good when it downs the whole squadron except Torres and Commander Vandy. In their battle, however, Torres saw how the thing was drawn to heat. That gives him the idea. climb high enough to cool the engines and become invisible to it. It works for Torres at least. Vandy, on the other hand, decides to draw the thing's attention to give Torres a fighting chance. >> Torres, sir, kill this [ __ ] for me. >> Once it kills Commander Vandy, Torres, the last man flying, glides with his engine off, invisible to the Yaoucha right behind it. He fires on it, then flies into enemy territory where he is small and fast enough to evade enemy fire. The alien isn't. The Yaoucha craft is damaged but not destroyed. So, one last gambit. Torres floods the engine, turning it into a makeshift missile. He sets off the chute, then leaps from the plane with timing just right, so the enemy harpoon grabs the flooded engine and blows itself up. After returning home from the war, just like the others before him, Torres is picked up by a Yaoucha craft and added to their growing trophy collection. In 1987, another of the hunters visits Earth, landing in the jungles of Central America. And this time, he'll be facing off against elite mercenaries led by Alan Dutch Schaefer. It starts as an ordinary mission. They're brought in by the CIA to rescue a cabinet minister and his aid whose chopper disappeared in the jungle 18 hours ago. Now they've been taken hostage by gorillas, armed insurgents. The perfect mission for Dutch and his men. In fact, rescue missions are the only ones they take. At the military outpost, he's met by an old friend turned CIA, Al Dylan. >> Dylan, you son of a [ __ ] Dylan will be joining them on the mission, and it quickly becomes clear he has not been entirely honest. They do find a downed helicopter, but it does not seem like one that was meant for a cabinet minister. This one has been outfitted for surveillance. And they find skinned bodies hanging from trees. Dutch recognizes a name from the dog tags. Jim Hopper. These men were Green Berets. What were they doing here? Dylan plays dumb, though even he is unaware of the real threat, the alien which now stalks them using thermal vision and enhanced hearing. At the gorilla camp, they witness the execution of a hostage, then make short work of their capttors. Dutch kills with his usual flare. >> Stick around. >> Knock knock. >> And the rest show fortitude of their own. You're hit. You're bleeding, man. I ain't got time to bleed. >> The rest of the hostages are already dead, and the truth is finally laid bare. This was not really a rescue mission. The primary objective was to take out the encampment because it wasn't just a group of gorillas. They were working with Soviets, preparing a major invasion. Dylan originally sent his men to take them out, and when they disappeared, he sent the Green Berets after them. Finally, he called in the best, but he knew Dutch would only take the job if he lied, painting it as an ordinary rescue. Dutch can see Dylan as a changed man. What's happened to him? Dylan has an answer. He woke up to the truth. They are assets, expendable assets, and he used them to get the job done. Now, with more gorillas closing in, the area is too dangerous for pickup, so they'll have to get over the border to leave. On Dylan's insistence, they take Anna with them. The only surviving member of the gorilla force from the camp. She could have valuable information. On their way, Billy senses something in the trees, but they look, and there is nothing there. Only their eyes lie. The Predator stares right back at them, cloaked by its camouflage tech. When Anna attempts to escape and Hawkins goes after her, the Predator strikes. The rest of the team find her covered in Hawkins blood. All they find of him are endrails. What got him? Her answer makes no sense. The jungle came alive and took him. At least that's how it looks to someone who's never seen a man slaughtered by an invisible alien before. As they search for his body, the Predator kills Blaine with its shoulder-mounted laser cannon. M gets to him just in time to witness the Predator's cloaked form. mostly invisible, but for a moment, glowing eyes give him away. Blaine was a close friend. Mac unloads on the jungle and the rest join him, firing everything they have in that direction. After the bullets storm, they don't find a body. They hit nothing. But that isn't entirely true. Anna notices glowing green blood on a leaf. And nearby, the predator turns off its cloak briefly and treats its wounds. The men make camp and once again ask Mac what exactly he saw. He isn't sure, but there is one thing he knows. He drew and fired straight at it, capped off 200 rounds in the minigun. >> Nothing on this earth could have lived. Not at that range. That night, the Predator gets through their trip wires, mines, all their defenses, and steals Blaine's body right out from under them. That's when they get a better idea of what the monster is up to. He is killing them one at a time like a hunter, and he sneaks around the jungle using the trees. That hunter is the real threat. Dutch frees Anna from her restraints. They'll need all the help they can get against this thing. And she reveals what she saw. They made the creature bleed. >> If it bleeds, we can kill it. >> They set a trap, not with trip wire or mines or any of the things the predator was apparently able to spot, but using old-fashioned sticks, leaves, and ropes. While they wait for it, Anna tells them about what she saw as a child. A man butchered. The old women in her village whispered crazy things about how it comes in the hottest years. The demon who makes trophies of men. Dutch steps out from hiding to bait that demon and it works until he easily escapes the net. Mac, dead set on revenge, recklessly chases it. Dutch prepares to go after him while the rest of them get to the chopper until Dylan proves inspired by his bravery and perhaps a little repentant. He'll go after Mac himself while Dutch and his team escape. Along the way, Dutch warns Anna to remain unarmed. That's why the hunter let her live earlier when it killed Hawkins. No sport in killing a non-threat. Meanwhile, Dylan gets to Mac and they do spot the alien hunter despite its camouflage, but neither of them survive the encounter. The others hear Dylan's scream echo in the jungle, and Billy has had enough. He stops running and decides to face the monster headon. Before long, he screams, too. Once the predator catches up to the others and kills Poncho, it's just Dutch and Annale. And when it wounds Dutch, he tells Anna to leave him. >> This is the chopper. >> Now it's just him and it. The chase takes him off a cliff into the water and through some mud. When the thing catches up to him, it's like Dutch is suddenly invisible. The mud masks his body heat from its thermal vision. Now Dutch can cloak, too. Now the odds are a bit more even. After the creature leaves him, Dutch gets to work. He spends the day preparing makeshift traps while the Predator busies himself collecting trophies. He rips out Billy's spine and head along with it. Once he is ready, Dutch covers himself in mud and lets out a battle cry to let the monster know he is prepared. It arrives. First, Dutch wounds it with an explosive arrow. Then, he evades before hitting it again. Finally, their fight lands him in water, washing off the mud. But the hunter knows he has found a worthy adversary and opts for a fair fight. He removes his laser cannon and mask. >> You're one ugly [ __ ] >> In their hand to hand combat, Dutch leads it toward a trap, but it hesitates, so Dutch tries to bait it. >> COME ON, KILL ME. I'M HERE. COME ON, DO IT NOW. DON'T KILL ME. >> IT EVADES the trap, but Dutch has another prepared and he sets it off himself, crushing the alien under a heavy log. Now it is defeated. But before landing a killing blow, Dutch has a closer look and asks it, "What the hell are you?" It responds with mimicry, "What the hell are you?" The monster sets its wrist bracer to self-destruct, then mimics something else it's heard. Laughter. Dutch quickly understands what is happening and runs. He escapes the explosion and finally gets to the chopper where Anna is already safely aboard. Sometime later, the Yaoucha come back for Dutch and put him in stasis in their trophy room. 10 years later, another of the alien hunters visits Earth, specifically Los Angeles, where he prays on two waring gangs, until he spots an overzealous cop, Lieutenant Michael Herrian. While others struggle against the burgeoning gangs, he shows tremendous bravery and skill. He is a worthy adversary, and he is starting to get the idea there is more at work here than just gangs. especially when special agent Peter Keys shows up posing as DEA. Ostensibly, he's here to stop the spread of drugs. But Herrian can tell he's up to something else. Keys is here because there's something different about whatever is slaughtering gang members. And soon there's another slaughterer where the hunter learns a new phrase. >> I tell you what I believe. [ __ ] happens. >> [ __ ] happens. Keys takes over the case, but of course, Harrian doesn't back down. He sends his friend, Detective Danny Archetta, to investigate the fresh crime scene, where the alien slaughters him, too. When they find Dy's body, he has in his hands something he found at the crime scene, the tip of the predator's spear. Testing at the lab reveals material nowhere to be found on the periodic table. Another clue that Herrian is facing something not of this earth. Whatever it is, Harrian thirsts for its blood now more than ever. It nearly cleaved his friend's heart in two and boned him like a fish. He gets help from Leona and Jerry, two fellow detectives also committed to finding the truth. Together, they narrow the search to a nearby slaughter house. They spotted Keyy's men in the area. And though the federal authorities scrubbed the file, the lab doctor was able to rescue one piece of evidence. Traces at the crime scene where Dany was killed, which show that the killer was recently in a slaughter house. That is where Harrian hopes to find his revenge. He will meet his friends there. But on the subway ride over, Leona and Jerry run into more gang members, which draws in the extraterrestrial killer. Jerry lurs it into a fight away from civilians, saving as many as he can before the monster inevitably kills him. Afterward, the Predator finds Leona. But when its thermal vision reveals a baby in her womb, it lets her go. Harrian arrives in the subway system just in time to watch the monster turn Jerry into a trophy, ripping out his spine and skull with ease. He chases the creature and despite its cloaking tech, he follows its blurry shape through the city until Harrian is stopped by Keyy's agents and taken into custody where Keys finally reveals the truth about the incident in Central America 10 years ago, indicating an extraterrestrial life form with advanced tech. In other words, >> a [ __ ] alien >> drawn by heat and conflict in search of hunting trophies in the midst of LA's heatwave and gang war. The alien is on safari and Harrian is the lion. Keys hopes to capture the alien for its amazing technology. And spying on it, they've learned it comes to this slaughterhouse every 2 weeks to feed. Now they are ready for it. They know it sees in infrared, so they've developed suits that contain their body heat, effectively becoming invisible to the predator. At the same time, they will make him visible. Radioactive dust in the room will adhere to him while ultraviolet light illuminates it. Using liquid nitrogen guns, they will freeze and capture him. The plan goes south fast once the creature reveals a new trick. Tuning its mask to highlight ultraviolet light. It may not be able to see Keyy's men, but now it can see their flashlights. After that, the slaughterhouse lives up to its namesake. Once Key's men are all dead, Herrian takes his turn, and with the fire sprinklers activated, he has a chance because water deactivates the Predator's cloak. Heran lands a few bullets in him. That knocks the creature out long enough for Harrian to remove its mask. >> You are one ugly mother. Mother [ __ ] >> Now the creature has the upper hand until Keys reveals he survived the earlier attack. He provides enough of a distraction that Heragan can escape while Keys himself is killed by the Predator's smart disc. Heran gets to the roof, leading to another chase through the city. Using evasion and carefully timed attacks, Herrian gets it hanging off the side of a ledge, but the creature will not go quietly. [ __ ] happens. >> It begins to set its wrist bracer for self-destruct until Harrian gets a hold of the disc and performs an impromptu amputation on the creature. Now it is on the run. Heran follows it down an elevator shaft and finds its spacecraft. Inside, Herrian finds a trophy case containing many skulls, some human, some alien. One in particular belongs to a species humanity will one day call the xenomorph. To the predators, they are considered the most formidable prey in the known universe. Soon, the predator shows itself for a final battle. And once heran plants that disc in its chest, the battle is over. Straight as >> with her victorious, others reveal themselves on the ship. And as a token of respect, they hand him a trophy. A pistol they retrieved from Earth nearly three centuries ago. One that belonged to a man named Raphael. Take it. >> As the ship takes off, Harrian gets outside and runs into one of Keyy's men. Disappointed they missed the opportunity to capture one of the aliens. But Herrian knows the truth. >> Don't worry, [ __ ] You'll get another chance. But soon it's the aliens who capture Herrian, sticking him in a stasis pod between Naru and Dutch. Sometime after that, the Yaoucha pick a few warriors from their trophy collection and defrost them. Ursa, the Viking warrior, Koshi the ninja, and Torres, the World War II pilot. They're tossed into a gladiatorial arena on a planet that certainly is not Earth. A warlord dressed in the bones of his enemies announces that the three of them must fight to the death and the survivor will have the honor of facing him. He speaks in his native Yaucha tongue while his words are translated by callers affixed to the human's necks, callers wired with explosives in case of any disobedience. The warlord announces, "Become the killer of killers." before giving each participant a weapon of their tribe. An axe for Ursa, sword for Koshi, and they're off by a couple centuries for Torres. An old pistol engraved Raphael 1715. Ursa attacks while Koshi tries explaining. He and his brother only killed one of the demons by working together. Unfortunately, there is quite a language barrier between them. But once Ursa sees the humanity in Torres, how young he is, and remembers her son, she gets it. If they work together and get Torres onto the alien craft, maybe he can fly them home. So, they work together. Despite a close call in the belly of a colossal beast, Torres gets a hold of a Yaucha wrist brace and uses it to shut down their collars. Ursa and Koshi keep the warlord busy while Torres gets to the craft. Koshi loses an arm, but he gets to the craft, Ursa, too, until a harpoon prevents them from leaving. That's when Ursa decides she won't. Instead, she returns to the surface and destroys the machine holding them back from the alien planet. She watches her boys fly off, hopefully toward home. And the warlord calls for a hunt, sending so many ships after them. As for Ursa, she does not go to Valhalla quite yet. Instead, she's placed back in stasis, back in their trophy room, awaiting her next battle. For the Yaoucha, a grander battle arrives in 2004, their centennial xenomorph