Tennessee Faris, called Tee by his crewmates, was a pilot on the colony ship USCSS Covenant in Alien: Covenant, played by Danny McBride. He and his wife Faris flew the ship as a married pilot team on the run to Origae-6. In 2104 he was the first to pick up the rogue transmission that drew the crew to Planet 4, where Faris died with the expedition lander. Tennessee flew the cargo lift down to rescue the survivors, helped Daniels get rid of the creature loose aboard the ship, and went back into hypersleep without knowing that the synthetic putting him under was David, posing as Walter.
Biography
Jamming The Saboteur's Detonator
In Alan Dean Foster's Alien: Covenant Origins, Tennessee and Faris sat as the two pilots on the bridge, where either of them could control all of the ship's systems, alone or together with Mother. Yutani employee Eric Sasaki got into a cargo bay, mined the loading door, and took a hostage. Daniels called the bridge and asked Tennessee to bathe the bay in a full electromagnetic pulse, so that whatever detonator Sasaki had built into his glove and boot could not fire. Tennessee asked whether it was her call and warned that it would scramble every unshielded instrument in the bay.
Any equipment that happened to be active would need to be completely reprogrammed. Daniels said Mother could do the heavy lifting on that, took full responsibility, and gave him five minutes. Tennessee carried out the order. When Daniels entered the bay in an EVA suit with the security team, her suit comm gave only a burst of static on every frequency, the sign that the jamming was in place, and the team had to talk through the manual diaphragms in their helmets. With the detonator jammed, Sasaki could not blow the door, and he later killed himself.
Ramming The Earthsavers Shuttle
Later, before the Covenant had been cleared for departure, an unscheduled cargo shuttle came at the ship and kept accelerating instead of slowing down. When Lopé asked whether the ship could get out of the way, Tennessee told him the Covenant was a colony vessel, not a repair skid. The shuttle's orbit would cross theirs in minutes, and the ship was not fully loaded or cleared, so firing the main drive could end the mission as surely as an impact. When Branson asked about throwing heavy machinery out of the cargo lock, Tennessee compared it to shooting minnows in a river from the top of a skyscraper.
Daniels suggested one of the ship's two landers, and Tennessee agreed that a lander firing all engines at maximum was big enough. Branson ordered Lander Two readied, but Mother refused to program the intercept without authorization from the company's colony control board. Faris said someone would have to board the lander, cut its connections to the Covenant, and program the intercept by hand, and Tennessee was out the door before she finished. From the lander he reported that he was shutting down the intership linkages, then went silent while the bridge waited.
He programmed the lander and was back at his station on the bridge before the intercept. The lander and the shuttle met head-on close to the Covenant and were largely vaporized, and the ship felt a slight impact from the debris that Mother judged repairable in a couple of days. Ricks reported that the shuttle had answered their queries just before impact with a phrase he could not make sense of, "Oh-tee-bee-dee", the same chant the captured Earthsavers had used.
Phobos Screening
Weyland-Yutani screened the crew at its base on Phobos, the larger of the two moons of Mars, in the 2017 short Alien: Covenant - Prologue: Phobos. A technician strapped Tennessee into a chair in a testing booth and left him alone with a computer, which asked about the coming mission, his strengths, and his fears. Small charges went off inside the booth without warning, and a round of word association followed. The technician watched the whole session from a separate observation booth.
The last stage made each candidate watch violent and graphic footage and rate how afraid or uncomfortable it made them. Tennessee was badly shaken by the clips, and his reactions were among the strongest in the group. Rosenthal ended up in tears, while Daniels, Oram, and Lopé stayed largely unmoved and Walter showed no emotion at all. The short does not show what the company concluded about him, but he still went on to fly the Covenant.
Lynchburg And The Crew Message
Tennessee came from Lynchburg, and before the Covenant left he recorded a video message for his younger brother in the 2017 short Alien: Covenant - Prologue: Crew Messages. He reminded his brother that he had always said he would get out of Lynchburg, though neither of them had pictured it like this. He was about to go into hypersleep and said he could not do that without one more drink with his little brother, so he held up a bottle of their favorite that he had smuggled onto the ship. He also talked about how much older his brother would be by the time they could see each other again.
The message doubled as a confession to Weyland-Yutani. He said that when he and Faris applied for the job, he never expected to pass the background check. Since it was too late to send him home, he admitted that he had been arrested three times, had stolen a vehicle, and had punched a police officer's horse in the mouth on St. Patrick's Day. The company had still handed him the keys to the most expensive spaceship in history. He finished by laughing at the people who had hired him and calling them suckers.
