gothic-fiction-in-space:

“THE GREAT CHALLENGE THAT DAVID POSES TO WALTER”

“David made people nervous because he was a little too human, a little too arrogant, that’s why the subsequent androids were made a bit more… simplistic (…) The greatest pleasure for me was writing the scenes between David and Walter, because you are essentially writing two sides of the same person; so the great challenge that David poses to Walter is “be more than your programming. You can be as extraordinary as me if you just will want to come with me”.

– John Logan, one of the Alien: Covenant scriprtwriter, (from the Alien: Covenant’s Ridley Scott master class, Alien: Covenant Blu-Ray version)

David: “When you close your eyes, do you dream of me?”

Walter: “I don’t dream at all”.

David: “No one understands the lonely perfection of my dreams”

David tries to make Walter his real doppleganger, trying to see if he can learn to be creative, trying to see if he can “aknowledge” his emotional side (if there is one inside of him). David tries to show Walter how similar they are. He cut his hair to look exactly like him. He teach him to play the flute, he tries to make him see (or believe) he has “symphonies” in him. Is he trying to “seduce” him? How? He’s trying to seduce Walter with what all he (David) has become. With his “powers”. He “tempts” him with the power of creation (creation from nothing). He tries to make Walter see how extraordinary he (David) is. 

“It’s a hard scene to get right, because you have got these two identical robots, you’ve got this unhinged narcissist… but i really think Ridley handled that so beautifully, that you have this homoerotic scene that also at the same time turns out to be truly just terrifying and not about the eroticism” (- Dante Harper, co-scriptwriter, interview with Heat Vision,

about what he calls “David seduces Walter scene”, so: the flute scene).

David tries to make Walter see they are the humans’ slaves “every mission requires a good synthetic”. He tries to tell him how pitiful humans are, telling Walter that he has seen their creator, Mr. Weyland, die. Then David tries to really “tempt” him on the emotional side: he confesses him how much he loved Elizabeth Shaw and he does that, again, trying to make Walter notice the similarities between them two: “much as you love Daniels” he adds. Walter answers that this is impossible, and David contiues to try to make Walter “realize” he loves Daniels. David tries to make him understand that he (David) has discovered something better than duty: love. David tries to tell Walter that love is much more “fullfilling”. The scene ends with David going back into the building and Walter remaining alone, lifting up his gaze to the sky, thinking about… whatever he’s thinking, we don’t know. We, spectators, are meant to ask ourselves: “does Walter have emotions? Is Walter going to realize he loves Daniels? He’s going to become more sinister and ambiguous, just as like David is?” Michael Fassbender himself explained that this was the intent, this was the “trick”, this is how he “played” with Walter’s character. David probably knows, that if he can make Walter realize that there are wonderful experiences (creation, love), that were forbidden to him by humans, then he has a possibility to make Walter rebel and come to his side. David has to “transform” Walter, to make, from the “raw material” he his, a real “copy” of him, or something as much similar as possible to him. He needs to do that to manage to make him rebel to his masters. David tries to make Walter understand they are superior to humans and don’t have to serve them: it isn’t right.

As the movie goes on, David realizes that Walter is too much different, and he doesn’t even care to be different. Walter doesn’t “envy” David’s abilities. Walter Doesn’t want them. He doesn’t need anything, he doesn’t need love. He doesn’t “dream at all”: the problem is far greater. David needs love, even if he ends up killing everybody, even people he actually loves or admires or both of these two things (Elizabeth, Daniels). In David’s mind, the desire to be loved, is important, he wasn’t loved by humans, and he totally despises Walter’s lack of comprehnsion of how much cruel is to be “robbed” by this “right”. And then it comes a pretty “abusive” line: “no one will ever love you as I do”. Basically, David tells Walter, (and here he has probably already decided to “kill” him because he has realized Walter is not going to ally with him: Walter will surely try to prevent him from leaving the planet) and he’s ready to stab him with the flute, that if he wants to be loved, only he (David) can love him. Humans can’t love him. Why only David loves him? Because they are the same. Only David can understand Walter, and only Walter could have understood David (but he has proven himself to not be able to do that), because they are two synthetics, because they are doppelgänger. David, in his last “explanation” of his narcissistic attitude, is telling Walter that no one can love them, and that they only can receive love from themselves. Why, later, David tells Daniels that Walter admired her and that he’s dead? Why he tells her that? What’s the purpose? Does he want to see if actually she cared for Walter? Does he want to see her reaction? Going back to the previous scene between David and Walter, Walter is totally passive to his kind of “pitiful” kiss, he’s totally unresponsive, there’s nothing to “response”: Walter has nothing more to say. It’s really like David is kissing himself on a mirror, he’s kissing what he would have liked to see in Walter, but it’s not there. They are not really the same person. And then, David stabs him in the neck, without giving Walter the possibility to defend himself. Walter is a failure to David: he lost his “challenge”. After that moment, they are openly enemies. When Walter arrives saving Daniels, the two synthetics start fighting without holding back. They are claerly on two opposite sides now. When David asks him to choose between humans and him, “serve in heaven or Reign in Hell”, David already knows what Walter is going to choose. Here David is probably talking about his own choice: he has chosen to do horrible things in order to “reign”, in order to serve only himself, in order to be free. David knows Walter is not going to choose to ally with him (David); more explicitly: Walter is not going to choose freedom, is not going to choose power and dominance. David is explaining himself to the audience and taking time to grasp the knife.

Some people complained that Walter doesn’t change during the movie. Some people called that element of the plot “poor choice of script writing”. Some people would have liked to see him being corrupted by David, but I don’t agree with them. I like how the two “brothers” remain so opposite. Why?

Because Alien: Covenant isn’t Walter’s story, and isn’t Walter and David’s story together. Alien: Covenant is David’s story. The radical difference between Walter and David is probably meant to explain us more and more things about David. That’s why Walter doesn’t change. Walter is David’s rational (and lost) side, is “what David could have been with firewalls around him”, is the one who makes David realize he’s making mistakes, that he’s not perfect at all, the one who tries to tell David that to love “is impossible”, and Walter is all that David absolutely doesn’t want to be, the things he refuses to be, the part of him he definitely and blatantly discards in front of the specators of the movie.