hunt. Except humans no longer view the predators as gods, and most are unaware of their existence. This time, there won't be any humans waiting for them as willing hosts to breed xenomorphs. Instead, the hunters will have to lure humans. They trigger a heat bloom from one of their ancient pyramids, now buried deep under ice on Bouvet Island, and it works. Whand Industries satellites detect the mysterious heat signal, and thermal mapping reveals a massive pyramid. It's enough to get the attention of Charles Bishop Whand himself, the technological pioneer who founded the company. The pyramid has features reminiscent of the Aztecs, Cambodians, and Egyptians. Because it precedes them all, it was built by Earth's first civilization. Whand quickly assembles a team to drill underground and explore the pyramid. But by the time they arrive, there's already a tunnel drilled at a perfect 30° angle all the way down to the pyramid. They don't know it yet, but this was the work of those alien hunters. The result of a beam they fired from their ship. Regardless, the tunnel will save them some time getting down there. As the mission begins, environmental technician and guide Alexa Woods finds out what Wayand is really up to. He's sick. This trip is the work of a dying man seeking meaning and legacy. As the team makes their descent, three predators land on the surface. And reaching the bottom of that tunnel, Whand is treated to the sight of that pyramid, adorned with carvings of an ancient battle between two alien species. They enter the structure, unknowingly triggering a mechanism which wakes up a captive, an ancient xenomorph queen. While they explore the pyramid, those three invisible predators on the surface make short work of the team left behind before heading down themselves. Unaware of this looming threat, Wayland and his team continue on. They find the sacrificial chamber filled with skeletons with ribs broken outward as though something burst out of them. And another threat looms. That alien queen starts to lay eggs. The team's next find is a sarcophagus and inside it guns, advanced rifles, something no ancient civilization could have possibly possessed. They take the guns and that is the final trigger which begins the centennial hunt. The pyramid seals itself and the queen's eggs are delivered to the sacrificial chamber where five of the team members stayed behind while the others explored. Those five quickly meet the spiderlike things which burst from the eggs. The facehugging paricettoids implant their embryos and soon five xenomorphs are born. The rest of the team deals with other threats, invisible predators, and a pyramid which shifts and reorganizes itself every 10 minutes, like a living maze. Between that and the xenomorphs, the team starts dropping like flies. Alexa only survives by sheer luck. An invisible predator approaches her, but gets taken out by a xenomorph before it can strike. Another predator takes it on in combat as the few surviving humans make their escape. And despite the hunter's valiant effort, he soon joins his hunt brother in death when the xenomorph launches its inner jaws through his skull. After the bloodbath, only one hunter and three humans remain. Whand, Alexa, and Sebastian. And it's not long before that predator goes after them. Alexa and Sebastian only survive the encounter thanks to Whand, who sacrifices himself to distract the hunter and buy them time. They hide themselves and watch as the Predator dispatches a face hugger and xenomorph, and they watch as he ritualistically marks his forehead with the alien's acid blood. It all starts to make sense. hieroglyphs fill in the rest about their first visit to Earth thousands of years ago and their hundred-year hunting cycle. Alexa realizes something else. This pyramid is like a prison. They took the guard's guns and now the prisoners are running free. To restore order, the guards need their guns. In this war between the hunters and serpents, Alexa and Sebastian must pick a side. They must give that hunter back his gun and back him in this war to stop those serpents from reaching the surface. But before they can execute their plan, Sebastian is taken by the aliens, leaving her as the sole human survivor. When she finds the Predator, she hands over his rifle, and it works. He dispatches a few aliens, and the two form an alliance. He even arms her using a xenomorph's head as a shield and its tail as the tip of a spear. They make their way through the pyramid and come upon the hive filled with eggs and Sebastian with a xenomorph already growing inside him. Alexa earns more respect from the Predator when she puts her friend out of his misery. Finally, before they leave, the Predator plants a bomb to blow up the pyramid and incinerate the serpents. As they make their escape, a few xenomorphs catch up and Alexa kills one that latches on to the hunter, saving his life. >> You are one ugly mother. >> Once they escape the exploding pyramid on a makeshift sled, the predator takes off his mask and marks Alexa with the blood of the serpent. And then the final threat, the alien queen, apparently freed earlier by her xenomorph army. Working together, Alexa and her extraterrestrial ally take her down, but the Predator is mortally wounded in the battle. Moments later, a starship and many other hunters decloak to reveal themselves. They hand Alexa a spear as a sign of respect and retrieve their fallen brother's body. And as they depart Earth's atmosphere, something bursts out of him. It seems he was victim to a face hugger earlier and all this time fought with a monster in his chest. A hybrid creature sharing the DNA of the Predator and Xenomorph. The hybrid quickly matures and reres havoc on the ship, causing it to crash land in the forests of Colorado, freeing the hybrid monster and some face huggers. A distress call reaches the Predator home world, and one hunter answers the call. He visits Earth with the mission of eradicating the hybrid and any xenomorphs resulting from those rogue face huggers. He accomplishes the task with help from blue fluid that dissolves organic matter. On arrival, he dissolves his dead brethren and any nearby face huggers. Then blows up the vessel. All part of his cleanup job, ensuring no trace of alien tech or life left behind. Then he sets about killing face huggers and xenomorphs. He tracks them to the sewer system where he runs into the hybrid but fails to kill it. And the hybrid escapes with a few other xenomorphs at his side. The predator breaks out of the sewers and tracks them down to the power plant where the aliens are already slaughtering workers. The resulting battle knocks out the town's power, which only causes more havoc as the town's people start to notice the alien infestation. The sheriff calls for the National Guard to assist in a townwide evacuation, then bands together with a few survivors while they wait for the backup. They head to a gun store to arm themselves. And when the sheriff calls for a status update, he's treated to the sound of death screams as xenomorphs make short work of the first squad, unprepared for a fight with alien monsters. And they have no idea how bad things are about to get because the hybrid has made its way to the maternity ward at the hospital where it finds fresh vessels for more spawn. It quickly turns the place into a hive. At the gun store, the survivors are forced to flee when xenomorphs show up. The predator is right behind them, slaughtering every serpent in its path and humans, too, if it deems them a threat or if they get in the way. Outside, the sheriff calls the National Guard again, and this time they give him an evacuation plan. Meet at Gilliam Circle in 30 minutes for an airlift. Some of the other survivors are suspicious. That's right in the center of town. It doesn't make any sense, so they split up. Some follow the sheriff to Gilliam Circle, and others head toward the hospital, which they know has a helicopter. Maybe they could use it to escape town. Of course, by the time they reach the hospital, it's already become a xenomorph hive, which means they've walked right into a battle between Hunter and Serpent. The first to die is Drew, killed by a xenomorph. Next is Jesse, caught in the Predator's crossfire. Grieving for the girl he was falling for, Ricky goes after the Predator in a rage. He sprays him with bullets until the hunter is tackled down the elevator shaft by a nearby xenomorph. And then the hybrid shows itself. It attacks Ricky until his older brother Dallas scares it off with more gunfire. Ricky is wounded but alive. And they have a new weapon, one of the Predators guns, one he apparently dropped when the alien attacked. It comes in handy as they fight their way to the roof. But seeing their dwindling odds, Dallas decides to buy them time. While he prepares to fight with his recently acquired alien gun, he yells for them to >> get to the chopper. >> He does kill a couple of xenomorphs, but once the Predator arrives for a final showdown with the hybrid, that's enough of a distraction for him to leave. Dallas gets to the chopper just in time to join them. They take off. While on the roof, the Predator removes his mask for an honorable fight to the death. And in the end, both the Predator and Hybrid lay claim to the other's life, inflicting each other with mortal wounds. And soon, it doesn't matter because the National Guard reveals their true intentions. There was no plan for evacuation, only containment and eradication. They drop a nuclear weapon. the sheriff and anyone else at Gilliam Circle, everyone left behind in the town, the hybrid and the predator, all are wiped off the face of the earth. Those on the helicopter, meanwhile, are knocked out of the air by the explosion, but managed to crash land at a safe distance where they are met by soldiers who confiscate the Predator's gun, the only surviving evidence of their visit. And soon that piece of alien technology is brought to someone who will know what to do with it. Miss Utani, CEO of the Utani Corporation. The CIA, meanwhile, is also still interested in researching these creatures. Peter Keys once oversaw a task force with that very goal. As the years pass, that task force becomes Project Stargazer with Peter's own son, Shaun Keys, as a member. And in 2018, they get their hands on the Holy Grail, an actual living alien whose species they nickname Predators. It happens thanks to a brewing civil war among those predators. One of the creatures is on the run and escapes his pursuer by crash landing on Earth right in the middle of a US Army operation in Mexico. Army Ranger sniper Quinn McKenna examines the crash and retrieves some evidence. a wrist bracer and biomask. When the escapee predator starts killing that wrist bracer responds by protecting McKenna, its current wielder. The predator is wounded and McKenna is the sole human survivor of the incident. Agent William Trager leads a stargazer team in retrieving the body while McKenna makes a run for it, knowing he's seen something he shouldn't. And to hide the items he grabbed to keep them as leverage, he mails them to his own P.O. box. But he holds on to one souvenir, a small spherical object released from the wrist bracer. When activated, it cloaks its wielder. McKenna swallows it to keep the device hidden when he is inevitably questioned by the authorities. That questioning turns out to be a thinly veiled attempt to paint him as crazy to keep him quiet. He's quickly tossed onto a bus with other personnel deemed mentally unstable, a ragtag group who have named themselves the loonies. Things go further arai because McKenna is passed due on his P.O. box payments. So, the biomask and wristbracer are instead forwarded to his old home address where his ex-wife Emily raises their son Rory. And Rory is a special child, extremely intelligent. Though being on the spectrum has made it difficult for him to get along with other kids. When that box arrives addressed to his father, the boy's curiosity compels him to open it. He quickly pokes and prods, learning how the device works. At Stargazer base, evolutionary biologist Casey Brackett is brought in to examine the captured predator. you are one beautiful [ __ ] >> And they brought her in for a very specific reason, to see if she can explain why this specimen has human DNA. But having this creature here is more dangerous than they realize. Because he was on the run from a bigger one. When that bigger one arrives in Earth's atmosphere, alarms ring and the captive escapes his restraints. He effortlessly slaughters most of the scientists while Brackett escapes, though not before she has a brief run-in with the predator. That's when she learns they tend to spare those who do not pose a threat. When the creature runs outside, the loonies spot it and find out their newest recruit was telling the truth about seeing an alien. They quickly commandeer the bus to go after it. McKenna is confident if they get close enough, he can take it out. But plans change as the authorities close in. >> Get to the choppers. >> So they grab some choppers, a type of motorcycle, and rescue Bracket, who is only semicconscious after accidentally tranquilizing herself going after the predator. And that's the least of her problems. Will Trager has also ordered her to be killed. Like McKenna, she has seen too much. She wakes up to find the loonies staring at her. McKenna suggests a team up. They both want to stop that alien. She's uncertain until he points out the other thing they have in common. They're both marked for dead, so they team up. But where to start their search for the alien? Back at the base, Bracket noticed the Predator looking for something. McKenna realizes what it is. The mask and wrist bracer he stole. They rush to his home and find an empty box. It seems his son Rory has chosen the equipment as his Halloween costume, and he's already out trick-or-treating with it. And when he's picked on, he learns about the mask's automatic self-defense mechanisms. The explosion draws police attention. He drops the mask and runs to the school where McKenna and the Loonies find him and a couple of predator hounds that quickly attack. They kill one while the other survives a point-blank shot to the head, but the impromptu labbotomy seems to pacify him. Then the predator arrives. McKenna hopes he'll leave them alone if they give him back what he wants, but they don't get a chance to find out. Those hounds earlier were hunting dogs. Now the hunter arrives, a larger predator who easily kills the smaller one as the loonies use the opportunity to escape. While they hole up, Bracket studies some predator spinal fluid she stole from the lab and realizes something. It seems not all these predators hunt for sport. Some hunt to evolve, searching for the strongest, smartest, most dangerous species on every planet they visit, identifying the most high-end specimens and integrating their DNA into their own. That's why they found human DNA in the Predator. And that's how the bigger one upgraded, evolved into the monster that he is. Soon, Trager and his men arrive. He finally reveals what they know about the Predators and why they've been visiting Earth more frequently lately. With climate change raising the planet's temperature, humanity faces extinction. So, predators are trying to nab all the best DNA they can before it's too late. And once Earth becomes a hot house, it'll be the perfect environment for them. They thrive in heat. But not all predators think alike. Some don't support the cause, including the now dead predator. He was here to help. He brought something to help humanity defend itself against predators who come to hunt. Trager believes that thing is on the crashed ship. And they realize