gothic-fiction-in-space:

About the black goo: a simple plot device or something more deep and fascinating?

The first time I watched Prometheus, the black goo felt like a bit of a cheap plot device to me. I’ll explain why.

In Prometheus the human characters arrive on a planet, an abandoned scientific/military outpost of the Engineers, were no one lives anymore, apart from one last Engineers that’s asleep in his pod. It’s not the only one that sleeps: the black goo, dormant in the jars, is a threat that must not been awakened too. The “main threat” for great part of the movie, is the black goo. At first I thought it was a too simple way to make humans get infected: it’s cheap and easy to put some dark liquid substance in a movie, it’s not something particularly visually elaborate and interesting.
On one hand you have a great cast, an expensive setting, a huge alien planet, a spaceship, spacesuits, and on the other hand you have… some goo. That didn’t felt so exciting the first time I watched Prometheus.

This feel of mine persisted in the first part of Alien: Covenant too, the first time I watched it. When I watched the scene where we see how David killed the Engineers, I was partially shocked by how far David had gone, and partially disappointed (but it wasn’t so important to me) by the way the Engineers were killed: using the simplistic plot device of that black cloud that goes around and basically burns and destroys whatever biological organism it meets. That’s an easy way to make a genocide happen in a very few amount of time.

Few time after watching Alien: Covenant I realized, thanks to the novelization, that the way the Engineers die is actually very similar to the death of the gods in the story told by David while he’s playing the piano at the beginning of the movie. And so I got it: oh, it’s the “twilight of the Gods”. And then I also realized that that kind of genocide was very much similar to the destruction of Pompei.
My brain started to work better and my imagination grew and my sense of wonder grew too.

Watching Alien: Covenant made re-evaluate the role that the black goo has in these movies, so in Prometheus too. The black goo has an unimaginable power of creation: it’s life itself at its most powerful form. That’s why Ridley Scott says that the aliens regenerate: the materials that compose them are indestructible, at the level of the DNA, at a genetic level; the virus can’t die, it transforms endlessly. It’s a power beyond our imagination. The goo used by the Engineers, by the creators of mankind, by the Gods, is the power of both life and death itself.
From that simple looking black liquid born mankind itself, and born the evil lost brother of mankind: the alien. Mankind and aliens are brothers since Prometheus: they have the same “parents” and they come from the same primordial ooze.

The wolf and the lamb. In all of this finds its place David’s pride, his vanity, his god-complex. He steals the “fire of the gods”, the most powerful one: he steals the “programs” of life in its entirety and has access to the “codes”, and can modify the program (a bit like when he enters in the main computer of the Covenant while Muthur is off for few hours and he has access to Walter’s codes and he inserts his own code). David has the very ingredients that produce life and he’s free to use them however he wants. It’s what Holloway foreshadows in Prometheus, that the discoveries they made make him think there’s “nothing special” in the creation of life and that “anyone can do it”, one only needs half of a brain and a strain of DNA. Unfortunately David has more than half of a brain and he doesn’t obtain a simple strain of DNA but he obtains access to the power of life and death themselves. While Elizabeth cries because she can’t “create life” in the form of the children she would like to have, David discovers that thanks to the black goo he can actually make Elizabeth’s body produce life. What kind of life? Not a human one, unfortunately for Elizabeth, but David doesn’t care: he’s the one that is in charge now, he’s the one who decides that humans are obsolete and that he has to create something better and something more evolved. The universe he finds himself into says to him that he’s right. The nightmare of the humans that discover to be just one failed experiment among the many possible ones, justify David’s actions. That’s what he inevitably sees. He has always wanted to prove to the universe he had the potential to be “the next visionary”, and once he finds himself free from Weyland and with the horrendously powerful black goo in his hands, he decides his time to take the stage has finally arrived, and around him he doesn’t see any clues that he could be wrong, he doesn’t find them in the universe where he lives into.

With the black goo David obtains the same powers of his father Weyland too: “the power to create, to destroy, and to create again”. David is in charge to decide how life shall work and how life shall look like: “reshaping life, virtually limitless in its potential”. “How is the creation of such incredible individual considered unnatural??” Asked Peter Weyland so many years before David erased whover could have stopped him. Weyland had to fight a mediatic battle against who believed in some inherent value in the human being as it was, but David simply looks around and thinks he has no reason to worry about this value at all, not anymore.

So of course the Engineers die in a pretty fast massacre sequence because of a giant black cloud: it’s the wrath of a new god, David. It’s not a cheap plot device, it’s something more deep.
If one has the power of death too in his hands, he can surely kill whatever he wants to kill without too much effort.
I re-evaluate the black goo, I think that it fits with all the themes we can find in the prequel saga. It’s fire, it’s life, it’s death, it’s a virus, it’s a cataclysm, it’s the wrath of a superior being (or self proclaimed one), and so on.