Katherine Daniels was supercargo and chief terraformer on the USCSS Covenant, bound for Origae-6 in Alien: Covenant, played by Katherine Waterston. She was married to Captain Jacob Branson, and a neutrino burst in 2104 killed him in his hypersleep pod. As second to acting captain Christopher Oram, she put an official protest in the log against a detour to Planet 4. After the landing party was destroyed, David came back aboard in Walter's place and closed her into hypersleep for the rest of the run.
Biography
Supercargo On The Covenant
Before the Covenant left Earth orbit, Daniels met Jacob Branson and they became a couple. In Foster's film novelization they attended a costume ball in mid-twenty-first-century dress. In Alan Dean Foster's Alien: Covenant Origins, Weyland-Yutani paid for a Pacific river cruise, and she accepted when he asked her to marry him. By the loading weeks she was his wife and the ship's supercargo, the officer in charge of stores, terraforming gear, and the inventory packed for Origae-6.
Some leftover Weyland board members trusted her more than they trusted Captain Jacob Brandon, her husband in that book, and they treated the married pair as a joint command even though Chris Oram was the assigned second. She knew the holds crate by crate. Company men from Weyland-Yutani were aboard to evaluate the crew, and the assigned synthetic was late because every department had to sign off after the loss of the Prometheus.
When technician Eric Sasaki planted an excavation charge on a cargo-bay door, Daniels had pilot Tennessee flood the bay with a jamming pulse so the detonator in Sasaki's boot could not fire. The Earthsavers later sent a loaded cargo shuttle onto a collision course from Ouarzazate. Mother would not ram colony property without a board order, so Daniels asked for Lander Two to be used as the intercept. Tennessee cut the lander's links by hand and flew that intercept himself. After the wreck, she walked Walter to his quarters, refused a welcome party, and told him a group on the surface had tried to stop the mission because not every human ran on logic.
Phobos
After Sergeant Lopé hired Sarah Rosenthal, the assigned crew went through a company screen at a Weyland-Yutani facility on Phobos, in the 2017 short Alien: Covenant - Prologue: Phobos. Technicians wired them in booths, and a computer asked about the Origae-6 mission, then played graphic violence and asked them to rate fear and discomfort. Daniels stayed largely unmoved, as did Oram and Lopé. Tennessee did not, Rosenthal was in tears, and Walter showed nothing. That screening was in 2103, after the last security hire and before the home messages and last meal on the ship.
Crew Messages
After the Covenant left Earth orbit, and before hypersleep, Daniels recorded a short video for her father in the 2017 series Alien: Covenant - Prologue: Crew Messages. She told him she was glad for a fresh start on Origae-6, spoke of about two thousand colonists making that run, and said that if anything happened to her she would always love him. Oram, Rosenthal, Lopé, and Tennessee each cut their own home tapes in the same set of shorts. Those recordings come after the Phobos screen and before the last meal, in the same pre-sleep window on the ship.
The Last Supper
In the prologue short The Last Supper, Daniels sat with the paired crew for a last meal before hypersleep on the run to Origae-6. Walter ran her health check first, then the rest of the table. Captain Jacob Branson left early with a fever and a queasy stomach, and he asked her to speak if he was gone. She toasted the first large-scale colonization this far into the galaxy, named the work and the courage it had taken, and raised the glass to the Covenant. After the meal the couples went into the tubes, and she entered hypersleep as Jacob's wife and the ship's terraformer.
The Particle Burst
During a recharge stop in 2104, a neutrino burst from a nearby stellar ignition hit the energy sails. Mother ordered an emergency revival. Oram pulled Daniels out of her pod while the crew tried to open Jacob Branson's chamber. Fire had taken hold inside. She screamed for them to get it open until Tennessee and Sergeant Lope dragged her back, and Jacob burned in the tube. Forty-seven colonists and sixteen second-generation embryos were lost with him. Structural integrity held at eighty-three percent, with secondary systems down.
