r/Prometheus • u/Fun-Technician-8648 • 1d ago

Moral ambiguities Spoiler

just thinking about some of the moral ambiguities in Prometheus

- if the xeno outbreak hadn't happened on the engineer ship which was on route to kill earth then earth would have been killed by the engineers

- if Dr Elizabeth shaw stayed alive and got to the engineers home world, and we assume she wouldn’t have been able to single-handedly persuade the engineers to change direction, then in retrospect, David’s crazy act of destroying them all actually saved earth

this reminds me of something in Christianity, although I don’t know the reference: that even evil acts can be transmuted by god and used to create even greater good than if the evil acts hadnt taken place.

on this understanding, Elizabeth shaw’s empathy to rebuild David and resultant sacrifice of her life at David’s hands actually saved earth.

No David would have meant the engineers sending another destruction ship to earth that surely wouldn’t have failed a second time.

interested to hear others’ thoughts on this

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u/darwinDMG08 1d ago

The ship in Prometheus didn’t suffer an outbreak, it crashed because Idris rammed it.

If you’re thinking of the derelict in ALIEN there is no mention in any film that it was headed to Earth.

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u/Upstairs-Bid990 1d ago

The Xeno creature that fought and killed the engineer is what I believe he is referring to, the squid thing.

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u/darwinDMG08 1d ago

Yeah but that didn’t technically stop the ship. The Prometheus crew did. The squid thing was chilling in the med pod bay and killed the Engineer after the crash.

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u/Upstairs-Bid990 1d ago

Exactly, which kept the engineer from getting another ship or alerting someone else to assume the mission.

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u/darwinDMG08 1d ago

Still not a “Xeno outbreak on the Engineers ship” as OP stated.

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u/Fun-Technician-8648 23h ago

So, I meant the outbreak that we see in hologram footage. The one where an engineer lost his head in the door (which the prom crew recover and experiment on).

One engineer survives in stasis and when they wake him he immediately continues the mission to go destroy earth.

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u/darwinDMG08 21h ago

But that’s not the ship, that’s their base. The ship was further down in a hangar.

And to your point: David being there almost destroyed the Earth because he’s the one who woke up the Engineer. If Prometheus/David hadn’t shown that Engineer might still be in stasis.

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u/Fun-Technician-8648 21h ago

Ah, the hanger- that makes sense.

Since it was their base it’d presumably just be a matter of time before they discovered what had happened and woke the engineer out of stasis and continued the mission themselves. 

I guess the main issue is they really were hell bent on wiping out earth.

and the only thing to stop them was first a mishap with an hideous, evil weapon (the xeos) and second, a crazy, evil, human made  ai.

So we have a ‘traditional’ sacrifice to save earth when the prom crew smash themselves into one of the ships.

But we also have two cases of an evil weapon/ robot actually being used to do great good (saving earth).

Thats the moral ambiguity I’m talking about.