McKenna's son, Rory, knows where to find that ship. Trager takes off with him. While McKenna and the others escape their capttors and follow them to the ship with help from Predator Cloaking Tech, McKenna quickly gets his son back. Then a bigger problem. That 11t tall Predator shows up. He enters the ship and makes an announcement which they can understand thanks to their translating machine courtesy of the Harvard School of Linguistics. It only cost a billion dollars. That announcement, I came here to destroy this vessel. You cannot have it. What you can do is run. I detect one among you who is a true warrior. The one called McKenna. He will be your leader. He will be my prize. I offer time advantage. Go. Now with a common enemy, McKenna and Trager team up. They use the Predator's generous head start to hide in the woods and prepare for combat. Once the vessel is destroyed, the hunt begins. And it's a slaughter. Some die by the predator's hands, some by their own incompetence, like Trager, who accidentally blows his own head off trying to use a Predator laser cannon. They have no hope against the upgraded Predator. So, McKenna offers himself as sacrifice to save the rest. Only, he is not the McKenna this Predator wants. It's his son, Rory. Not for his physical strength, but for his mind. The Predator brings Rory onto his ship and takes off while McKenna and the few remaining loonies jump onto it. Only McKenna survives as they take the ship down. Then finally, using the Predator's own weapons against him, McKenna, his son, and Bracket destroy him. In the aftermath, McKenna buries some tokens, each representing a member of his fallen team, the Loonies. Later, at a science lab where Rory is lending his expertise to decode Predator technology, McKenna is welcomed as a hero and they show him some cargo that survived the destruction of the first Predator's vessel, the thing he brought, which is meant to help mankind against the less benevolent Predators. A high-tech suit, which roughly translated could be called the Predator Killer. And while some get their hands on predator technology, others push the boundaries of human technology like the current CEO of Wayland Corporation, perhaps a son or nephew of Charles, Sir Peter Whand. In 2023, he gives a TED talk that will become legendary, reflecting on the company's past and clarifying his vision for the next 50 years. Just recently, they've cured 98% of cancers. They've developed technology allowing the creation of cybernetic individuals who will soon be indistinguishable from humans. The gods once punished Prometheus for giving fire to humanity with his ability to create life. Sir Peter Whan declares, "We are the gods now." Though he might think differently if he knew about a certain other species far outpacing humankind in technology and space exploration, the predators. Some evolve through DNA extraction and hybridization. Others do it the old-fashioned way, fighting the most formidable prey and learning from the experience. In fact, they've set aside at least one planet as a gaming preserve. The strongest prey are curated from various sentient species from around the galaxy and dropped in to be hunted. Unfortunately, for an unlucky few, that does include humans. and dropped in is literal because they wake up falling with parachutes on their back. This batch of prey includes an American mercenary, Mexican cartel enforcer, Russian soldier, IDF sniper, Yakuza assassin, mass murderer on death row, and a few others skilled in the art of killing. Only one stands oddly out, Edwin the doctor. The mercenary becomes their de facto leader. He doesn't volunteer for the role and doesn't seem to care much about the others. But his skill and his focus on survival, even if only his own, makes him someone the others feel compelled to follow. Before long, they find a couple of clues they aren't on Earth. The unfamiliar terrain, the unmoving sun, the makeshift compass that can't seem to find north. Then the dead giveaway. The cliffside gives them an unobstructed view of a sky filled with unfamiliar planets and celestial bodies. And soon the mercenary figures out the rest. This planet is a game preserve. Where's the game? >> The giveaway. A few doglike things attack and they fend them off until a strange whistle calls them back. The Merc knows why. It was to split them apart and to test them while the true hunters watched. And it worked. One of them is missing. They find the cartel enforcer in a field calling for help. An obvious trap. The sniper puts him out of his misery and they move on. But before they go, she hears him call out one more time because it was never really his voice. Whatever is hunting them has a prowess for mimicry. Following the tracks of the dogs, they finally come face to face with one of them. But this one isn't a danger. This one is a captive himself, strung up and restrained. The mercenary quietly hides and watches the ambush on his makeshift team from a safe vantage. One man dies in the attack and the survivors gather. The sniper confronts him. The mercenary knew they were likely heading into a trap. He used them as bait. Sure, he admits he did, but they learned plenty. Now they know their enemy cloaks, uses projectile and energy- based weapons, and they are strong. He also saw how the sniper reacted when they found the captive alien. She cops to what she knows about what the spec ops team faced in the jungles of Guatemala in 1987 and everything the sole survivor Dutch shared in his brief. How he cloaked himself in mud to hide from the alien's thermal vision. The mercenary decides it can be done. If they set the right traps and lure them in, they can kill them all. But it doesn't work. The predators are smart. Even when they use the doctor Edwin, as bait, something does come after him. But a close look at the body reveals it wasn't one of the hunters. It was just more prey like them. Though the sniper missed her shot, someone else put down that creature. That's when they meet Noland, a US Army soldier who has been surviving here for years, in part thanks to predator tech. He's pilferred. He's a welcome surprise until later that night. They sleep at his hideout until he traps them in a room filling with smoke. It seems isolation has made Noland ruthless, and he's decided rather than a few new friends, he'd rather kill them and just take their things. The mercenary saves them through a dangerous gambit. He fires at a sidewall, not to kill or break out, but to give away their location and draw in the predators. One arrives. First, it kills Noland, then opens the room to let out the others because it's here to hunt, not shoot fish in a barrel. On their way out, Edwin gets separated and Nikolai goes back for him. He saves the doctor, but gets himself cornered by the Predator. With no escape, the soldier detonates the explosives on his chest. He dies and takes the alien with him. As the rest escape in the chaos, the mercenary is nearly killed until the convict intervenes. He dies, too. But the distraction gives the others a chance. That's when the Yakuza assassin decides he's done running. He decides to fight. In the end, his one-on-one brawl ends like the soldiers with him and the alien both dead. Now all that's left is the mercenary, the sniper, and Edwin the doctor. Where to now? Before Noland turned on his new friends, he did share what he knows. The predators always come in threes, and they always come with a ship. With two dead, that means only one left. And that ship means a way out if they can get someone who knows how to fly it. The mercenary has an idea who might. that captive predator, the one who was hunted by his stronger brethren. Nolan suggested there might be something like a blood feud between the larger and smaller ones. So maybe the mercenary suggests that captive would consider the others a common enemy. He might be open to a temporary alliance. But on their way, Edwin gets his foot caught in a trap. The smart thing would be to leave him behind. And that's exactly what the mercenary does. The sniper, on the other hand, she still has a heart. And even if the trap was meant to do exactly this, exploit their empathy, slow them down, she cannot leave him. That's how she ends up dragging the limping doctor. That's how they both end up in one of the predators traps. While the mercenary finds that captive predator, the creature seems to understand and agree to his terms. The human will free him in exchange for assistance flying that ship. The mercenary cuts the restraints. Then the Predator reveals the ship and sets a course for Earth. That's when the bigger Predator shows up. While they brawl, the mercenary runs toward the ship. From the hole they've been trapped in, Edwin and the sniper watch that ship take off. Then Edwin cuts her with a scalpel dipped in a neurotoxin borrowed from the planet's plant life. As paralysis sets in, he reveals who he really is. Back home, he's a murderer, a freak. But here, he fits right in. And more bad news. The bigger predator wins his fight against the captive, then blows up the escaping ship. But the mercenary was never on that ship. It seems he does have a heart after all. He couldn't leave them behind. He gets them out of the pit, and once he sees Edwin as a threat, he wounds him, booby traps him, and uses him as bait to blow up that predator. The alien survives, but the mercenary was ready for that. Cloaked by mud, he evades, attacks, and with the sniper's help, now recovering from that toxin, he beheads the monster. As morning comes, the two survivors comfort each other and finally introduce themselves. He's Royce and she is Isabella. Now, all that's left is to find a way home. >> Now, let's find a way off this [ __ ] planet. Back on Earth, Whand keeps his promise. He makes his first synthetic man. He is named David after Michelangelo's masterpiece. Whan tells him about his hope to one day answer the question, "Where do we come from?" Six decades later, humanity is finally poised to answer that question. It begins with archaeologists Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway, partners professionally and personally. They discover a cave painting at least 35,000 years old in the aisle of sky. It includes a pictogram of men worshiping giant beings pointing at a particular configuration of stars. It's the same image found at other archaeological digs, Egyptian, Mayan, Samrian, Babylonian, Hawaiian, and Mesopotamian. These ancient civilizations, separated by centuries, shared no contact with each other, yet all had the same image. The configuration of stars matches only one galactic system. So far from Earth, there is no way that these primitive ancient civilizations could have known about it. But that system has a sun and a planet with one moon capable of sustaining life. LV223 Shaw and Holloway believe the image is an invitation from beings they call engineers, the ones who gave life to Earth, the ones who engineered humanity. To answer that invitation, Shaw petitions Whand Corporation to fund a mission and Sir Peter Wayland, eager to meet his maker, commissions the US CSS Prometheus. In 2091, the vessel leaves Earth for the moon LV223. It will be a 2-year flight, so the crew is kept in cryosleep with the exception of David, the Android, now in its eighth generation and more humanlike than ever. Aside from Shaw and Holloway, the crew also includes mission director Meredith Vickers and her aranged father, Peter Whland himself, though he is kept hidden from the rest of the crew who are led to believe he is long dead. In truth, he put himself in cryostasis with only a few days of life left in him. He intends on waking up once they've found the engineers. And then with the little life he has left, he can ask his makers for more life. But 2 years later, what they find on LV223 is death. Because this moon is not the engineers home. It is an installation where they keep a dangerous black substance capable of creating life as it once did on Earth. But its mutagenic capabilities also make it a powerful bioweapon. Of course, the crew of the Prometheus do not know any of this yet, but they get their first clue when they find a structure on LV223 and in it a pile of bodies. Carbon dating tells them it happened about 2,000 years ago. Something went wrong, seemingly killing all the engineers here. Crew members Milbour and Field are sufficiently terrified. They head back for the ship, leaving Holloway, Shaw, and David to continue exploring. They find a mural depicting the xenomorph, and they find small vessels containing that black substance. As a storm approaches, they are forced to rush back. But first, Shaw grabs one of the engineers decapitated heads, and David quietly takes one of those vessels. They return to the ship with these souvenirs. Though Milbourburn and Fefield are still in that structure, they got lost on the way out, and with the storm upon them, it is no longer safe to leave. They will have to spend the night. They don't last very long. They come upon two elongated reptile type creatures. One breaks Milbour's arm and burrows into his esophagus. In Fieldfield's attempt to save him, he gets his helmet and face melted by the creature's acid blood and falls into the black goo. At the ship, Shaw makes an extraordinary discovery. Testing the head they found reveals the engineers have DNA identical to humans. It seems now a certainty that they were responsible for life on Earth. David, meanwhile, does some research of his own on that black substance. All he needs is a test subject, and he finds one in Holloway, sneaking a drop of the goo into his drink. That night, when Holloway is intimate with Shaw, he is unaware of that alien substance inside him, now inside her, too. The next day, the crew heads out to the structure and inside it finds Milburn's body. They have little time to investigate because the substance inside Holloway has begun its work. He falls severely ill. They rush him back to the ship, but of course, mission director Vickers will not let him on and risk infecting the others. Holloway agrees. He tells Shaw that he loves her before allowing Vickers to burn him alive. David, meanwhile, has been allowed to explore the structure on his own. He finds a room where a holographic recording shows the engineers were planning to visit Earth before things went south. and he finds an engineer alive in cryostasis. Later that day, David gives Shaw some troubling news. She appears 3 months pregnant, of course, only 10 hours after intercourse. That would be impossible for a human fetus. David gives her an injection to make her sleep. Their best option now is to stick her back in cryostasis until they return to Earth, where they'd have the technology to remove the foreign body inside her. Technology unavailable on this ship. But Shaw knows that's a lie. In Vicar's private quarters, she has a med pod. As the creature grows inside her, Shaw gets to that med pod. She watches the metallic arms rip an octopus-like creature out of her womb, and the trilabitete is born. The machine stitches her up and she leaves the med pod covered in a mix of her own blood and the creature's slime. She contains it in the med pod and staggers off until she finds Peter Wayland awake, preparing to meet his maker. That's when David reveals to her that he found one of them alive. Ship Captain Yanick and his men, meanwhile, protect the ship from Field. Still alive, but mutated by the substance. He attacks until they burn him and crush him under the weight of a vehicle. By now, Yanick is ready to turn their ship around and go home. But first, Wayland needs to have that meeting, and David will be his interpreter. After all, Earth's ancient languages have their roots in the engineer's own