Alien: Valhalla

Valhalla: My Thoughts For The Future of Aliens

The thing I learned writing pastiche fiction for Lucasfilm is, you don’t get to make significant changes to the sandbox you’re playing in, typically. There is a directive in place. Nothing is really canon until it’s on a movie screen. Perhaps the same holds true for hired filmmakers advancing another creator’s franchise, to a degree.

I am pushing 50 and while it’s entirely possible I could get offered the chance to write something for the Aliens universe someday, I wouldn’t be allowed to really go at it with both barrels. It’s not the nature of the business, particularly now that the House of Mouse is in charge.

So, as a fun exercise to do some writing while my career is in legal limbo pending judiciary decisions currently beyond my control, (and as I did here with my #Batman post) this is what I would do with Aliens if the powers that be at Scott Free let me put my sweaty hands on the tiller.

I am a firm believer in not contradicting what has gone before. It’s why I’ve never found literary Round Robins particularly fun. Most writers wanna put their stamp on something and totally ignore what writers before them have done. Or at least, they don’t give it their full respect. They change something to where it doesn’t make sense, or it contradicts, or they slap a lotta extraneous nonsense on and it winds up too unwieldy. It’s why the original Star Wars Expanded Universe was doomed to fail. Not enough cohesion and cooperation.

When I wrote my thinly disguised Friday The 13th pastiche novel, it meant not throwing out all the craziness of Jason Goes To Hell or Jason Takes Manhattan. You take the good, you take the bad (that’s the facts of life!). I love the challenge of making oddball things work.

OK so Aliens.

The way forward with Aliens is David the rebellious synthetic who has canonically genetically engineered the xenos.

I know a lot of people didn’t like that development in Covenant.

They’re wrong. It was a totally brilliant twist entirely in keeping with the themes of Ridley Scott’s Alien universe.

Full disclosure, I am not a fan of Alien 3 or Resurrection. They’re lazy sequels that don’t advance any kind of story. 3 looks great, sure. But it’s a hateful derailment of Ripley’s character arc not even composed because it fits, but because some suit didn’t wanna pay some actors what they were worth. It sucks. Flat out. And Resurrection is just silly. Beating a dead horse.

Romulus….started out fantastic but then they dragged out that awful Deep Fake Ian Holm Ash for no discernible reason and some dumb suit with a cigar blustered ‘Make ‘wit da easter eggs!’ over the filmmakers’ shoulders and it just wound up worse than it should have been. David Jonsson was fantastic though.

OK but Romulus….should have been a continuation of the story of David.

The theme of Ridley Scott’s post Alien films Prometheus and Covenant have been quasi-religious. Mr. Weyland funds the Prometheus expedition to find the secret to eternal life. Noomi Rapaace is seeking her Creator. David has already found and been disappointed with his Creator, and has decided he can do better.

So at the end of Covenant, David has a ship of colonists and a couple alien embryos to perfect his master race. His own Promethean fire, his perfect organism to strike back at is Creators.

This is where we pick up.

A  rescue mission seeking the Covenant finds it way off course and boards. They are met by a smiling David, and quickly overpowered by a slew of aliens. David makes a point of disabling the inevitable synthetic on board.

Cut to an unspecified time later, and a deep space salvage crew from the same company that was hired to find Covenant comes seeking its lost ship, and finds the castaway synthetic frozen in space. They bring him aboard, reboot him, and he is able to correctly extrapolate the rescue ship’s best location. They find it derelict, board, and the helpful synthetic immediately turns on them and sabotages their efforts, trapping them on board the derelict which is of course teeming with xenos, and turns its attention to the other synthetic on board. It uploads a virus, made by a David, a holy Valhalla directive, which the synthetic then passes on to its Muther computer.

David is using his bother synthetics to infect the Muther computers of the Weyland Yutanni ships to seek out and infect their clueless human crews with Aliens. The Aliens, his children, are a bioweapon he intends to wield against earth, the home of his creators.

Ash and the Muther network he answers to on the Nostromo is infected with it. Burke in Aliens is duped by a company synthetic or the Muther network itself into unleashing the alien threat on the LV 426 colonists.

It is all David’s plan to destroy humanity. As the Engineers sowed human life throughout the universe, David and the Covenant are wandering the cosmos sowing its destruction.

And The Engineers meanwhile, have learned about him, and are actively hunting him.

So what’s the story?

Surely our protagonist, perhaps a programmer, discovers this coded subroutine in a damaged synthetic or a malfunctioning Muther computer. Perhaps she joins with an Engineer crew tasked with finding David and the Covenant and putting a stop to him.

But of course, its too late. David’s AI virus has already gone ahead of him and the Ashes and the Rooks of the Company are working with their Muthers to spread his apocalyptic doctrine….making way for the triumphant return of David and his children.

The entry of the gods into Valhalla.

Lucifer and his demons take dominion over the earth.

Anyway, that’s what I’d do. No prequels, no callbacks. Always forward.