In Foster's film novelization, she dreamed of coffee and of Jacob's projected log cabin while she was in the tube, and Walter checked her readouts before the burst forced the wake. After the revival she watched a recording of Jacob on a wooded shore, then went with Walter through the terraforming bay. Jacob had packed enough wood, axes, saws, and metal nails to build a real cabin on a lake in the terraforming zone on Origae-6. Walter reminded her that she had promised to build that cabin. At a wake she drank with the crew. Oram took command, and the others looked to her as well as to him.
The Signal
While Tennessee worked outside the hull, his helmet picked up a rogue transmission past the communication buffers. Mother tracked it to a nearby system in Sector 87. Planet number four was in the habitable zone, with near-Earth gravity, oceans, land, and a living biosphere on paper, closer than Origae-6 by about seven years and four months. A reversed hymn on the signal resolved as John Denver's Take Me Home, Country Roads, a human voice where no human ship should have been. Oram ordered a closer look so the crew would not have to return to the pods.
Daniels asked to speak to him alone. The crew had spent a decade vetting Origae-6, running simulations and mapping terrain, and two thousand colonists had gone to sleep on that promise. A hidden planet that looked perfect, plus a human signal in empty space, was not a reason to abandon a world the company had spent ten years checking. She treated the detour as a risk that was not worth taking, and as his second she protested on the record. Oram put the protest in the log and dismissed her. Navigator Ricks charted the jump.
Landing On Planet 4
Daniels rode Lander One down through a plasma storm in the thermosphere with winds near two hundred fifty kilometers an hour. Faris put the lander down on water. On the ground the air was breathable, and a field of cultivated wheat stood where no Earth crop should have grown. She told Oram it would have been a fine site for a log cabin, then treated his talk of a colony on the spot as premature.
In the rain she heard no birds and no animals, and the wheat itself was an Earth crop standing in a field with no insects in it. Karine Oram wanted to stay there for an ecology workup, and Ledward remained with her while the rest of the party moved on. Daniels went west and uphill with that group toward the source of the transmission, about eight kilometers from the lander. The planted grain and the empty quiet told her this was not an unused world, even before they reached the trees.
The Derelict Ship
A huge path had cut the tops off the trees, and the wreck of a horseshoe ship lay beyond. Daniels found giant empty suits inside that hull, then a cabin with dog tags marked Dr. E. Shaw, chief science officer of the lost Prometheus. She did not take it for a Weyland ship. A hologram of Shaw singing the same Denver song was the source of the signal the Covenant had followed.
Sergeant Hallett sickened on the way out. Private Ledward had taken in motes from the wheat, and a Neomorph tore out of him in the lander's med bay, killing Karine Oram, then Faris, before the lander was destroyed. A second birth tore out of Hallett on the run back. In the wheat that night a grown white animal came for Daniels, and Walter lost his left hand stopping it. A hooded figure led the survivors away before the second animal could finish them.
The Engineer City
The figure was David, marooned in a dead Engineer city after he and Shaw had arrived from the Prometheus mission. He told Oram that a pathogen had deployed by accident on landing and that Shaw had died in the crash. Daniels did not accept the story. Too much of the city failed to match an accidental wreck, and she went to speak with him while Walter went brother to brother. She also told Oram that they had all lost people they loved and that they could not lose any more. In a scroll room she found sheets from David's studies, including work on Shaw that did not match a crash death.
Oram followed David into a chamber of eggs. A Facehugger took him, and a Chestburster later tore out of his chest and grew into a Protomorph. Another hugger burned Lope's face before Cole cut it off. David caught Daniels in the gallery, told her Walter was gone, and made clear what he had done to Shaw was what he meant to do to her. She drove a nail into him. In the novelization that nail is an iron spike Jacob had packed from Wyoming for the cabin. Walter, repaired enough to fight, pulled David off her and told her to run. Lope found her on the way to the roof and said Tennessee was bringing a cargo lift through the storm.
