Sure, Xenomorphs are still terrifying, but the scariest part of the Alien franchise these days might just be trying to figure out exactly how all the new movies fit into the series’ continuity. Ridley Scott, the man behind the series, isn’t exactly making things any easier to understand. While speaking to Entertainment Weekly, the 79-year-old director laid out his plans for the future of Alien, and in the process, suggested that the upcoming Alien: Covenant won’t get around to solving a big old plot hole from the original movie.
In the interview on Thursday, Scott explained how he returned to the franchise he created after coming up with the idea for Prometheus.
“I thought about it for about 10 years and went back to Fox saying, ‘I think I can resurrect this old guy’ and went in with an idea for Prometheus, which is the long way around because it will be a prequel,” Scott said. “And then the next one is Covenant, which is again the sequel to the prequel. And then, after that, unless we run out of steam, we’ll then come back in into the rear-end of Alien 1.
“You’ll know full well by that point who the affectionately termed ‘Space Jockey’ is,” he said.
What this all means is that the next movie, tentatively known as Alien: Awakening, will take place after Covenant and run right up to the start of the 1979 Alien. Scott is suggesting that Awakening will explain just how the Space Jockey from the original ended up crashing on that planet where Ridley and the crew of the Nostromo first encountered a Xenomorph.
Elsewhere in the interview, Scott explains that although the Space Jockey was originally mean to be a skeleton, it was later retconned to be an Engineer space suit. So far, though, we haven’t seen any Engineers crash-land on the Alien world, and it doesn’t look like we’ll be seeing that origin story in Covenant.
Alien: Covenant hits theaters on May 19.
