Way back when Ridley Scott was just starting to work on his Alien prequel Prometheus, he hired Damon Lindelof to refine the script Scott had worked on with Jon Spaihts. Lindelof’s job was to focus more on the Engineer aspects of the film and less on the Alien bits, creating what turned out to be a totally bizarre, inventive take on the foundation of Scott’s Alien universe. Because he was so steeped in the Engineer lore, Lindelof might have some idea of where the franchise plans to go after the events of Alien: Covenant.

While speaking to Collider about his other project, that little series you might’ve heard of called The Leftovers, Lindelof answered a few questions about his take on the Alien movies. First off, did he see anything in Covenant that he recognized from his and Scott’s talks about the franchise?

I don’t know, I mean we weren’t necessarily talking about what the sequel to Prometheus would be as opposed to like where this journey was going to end up, and I think that the themes that Ridley was really interested in overlapped with themes that I was interested in, which is things that he had already explored in Blade Runner. He had always explained Prometheus to me as the marriage between Alien and Blade Runner because he was interested in this idea of creation and that there were three generations of creation. You have man and his creation, which are the synthetic beings, the androids, the robots, replicants, whatever you wanna call them depending on which Ridley movie you’re in. And then what’s the next level of that, which is who created man? So that search for God as it were to go and ask, ‘Why did you make me and to what end?’ was something that Ridley was interested in and was in Jon Spaihts’ draft long before I came along, and so that was the thing that I keyed into.

A “marriage between Alien and Blade Runner” is actually a fascinating way to look at this new series, and totally makes sense when you think about Scott’s creation angle. Lindelof also mentioned that there seems to have been a slightly different plan for the Engineers’ home world than the one we saw destroyed in Covenant. Or maybe that wasn’t their home world at all?

I think that one of the conversations that we had at the end of Prometheus is, Shaw and David have basically locked in on the coordinates of the planet where the Engineers came from. What does that place look like? Ridley called it ‘Paradise’. What happens when they land on that planet? It doesn’t feel like they’ve gotten there yet in Covenant, Covenant felt like it maybe was a detour prior to them arriving at the place of origin so I don’t want to spoil any place that he might still be wanting to go, but the conversations that he and I had about where the story goes next were largely about the place where the Engineers were from and less the events of Covenant.

Where does David take his human captives from here? Where is he heading towards? It could be that the Engineers’ part in this story isn’t yet over.

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