The plot-obstacles to an Alien prequel

The Eggs in the derelict ship
Likewise problematic is the reason that all those eggs were in the cargo hold of the derelict in Alien. Were they laid there by a long-dead Aliens-style xenomorph queen after the ship got infested, like the Nostromo, by a single alien? Or are they genetically-engineered weapons created by the space-jockey race to drop on enemies in a ghastly act of biological warfare?

Ridley Scott and others have commented on the space-jockey that his race seems to have been pacific by nature, perhaps more so than mankind. Yet Dark Horse's comics spin-offs and various other Alienverse novels and spins have been providing a wealth of alternative possibilities since the late 1980s.

Michael Jan Friedman's Aliens: Original Sin names the space-jockey race as the Mala'kak, whilst Steve Perry's 1992 novelEarth Hive calls them 'the collectors'. Graphic novel writer Mark Verheiden instead depicts the space-jockeys as a war-like race in the vein of the Predators, but ones who are only holding off their enslavement of the human race until the galaxy is dis-infested of their common enemy - the xenomorphs.

Another spun-off origin story for the space-jockey came from the creators of ALIEN - The official authorised movie magazine. You can find the piece here, but fundamentally it suggests that history was pretty much repeating itself when the colonists met their grim fate on LV-426 in James Cameron's Aliens. In this set-up, the space-jockey race had been searching for lifeless worlds to colonise, and their sweeps for life-forms on the apparently barren planet had not registered the 'dormant' alien eggs, which woke up enough to wipe out three successive landing parties, each more heavily-armed than the last (the last being the space-jockey's own doomed mission from Alien).

(This doesn't necessarily establish LV-426 as the xenomorph home world - flies don't really have a native country as a species, and a xenomorph culture is merely an 'infestation' in the terms of more civilised societies. Who knows how many millennia these acid-spewing nasties have been stowing away and spreading their unique brand of havoc throughout the galaxy?)

Scott et al have also suggested other theories regarding the space-jockey, including that the apparent rough similarity in physiognomy between the two alien races is because the xenomorphs are biological weapons, or super-soldiers derived from space-jockey DNA. Thus the protective 'blue layer of light' over the egg-weapons in the cargo hold.

But what sense does that make? As soon as Kane breaks the beam of light, the little fellers start twitching. Why would any military party set a trap on board its own ship?

The fundamental problem here is how dated the Holoco laser-effects are in the sequence where John Hurt descends to investigate the egg. The camera is kept at a low angle in order to disguise the fact that the blue layer emanates from a single light source, but these days it doesn't look like anything but a late 1970s disco laser. James Cameron didn't keep the blue-light device in the finale of Aliens, so itmust have been space-jockey tech, right?

But in my opinion Cameron also thought it was a protective xenomorph tripwire, a luminous gas to give the creepy creatures the heads up on a new victim approaching - but one that would have been too hard to make work in his own explosive confrontation between Ripley and the alien queen.