It took a while for Prometheus’s place in the Alien franchise to make sense, but 2024’s latest installment proves the prequel improved the series as a whole. The Alien movies all have their defenders and their critics but, broadly speaking, the critical trajectory of the series isn’t subject to debate. Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror Alien is considered a masterpiece, while its 1986 sequel Aliens is considered an equally impressive, if not even better, follow-up. The rest of the Alien movies rank lower, although their specific order changes depending on the viewer.

Director David Fincher’s bleak Alien 3 is universally viewed as a disappointment compared to Alien and Aliens, but some reviewers prefer it to 1997’s offbeat, blackly comic Alien: Resurrection from director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. While the Alien Vs Predator movies are almost universally reviled, the reception of Scott’s divisive 2012 prequel Prometheus is more complicated. For some viewers, the long-awaited blockbuster is over-ambitious but laudable, while others found it ponderous, overlong, and lacking in the franchise’s trademark tension. 2017’s Alien: Covenant, while undeniably more effective as a straightforward horror, provided few definitive answers to the mysteries left open by Prometheus.

Prometheus Has Made The Alien Franchise More Interesting

The Plot Of Prometheus Permanently Altered The Weyland-Yutani Story

Fortunately, director Fede Alvarez’s 2024 sequel Alien: Romulus changed the legacy of Scott’s controversial sequels. By Alien: Romulus’ ending, Prometheus had gone from a curio whose place in the series timeline was hard to define to a pivotal part of the franchise story. This was a bold move by Alvarez, but one that was overdue for the franchise as a whole. After all, for better or worse, Prometheus’s story changed the Alien franchise’s lore drastically and opened up a lot of new possibilities in the process.

By explaining more about the Engineers, introducing the Black Goo which is central to its plot, and revealing just how long the Weyland-Yutani Corporation had known about the Xenomorph’s existence, Prometheus made Alien’s simple story far more complex. After seeing Alien, a viewer could have been forgiven for ᴀssuming the movie’s main characters were just luckless space truckers who answered the wrong transmission. Prometheus proved that the Xenomorph’s relationship with their employers had deeper roots than the original movie revealed and Alien: Romulus solidified this.

Prometheus Is Not The Best Alien, But It’s Essential To The Franchise Now

Alien: Romulus Made Prometheus’s Story Indispensable

Although Alien: Romulus is set between Alien and Aliens, its plot pays off many elements established in Prometheus. The Black Goo of Prometheus is revealed to be Z-01, a substance the corporation used in an attempt to create superhuman Xenomorph-human hybrids who would be capable of surviving long-term space travel and adverse conditions. Alien: Romulus also revealed that David’s experiments from Alien: Covenant may have found their way back to a Weyland-Yutani lab after the sequel’s events ended.

The plot of Prometheus is now pivotal to the world of the Alien movies thanks to Alien: Romulus’s additions to the lore of the series, which marry Scott’s prequels to the original movie timeline. Viewers can no longer just write Prometheus off after Alien: Romulus proved that the events of the movie led to the Weyland-Yutani Corporation’s further research into the Xenomorph’s life cycle. The missing link that lay between Prometheus’s ending and Alien’s beginning was revealed not by Alien: Covenant, but by Alien: Romulus (even though the sequel takes place after Alien’s ending).

Alien: Romulus Chose The Right Things To Bring Back From Prometheus

Alvarez’s Reboot Helpfully Condensed Prometheus’s Complicated Lore

With Alien: Romulus, Alvarez streamlined the lore of the franchise and brought its story full circle. Alien: Romulus’ new monster the Offspring looking like an Engineer after the Black Goo was combined with human and Xenomorph DNA gave viewers an idea of how the three species were related. Xenomorphs appear to be a bioweapon first developed by the Engineers in an attempt to make themselves more lethal and resilient, and the Engineers remain the original species that begat both aliens and humanity in Prometheus.

Alien: Romulus brought back the right elements from Prometheus, leaving behind the high-minded philosophizing of Scott’s prequels in favor of a plot that explained exactly how the Engineers crossed paths with humans and why it mattered. The android Rook broke down the Corporation’s plans to create superhuman and Kay injecting herself with K-01 explained what the Black Goo does to living people and their offspring. Although Prometheus’ prequel story did feature human characters dying after exposure to K-01, the connection between the Black Goo and Xenomorph-human hybrids was less clear.

There Is Still One Prometheus Story Left To Be Concluded

Alien: Covenant Never Explained The Fate Of Michael Fᴀssbender’s David

Despite all this clarification, I still came away from Alien: Romulus stumped by one lingering mystery. The question of what happened to David after Alien: Covenant’s twist ending remains unclear and, although viewers could piece together his plot from the tie-in comics, his arc still feels unfinished. From what viewers see in Alien: Romulus, viewers could infer that David must have reconnected with the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, as this would explain how they got a hold of Xenomorphs in the first place.

However, this isn’t a satisfying answer on its own. After all, viewers know that the Weyland-Yutani Corporation may have first found Xenomorphs to work with after Ripley’s encounter on the Nostromo, so David’s fate isn’t entirely clear. Furthermore, after the bleak twist ending of Alien: Covenant, viewers never got closure for the character. Even if viewers ᴀssume that David did continue his experiments and created more neomorphs by using human victims as vectors for his experiments, it is not clear how long he spent doing this or when he reported back to the Corporation.

While the Weyland-Yutani Corporation is infamously amoral, it is still likely that they might have a problem with David indiscriminately killing people for his experiments. Moreover, it is not clear whether David experimented on people for the Weyland-Yutani Corporation’s sake or for his own ends, and any answer to this question would require a follow-up that features Fᴀssbender returning to the role. Addressing the question of David’s unclear motivations requires his presence, not merely a mention in Alien: Romulus’ follow-up. Thus, Prometheus’ best character must return in a future Alien project to wrap up this unfinished plot.