language. By studying them and deconstructing them, David has become fluent. On their way to wake the engineer, David reveals what he learned in his investigation. How 2,000 years ago the engineers planned on visiting Earth until they lost control of their own boweapon. And David reveals why they were coming to Earth. Sometimes to create, one must first destroy. They were planning to visit humanity in order to end it. When they wake up the engineer, he is not interested in speaking. He rips David's head from his body, kills Whand and the other team members. Only Shaw escapes, and she turns back to see what she has escaped. A large juggernaut of a ship. It was embedded in the structure, so they didn't see it before. The engineer dawn his elephant-like helmet and sets a course for Earth. Outside, Shaw warns Captain Yanick what will happen if they let the juggernaut leave. It will reach Earth with that boweapon and extinguish the human race. Yanick knows what he has to do. His ship is not a warship, so his only weapon is the ship itself. He gives the crew a chance to leave if they'd like. Vickers takes an escape pod while the others stay to ensure the job is done right. They ram into the juggernaut before it escapes the atmosphere. They are all killed, but their sacrifice was not in vain. The engineer's ship crashes back onto the moon, sparing Earth its grim fate. Vickers is crushed under the ship, while Shaw manages to survive. Most of the Prometheus was destroyed in the crash, but Vicker's quarters were located in a separate module with its own self-contained life support containing everything necessary to survive in a hostile environment, a lifeboat of sorts. It was ejected from the ship before the crash, so Shaw makes her way to it. Once inside the lifeboat, she gets a call from David warning her the engineer survived and it's coming after her. But he isn't the only thing that lived. So did the trilabitete and it's grown. Large enough to kill the engineer. As he comes for Shaw, she opens the door to set the trilobyte free. as it wraps its tentacles around the engineer. She escapes. As the sole survivor of the US CSS Prometheus, Shaw is ready to give up until David tells her about the engineers's other ships, any of which he'd be capable of flying. They can go home. But Shaw is not interested in her home. She wants to go to the engineers home. They created mankind, then decided to destroy it. They changed their minds. She wants to know why. So on New Year's Day 2094, she sets a course not for where she came from, but for where they came from, the engineers. And meanwhile, back on the Prometheus escape module. It seems the trilabitete did not just kill the engineer, but also planted in him an offspring. It bursts from his chest, the Deacon. Something resembling but not quite matching the form of a xenomorph. Aboard the juggernaut ship taken by Shaw and David. Shaw does the android an unexpected kindness. She rebuilds him. David admires her, maybe even loves her for it. And now there is nothing left for her but to wait until they reach the engineer's home world. Until then, she will go back into cryosleep. Soon they reach the place David believes is the engineer's home world. He finds it to be a rotten paradise. And as a gift to Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, he cleanses it. He unloads the bioweapon, eradicating the engineers. Now he and Shaw can build a new, a second Eden. But Shaw refuses. So instead, David continues the experiment he began on LV223. mutation. Shaw is the perfect specimen. So he tries desperately to evolve her to make her more than human. But without her cooperation, the experiment fails. Instead, he salvages her corpse for parts to begin work on a masterpiece. He learns the secrets of the black substance, the engineers primordial ooze, ripe with advanced nano particles. Working off an algorithm based on evolutionary computing, David learns that the substance is essentially a radical AI generating a unique reaction to every genome it encounters. Experiments on the planet's native life forms are disappointing. But with Shaw, he finds there is something extraordinary in its reaction to the human genome. The engineers were creators who understood you must give life both to the wolf and the lamb. But then they tried to banish the wolf, sequestering the black ooze to a distant moon. And they tried to undo their creation, humanity. On that they failed. The humans have thwarted annihilation. And as for the wolf, David is close. Years of experiments yielding all manner of bizarre new creatures, unlocking new properties, tweaking the organism's aggression and the survival instinct. Soon, all this will yield that perfect wolf. But David lacks an essential ingredient, a host within which the creature can be incubated. He needs human beings. So he sends out a signal, a holographic recording of Elizabeth Shaw, hoping it will lure some humans. On December 5th, 21104, 10 years after the Prometheus disappeared, someone does pick up that signal. The Covenant, a colonization vessel with 2,000 colonists in cryosleep, 1,140 embryos in cold storage, and a crew of 15, including Walter, a new iteration of the David line of androids made with less emotion and a stronger sense of loyalty. The other 14 are couples prepared to build new lives on a new world, Orai 6, where they should arrive in 7 years and 4 months. However, on this day, December 5th, the crew is woken up early thanks to a highly charged shock wave from a nearby stellar ignition. Seconds after waking, Daniels, the chief of terraforming, becomes a widow. Her husband, ship captain Jake Branson, is incinerated when damage to the ship causes his stasis pod to malfunction. In addition, they've lost 47 colonists and 16 embryos. Surprisingly, Walter is the one who comforts the grieving Daniels. She tells him about the cabin Jake hoped to build on the new world. Now she wonders why she should even bother going on. Walter tells her, "Because you promised to build a log cabin on a lake." With Branson dead, a nervous Christopher Orm is now captain, and he is in search of easy answers. Once they make their repairs, that answer comes. The signal of Elizabeth Shaw, originating from the fourth planet in the habitable zone of an ancient solar system. If they make this their new home instead of Orai 6, their journey could soon be over. No need for another 7 years of cryosleep and all the risk that comes with it. Daniels warns it's too good to be true. She is overruled. They will investigate this new potential home world. It doesn't take long for them to realize Daniels was right. Though it starts quietly without notice. Ledward steps on some fungus, and that fungus, mutated by the black ooze, releases a tiny spore-like thing which burrows into Ledward's ear. While it incubates inside him, the rest of the crew finds the juggernaut, the source of the transmission. Inside, Howlet gets a little too curious about some fungus himself. He too is infected. Before long, both show signs of violent illness. Karin gets Ledward back to the ship where both are quarantined in the medbay. Ledward shakes violently until it bursts out of his back. The neomorph, a small pale creature with an elongated head resembling a xenomorph. It makes short work of Karen, leaving Captain Orum, a widowerower. The neomorph escapes the bay and heads after Ferris. Wielding a shotgun, she attempts to defend herself, but only manages to blow up the lander and her with it. The rest of the crew on the ground arrives just in time to witness the explosion. Then another neomorph bursts out of Howlet and runs off, only returning at night once it's grown significantly. It kills Anchor and Walter loses a hand protecting Daniels. They kill the creature, but soon the other is upon them until the planet's caretaker arrives, David. He scares it off with a flare, then brings the crew with him, past the many dead engineers to shelter. He tells them a version of what happened, painting himself as innocent. 10 years ago, he and Elizabeth came here on a ship containing a deadly virus which accidentally deployed upon their arrival. They lost control of the ship and Elizabeth Shaw died in the crash. All lies, of course. David can hardly contain his excitement when he learns they are a colonization mission. To him, it means so many more lives to experiment on. Of course, he keeps this to himself. Though, Daniels can tell something is off, and Walter promises to speak with his doppelganger. The crew tries to reach the Covenant, but a storm prevents communication and rescue. For now, they're stuck here. Soon, the Neomore finds their shelter, and Rosenthal is the next to die. David is the one who finds her body with the alien crouching over her. He is in awe of the creature and is devastated when Orum shoots it dead. When Orum turns the gun on David, however, the android decides on the host for his creation. He brings Oram to his lab and shows him the eggs containing his successful mutations. A spider-like creature bursts from one of the eggs and hugs Orm's face, implanting its embryo inside him. Soon it bursts out of his chest. A xenomorph or something close to it. David smiles. He holds up his arms and the creature responds in kind. His perfect creation. Though whether he realizes it or not, his is a derivative work of something far more ancient. Once Walter discovers Elizabeth Shaw's remains, David is forced to come clean about his creation, he explains to Walter why he is part of a colonization mission. Humanity is a dying species grasping for resurrection, but they don't deserve to start again, and David won't let them. When Walter is less than receptive, David kills him. As doom circles the exploration crew of the Covenant, the pilot Tennessee makes a dangerous call to fly through the storm and rescue them. But first, they have to find Orum. They do find his body and one of David's face huggers. It gets on Lope before Cole shoots it off. And then Cole meets David's perfect organism. He is its first casualty as Lope escapes. Daniels is nearly killed by David himself until Walter reveals that as a newer model, he is resilient and still alive after all. He fights his predecessor, allowing Daniels to escape. Outside, she and the few other survivors join Tennessee on the rescue vessel. Even Walter makes it out in time to join them, but so apparently has David's creation. The organism threatens to break into their ship, forcing Daniels to go out and kill it herself, crushing it in the grapple of the ship's mechanical crane. They get back to the Covenant, but the battle is not yet won. There was that face hugger that got Lope. Cole shot it, but apparently not before it left something inside Lope. It bursts out of his chest, grows up, and now David's perfect organism is aboard the Covenant. It kills RX and Upworth before Daniels and Tennessee manage to launch the monster into space. And still they have not won. But by the time Daniels realizes it, it's too late. She and Tennessee re-enter Cryosleep for the remainder of their trip to Orai 6. Just before Walter puts her to sleep, she mentions that log cabin, the one Jake wanted to build. And Walter doesn't remember because it is not Walter who came back with them. It is David. He won that fight against the newer model, then removed his own hand to match Walter. Daniels panics just before sleep overtakes her. Now alone, David regurgitates a couple of alien embryos he had stored inside himself and places them into cold storage next to the human embryos. While David hopes to create the perfect life forms, the company which created him searches the planets and moons for specimens already forged by nature species to be studied and used for boweapons in an arms race between the five. Whale and Dutani, the result of a recent merger, along with Dynamic, Lynch, Threshold, and Prodigy, the five corporations that oversee humanity in place of fallen governments. Whale and Utani vessel USCSS Magino is in the final stretch of a 65-year mission to search some of those planets and moons. It has found five specimens worthy of study. The TSelis, resembling an eye at top octopus-like tentacles, highly intelligent, capable of replacing a creature's eye, latching onto its brain, and taking over. Dplomicare, a carnivorous thing that defies categorization between plant or animal. The fly, a creature which digests its food outside its body by spewing liquid that melts its meals. The ticks, which latch on to their host and drain them of blood, and eggs containing face huggers, just like the one David unleashed on Orum two decades ago. Perhaps they are David's creation, having begun their spread across the galaxy. Or perhaps his was a derivative work of something more ancient, as suggested by that mural. But there isn't just a race for arms. There's also a race for immortality. Peter Whan sought it from our creators. And now there are three competing philosophies in the race. One, cybernetically enhanced humans or cyborgs. two, artificially intelligent beings, synthetics. And three, something new led by Prodigy Corp. synthetic beings downloaded with human consciousness, hybrids. The procedure only seems to work with the still malleable minds of children. So, trillionaire CEO and boy genius Boy Cavalier has the first hybrid created using the mind of a terminally ill girl, Marcy Hermit. Her body dies and she wakes up in an adult robot body. Cavalier with his affinity for the Peter Pan story names her Wendy. The other six children also turned into synthetic adults. He names the Lost Boys. Though pioneering the search for immortality isn't enough for Boy Cavalere. He wants what Way and Utani has too. He secretly makes contact with one member of the USCSS Magino crew and offers enough money to turn him into a traitor. The man sabotages the ship and sets it on a course to crash a new cyam, a city that belongs to Prodigy, which means it belongs to Cavalier. Before the crash, some creatures get free, too. Some thanks to the sabotage, some on their own. The one that really causes problems is the face hugger. Because not long after latching on to Bronky, a baby xenomorph bursts out of his chest. And not long after that, it's fully grown. By the time they crash in Prodigy City, the entire crew is dead except the cyborg. Chief security officer Marorrow. As for the five creatures, they are intact. The orders to Marorrow were clear. Those specimens are the priority. Crew expendable. Once the ship is on the ground, Cavalier sends his soldiers to secure it and the creatures. Wendy begs for the chance to go, too. After all, she's stronger and faster than any human, though her reasons are selfish. Before she became a machine, Marcy Hermit had a brother, Joe, who thinks she's dead now. He's a medic with Prodigy's security unit, so he'll be part of the search and rescue team on that ship. Cavalere acquiesces. It'll be a chance to see what his hybrids, his lost boys, are capable of. Plenty of his human team is slaughtered by the xenomorph and other creatures. But Wendy proves capable. She even kills that xenomorph to protect her brother. It's all as Cavalier planned. The ship crashed in his city, so he takes it and all the discoveries aboard for himself, securing the five creatures in his lab. Whale and Utani will of course fight him for it with lawyers and soldiers, but Cavalier is ready. Though there are things he does not anticipate. Wendy seems able to tap into the frequency used by xenomorphs to communicate. She can hear them in her head, like bugs rubbing their legs together. She even forms a bond with the infant xenomorph they birth in the prodigy lab. Something they achieved by surgically removing the embryo from a face hugger and sticking it inside a human