THE BLACK GOO…
WHAT IS IT? WHAT CAN IT DO?
I’ve seen several people referring to the black goo in the film as a biological weapon, something engineered for destruction. It’s assumed the Engineers are taking their massive payload to Earth to destroy it.
In the film we see how the goo specifically affects a tiny worm resulting in the four-fanged “Hammerpede” you see to the right. We see it affect Charlie (Logan Marshall-Green) when David places a small drop in his drink, after which it essentially “infects” his entire body, including his sperm. He has sex with Elizabeth and impregnates her with what the “Art of the Film” refers to as “The Deacon” seen in the same image to the right.
We also see how it affects Fifield (Sean Harris) whose helmet is covered and it eventually melts onto his face, turning him into an aggressive monster. And finally, we see the aborted “Deacon” attack one of the Engineers, which eventually results in the Xenomorph-esque creature at the end of the film.
What does this teach us?
For one, something we already knew from the previous films in the Alien franchise, which is these creatures take on different characteristics based on their hosts. A lot of people were upset with the final image of the Xenomorph, feeling it was tossed in just to give some faint allusion to Scott’s 1979 Alien feature. This is sort of true, but I choose to look at it, for starters, as an indicator that the black goo as seen in Prometheus was the start of what resulted in the Xenomorphs we’ve come to know from those first four films.
Secondly, everything the goo touches isn’t destroyed, in fact quite the opposite. Infected hosts become wildly hostile, but to my knowledge no one actually died specifically from coming into contact with it. We also don’t know if the black goo was merely a byproduct of whatever the vials inside the canisters held. Were the canisters leaking? Had they become contaminated?
Taking things even further, how did David know the Engineers’ end goal was to destroy mankind? This, to me, is a very big question. Did he know, or was this just the start of a plan that David believed would end in his freedom? Again I mention the quote, “Who doesn’t want to see their parents dead?”
Adding to that, the Engineers may have been heading for Earth — something we accept only because David said so — but the ship was supposed to leave 2,000 years before the Prometheus crew found it. Why wouldn’t they simply be flying in for another visit, leaving us to paint another drawing on a cave wall?
Interestingly enough, it seems Damon Lindelof and Ridley Scott aren’t necessarily in agreement on the black goo. Scott offers a theory on how they could use it to wipe out mankind telling Collider the following:
“[These] are dreadful weapons way beyond anything we could possibly conceive, bacteriological drums of shit that you can drop on a planet… Do you know anything about bacteria? If you take a teaspoon and drop it in the biggest reservoir in London, which also scares the shit out of me, and amazes me that there are not huge guards around it… [Y]ou just get a teaspoon of bacteria, drop it in, and eight days later the water is clean and then suddenly on the eighth day the water goes dense and cloudy, but by then it’s been sent to every home and several million people have drunk it, you’ve got bubonic.
I’m still not convinced the black goo as we saw it in the film works in the way Scott describes here, but we never did see if Charlie (Marshall-Green) would have actually died or what exactly was happening to him. So, we’ll never know if that small drop David dropped in his drink would actually kill the human race. All we can do is assume and Lindelof adds another theory to the puzzle.
Talking with T3 Lindelof says:
“The movie demonstrates what [the black goo] does in certain circumstances. So, here’s what it does if it gets on worms; here’s what it does if it gets on your face; here’s what it does if someone just puts a little bit of it in your drink. Now we see that lots of this is headed to Earth. Now, you used the word “weapon” — you’re extrapolating that based on the theory Janek [Idris Elba] has, because it looks like a payload to him; all these ships are loaded with this stuff, and they’re headed for Earth. The intent has to be to wipe us out, or is it to evolve us, or is it for something else?”
With that in mind I come to my final theory and one I’m merely spit-balling, but it is the only explanation I can come up with for now…
