Doctor Elizabeth M. Shaw was an archaeologist aboard the USCSS Prometheus in Prometheus, played by Noomi Rapace. With Charlie Holloway she read matching star maps in unrelated ancient cultures as an invitation from the beings who had made humanity. On LV-223 in December 2093 that invitation turned into a weapons cache, a pregnancy she had to cut out of herself, and a last living Engineer who meant to finish a flight to Earth. She left the moon with the severed head of the synthetic David. On Planet 4 he kept her alive as a subject and she died in 2094.
Biography
Childhood
The only early memory the expedition record gives for Shaw is the one David watched while she was in hypersleep on the way to LV-223. In it she is a child in a red hat, standing with her father in a village in South Africa. He was a missionary, and the people around them were dying of an illness he could not stop. Her mother had died, and her father died of Ebola. Before he died she asked him what happened to the dead, and he answered with heaven and gave her his cross. She kept the cross, and she kept the answer as a choice rather than as something she could prove.
David treated the dream as data. He had the ship's files on her archaeology, her medical record, and this memory of her father, and he studied all of it during the years the crew slept. The cross in the dream is the one she was wearing when the Prometheus woke her. Holloway later wanted it off her neck. She would not take it off, including after the finds on the moon made the Engineers look less like benefactors and more like an enemy.
Isle Of Skye
In 2089 Shaw and Holloway opened a cave on the Isle of Skye in Scotland and recorded a painted figure pointing at a star pattern. The same arrangement turned up in art from cultures that had never met. They read it as a map left by the makers of the human species, later called Engineers, and as a place those makers wanted people to find. Peter Weyland funded the ship that would follow the map. Holloway was her archaeological partner as well as her romantic partner, and he wanted the meeting to confirm that humans had been engineered. Shaw wanted to ask those makers why they had made people at all.
The cave was the find they could show. Matching paintings from other sites gave them a single stellar position, and Weyland paid for a ship to go there. Shaw's part of the case was the pattern in the art and the claim that the same visitors had left it. Holloway supplied the archaeological reading. By the time the Prometheus was crewed, the two of them were a couple as well as the science leads, and the cross from her father was the one personal object she would not pack away for the crossing.
Quiet Eye
In the 2012 short Quiet Eye, Shaw placed a video call to Peter Weyland and asked him to fund the expedition. The call screen named her Dr. Elizabeth M. Shaw, dated the transmission April 8, 2079, and located the call in Glasgow. She told him she had doctorates in paleontology, archaeology, human mythology, and metics, and she laid out the repeated star map as a destination the makers of humanity had left behind. That screen date fell ten years before the 2089 cave in the film. Weyland was the man she asked to pay for the ship.
Prometheus Transmission
Before the Prometheus reached LV-223, the expedition sent a greeting ahead of the ship, in the 2012 short Prometheus Transmission. The message packed language, mathematics, music, and pictures of Earth, then cut to the crew in training. Janek was short with the camera, Holloway was eager to leave, and David kept his piece brief. Shaw spoke last, to the Engineers she hoped were listening, and she told them she wanted to meet the makers of her species. The transmission was the welcome she thought the star map had promised.
The Prometheus Expedition
The Prometheus left Earth under Captain Janek, with mission director Meredith Vickers and the synthetic David awake for the crossing. Shaw and Holloway briefed the crew after wakeup on what the star maps were and why Weyland had paid for the trip. Holloway called the destination an invitation. Shaw was more careful about calling the Engineers gods, and she would not give up the cross when the crew treated faith as a joke. David had spent the voyage studying ancient languages and the crew's files, including hers.
Exploring The Ship And The Storm
On 21 December 2093 the Prometheus put down near a line of artificial structures on LV-223. Shaw went in with the first party. A hologram in the corridor showed Engineers running from something, and the chambers beyond held murals, a pile of bodies, and urns. She treated the complex as a place that might have living occupants, and she wanted the dead Engineer's head brought out for study. Holloway and the others helped load it.
A silica storm closed on the site before the party could finish the survey. Shaw rode a rover back toward the ship with the head bagged in front of her, the wind and grit cutting visibility to a few meters. Geologist Fifield and biologist Millburn missed the recall and stayed inside. The head reached the lab. Her reading of the place as a welcome did not survive what the lab and the next day's return showed her.