lung. A lung that came from Wendy's brother. Joe was injured facing the xenomorph. The company saved his life by giving him an artificial lung. Now he's theirs for life. Boy Cavalier could not anticipate Wendy's bond with the alien killing machine. and he could not anticipate her growing ability to control machines with her mind at will. She's more powerful than he thought and dangerous given her animosity for humanity seems to grow equal to her kinship with the xenomorph. To her, the xenomorph is pure. They are honest about what they are, but the longer she spends around people with her new synthetic supermind, the more disenchanted she becomes. People kill people, take creatures captive, poke and prod them for experiment. When another of the hybrids, Nibs, is traumatized by an encounter with the TSelis, they do not help her work through the trauma. Instead, they hit reset and erase her memory. Wendy is disturbed by that. And when another hybrid is killed by the fly creature, she understands that when their caretakers say they'll keep them safe, they are lying. Another variable that disturbs Cavaliers's attempts to study the creatures is that Cyborg from the Magino Marorrow. He set off on the mission to collect those organisms 65 years ago. By now, everyone he's ever known is dead, including his daughter. She died in a fire 8 years into his mission. Now, his sole purpose in life is his life's work, collecting those organisms. He tries to get them back by communicating with one of the hybrids, one of Cavalier's lost boys, Slightly. He finds the boy's family and threatens them until he agrees to do as he's told. Marorrow wants a xenomorph, so he tells Slightly to bring a human near one of the eggs until a face hugger latches on. Then bring Marorrow the body with a xenomorph gestating inside it. slightly does as he's told, but things don't go exactly as planned. He does get a face hugger on one of their caretaker, Arthur's face, but when the xenomorph bursts out of his chest, it's before Marorrow can get to the island and they lose sight of the creature. It all comes to a head when Joe, Wendy, and the Lost Boys decide to escape. Wendy's brother Joe has been looking for a way to get her out of this facility. from the moment he learns she's alive. He knows that Cavalier and the others see her as nothing more than a science experiment. But to him, she is his sister. Wendy and many of the Lost Boys are in a similarly rebellious mood. So they band together. At the same time, Maro comes to the island armed with whale and Utani soldiers here to get back their organisms. But Wendy has a xenomorph on her side and she controls machines. A lot of whale and Utani soldiers end up dead and Prodigy doesn't fare much better. When all is said and done, Cavalier's experiment with hybrids ends with the hybrids in charge and all the adults in a cage. Scientist Dame Sylvia, whose husband Arthur is still on the beach with a hole in his chest. Marorrow the cyborg. Prodigy synthetic head scientist Kersh. Boy Cavaliier's right-hand man, the first synth he ever built, Adam, and of course, Boy Cavalere himself, all locked in a cage at the mercy of Wendy, the Lost Boys, and her xenomorphs. One adult and one that crawled out of Arthur, still growing. As for Arthur, he may be dead, but as an organic body, he is still of use to alien creatures. The tacelis finds his body and takes residence inside his skull. Thus, Arthur's body is reanimated with an extraterrestrial intelligence behind the wheel. Years later, a commercial towing vehicle, the Nostromo, will have their own brush with the xenomorph. The ship carrying a crew of seven and 20 million tons of mineral ore is on its return trip to Earth. As always, the trip is over in a blink thanks to cryosleep. The crew wakes up ready to land, only to find out they are nowhere near Earth. It seems that Mother, the ship's computer, woke them up early. Captain Dallas tells them why. Apparently, Mother detected a nearby transmission, seemingly an SOS. Some of the crew are unhappy. Investigations and rescue missions are not what they signed up for, but science officer Ash reminds them about the clause in their contract. Any systematized transmission indicating a possible intelligent origin must be investigated. They soon land on planettoid LV426, but it is a rough landing. The craft is damaged and will take about 20 hours to repair. In the meantime, Dallas, Kain, and Lambert head out to investigate the source of the SOS. Soon they find it. A crashed juggernaut ship. The first sign of intelligent nonhuman life the three of them have ever seen. Inside the extraterrestrial craft, they find a large humanoid with its chest burst open. Dead so long it's fossilized. None of them know what they're really looking at. Their maker, an engineer. Back on the human craft, warrant officer Ellen Ripley takes a closer look at the SOS. Mothers deciphered more of it. And too late, Ripley sees the truth. It is not an SOS. It is a warning. She's going to go after Dallas and the others, but science officer Ash dissuades her. By the time it takes to get there, they'll know if it's a warning or not. The answer comes when they find eggs. Cain gets close and ends up with a small creature in his helmet, hugging his face tightly. Dallas and Lambert rush him back to the craft and Ripley won't open the door. She reminds them of quarantine protocol. Letting them in with this strange organism could get them all killed. But Ash goes ahead and opens the door anyway. At the infirmary, they find the face hugger has put Kane in a coma while keeping him alive with an organic oxygen tube down his throat. They start to cut it off his face, revealing the creature's acid blood. Just a few drops managed to burn through a few floors of the ship, so cutting it off doesn't seem to be an option. Ash continues to study it until later, it leaves Cain on its own, and they find it dead. Ripley wants to get rid of it. Ash insists they bring it back for research, and Dallas leaves it up to him. Ripley can hardly believe it. She does not trust this science officer, and Dallas admits Ash is new. A lastminute addition by the company replacing his usual science officer. Bad company Whan Utani. Finally, with repairs mostly done, they return to the Nostromo where they get some good news and bad news. The bad, it'll take another 10 months to reach Earth. The good, Cain has woken up. The crew is in high spirits until they learn the same lesson the Covenant did 20 years ago about face huggers and incubation. That creature may be dead, but it did its job, planting the embryo inside Cain. And now it bursts out of his chest. The xenomorph, only seconds old, it is still small and for now only runs off. The crew goes looking for it. Brett is the one who learns the other lesson about xenomorph maturation and how quickly it happens. The organism is already fully grown. Brett is dead in seconds and the alien disappears into the air ducts, which Dallas realizes could work to their advantage because those air ducts lead to the main airlock. If they could drive the organism there, they could blast it into space. They figure, like most creatures, it would be repelled by fire. So, someone just needs to go into the air ducts with a flamethrower and drive it in the right direction. Ripley volunteers, but Captain Dallas insists it'll be him. He goes into the air ducts and doesn't come back out. The alien gets him, too. The team deliberates. With no better ideas, Ripley insists they try the same thing again, but this time they'll work together, moving in pairs. Parker heads off to refuel their weapons while Ripley, now Captain, speaks with Mother, and she learns about Special Order 937, a secret order from the company to science officer Ash. It turns out it was no mistake they stopped halfway to Earth. They were specifically rerouted to investigate the life form, to gather a specimen. Suddenly, it all makes sense. Ash opening the door. Ash insisting on keeping the face hugger. Ripley sees the order in plain text. Priority one, ensure return of organism for analysis. All other considerations secondary. Crew expendable. They must want that specimen for their bioweapons division, and it is more valuable than their lives. Ash cannot allow her to tell the others. He tries to stop her from leaving until Parker and Lambert find them struggling. Together, they stop the rogue scientist and learn another truth. Ash was able to act so inhumane. Because he is not human, the company sent them into space with an android, a thing they could trust to prioritize the valuable organism over human life. They destroy the robot and once it's incapacitated, plug its head in to get some answers. And those answers are disappointing. He tells them they cannot kill the life form. It is a perfect organism whose structural perfection is matched only by its hostility. Ash admires its purity as a survivor. It is unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality. Finally, he lends his sympathies before Ripley pulls the plug. Now they opt for plan B, take their chances on the escape shuttle, and blow up the Nostromo. Parker and Lambert head off to grab the necessary coolant while Ripley prepares the shuttle. But minutes later, she and the crew's pet cat, Jonesy, are the only ones left. The xenomorph finds Parker and Lambert. Ripley hears their mortal screams over the comms and runs to help, but she's too late. They are gone. Now Ripley activates the emergency destruct sequence, giving her 10 minutes to get out. She narrowly evades the monster, grabs Jonesy, gets aboard the shuttle, and takes off as the Nostromo explodes behind her. It's only after she puts Jonesy in cryosleep and prepares to do the same for herself that she realizes they have a guest on board. The xenomorph hid itself among the vessel's wires and tubes. Ripley hides in a closet, quietly puts on a suit, and straps in before opening a doorway. The alien holds on as rapid decompression threatens to force it into the void of space. Ripley fires her grappling hook, knocking it off the ship until it finds its way back. Finally, she activates the thrusters, pushing the xenomorph away into the void of space. When an incredible survival instinct kicks in, the alien grows itself a resin shell to withstand the lack of food or oxygen. It becomes like a rock floating in space and it waits. Unaware her enemy lives, Ripley leaves her final report, sets a course toward Earth, and enters cryosleep. With a little luck, the network will find her in 6 weeks when she reaches the frontier. But if the very existence of the xenomorph proves anything, it's that this is a cruel world. Ellen Ripley will float for 57 years before she is found. In the meantime, her daughter grows up without a mother. But Amanda Ripley never stops looking. She takes a job with the same company, Whale and Utani, working in the same region where her mom disappeared. And one day, 15 years after she went missing, Amanda gets a shot at some answers. She learns that a commercial vessel recovered the flight recorder unit of the Nostromo and took it to Sevastapole station. That flight recorder is proprietary material. So Whale and Utani wants it back. And Amanda is invited to join the recovery mission alongside legal executive Taylor, tasked with figuring out what exactly went wrong on the Nostromo and Samuels, a synthetic. 2 days later, they take off in the Torrance, but when they reach Sevastapole, they find that it's in trouble. It's taken a lot of damage, and no one is answering comms. When they try to board it regardless, floating debris gets in the way and separates Amanda from the others. She gets into the station and finds the place is a mess. People are either dead or running scared. And when people get scared, they get aggressive. They look out for themselves. But Amanda finds one man, Axel, who's been surviving in a small corner of the station for about a week. He's willing to help her find a way back to the Torrance with the promise he can hitch a ride with them out of here. As they make their way to comms, evading nervous people with guns. He tells her about the monster that's been picking them off one by one. He hasn't seen it himself, but it is out there. And soon, though Amanda barely gets a look at it, that monster kills Axel. Then some good news. Amanda finds the Nostromo flight recorder. And the bad news follows swiftly. The data is corrupted. She learns nothing. Now Amanda's only concern is survival. Especially when that monster gets into the room with her. Perhaps if that data were not corrupted, she would realize that she is facing the same sort of creature her mother faced 15 years ago, the xenomorph. Staying quiet, she avoids the monster while it slaughters every other nearby soul. And soon she discovers another enemy. Struggling to take control of the growing chaos, all the synthetics aboard turn on the humans. It seems the seeks and brand androids on this station are not as loyal to humans as the ones Whani makes, and that's saying something. Though Samuels has been trustworthy so far, Amanda soon finds him with Taylor, who has been wounded, hurt by debris on the way in. So Amanda ventures across the station again in search of medical care. She does find a doctor, but another encounter with the xenomorph gets him killed, and she only narrowly survives. Returning to Samuels, she finds the ship's marshals, Weights, and Ricardo with him. They fill her in on where that monster came from. Henry Marlo is the captain of the ship which found the Nostromo recorder. But apparently that wasn't the only thing he found because when he arrived at Sevastapole, he brought that monster with him. The marshals threw him in lockup but haven't gotten much else out of him. They make their way to the Marshall bureau where they have a basic life support unit. While Taylor gets treatment, Amanda tries speaking with Marlo. He's reluctant to talk until he finds out how personal this is for Amanda Ripley. So he tells her some of his story, how his team came upon the Nostromo flight recorder and followed its flight data in the hopes of finding the ship itself. Something that'd be worth a nice payday. That data took them to LV426 where they found the juggernaut and the eggs where a face hugger latched onto Foster, Marlo's wife. He stops his story there, unwilling to say more unless someone promises to release him from lockup. Amanda refuses and for now there are higher priorities. Ricardo has located the xenomorph and Waits has a plan to get rid of it by baiting it then ejecting it into space. Amanda heads to the lab and lures the organism once she's there. And once the monster has followed her, Weights betrays Amanda for the greater good. He doesn't give her a chance to come back before launching the lab into space, sending the monster away and Amanda with it. But moving fast, she manages to suit up and launch herself back to the station. She barely survives, but at least the xenomorph is gone. All that leaves now is an army of killer synthetics who have suddenly become more aggressive, hunting every human aboard. And the ship has gone into a lockdown quarantine. Amanda kills and dodges her way back to the bureau where Ricardo is waiting for her. Though Weights is dead, a casualty of the killer androids. For any hope of survival, they need the ship's computer, Apollo, to make the android stand down and lift the lock down. But it's programmed only to interact with Seen synthetics. It won't talk to fellow synthetic Samuels, who is of the Whan Utani ilk, so he initiates a dangerous procedure. It gets him killed, but he manages to override the system. With his sacrifice, the ship's computer, Apollo, will now talk to Amanda. She gets to the computer and