Prometheus ending explained - how does it connect to Alien: Romulus?

The expedition is led by two scientists named Dr Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Dr Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), who followed archaeological clues on Earth which appeared to show a map in the stars to a location in space, which brings them to a distant moon that is dubbed LV-223.

However, there are further machinations at play behind the expedition that is funded by the Weyland Corporation, itself founded by the now-elderly Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), and overseen by the icy corporate suit Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) and the android David 8 (Michael Fassbender).

Of course, this being in the Alien franchise, this scientific expedition does not go to plan. However, does this link to Alien: Romulus?

Prometheus ending explained

The prologue of the film shows a large pale humanoid figure on Earth consuming a cup of a live black liquid before it poisons him and causes his cells to break down before collapsing into a waterfall. In the water, we see it break down the DNA of the figure before the cells begin to reconfigure and then multiply - suggesting the creation of life on Earth...

In the central timeline of the film, the ship Prometheus arrives on the moon LV-223, where the expedition comes across a large, ancient architectural structure which is found to contain a large humanoid-like statute, the remains of extra-terrestrial life, and large vases of a black-coloured liquid.

Most of the team returned swiftly to the ship amid a storm, but two crew members, Fifield (Sean Harris) and Milburn (Rafe Spall), had split off from the others and gotten lost in the structure.

While the crew returned to the ship and ran tests on an alien head of the race they dub 'Engineers', they find it shares DNA with humans, confirming that they are humanity's forebears and creators, with a much more human-like face inside a helmet resembling that of the 'Space Jockey' seen in the original 1979 film Alien.

Meanwhile, the android David secretly smuggled a vase of the black liquid back on the ship and conducted his own chaotic experiment by planting a small sample in a drink and ensuring it was drunk by Dr Holloway. Holloway went on to have sex with his partner, Dr Shaw, who revealed in conversations that she is infertile.

Inside the structure, Fifield and Milburn are attacked by a serpent-like creature which sprays an acidic liquid on Fifield's face, and his face then falls into a puddle. Milburn is choked and killed by the creature, and his body is discovered when the crew returns.

David next explores a control room inside the structure and finds a living Engineer in stasis, and discovers a holographic map and course set for Earth.

The team is forced to return when Holloway's health rapidly deteriorates, but his entry is refused by Vickers, who wants to keep the ship quarantined - and so, to protect the team and at Holloway's encouragement, she torches him with a flamethrower, killing him.

As the team undergoes medical checks following Holloway's infection and death, Shaw is flabbergasted to discover that she is pregnant and at an advanced stage - despite having been medically infertile.

Horrified, Shaw checks the medical scans and realises something is seriously wrong, and has the pregnancy exorcised in a mechanised medical pod, producing a writhing squid-like creature before her wound is sealed by the pod.

After undergoing the traumatic procedure, Shaw discovers that the elderly benefactor Peter Weyland is aboard the ship, and that Vickers is his estranged daughter, with android David acting like a surrogate son and assistant. No one else outside of the trio was aware Weyland was aboard, and he was there to find potential immortality with the Engineers.

Elsewhere, a monstrously mutated Fifield returns to the ships and begins to attack his fellow crew members, killing multiple, before he is killed by the ship's captain, Janek (Idris Elba). In a conversation, Janek suggests that the planet served as a military base for the Engineers, but they died when they lost control of a biological weapon - the black liquid.

Weyland, David and Shaw soon return to the structure and the control room to awaken the Engineer from its stasis. When David does so, he attempts to commune with the ancient Proto-Indo-European language, revealing the desire of eternal life from Weyland.

However, the Engineer proceeds to rip David's head off his body before murdering Weyland and other present crew members, while Shaw escapes.

The Engineer begins to activate its control room, revealed to be the bridge of a large half-donut-shaped ship which begins to leave the structure with the coordinated route to Earth and with the black liquid vases on board.

On the Prometheus, Vickers orders Janek (whom she has had sexual relations with) to depart for Earth, but Shaw communicates from the planet's surface that the Engineer is departing for Earth with the biological weapon aboard - and it will exterminate all life there.

In response, a heroic Janek and his fellow pilots ram the Prometheus into the Engineer's ship as it takes off. Before the collision, Vickers flees in an escape pod to the planet's surface, while Weyland's own personal lifeboat, which contained his med pod, was also ejected.