The Engineer Head
In the lab the helmet came away from the severed Engineer head, and the face underneath was recognizably close to a human face, on a much larger skull. Shaw took that likeness as evidence that people and Engineers shared an origin. The tissue then broke down, and the head was destroyed before it could be kept.
The urn room and the murals changed her view of the mission. The pictures showed Engineers menaced by creatures, and the urns held a black pathogen rather than a gift. Carbon dating put the deaths in the complex at about two thousand years before the landing. Shaw told Holloway they had been wrong about why the map existed. He answered by getting drunk and pressing her about the cross and about her inability to conceive, which the ship's medical file already recorded.
Holloway's Death
David had taken a drop of the pathogen from an urn and put it in Holloway's drink. Holloway sickened through the night after he and Shaw had sex. By the next surface trip his eyes had changed, his skin was failing, and he could not get the helmet sealed. On the ramp he asked not to be let back aboard, and Vickers raised a flamethrower while Shaw tried to stop her. Holloway walked into the flame himself, and his body was left on the moon.
Shaw went to the medical bay expecting grief and a scan. David told her she was pregnant, hours after the only recent sex. She knew she had been sterile, and she took the growth as something Holloway had passed to her from the pathogen. She demanded it be removed. David refused, sedated her, and meant to put her back into hypersleep for study. She woke from the sedative and went looking for a surgical unit he did not control.
The MedPod
Vickers kept a Paul MedPod in her lifeboat, set for a male patient. Shaw broke in, reprogrammed it for an abdominal extraction of a foreign organism, and climbed in while the growth was already moving. The machine opened her, pulled out a squid-like creature, and closed the wound with staples. She killed that organism in the compartment before it could reach her face, then staggered out with the incision barely held. The thing did not stay dead in the way she thought. It grew in the lifeboat into the Trilobite.
While she was still weak, David led her to a hidden compartment and showed her Weyland, who had been aboard the whole time and wanted an Engineer to extend his life. Shaw told him the complex was a military installation and that the survivors had been preparing a ship for Earth, loaded with the pathogen. Weyland had her suited and taken along anyway, because David had found one Engineer in stasis and intended to wake him. She went back into the structure with the staples in her abdomen.
The Crash
David woke the last Engineer and spoke to him. The giant answered by tearing David apart and killing Weyland and the security team who had come to beg for more life, and Shaw ran. The Engineer dressed in a flight suit, started the juggernaut on a course for Earth, and she reached Captain Janek to tell him the cargo was meant to wipe out the planet.
Janek rammed the Prometheus into the alien ship, and both hulls came down. The juggernaut hit the plain and rolled on its rim toward Shaw and Vickers, who had gotten clear of the Prometheus in the lifeboat. Shaw cut to the side. Vickers stayed in the path, and the rolling hull crushed her. The ship slowed and settled as a ring, with Shaw inside the hoop, and she ran from there to the lifeboat on foot. The Engineer climbed out of the wreck and came after her.
In The Escape Pod
The Engineer followed her into the lifeboat. Shaw hit him with a fire axe from the locker and lost that fight. She released the grown Trilobite from the bay where the MedPod had left it. It overpowered him, forced a tube into him, and implanted him the way a Facehugger implants a host. She left the pod. The Deacon came out of the Engineer after she was gone. She went back into the wreck for David's head, and the head was functional enough to say he could fly another ship.
Departure From LV-223
Another juggernaut stood in a neighboring complex, the next installation over from the one that had launched, and David told her he could fly it. Shaw would not go back to Earth with a warning she could not prove, and she would not abandon the question that had brought her off Earth. She had him set a course for the Engineer homeworld indicated by the ships' maps. In January 2094 she recorded a warning that LV-223 should be left alone, then entered a hypersleep coffin on the alien ship with David's body and head packed for the crossing. That crossing is the 2017 short The Crossing. She expected to wake among the makers and ask them why they had turned on their own work.
The ship did not arrive at a living homeworld in the way she hoped. David brought it down on Planet 4, a populated Engineer city, and the pathogen in the hold was released over that city during the landing. In Alien: Covenant he told the Covenant survivors that Shaw had died in that crash. The rooms he had lived in, and the drawings he had made, showed a longer stay.