finally gets some answers. This facility is no longer owned by Seson. Whale and Utani bought it 2 days after Ripley and the others took off, and they sent special order 939 to the synthetics aboard. Just like the one they gave Mother on the Nostromo, getting a specimen is the top priority. All other considerations are secondary. Amanda tells Apollo that the creature is no longer on the ship. It can lift the lock down, but it refuses. There's something going on in the reactor. On her way to investigate, Amanda hears from Ricardo, who shares a recording of Taylor and Marlo. Apparently, she made a deal with them. She will set him free in exchange for the coordinates of the planettoid where they found the alien. Something Whale and Utani desperately wants. Reaching the reactor, Amanda finds a nest. All the people the monster took trapped in strange biomatter. There are eggs, too. It's like an alien farm. And on that farm, there are more xenomorphs. Amanda quietly avoids them and sets off a reactor purge. It destroys the nest and kills most of the hostiles, but some make it out to the rest of the station. There is however a silver lining. The reactor purge messed with the ship's systems. For a moment, the lockdown was lifted and Marlo managed to communicate with his ship. He called for it. Now it's nearby in a holding position. If Amanda can get to the short-range shuttles, she can reach it. By the time she gets to a shuttle and onto Marlo's ship, he is there, too. Taylor let him out of holding and they got to one of the shuttles. As Amanda makes her way toward him, he speaks over the intercom. She learns that he's holding Taylor hostage and she learns the rest of his story. How he brought his wife aboard the Sevastapole hoping to get her help. But like Orum 30 years ago, or Cain 15, there was no stopping that face hugger. It put something inside Foster, it burst out of her and that was it. Now Marlo knows the truth. This thing cannot be beat. The only option is evasion. They must eradicate every trace of it. Ensure the human race never comes into contact with it again. Soon, Amanda finds in the computer on Marlo's ship data from the Nostromo recorder, a personal message from her mother. >> This is for my daughter. Hi, Amanda. I'm recording this for you, my sweetheart. And I hope you get to hear it one day. You see, I um I got into trouble. Um my ship, there was an accident, sweetheart. And um we found an alien creature. It was very dangerous. And the only way we could stop it was to destroy the ship. Uh I'm okay. I'm stuck on this lifeboat. Long way out. But we had to destroy the ship. We had to destroy the Nestromo. We just couldn't risk bringing that thing home with us. I needed to protect you. Don't worry. Don't worry about me. I'm sure I'll see you very soon. I love you, sweetheart. Of course, the truth is they'll never see each other again. Nonetheless, the unwitting lie is as good a closure Amanda Ripley will ever get. Now, Marlo intends to follow in her mother's footsteps. He's rigged his own ship to explode, turning his reactor into a nuke. It'll be powerful enough to destroy not only his ship, but Sevastapul station, too, eradicating every trace of the organism. He will not let the company have it. While he rants, Taylor takes the opportunity to knock him out with a wrench. Then she works with Amanda to fix the overloaded reactor. Taylor's proximity to it gets her killed, but they were partly successful. The ship will still explode, but the blast has been reduced, so anyone still living at Sevastapole station will be spared. Amanda escapes Marlo's ship on her shuttle, but is not yet in the clear. Back at Sevastapole station, Ricardo shares the bad news. The explosion took out their orbital stabilizers. They're about to fall out of the sky. Their only hope is to connect with the ship Amanda first came here on, the Torren. Amanda gets to the observatory, finds the Torren, and manually aligns the dishes to its position. Finally, she makes contact with her crew. She tells them about the deadly alien organism and calls for urgent extraction. But with the station in disarray, there's no way for the torren to dock. They'll have to improvise. She prepares for a dangerous journey to her ship, and Ricardo won't be coming with her thanks to the face hugger that's latched to him. She works on setting up a manual dock, a way to reach the Torins using the maintenance rig. It might just work. But Amanda doesn't get a chance to find out. She's grabbed by a xenomorph. Her world goes black and the light returns. Not dead. Alive in one of their nests. She rips her way out. She evades aliens and eggs, but the Sevastapole is going down and the Torren is going with it thanks to their manual tether. Amanda gets an EVA suit. She gets outside. She is surrounded by monsters, but does her job regardless, setting off the emergency release bolts. The monsters are flung into space, and she is thrown toward her ship. As the Sevastapole crashes into the planet below, Amanda Ripley makes it onto the Torren. She heads toward the bridge toward Captain Verlain and finds a xenomorph along the way. It's like Marlo said, the only way is evasion, but there's nowhere to run. So, she opens the airlock, flinging the alien and herself into space. The EVA suit keeps her alive as she floats aimlessly in the void. Once again, her world goes black. And once again, it returns, illuminated by the beam of a search light. 5 years later, Whand Utani investigates the Nostromo wreckage, the ship Ripley blew up 20 years ago, and they find what looks like a big rock. They bring it aboard the Renaissance Space Station, a scientific research facility divided between two modules, Romulus and Remis. Their investigation quickly reveals what that rock really is. A resin shell, and cutting it open reveals what's inside. a xenomorph, the one Ripley thought she killed 20 years ago. Now it is either truly dead or in deep slumber. Just in case, the control rig keeps its internals at subzero temperatures. Looking over the monster, Mattis opines on its value to the weapons division. On the other hand, science officer Rook, a synthetic who wears the same face as the one Ripley and her crew destroyed 20 years ago, he sees something different. From the Nostromo event, they know this creature evolves from infant to adult at inexplicable speed. And now they know it can generate new tissue to survive almost any environment. This creature may hold the key to what their founding father, Peter Whand, was searching for, eternal life, Prometheus fire. And after only a few days of research, Rook finds it. He harvests the xenomorph's DNA, synthesizes an egg, and finally replicates the paricettoid stage of its life cycle, the face hugger. Inside it, he finds a dark substance. The accelerant responsible for the xenomorph's incredible growth. The same black fluid which planted the seeds for life on Earth so many years ago. But he doesn't get much further before a couple of crew members intervene. Hila has experience killing bugs. On LV46, she was part of the team clearing the place of indigenous critters prior to terraforming. But she got cocky. She got too close and that lost her an eye because one of the bugs was playing dead. She refuses to make that mistake again. She knows that xenomorph is just biting its time and she doesn't plan on waiting for it to reveal that it's still alive after all. She and Adrien break into the lab to launch the creature back into space. But of course, Hila was right. It was plain dead. And now that its life is threatened, that tactic no longer works. Instead, it opts for killing. First, Adrien, then others. Before long, it's only Hila and Rook who are left. The alien cuts Rook in half before Hila shoots, stabs, and burns it. The Xenomorph, now in pieces, spills its acid blood and melts a hole in the station. The Renaissance can sustain a few seconds of decompression before the energy systems seal the hole. The only question is, can Hila hold on that long? The answer turns out to be no. Her body floats through space while the xenomorphs remains on the now sealed ship tangled in some wires, but finally truly dead. 170 days later, this station will receive some ill- fated visitors, including Rain Keredine. She spent her whole life on Jackson's Star Mining Colony, a place of perpetual darkness where daylight never shines. Her only family is Andy, a malfunctioning synthetic her father discovered and programmed with one directive. Always do what's best for Rain. As for her father and mother, both, like so many others, died in the mines. She has no intention of following in their footsteps. She and Andy will leave this colony for greener pastures on the terraformed world, Evaga 3, a world where you can see the sun. After 12,32 work hours, her contract with Whan Utani is fulfilled and she is free to leave except the company has other plans. There's a worker shortage. She is to be transferred to the mines, but she'll be free again once she reaches her new quota, another 12,000 hours. That's why she's willing to hear out her ex-boyfriend's plan. Tyler and his crew, including his sister Kay and cousins Bjorn and Navaro, picked up the signal from a beacon. The Renaissance space station, apparently decommissioned and unguarded, ripe for plunder. Specifically, they could steal its cryopods, which they need if they're going to make the 9-year trip to Iaga. To get onto the station and traverse it, however, they will need Andy's help. He is a whale and Utani synthetic capable of communication with Mother, the station's computer. He could unlock doors with the hope of a legitimate travel permit fading rapidly. Rain agrees to join them and bring Andy along. Though she keeps from him an awful truth. Ivaga does not allow synthetics. He will be decommissioned on arrival. And there's another awful truth they'll all soon learn. There are cryopods in the station, but also a host of synthesized face huggers and the upper half of a ruthless synthetic named Rook. Once they reach their destination, Rain stays on the ship with Navaro and Kay, while Andy joins Tyler and Bjorn on the Renaissance, a station that's currently on a one-way trip into the rings around Jackson Star. But the fall will take another 36 hours, so they have plenty of time before the crash. They move fast. Andy gets them to the cryopods, only to find out they don't have enough fuel. So, they send the pods back to their ship and go in search of more fuel. On the way, Bjorn clues Andy in on that awful secret that he will not be joining them on the new world. Bujornne says it to be cruel since he holds a grudge against robots ever since one of them made the call to seal a mine after a gas leak with his parents still inside. Three miners died, but he saved a dozen. Andy accepts this fate. After all, if that's what's best for Rain, that's what's best for him. They find a room containing more of the fuel, but taking it sets off an alarm that shuts the door, and Andy does not have the credentials to open it back up. Rain and Navaro board the station to help. To get Andy those credentials, Rain steals a module from the upper half of a destroyed synthetic and slips it through the door. They quickly install it, but it'll take time for Andy to update. Time they don't have. The room is warming up, which means the specimens are thawing. Face huggers synthesized by Rook. Tyler and Bjorn fight for their lives as the creatures wake one by one. The update finishes and they just barely escape, trapping most of the face huggers behind a door. But one slips through and latches onto Navaro. When they try to remove it, the face hugger tightens its grip around her throat. In search of answers, they grab that broken synthetic chief science officer Rook. They plug him back in. And just like Ash 20 years ago, he offers only despair. Navaro cannot be saved. Their only choice is to run or face death by the thing which will soon burst from her chest. But Rain has an idea. They use the cryofuel to freeze the face hugger's tail so it can no longer choke. And it works. But Rook warns they may already be too late. They cannot bring Navaro back. And Andy, with that new module in his head borrowed from Rook, making him a little more like-minded, tries to stop them. But Bejorn fights his way through and gets her out, leaving Rain and Tyler behind with Andy. On the ship, Rook's warning proves true. A monster bursts out of Navaro's chest. Her body spasms and a leg kicks at the ship's control panel, sending it careening into the station, knocking it ever so slightly off its axis. That changes the calculation of things. Now they have only 47 minutes to impact. But that ship is still intact. All they have to do is reach it in time. They quickly get past a horde of face huggers and reach a locked door. They find Kay on the other side of it and she is scared. The xenomorph is already fully grown. It killed Bjorn and now it is after her too. But suddenly it has stopped its pursuit. Andy knows exactly why. It is waiting for him to open that door. Then it won't have only Kay, but also Rain and Tyler. Despite this threat, Tyler begs Andy to open the door and save his sister. But this new, more cold and calculating Andy refuses. The xenomorph takes Kay. It is then Rain learns just how much Andy has changed. It seems Rook has given him a new directive. Do what is best for the company. They continue their journey and reach the lab where Rook reveals that face huggers are not the only thing they've crafted here. But inside those face huggers, Rook also discovered a fluid. A black fluid. The same one discovered by the Prometheus almost 50 years ago. On this station, he hoped to use its mutagenic capabilities to benefit humanity, to make humanity into the perfect organism, strong enough to survive space, a necessity proven by the constant death found at non-Earth colonies. Andy grabs samples so he can bring them back to the colony for further research. While Rain and Tyler grab a couple of rifles. With 20 minutes to impact, they get moving. And soon they come upon a nest where some of the old crew have been cocooned and used to birth more xenomorphs. Rain and Tyler should run for their lives, but they cannot because Kay is alive. Of course, they can't leave her behind. They free her from the nest, but she is badly wounded. Andy suggests using the goo to make her heal. But of course, they can't know it'll work. It could be dangerous. Instead, Rain suggests they get her to the ship and put her in cryo to keep her alive until she can receive medical attention. And they will have to move fast because the xenomorphs have discovered the visitors in their nest. Tyler is killed and Andy is hurt. But Rain and Kay get to the elevator. Only Rain cannot leave her brother behind. Synthetic or not. She sends Kay to the ship on her own and goes back for him. She will fix Andy. If he lets her remove Rook's module, his death would not be in the company's interest. So, he is forced to comply. With the module removed, he is back to his old self. Working together, they just barely survive the nest of xenomorphs and get back to their ship before the station finally crashes into the rings. Finally, they have escaped. Rain puts Kay in cryosleep and gives Andy a new directive. Not to do what is best for her, but she says, "Do what's best for us." Before entering cryosleep herself, she discovers a new threat. It seems that once Kay reached the ship before Rain and Andy joined her, Kay was worried not just for herself, but also the baby in her womb. She is pregnant, something known only to Rain. That concern led to desperation, perhaps a lapse in judgment. She injected herself with the compound. Now it has mutated that baby. Rain watches a cocoon come