She raised a hand towards him. “Walter – thank you. For everything. You’re crew, and I don’t know what kind of a future there will be for you once the colony is established, but I know there’ll be something. I don’t care what the regulations say. I’ll see to it myself”.
At his touch on the external controls, the pod canopy closed. He hit the control to activate hypersleep. Her eyes were locked on his as the narcotic steam began to fill the pod.
“I know you will, Danny, but even if you can’t do anything for me, I’ll love you just the same”.
When the steam cleared, she was fast asleep. He wondered if she would dream. If so, he wondered if he would be in it. That last moment, those lasts words – did she know? Had she retained, at the last, just enough cognizance to comprehend? That thought that she would dream of him was pleasurable. (…) Turning, he walked out into the holding room, gazing contentedly down at row upon row of sleeping colonists. His subjects. He smiled. His future.
This is the ending of the story in the novelization. It’s different: Daniels doesn’t realize she has David, not Walter, in front of her. That’s what I think about this scene:
David wants to take his “future” by himself, he doesn’t want Daniels’ help. Daniels, in the novelization (but in the movie too) clearly shows David that she cares for Walter and doesn’t consider synthetics as less than her. In the novelization Daniels is all David would have liked to find in a human being! Daniels is sincerely kind with Walter, she always tries to not even allow him to say “I’m just a machine”! David seems struck by that in the novelization, but that doesn’t change him, because he’s proud. He wants to be a king, not Daniels’ best friend (or more). He doesn’t want to be helped by humans. Surely David likes to imagine how it could be to be loved by her (because it’s part of David’s inner contradictions: he hates humans but seeks validation from them, he’s attracted by them, he’s fascinated), he likes to indulge in that sweet fantasy (that’s why he asks himself if she has heard him and if she would have dreamt of him), but at the same time, his pride is too strong: he can choose to serve in Heaven with Daniels, but he has already chosen: he wants to reign in Hell (and plus, we know David has the twisted passion for turning the people he likes into his favorite experiments… ).
In the novelization David’s refusal of humans’ world is stronger, because he really can choose his destiny in the novelization: he can choose to live as Walter with Daniels’ affection, but he choses to refuse her offer (that fits with Paradise Lost’s thematics too: in that poem man simply chooses to take knowledge by himself before the right time, the knowledge is not meant to be really “forever” forbidden to him in God’s intentions).
David:Shh! Don’t let the bedbugs bite. I’ll tuck in the children.
Notice how the light changes on David’s face while Danny understands who he is. When she thinks he is Walter, his face is totally illuminated. When she dramatically notices that is David, his face is half-illuminated. He is like split in two: his dark side now shows itself in the absence of light.
Michael Fassbender and Katherine Waterston in ‘Alien: Covenant’, (2017). Dir. Ridley Scott.
Jab loves robots 