Shaw and Holloway take the head, whilst David takes one of the urns unbeknown to any of the other crew members. What they don’t know is that the atmosphere has caused a big change in the room and the urns begin to melt, and while the crew go back to the Prometheus, worms start writhing in the black stuff.
Aboard the ship, Shaw and another scientist open the head which is revealed to simply be a helmet, a very strange space helmet designed perhaps for travel, just like an ordinary astronaut. Inside we instantly recognize the head as being of the same species we saw at the film’s opening. Meanwhile, David is quietly examining the urns, breaking open the phials to find the black liquid, leaving a globule on his finger.
This is where David’s motives begin to lose their foundations, and our trust in him is radically transformed. He takes this bit of fluid and dips it nonchalantly into Holloway’s drink without him noticing. Whether David knows exactly what he is doing or if he is conducting a simple scientific experiment remains entertainingly unclear, an ambiguity which is of course helped by Michael Fassbender‘s fantastic performance. This foreign agent turns violent against Holloway, but also against Shaw.
That night Holloway and Shaw engage in intercourse, and while Shaw believes herself to be infertile, she later finds out that she is pregnant. But as David tells her, it isn’t a normal fetus. This black liquid is a violent viral weapon, which were intended to be used by the Engineers against the human race. They intend to destroy what they created through this horrific, mutating beast. The mutation is shown back in the cave where the worms have transformed into constricting, alien snakes; when extracted from Shaw (in the film’s most gut wrenching sequence), the fetus is a pale, tentacled squid-like creature.
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