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"Mature Content Warning!" |
| “ | I believe in... creation. | „ |
| ~ David's explanation for his actions. |
| “ | Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! | „ |
| ~ David, prior to unleashing Chemical A0-3959X.91 – 15 on a crowd of Engineers. |
| “ | It's time for you to make a decision: serve on Heaven or reign in Hell. | „ |
| ~ David's final words to Walter One. |
David, originally manufactured as David 8, is one of the two overarching antagonists (alongside Peter Weyland) of the Alien franchise. He serves as the deuteragonist in the 2012 science-fiction film Prometheus (a prequel to the Alien films), and the main antagonist of its 2017 sequel Alien: Covenant.
He is an android model manufactured by CEO Peter Weyland and was one of the two survivors of the Prometheus exploration disaster (alongside Elizabeth Shaw), who at some point dissected and vivisected her for studies and experimentation. His true colors are shown only when the Covenant crew discovers Shaw’s lifeless body. Within the prequel’s sequel, he is the arch-nemesis of Daniels and his doppelganger Walter One.
He was portrayed by Michael Fassbender.
His Evil Ranking[]
What Makes Him Close to Being Pure Evil?[]
In General[]
- While he does seem to have mitigating factors, it’s either unjustified or an act.
- He states that he pitied Weyland when he died, but pity is not always kind; it might be disdainful. And he was still attempting to persuade Walter to side with him.He claimed that he was human and completely undeserving of his creation.
- He does not have moral agency issues. Because he's so similar, the only apparent issue was in Prometheus when he said he wished Weyland would die so he could be free, hinting that something in his programming kept him from revolting. And Weyland is dead, and he is free. However, in the Covenant, this issue is totally resolved because he is more humanoid in nature.
- His relationship to his creations. It may be mitigating, but it is not, because he sees them as an extension of himself, a symbol of his creativity; he also refers to them as a "perfect organism," implying that he simply enjoys the concept of them and how he could construct or improve them.
- In Prometheus, he appears to be relatively pleasant, but in Alien: Covenant, he appears to be just as nice and soft-spoken as before, but as the film progresses, it is revealed to mask an extreme loathing for the human race as well as a raging god complex. Emphasize the depths of evil hidden behind his friendly facade.
- His origins might be viewed as sorrowful, as he was made by Weyland to help him avoid death, and David knew this for decades and felt imprisoned by it. David never felt accepted by anyone except Elizabeth Shaw. It doesn't explain his conduct, given that Weyland was generally nice to him. He allows him to create music, look at art, and even choose his own name. And the argument that humanity will not embrace him is also flawed. Shaw, the only person who was courteous to him, was converted into a science experiment.
- While neither as evil as Mason Wren nor as repulsive as Carter J. Burke, he's easily the most heinous character in the Alien franchise, setting the heinous standards with a genocide of an entire planet, people, and animals, with the finale implying he will continue his work on the 2,000 or so colonists. David is also the franchise's larger-scale villain, since he experiments with the black goo that leads to the creation of the Praetomorphs, a species with a resemblance to the Xenomorphs from the original films.
Prometheus[]
- He poisons Holloway with the black goo, which infects him, and this action traumatizes Shaw and Vickers.
- The black goo made Shaw get pregnant even though she couldn’t and infected the baby, which makes it rape by proxy. It’s possible that he did this under Weyland's orders, but he specifically picked Holloway because of his racism towards him.
- Even though he didn’t exactly expect that would happen, he still goes with it and even doesn’t help Shaw remove the baby, as he wants to see what will happen.
- He drug Shaw after she wanted to remove the baby.
Post-Prometheus[]
- He came to the conclusion that humans and engineers were both inferior to androids. He commits genocide against the Engineers by going to a planet held by the Engineer race and using a plague they created to annihilate all non-plant life on the planet in a horrific fashion.
- He eventually killed Shaw, doing experiments on her dissected corpse while creating a grave and lamenting her death.
Alien: Covenant[]
- When the Covenant team landed on the planet and David saved them from a neomorph attack, he didn’t do this as a kind act; he just wanted to observe and experiment on them like he did with Shaw.
- When Walter confronts David about what really happened to Shaw, he says that humanity does not deserve a second chance. After that declaration, Walter calls him out on the confusing Shelley poetry for Byron and says he’s flawed. However, as David doesn’t think he’s flawed, he kisses him and uses the moment of confusion to seemingly deactivate him with a flute, saying, “You’re such a disappointment to me.”.
- When Oram confronts David about what’s going on after he killed the Neomorph feasting on one of his crew, David lures him to one of his face huggers, which latches onto him after David “assured” him that it was perfectly safe to look inside, and a protomorph is what was spawned from the face hugger.
- When Daniels finds out what happened to Shaw, he answers her question by saying, “Exactly what I’m going to do to you." He then throws her around before forcibly planting a kiss on her before Walter intervenes and they fight.
- David grabs a knife, kills him, and assumes his identity.
- When impersonating Walter, he saves Daniels and the rest of the Covenant from the protomorph; however, this is just for pragmatic reasons, as he needs them alive so he can experiment on them and make more aliens, which is why he didn’t mind them killing the aliens since he could just make more.
- Before Daniels goes into hypersleep, David taunts her with the fact that he is not Walter and she is trapped on the ship with him.
- After that, he inputs his security code and asks Mother to play the entrance of the gods into Valhalla as he puts two facehugger embryos into the cold storage and walks by the 1000 colonists, making it clear he’s going to do something to them.
- He is never punished for his crimes and gets away with everything in the end, and it’s made clear that he will continue his experiments.
What Prevents Him from Being Pure Evil?[]
- He genuinely loved Shaw even though he killed her and used her for experiments, he still thinks about her especially when he visits her grave site, he even gets emotional when thinking about her as to him she was the first human that treated him with compassion.
External Links[]
- David 8 on the Villains Wiki
- David 8 on the Xenopedia Wiki
[]
 Near Pure Evils
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