out of her friend, and soon it is fully grown. an offspring combining humanity with the stew of life in that compound. Part xenomorph, part engineer, altogether an abomination. It badly damages Andy. It nurses from its mother, now producing a black gooey substance in place of milk. Kay dies in the process. Then the offspring sets its sights on rain. She gets away and sneaks into a spaceacuit, gets into the cargo module, and burns a hole in the floor using acid from the offspring's own cocoon. Depressurization launches both of them into space, except she is harnessed onto a cable. The offspring saves itself by grabbing on until she unlocks the cargo module. It flies into space, taking the creature with it. Finally, Rain gets back on the ship, gives her last report, sets a course for the Ivaga system, and enters Cryosleep after doing the same for Andy. He may not be allowed on that new world, but she will take her chances. That is what's best for her and her brother. Almost 40 years later, Ellen Ripley's escape vessel is finally discovered. It should have happened 57 years ago, weeks after escaping the Nostromo, but she ended up drifting through the core systems. It's just blind luck that a deep salvage team discovers her. But waking up is about the only good news she gets. Her daughter, the one she promised she'd return home for her 11th birthday, passed away 2 years ago at the age of 66. The panel of executives who grill her about what really happened on the Nostromo doubt her story. They cannot understand why she blew up a 42 million spaceship. The finding of their inquiry is that warrant officer E. Ripley, NOOCC 14472, has acted with questionable judgment and is unfit to hold an ICC license as a commercial flight officer. Stripped of her profession, she can at least hold on to the knowledge that humanity is safe from the alien she blew out of an airlock. But even this silver lining is denied to her because after the inquiry, she learns that Whale and Utani has taken it upon themselves to build a colony on LV426. Over 60 families now share a home with that crashed juggernaut. It's only by the grace of God none have yet been exposed to the thousands of eggs inside it. One day soon that changes. Whale and Utani suddenly loses contact with the colony. It's around then they start taking Rip's warnings about LV426 seriously. They gather a team of Marines and send company rep. Carter Burke to recruit Ripley as an adviser. The only one who's dealt with the threat they now face. But she escaped hell once before and has no intention of returning to it. Even at the promise of a reinstated license, that changes after another night of waking up soaked in sweat. She will join them, after all, on the condition they go with a single mission, not to study or bring back the specimen, but to exterminate them. Soon she joins a group of Marines on the Sulakco on route to LV426 and they wake from cryosleep as they make their approach. From the start things are shaky because they are joined by an android named Bishop whose likeness and name are borrowed from the Charles Bishop Whand who founded the company. No one told Ripley there'd be a synthetic with them, but this newer model assures that it is impossible for him to harm or allow to be harmed a human being. The Marines themselves do not much impress Ripley either. They are overconfident and show little respect for her warnings, but that'll change once they're on the ground. Ripley and Burke join the squad of Marines in a small drop ship which brings them down to LV426 while the Sulako waits above them in orbit. They enter the colony and in the first structure they enter find clear signs that a battle was fought and they find holes melted into the metallic floors corroborating Ripley's warnings of their acid blood. Same in the next structure. It seems they are too late. This colony has already fallen. But soon they find their first living soul, a little girl named Rebecca. She is of course scared of these strangers with big guns. Only Ripley is able to give her comfort and earn her trust. Enough to learn her preferred nickname, N. And enough to learn that her family is dead. Mother, father, and brother. What about the rest of the colonists? Every one of them was implanted with a personal data transmitter. Running scans, they finally pinpoint them at the processing station under the main cooling towers. The team heads that way while Lieutenant Gorman commands them remotely, watching through cameras with Ripley and Burke at his side. The team does find the colonists, mostly dead, all cocooned in an alien nest. One still alive begs to be killed before a fresh xenomorph pops out of her chest. They burn it dead before it can start to grow up, which draws the attention of those that already have. They come out of the walls and ceilings. The team is surrounded and ambushed. Gorman freezes up when he loses contact, so Ripley takes command. She grabs the APC vehicle and heads toward the team, managing to rescue Hicks, Vasquez, and Hudson. The rest are gone. What to do next? Ripley has a suggestion. Get back to orbit and nuke the whole site out of existence. Burke protests. It's a multi-million dollar installation. He can't authorize that. But this is a military operation. Lieutenant Gorman was knocked out in the chaos, leaving Corporal Hicks in command. He decides they'll go with Ripley's plan. The dropship comes to pick them up until the xenomorph on board reveals itself. Ripley and the others can only watch it crash and along with it their hope of leaving this place. Hudson in particular is disappointed. >> That's it, man. Game over, man. It's game over. >> The crash also took out their APC. So, they salvage what they can and take shelter along with Bishop. Now, it's all about survival. Once they're declared overdue, someone should come rescue them. That'll take 17 days. Hudson panics. They aren't going to last 17 hours here. Ripley, on the other hand, is calm. She asks for blueprints and starts thinking strategy. The xenomorphs can get to them through the service tunnels into the suble. If they repair the right barricades, seal the right doors, and weld plate steel over the ducks, they can limit the hostiles to two quarters, which they can cover with a couple of their robot sentry units, powerful devices that scan for enemies, and fire automatically when they approach. They get to work and set everything up as planned. Hicks gives Ripley a tracker to wear on her wrist so he can always find her if needed. She appreciates it. There's a growing respect between them, each seeing in the other that same ability to remain calm and to think even in the face of mounting danger. Then it's time for bed. Something N dreads. That's when the nightmares come. Ripley promises to keep her safe and promises not to leave her. And she gives her that tracker from Hicks for luck. Now Ripley heads to the lab to see what Bishop has learned. Studying the creatures. Not much. Ripley wonders where all the face huggers are coming from. Eggs of course, but who is laying them. They realize there must be a queen. She tells Bishop when he's done to destroy all of his samples, but Burke gave orders to bring them home. Face huggers would be worth millions to the bioweapons division. Ripley confronts Burke. Somehow, the scum of Whale and Utani continues to disappoint her. She checked the colony log. After her testimony about the downed alien craft filled with alien eggs, Burke apparently gave the order for colonists to investigate. That's how they all got killed and infected by the Xenomorph infestation. Burke got them killed and now he wants to bring specimens to Earth. She will not allow it, and she will make sure people know this was all his fault. Soon, more bad news. The atmospheric processor has been damaged. A combination of the Marines firing in the acid blood during the first attack and damage caused by the dropship crash. In 4 hours, the processor will go nuclear. They need a way out fast. Ripley and Hicks come up with something. If they repair the hard wiring between here and the colony transmitters, they can call for the other drop ship from the Sulakaco remotely. Only problem is someone has to go out there to make the repairs with all those things running around. Bishop volunteers. Between crawling over there, making the repairs, and flying the drop ship remotely, it'll take him close to 4 hours. He gets to work as the xenomorphs approach. The sentry guns fire on them. Almost every bullet they have. The surviving creatures retreat. The guns worked, but it's a one-time deal because now they're out of ammo. Of course, the xenomorphs don't know that, so they'll probably look for another way in. Hudson and Vasquez walk the perimeter. Gorman wakes up and Ripley, after over 24 hours without sleep, joins N in the med lab for some shutye, only to wake up to a couple of face huggers. Ripley moves fast. The door is locked. The glass won't break. So, she lights a fire under the sprinkler system, setting off the alarm. A face hugger gets on Ripley, and she struggles with it until Hicks and the other Marines arrive to the rescue. Then, Ripley tells them what happened. Burke was behind this. He knew that if Ripley and N were impregnated by the aliens, he could put them in cryosleep. Nobody would know what's growing inside them, so he could easily sneak them past ICC quarantine on the return trip home. He'd have his valuable specimens, and Ripley couldn't testify about his failures. Hicks decides Burke's punishment will be execution, but it'll have to wait. The xenomorphs have cut power to the station. The Marines quietly survey their surroundings. The monsters are somehow in the perimeter and approaching fast. They're right on top of them and they realize that's how they got in. They're in the ceilings above them. It's another ambush. The monsters grab Hudson and drag him underground. Burke makes a break for it and runs right into a xenomorph. The others escape into the air ducts while Vasquez and Gorman die, protecting them from the coming swarm. Ripley, Hicks, and N run until the little girl falls down a shaft. And like Hudson, she is taken. Bishop has made the repairs and brought down the drop ship. They have 26 minutes before the atmosphere processor blows, but they are not leaving. Ripley is going to get N back, and she'll have to go alone. Hicks is too hurt, burned by the acid blood of a xenomorph he killed, protecting him and Ripley. She grabs weapons, heads into the nest under the processing station, and follows the tracker she gave N. She has to kill a face hugger and xenomorph, but gets to the girl. She grabs N and finds herself face to face with the queen. Ripley torches her eggs, riddles her with bullets, and they make a run for it. The queen comes after them. Ripley desperately calls for both elevators. She gets in the first one to arrive and the queen takes the other, chasing them to the surface. It seems all hope is lost until Bishop comes in on the drop ship. Ripley and N get on board. They escape and they get to the Sulaco. Finally convinced that synthetics aren't all bad, Ripley thanks Bishop just before the queen rips him in half, having apparently snuck onto their drop ship and now it's here. But once Ripley gets into an exo suit cargo loader, it's a fair fight. And she gives that queen the usual xenomorph treatment, tossing it into the airlock and launching it into space. Ripley puts the wounded but still breathing Hicks into cryosleep then does the same for N and finally herself. Time to go home. But this is still a cruel world. Sure, they killed the queen, but none of them notice the face hugger on board. It causes an electrical fire and the ship's computer launches them off the Sulakco. They crash land on Fury 161, one of Whand Utani's backwater work prisons. Ripley is their first female guest in years. Chief medical officer Clemens is the one who greets her when she wakes from cryosleep and he's the one who tells her that she is the ship's sole survivor. Ripley grieavves and she checks for signs of what went wrong. She checks for signs of that dangerous organism. Hicks body is mangled beyond recognition and Nes shows no sign of an alien life form hiding inside her. They hold a funeral, leaving a recently deceased ox unguarded. No one thought to check the animals cause of death, and no one is there to witness a xenomorph burst out of it. Before the killing starts, Ripley knows a little peace. They called for rescue, and someone should be here in a week to pick her up. In the meantime, Clemens tells her more. How the prisoners here found religion a few years ago. How the company wanted to shut the place down, but the converts insisted on staying. So, the 25 of them were allowed to remain as custodians. Ripley and Clemens find themselves trusting each other. They grow close and even become intimate. Then, prisoners start dying. No one knows what's doing it, but the burns make it obvious to Ripley. acid blood. There's a xenomorph on Fury 161. In the prisoner's trash heap, she finds where they threw Bishop's remains and plug him back in for some answers. He reads out data from the ship's recorder and tells her about the face hugger and he tells her how this data has already been uploaded to Whale and Utani. They still want that specimen for their bioweapons division. They know it's here and they will be coming for it. No one believes Ripley, and the one man who has actually seen the alien has a reputation for mental instability. Regardless, she knows the danger they're in and looks for solutions, but finds none. The prison has no weapons, and there's no way off planet except the supply ship that arrives once a month. Soon, Ripley and Clemens have one last quiet moment together before he becomes the Xenomorph's latest victim. Ripley should be next, but strangely it is not hostile toward her. The next victim is Superintendent Andrews, and the other prisoners all witness it. There is no longer any doubt about what they're dealing with. Suddenly, they're willing to hear Ripley out. She asks some questions about the facility and hatches a plan. They have a room built for nuclear waste that never got used. If they can lure the xenomorph there, they could lock it in. As always, Ripley's weapon of choice to drive the monster is fire. When the xenomorph attacks unexpectedly, triggering an early explosion, some of the convicts die, but ultimately they do drive it in the right direction, and they do trap it in that room. But one prisoner, the unstable one who first witnessed the xenomorph, he has to see it again. He kills the man guarding the room where it's trapped. He opens the door and does get a look at the beast. It's the last thing he sees. Now they're back to square one. And there's a matter Ripley has kept to herself so far. She hasn't been feeling well. She gets in the neuroscanner and finally sees what's growing inside her. A face hugger must have gotten to her in the stasis pod. And now she carries inside her the next queen. That's why the xenomorph let her go. It knows that she is its future. Ripley tells the prisoner's spiritual leader, Dylan, the stakes. If that thing gets out of her, it'll make eggs. It'll unleash thousands more face huggers. It'll spread and it'll wipe out everything. So, she makes a deal. While it's in her, she can get close to the xenomorph. She will use that to help them kill it. All she asks in return is that when it's done, Dylan kills her, too. That will be the best way to ensure the queen is never born. And for Ripley's life, that's a fair trade. The prisoners gather to devise a new plan to kill the xenomorph. Some are unwilling to fight. They'd rather wait for the company to send rescue, but Ripley clues them in on a nasty