Prometheus heroine Elizabeth Shaw may meet a brutal end before the action of Alien: Covenant begins, but the original grisly fate of Noomi Rapace’s character was far worse. Beginning in 1979 with future Blade Runner helmer Ridley Scott’s iconic “haunted house in space” sci-fi horror Alien, the Alien series has since gone on to spawn a massive franchise that dwarfs the claustrophobic original movie. In the wake of Alien's success, the franchise went on to include the bigger action-oriented sequel Aliens, the disappointing David Fincher-directed three-quel Alien 3, and even a pair of (subpar) face-offs between the eponymous Xenomorphs and the aliens of Predator, a rival franchise.
However, it wasn’t until 2012 that Gladiator helmer Scott would return to the director’s chair for another Alien installment, adding some more complexity to the backstory of the series. When Scott came back to Alien, the director ended up making a prequel to the original movie in the form of 2012's critically divisive Prometheus. A more ambitious breed of Alien follow-up, Prometheus offered some interesting philosophical quandaries for viewers but lacked the visceral thrills of Scott’s original Alien as it became bogged down in backstory.
Although not as hated as the heavily-recut Alien 3, Prometheus was nonetheless a disappointment for many franchise fans. As if to make up for Prometheus’ lack of impactful gore and scares, Scott soon directed the sequel Alien: Covenant in 2017. Despite a weak showing at the box office (and an equally knotty, over-complicated backstory), this Alien sequel earned more love from fans thanks to its many suspenseful sequences and inventive death scenes. One gory demise that was left offscreen was that of Prometheus heroine Elizabeth Shaw, whose corpse is seen in Alien: Covenant long after it has been used as a Xenomorph-breeding testing site. However, Shaw’s Alien: Covenant fate was originally much, much worse, with Scott wanting to turn the heroine into a “Neomorph Queen,” a grotesque genetic aberration created by villainous android David that combined a human body with the Xenomorph’s iconically creepy appearance.
Originally, Rapace’s Prometheus heroine would have appeared in Alien: Covenant as the Neomorph Queen, the “successful” result of David’s Xenomorph-human crossbreeding. Concept art of the Prometheus character’s grim fate depicts an abomination with whitish-green skin, a human bottom half, an androgynous body with Xenomorph-style shoulder-spikes, elbow spikes, and webbed fingers. As if that weren’t enough torture, in these sketches Shaw’s head became a sightless, massive blob.
It’s a far more upsetting image of Xenomorph-human crossbreeding than the much-mocked Newborn Alien of Alien: Resurrection fame, and Alien: Covenant could have gained a truly horrifying scene from sharing this ambitiously gruesome monster with viewers. However, Shaw’s brutal offscreen death already felt a little pointless after Alien fans spent the entirety of Prometheus’ runtime rooting for her, and the subsequent death of Alien: Covenant’s entire cast means that the addition of the Neomorph Queen may have been a bit too much bleakness even for the gory Alien series to handle.