Vickers and Shaw witness the collision from the planet's surface, but the remains of the Engineer's ship fall from the sky and collide with the surface, causing huge destruction and rolling in the pair's path. While Shaw manages to roll her way to safety, Vickers runs but is crushed by the wreckage.

Following the destruction, Shaw makes her way to the lifeboat to survive, but then finds herself confronted by her monstrous squid-like offspring which is still alive.

Then, Shaw finds she has been followed by the Engineer who has survived the crash and attempts to kill her, but she survives by unleashing her offspring on him, with the creature wrapping itself around the Engineer and choking him with a tentacle.

Having survived the encounter, Shaw visits the crashed ship and finds the decapitated remains and head of David, who is still online and who she plans to reassemble.

Shaw tells David that she wants to pilot another Engineer ship to their homeworld, as she wants answers about why the Engineers created humanity and why they changed their minds and planned to annihilate humanity.

The film ends with Shaw signing off as the sole human survivor of the Prometheus and how she plans to search for answers.

A further scene shows the encounter between Shaw's alien offspring and the Engineer, which sees a new alien species burst from the Engineer's chest. The creature resembles a Xenomorph from the other Alien films, but with some differences - and is dubbed outside of the film as The Deacon.

Was there a sequel to Prometheus?

Yes, the film Alien: Covenant which was released in 2017.

This sequel did not focus heavily on Shaw's quest to the Engineers' homeworld, but the results of her search for answers and her final fate are revealed.

A prologue short film was released before the release of Alien: Covenant dubbed 'The Crossing', which showed the immediate aftermath of Prometheus and saw Noomi Rapace reprise her role as Dr Elizabeth Shaw.

In the clip, seen below, the pair are shown charting their course for the homeworld of the Engineers after Shaw repaired David, with Shaw entering into cryosleep as David oversaw their journey.

A major figure in the central film Alien: Covenant and its chief antagonist is David, who now resides on an uncharted planet which is a homeworld for the Engineers.

It is in this world that David has been experimenting with the pathogen found in Prometheus, where he has been attempting to create a perfect lifeform, creating several monstrous creatures in the process.

Upon arriving on the Engineers' homeworld, David unleashed the pathogen and exterminated humanity's ancestors in the process. Shaw survived the journey to the planet, but later met a grisly fate herself in one of David's experiments, with her dissected corpse shown later in the film.

Alien: Covenant's ending leaves a sinister cliffhanger where David is in control of a human colony's future, heading to a habitable colony world named Origae-6 and in possession of face-hugger embryos from his experiments.

Sadly, David's fate and final plans have yet to be committed to film...

How does Prometheus link to Alien: Romulus?

Alien: Romulus takes place after the prequel films Prometheus, its sequel Alien: Covenant and the original 1979 film Alien.

The chief connection occurs aboard the Romulus science station, when the synthetic human Andy (David Jonsson) stumbles across a black liquid which the damaged synth Rook calls "Prometheus fire" and reveals was extracted from the Xenomorph recovered from the wreckage of the exploded Nostromo ship from Alien.

The mention of the Prometheus crew also is accompanied by a brief sample of the original score from the film Prometheus.

Experiments were being conducted using the liquid to attempt to "perfect humans" and advance them, not dissimilar to the experiments of David in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.

Rook is keen on preserving the discoveries for the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, and later the liquid is ingested by the pregnant Kay (Isabela Merced).

Following this, she produces her own monstrous mutated alien-hybrid child, dubbed Offspring, sharing parallels to the experience of Shaw in Prometheus.

Therefore, the key connection with Prometheus remains in the power of the black liquid, which was first discovered by the crew of the Prometheus in the 2012 film, and its after-effects - to create life and destroy it.

Speaking to Variety, director Fede Alvarez said: "I was hoping that people picked up the whole Engineer part of it. The black goo is the root of the whole thing that was introduced in Prometheus. It’s the root of all life, but also particularly the Xenomorphs come out of that thing, which means it has to be inside them.

"It’s the Xenomorphs’ semen, almost. So we thought, if it affects your DNA, and the Engineers clearly came out of the same root of life, it made complete sense to me that [the offspring of a human and a Xenomorph] was going to look like that.

"It’s probably a new species, because that mix never happened before."

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Alien: Romulus is out now in cinemas, and the other Alien films are all streaming on Disney Plus.

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