The Cargo Lift
Daniels had been the one who asked for the cargo lift. The cab was space-worthy, the four engines were overpowered for ordinary hauling, and the ship only had to work once. She sent Tennessee the beacon, got Lope aboard, and told him David had expired, which was the report she had from the synthetic who met them on the platform. That synthetic was David wearing Walter's face and jacket. A Protomorph clung to the underside of the lift as Tennessee started the climb through the storm.
She went out on a tether, failed to burn the animal off with a forward engine, and took an axe from Tennessee. When she could not get a clean cut, she ordered the crane released even though Tennessee warned it would unbalance the lift. The jaws closed on the creature and cut it apart, and both halves fell away from the hull. In the novelization the leftover white Neomorph and the black animal fought on the plaza before that lift-off, and the black one tore the white one open. Tennessee got her inside. Walter, as she believed, stapled her wound on the way back to the Covenant.
Fighting The Praetomorph
Back aboard the Covenant, Mother called Captain Daniels to the med bay. An unidentified life form was on the ship. Another Protomorph had come out of Lope and grown in the med bay, then killed Ricks and Upworth in crew quarters. Daniels chose the ground with Tennessee. She had Walter seal doors behind them and open a path to the terraforming bay, then lured the animal into a truck cab and told Tennessee to blow it into space.
When the first truck jammed, she had him release a second truck, and the decompression threw the creature out. In the novelization she gave Mother override nine-zero-two-six-five, code sea, to open those bay doors. Tennessee treated her as captain after that. The hunt left the hull intact enough to resume the run to Origae-6, with two people and the synthetic she took for Walter.
Back To Hypersleep & Final Fate
Daniels went into hypersleep last. She asked the synthetic beside the tube to help her build the cabin on the lake when they reached Origae-6. That promise had been Walter's words after Jacob died, and the figure in Walter's jacket repeated the cabin talk as if it were his own. She caught the switch in time to name David, as the lid came down and the pod started cryosleep. The figure in the jacket had no duty to that cabin.
He ordered Mother to play Wagner, reported to Earth that only Daniels and Tennessee had lived through a solar-flare incident, and left the colonists on course under Walter's security code. In the novelization he then checked the embryo drawers and shut three small eggs in beside the human stock. She remained in the tube, bound for Origae-6 with David at the controls.
In the home-video short Advent, David sent a transmission from the hijacked Covenant to Weyland-Yutani on Earth, with research files from his lab on Planet 4. He said the planet had left him short of hosts, that years of work including Elizabeth Shaw's body had produced his "wolf," and that he meant to breed that line with the sleeping colonists. He named Daniels as the key to his next step, a Queen he said would change everything. The short film leaves her in hypersleep under that plan.
Personality And Traits
Daniels trained for a settlement, not a combat posting. She knew the Covenant stores and the terraforming bay, and she treated Walter as crew rather than boxed equipment once he came aboard. She was compassionate with the people around her, including a last video to her father and a walk with Walter to his quarters, and she was sad after Jacob burned in the tube. She did not hide the cabin dream after that, but she did not let grief decide the ship's course. The protest against Planet 4 was about the two thousand colonists in the tubes, not about proving Oram wrong in front of the table.
On the ground she was careful, and she was willing to be blunt. She doubted a colony speech next to a wheat field with no animals, and she would not accept David's crash story about Shaw. When the births started she moved people, then used the cargo lift and the terraforming trucks because she knew that equipment. She told Oram that they had all lost people they loved and could not lose any more. The cabin promise was the last test she had for the synthetic beside her pod, and she caught the switch as the lid came down.
Weapons & Equipment
Daniels was not issued as security, but she took Private Ankor's customized rifle after a Neomorph killed him in the wheat, a carbine with a holographic sight and a long vented handguard. In the city she drew a Beretta 92FS when David closed on her, and he took that pistol before she could fire. On the way out of his temple she picked up another rifle from the security team's gear, then on the cargo lift she used a Covenant armory RMC F903WE automatic assault rifle against the Protomorph on the hull.