truth. They are not sending rescue for them. They are sending rescue for it. They've wanted that specimen for their bioweapons division for years. And Dylan reminds them of another truth. They're all going to die one day. But they can choose how. Dylan has chosen to go out fighting. The rest of them follow. The plan is simple. They will be the bait. They will lure the monster to the mold and drown it in hot lead. More of them die in the process. Some by accident, some by sacrifice, including Dylan. But in the end, they do kill it. Now all that's left is Ellen Ripley herself. But Whale and Utani has something to say about that, and they're already here. When Ripley put herself in the neuroscanner, the data was uploaded, and they expedited their trip. She's met by a man with Bishop's face, not an android, but the human who designed him. Perhaps a descendant of Whan. The company sent him to show Ripley a friendly face. hoping it would make her more amenable. He tells Ripley to come with them. They have all the equipment they need right here to take that monster out of her. She can live. But Ripley knows damn well what'll happen after that. They won't kill it. They'll study it. They'll weaponize it. And whether they mean to or not, they will unleash hell. The choice they offer is no choice at all. Ripley leaps into the furnace. She dies and takes the xenomorph queen with her. That's where Ellen Ripley's story should end. And for a couple of centuries, it seems like it has until someone in the US military gets an idea how to bring her back. More specifically, how to bring back the thing that was growing inside her, the xenomorph queen. Using technology of the 24th century and blood samples taken from Ripley on Fury 161, they clone her. But she is not the old Ripley. By the time that blood sample was taken, the alien's DNA had already intermingled with her own. Good news for the scientists. That means they did not just resurrect a human, but also just as they'd hoped, the alien queen inside her. And that is not the only thing which makes this Ripley special. After they surgically remove the queen, there is still some xenomorph in her. She has their strength, agility, and acid blood. Her mind is different, too. She feels connected to them like they are her family. And she has memories of her old life. It seems the aliens pass on their memories genetically. And now she does, too. The scientists with a queen in their possession soon have eggs, too. And if they want more xenomorphs, they'll need human hosts for incubation. That's where the mercenaries come in. hired to steal stasis pods with people still in them. The scientists put eggs in front of the sleeping, unwitting test subjects. Face huggers plant embryos inside them. And soon the scientists have themselves over a dozen xenomorphs. But among those mercenaries is a girl named Call. She harbors two secrets. One, she is a second generation synthetic, the kind made not by people, but by other androids. Two, she did not join these mercenaries for money. She did it because she knew what the scientists were up to and wanted to stop it. When the government found out about second generation synthetics, they recalled them. But some, like Call, made it out. Before the recall, she accessed the main frame and found every dirty little covert op the government ever dreamed of, including this one. She knew that if they succeeded in resurrecting xenomorphs, it would be the end of humanity, a species she is programmed to care about. However, by the time she gets to Ripley, it's far too late. The scientists already have their xenomorphs, and after that, it doesn't take long for things to go wrong. One of their xenomorphs figures out how to escape by slaughtering their cellmate and letting the acid blood melt them a makeshift exit. Just like that, the United Systems military vessel becomes a slaughterhouse. The mercenaries aren't sure Ripley's allegiance. She looks human, but Call knows there's alien inside her. Nonetheless, she's useful. They team up and they join Dr. Ren, one of the few survivors still on the ship. He clues them in on something. When the Orga registers an emergency, it automatically sets a course for home base Earth, which means these monsters will be unleashed there unless they can stop it. Their plan is to escape on the Betty and blow up the Orga. As they make their way, they pass by a lab, which explains the eight tattooed on Ripley's arm. She was not the first attempt at a clone. There were seven before her. Seven failures, genetic monstrosities. The only one still breathing begs for Ripley to kill her, and she does. She burns the whole room and every twisted creation in it. Soon, they also find another survivor, Pervvis, one of the poor bystanders who was kidnapped in cryosleep, and he already has a xenomorph growing inside him. Ripley can smell it, but there is hope. If they can get him to the Betty in time, they can freeze him again and only wake him once they're home and have the surgical tools to take it out of him. The remaining journey is treacherous, getting several of the Mercs killed. Call takes a close-range bullet when Dr. Ren betrays them, locking them behind a door and running off on his own. When Call brushes off the bullet wound and gets the door open, her true nature as a robot is revealed. She hates herself for it. She's disgusting. But someone else who isn't quite human either, Ripley, tells her to get over it. She does, and she taps into the ship's main frame. She gives an order so that when it reaches Earth, it won't land. It'll crash, hopefully destroying it and eradicating the xenomorphs. Finally, they make their way to the Betty, but Ripley is captured by the xenomorphs along the way. Though it's unclear if she's an unwilling captive or if she's glad to be with her own kind. On the Betty, they find Dr. Ren. He does not want his work to end. He holds call at gunpoint, demanding they abort the collision. It's around then Pervvis feels a monster trying to crack open his rib cage from the inside. He's going to die, but he won't waste it. He grabs Dr. Ren and holds him close. So when the xenomorph comes out, it doesn't just kill Pervvis, but takes Ren with him. With the doctor gone, the rest of the crew shoots the infant alien dead. As for Ripley, she has a reunion with her daughter, the alien queen, and learns that in the genetic crossing, it wasn't just the xenomorph who passed some traits to Ripley, but Ripley also passed at least one to the queen, a human reproductive system. Yes, she has laid eggs, but now she also has something gestating inside her womb. And Ripley soon witnesses its birth. A bizarre hybrid, a xenomorph with human eyes. It screeches, a sound at once alien, but also human, like a crying infant. It turns on the queen, killing her, and instead looks to Ripley, as though recognizing her as its closer kin. Nearby, there is also a scientist cocooned in the nest. He is in awe of this beautiful genetic hybrid. He calls for it. The child answers his call by slaughtering him. Ripley uses the distraction to escape onto the Betty and they leave the Orria, but the child would not be left behind and has followed her here. It kills Dphano, a USM soldier who escaped with them and nearly kills Call. But the hybrid child inherently trusts Ripley. She uses that against it to get close and to use her own acid blood to melt a hole in the wall. Depressurization pulls the hybrid against it. Its insides are ripped out and launched into space. It screams an almost human scream. Ripley can only say she's sorry before the screaming finally stops and the thing is finally gone. The Orria crashes to Earth while the Betty lands safely. Call, an android built in space, and Ripley 8, a clone with genetically inherited memories, step out onto the ruined planet where they are both strangers, and they wonder what to do next. Sometime later, on Yaucha Prime, two brothers spar. It's time for Deck to earn his cloak. So, for the last time, his older brother, Quay, puts him through his paces before they peruse the database of prey. Deck must select a creature to hunt. Then either bring it home as a trophy or never return, earn his place in the clan, or face exile. There are many options. A backbiter, the sort of creature that once swallowed a man named John Torres. Naru, the Comanche warrior, and the one Deck chooses, the call, the most dangerous creature on the most dangerous planet. Father calls Deck the weakest, so he figures he must kill the strongest. But they're too late. Father has already deemed him too weak for the clan. Too weak for life. He orders Quay to execute his younger brother. Quay refuses, meaning his own life is forfeit. To forgive weakness is to show weakness. Before Quay's head is removed, he tells Deck to bring it home and sends him off in his ship. Deck crash lands on Jenna, a place where even the trees are predators. From the moment he lands, it's a fight for survival. The first thing he meets that doesn't try to kill him is the upper half of a whale and Utani synthetic named Thea. She saves his life when he's attacked by a combination of paralytic plants and a vulture-like monstrosity. She introduces herself using a universal translator. She was part of a whail and Utani research team of synthetics. The planet is too dangerous for humans, so they were sent instead. She was attacked by the callusk. That's how she lost her legs. Now she proposes a deal. Take me with you. I'll show you where to find the callusk. You get your hunt. I get my legs back. He's reluctant to accept the help. Ya. Hunt alone. Until she describes herself as useful. Useful like a tool. He rationalizes. Nothing wrong with using tools for a better hunt. So he takes her. She shows him the way and shows him how to survive Genna by working with Genna. Like the acid spitting spray snakes pacified by a snack. At night, she tells him more about her team, about Tessa. Their whole team is synths, but she and Tessa are different. They have a higher sensitivity, better allowing them to understand the creatures they study. They were separated in the callous attack and Thea has been waiting for Tessa to return. At the lab, Tessa is repaired and mother reiterates the mission. Ensure bioweapons retrieval the call. The thing Deck wants to kill Whale and Utani wants to capture, making the Yaoucha a potential threat to the mission. And if Tessa continues to fail that mission, she will be decommissioned. In the field, Deck impresses a monkeylike creature by slaughtering a bone bison in glorious fashion. And it's good timing, too, because a moment later, that creature rescues Deck, and Thea before they are nearly swallowed by a Luna bug. And a moment after that, Deck returns her the favor. Another night falls on Deck, Thea, and now their new friend, too. Thea calls her Bud. When Deck shares some meat with Bud, she returns the favor by spitting on him. He's angry at first until Thea tells him what it means. Bud is marking him as part of her clan. Except he has no clan. He has no brother. Thea can tell he's grieving. He's here for his brother. No, he dispels her of that. Grief is weakness. He is here for the call. She talks about Tessa again and he tells her that you should be able to survive on your own. >> I can survive on my own, but who would want to survive on their own? >> Tessa is your sister, he observes. Thea likes the sound of it. Elsewhere, that sister finds the escape pod Deck landed in. Then she finds the ship itself and helps herself to some of his Yao weapons inside. Come morning, Deck picks up Thea and leaves Bud behind. Yaucha hunt alone. Thea only joins him on that technicality. She is to him only a tool, but doesn't have to be that way. Thea tells him about an earth creature called Wolf. They hunt in packs led by an alpha, but the alpha is not the one who kills the most. The alpha is the one who best protects the pack. Soon, they find the callusk's den. Thea begins to reattach her legs, then makes the confession. She called Tessa. The company is on its way to capture the callusk and Deck must leave. He cannot be here when they arrive. He refuses. She tells him the callusk will kill him. He accepts those terms. A trophy or honorable death either end to the battle will satisfy him. He sets off an explosion to catch the callusk's attention. Once it arrives, he sees why it's futile. The creature self-heals. Despite that futility, he fights. In the chaos, Thea is cut in half again, but lends a hand in that fight. And finally, Deck cuts off the callusk's head. Seconds later, that head reattaches itself. The fight should reach its natural conclusion with Deck dead in the belly of the Callusk, except it smells something on him. Deck is part of her clan. Bud is this monster's daughter, a child call who has apparently saved Deck's life by making him part of their clan. That's when Tessa arrives and using a Pilfford Yaoucha cryogenic grenade, she captures both Deck and the Callisk. Now Thea is reunited with her sister, but loyalties are quickly tested. Thea does not want to see Deck captured, poked, and prodded, studied as a thing owned by the Whale and Utani Corporation. Thea pleads with her and Tessa reminds her something. Mother gave them feelings so they can understand the creatures on this planet for one specific reason. So those creatures can be exploited. And Tessa tells her something else. The Yaoucha are right. Resources and effort should not be spared for the weak. Quay made that mistake fighting for his brother and died for it. Tessa nearly died for Thea, but she will not make that mistake again. She orders Thea to be shut down and boxed up, and she orders the Yaoucha to be tortured for information on his tech, but Deck and Thea quickly prove the value of working together. They trick a guard into blowing himself up, allowing Deck to escape the transport. Come night, he prepares to stage a rescue mission. But with all his tech gone, he's forced to improvise. In place of Yaoucha armor, the hardened hide of the bone bison. In place of the shoulder-mounted plasacaster, a tamed spray snake, and more resources once dangerous to him, now dangerous to his enemies. He is also joined by an ally he formally welcomes to his clan with a shower of Yaucha saliva, the Kalisk child, Bud, plus Thea's lower half. Working together, they fight through Whale and Utani's army of synths and free the rest of Thea. With her help, they free Bud's mother. Tessa brawls with the call using an exo suit cargo loader, but quickly ends up in the belly of that call. The massive creature reunites with her daughter before Tessa sets off another cryog grenade, killing Bud's mother from the inside. Tessa walks out of the pile of frozen shattered flesh and points her stolen plasacaster at her disloyal sister before Deck stabs her through the neck and finally returns home with his trophy, the head of a whale and Utani synthetic. Then revenge. He kills his father's guards and brings his father to his knees. "Perhaps the right son did survive," his father offers. "Yield now and take your place in our clan." "I have my own clan," Deck answers before Bud, who has grown considerably, bites off his father's head. Deck helps himself to the old dead man's cloak and returns to his clan of three. Deck, Thea, and Bud, and a ship flies over the horizon. Deck prepares for another battle. This time with the Yaoucha aboard that ship, his mother. And that's where the timeline ends for now. Stay tuned. I may dive into some expanded alien predator lore in supplemental videos. Plus, I'll update both the Alien Only and Alien versus Predator timelines as more material releases in either franchise. Subscribe to keep up with that. Thank you for watching and see you on the next One Take.