Planet 4
Shaw survived the landing. David kept her alive for some time and used her body in the breeding work that led to his later creatures. In Alan Dean Foster's novelization he told Daniels that respect had given way to necessity, that Shaw had been his finest subject, and that he intended the same use of Daniels. A hand-carved urn in his rooms was inscribed Elizabeth Shaw, 2058-2094, with her tags, a hairbrush, a photograph, and a lock of hair set around it. The birth year on that urn is the date the later record gives for her. The film shows the result as a dissected corpse in his laboratory, not as a woman who died in the impact.
A hologram of Shaw singing remained in the crashed juggernaut and became the signal the Covenant followed in 2104. Daniels found the tags marked for Dr. E. Shaw, chief science officer of the Prometheus, and, in a scroll room, sheets from what Titan later published as David's Drawings, including studies of Shaw opened and altered. The short Advent has David report to the company that years of trials, including Shaw's body, produced the creature he called his wolf. Nothing in that record has her leaving Planet 4.
Personality And Traits
Shaw was compassionate in the ordinary sense of staying with people who were hurt. She kept her father's cross because it was his, and she tried to keep Vickers from burning Holloway on the ramp after he asked not to come back aboard. She was also determined. Sterility, the pregnancy, the staples, and the loss of the Prometheus did not turn her back toward Earth. She left LV-223 with a severed synthetic head because she wanted an answer from the makers, and she was willing to do the surgery, the run, and the flight herself.
She was resourceful under pressure. The MedPod was not set for her, so she reset it. When the Engineer came into the lifeboat she used the axe at hand, then the creature the pod had pulled out of her. She was naive about David, and she treated him as a loyal attendant. She did not see the dose in Holloway's drink, or his plan to keep the pregnancy, until both had happened. She used him as a pilot later because she needed a ship, not because that trust had held.
Behind The Scenes
Noomi Rapace played Shaw for director Ridley Scott in Prometheus, released in 2012. An earlier draft by Jon Spaihts centered the expedition on an archaeologist named Dr. Jocelyn Watts, partnered with Professor Martin Holloway aboard a ship called the Magellan. Damon Lindelof's rewrite replaced Watts with Elizabeth Shaw, moved the destination off LV-426, and cut the draft's longer terraforming plot. Lucy Hutchinson played Shaw as a child, and Patrick Wilson played her father in the dream David watches.
Shaw does not appear as a living woman in Alien: Covenant (2017). The production used her hologram, her tags, and a dissected body on Planet 4, with Rapace's likeness. Foster's novelization, published the same year, gives the urn dates 2058-2094 and David's account that he kept her alive before the dissection. The birth year is not spoken in the 2012 film.
Merchandise
NECA released Elizabeth Shaw in April 2017 in Prometheus Series 4, The Lost Wave, a 7-inch figure with a Rapace likeness, a removable helmet, a fire axe, and David's severed head. The same wave packed Vickers with a flamethrower and Fifield with a flashlight, each in a clamshell. Eaglemoss covered the same film in its Alien & Predator collection with the USCSS Prometheus, an Engineer, the Trilobite, and the Deacon.
Famous Quotes
- "I don't. But it's what I choose to believe."
- "I think they want us to come and find them."
- "We were so wrong."
- "I was sterile."
- "Get it out of me."
- "That ship is going to Earth."
- "My name is Elizabeth Shaw, last survivor of the Prometheus. And I am still searching."
Conclusion
Elizabeth Shaw found the star map, flew to LV-223, and lived through the collapse of the Prometheus expedition by cutting the Trilobite out of herself and stopping the Engineer's flight to Earth. She left with David in 2094 to ask the makers why they had done any of it. He ended that search on Planet 4, used her in his experiments, and left an urn dated to the year they arrived. The Covenant found the recording and the body ten years later.
Appearances
- Quiet Eye: Elizabeth Shaw (2012)
- Prometheus Transmission (2012)
- Prometheus (2012)
- Alien: Covenant - Prologue: The Crossing (2017)
- Alien: Covenant (2017), hologram, tags, and body
- Alien: Covenant - Advent (2017)
- Alien: Covenant novelization by Alan Dean Foster (2017)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Lore | Xenomorph Encounter Survivors | Prometheus Lore