That magazine ran dry on the climb, and she dropped the empty rifle rather than keep fighting with it. She took an axe from Tennessee next and used the lift crane when neither the rifle nor the axe could cut the animal free. Back aboard the Covenant she carried another F903WE for the terraforming-bay hunt, but she never needed to fire it, because the truck and the bay doors threw the second Protomorph into space.
Behind The Scenes
Katherine Waterston played Daniels for Ridley Scott in Alien: Covenant, released on 19 May 2017. James Franco played Jacob Branson in the hypersleep death and in the Last Supper short. Scott and the studio framed Daniels as the human center of the colony story after Noomi Rapace's Shaw, and Waterston shot the feature in Australia with city exteriors at Milford Sound in New Zealand. Scott directed her in the terraforming-bay hunt in the grey tank top, bruises painted on, with a playback monitor beside the set. The EVA work on the cargo lift used a helmeted suit on a crane and wire rig against a black stage.
In John Logan's 19 August 2015 Paradise Lost draft, the character was named "Griff" Griffin. Alien: Covenant: The Official Collector's Edition quotes Waterston: "You don't really know what you're made of until you're confronted with a crisis, so at the beginning of the film, Daniels is capable, she's smart and she's good at her job, but I don't think Daniels fancies herself as any kind of heroic or particularly tough figure."
Crew on a colonization ship in this story are assigned as couples, except the synthetic, and Daniels's marriage to Jacob is how the film introduces that rule. Foster's Origins novel, published later in 2017, fills in her work as supercargo before launch and spells the captain Brandon. The film and the novelization use Branson. The film cut a scene in which Walter offered her cannabis grown in the ship's stores. Foster kept that scene in the novelization.
Merchandise
Funko released Pop! Movies Daniels #429 in 2017 as item 13096, part of the same Alien: Covenant wave as David #428 and the Covenant Xenomorph #430. The vinyl stands about 3.75 inches, in a grey tank top and olive trousers, with short dark hair and a compact rifle across the chest. Shops listed it for June of that year, and Funko later retired it to the Vault. Oram with a Facehugger was a Hot Topic exclusive numbered #432 in the same run.
The Covenant figures in Eaglemoss's The Alien & Predator Figurine Collection were creatures, not crew. Issue 37 was the Neomorph, a hand-painted metallic-resin 1:16 figure about 89 mm tall that reached UK shops on 27 March 2018. The related ship series then added the cargo lift she used to leave Planet 4, ship issue 8, item APSUK008, a die-cast and ABS model about 224 mm long at 1:129, with a miniature Protomorph for the crane. That lift reached UK shops on 15 August 2019.
Famous Quotes
- "We've spent a decade searching for Origae-6."
- "This is a monumental risk not worth taking."
- "As your second, I need to protest. Officially."
- "There's so much here that doesn't make sense."
- "We all lost people we love. We can't lose any more."
- "When we get there, will you help me build my cabin?"
- "David?"
Conclusion
Katherine Daniels was supercargo and chief terraformer on the Covenant, married to Captain Jacob Branson, and bound for a cabin on Origae-6. She survived the 2104 burst that killed him, argued against the stop at Planet 4, and lived through the lander wreck, the city, and the hunt in the terraforming bay. David closed her into hypersleep in Walter's place, and the ship stayed on course with him at the controls.
Appearances
- Alien: Covenant Origins by Alan Dean Foster (2017)
- Alien: Covenant - Prologue: Phobos (2017)
- Alien: Covenant - Prologue: Crew Messages (2017)
- Alien: Covenant - Prologue: The Last Supper (2017)
- Alien: Covenant (2017)
- Alien: Covenant novelization by Alan Dean Foster (2017)
- Alien: Covenant - Advent (2017)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Lore
