Remembering the iconic women of the Alien franchise

Elizabeth Shaw

The scientist who transformed into the first Xenomorph Queen had a triumph rise to her role in the franchise. You know: Before Alien: Covenant decided to write off her between-films journey off-screen and out of sight. Can you tell we’re still bitter that we never got a proper conclusion to Dr. Shaw’s arc?

There’s no questioning that Shaw is a tough scientist, character, and woman. She managed to grieve the death of her husband, pioneer a science expedition, and fight off the creators of humans. That summary doesn’t even note how she endured a makeshift C-section, then extracted the pre-Deacon lifeform from her body… all while awake during the procedure. She even found time and energy to fight off a robot and an angry Engineer.

Shaw’s character trajectory didn’t just lead her to an implicit revenge arc off-screen as she and David tracked down the Engineers. She also found time in the depths of her characterization to show compassion for the synthetic human who tortured her, experimented on her (more than one), and inevitably killed her. Even after everything, she was still sympathetic to Davi. Heck, she even apologized for putting his decapitated head in a duffle bag.

After being mutilated, turned into a rudimentary version of the first Xenomorph Queen, and later dying after producing the first facehugger eggs, the sour taste to Shaw’s concluding chapter in the Alien franchise is that she didn’t actually get a visible conclusion. David’s illustrations consolidated her death and journey between Prometheus and Covenant.

Shaw’s omission in Covenant isn’t her fault. It’s the writing. Instead, we’ll just have to keep imagining how she likely tried to stop David and his attempts to play god. The Elizabeth Shaw problem highlights a lot of the narrative issues in Alien: Covenant. Even a women-centric filmverse like Alien isn’t without faults.

We didn’t get to officially witness it, but Shaw started the long-standing rain of Xenomorphs.