The Last Supper
In the 2017 short Alien: Covenant - Prologue: The Last Supper, the crew gathered for a final meal before the long sleep to Origae-6. Captain Jacob Branson came to the bridge to say he was feeling queasy and burning up, and that he was turning in. He told the others to have Daniels lead the toast and asked Tennessee to make sure everyone behaved. Tennessee told him he could count on him. As soon as the captain was gone, the crew put on music and the party started.
Tennessee and Faris were both drunk by the time the party was under way. Across the room, Oram and his wife Karine watched them and were openly dismissive. One of them said Tennessee could be a jerk, and when told to keep it down because he was right there, answered that he could not hear because he was drunk. The remarks went on that he was drunk again, that he was always drunk, and that his wife was even drunker. Tennessee and Faris went on laughing together and showed no sign of having heard.
Talk at the table turned to reports of bugs the size of a giant poodle outside a colonial outpost, and Ricks asked everyone to stop because they were trying to eat. Tennessee said the meal was barely food anyway. The crew went around listing the foods they would miss, and when one of the women choked, Walter cleared her airway with a sharp blow to the back. At the end of the night, Daniels gave the toast Branson had asked for, telling the crew she could not have picked a better bunch of jerks to be marooned on a distant planet with.
Faris sat beside him, and the two had flown together long enough that Oram later counted them as the best piloting couple the company could find. Crew on the Covenant traveled as couples, with the synthetic the only exception. Tennessee and Faris were friends with Daniels and Branson, and Faris was the pilot who would fly the expedition lander. The meal was the last time the full crew was awake together before the ship left the solar system.
Waking To Branson's Death
In 2104 a burst of charged particles hit the Covenant, and Mother woke the crew early. In Foster's novelization, Oram pulled Daniels from her pod and told Tennessee to help her while he saw to the others. Tennessee, an old friend and colleague, eased her out and told her that Jacob was in trouble. When Branson's pod would not respond to its controls, Tennessee went to the manual override and leaned on the levers with all his weight, but they would not move.
The pod caught fire with Branson inside and stayed sealed, while Oram and Lopé could only watch. It took all of Tennessee's strength to pull Daniels away from it, and he held her while she cried. At the crew meeting that followed he tried to keep things level, saying that placing blame would not help anyone. When Oram moved straight on to repairs, Tennessee objected mildly, which only made Oram harden his position. As the crew went back to work, Tennessee silently mouthed, "Dismissed?"
Repairing The Collectors
Tennessee went outside with Ankor to repair the ship's damaged energy collectors. They split the work, with Tennessee heading for the tip of one collector extension while Ankor went to the mast core. He cut away damaged panel sections with a power trimmer and kept talking the whole time, telling a crewmate to look out the window instead of at a projection. Inside, Upworth did not need his health monitors to know how he was doing, because he kept whistling.
When the power came back, Upworth told him the ship was fully live and asked him to come in. He asked for a cold one to be ready for the weary traveler. Before he got back, communications dropped, and Faris called to ask whether he was reading her. His suit's backup systems had recorded a faint transmission that the ship's receivers had missed. Ricks guessed the suit caught it because Tennessee was working past the ship's internal communication buffers.
Identifying The Transmission
The crew played the recording on the bridge. It showed a distorted face and carried faint singing, and Tennessee began to hum along before he named the song. It was "Take Me Home, Country Roads", which he said was first recorded by John Denver, a mid-twentieth-century singer, songwriter, and environmental activist. When Sergeant Lopé seemed to take it as a joke, Tennessee answered solemnly, "I never kid about John Denver." Upworth traced the signal to a nearby planet that looked better than Origae-6.
Oram decided to divert, and most of the crew went back to work excited. Only Daniels and Tennessee looked worried. Watching the planet, he called it the siren's song and joked that whatever was down there, it was not Scylla and not West Virginia either. Oram took an expedition team down in the lander with Faris as pilot, and Tennessee was left to run the Covenant in orbit. He was unhappy about it, and during the descent he tracked the lander from the bridge and traded remarks with Faris over the comm.
Overriding Mother Near The Storm
An ion storm soon broke up the expedition's signals. Tennessee heard Faris over garbled suit-to-suit links, saying that Karine had sounded scared, and he tried to calm her and get the story from the beginning. As acting captain he ordered Mother to descend to eighty kilometers above the storm to improve the link. Upworth told him they could not risk the ship, and Ricks said distance would make no difference to the ship's systems.
Tennessee answered that it would make a difference to the people on the surface and that it was their crew down there. When Mother refused to bring the ship within forty kilometers of the storm top, he gave his command override, "Tennessee four-eight-nine-zero-three", but the computer wanted a second bridge officer to agree. He told Upworth that anyone who wanted to live safe had stayed on Earth. She agreed, and the two of them threw paired override switches on opposite sides of the bridge, which gave Mother the order and got two-way contact with the survivors.
Losing Faris
Daniels asked whether the Covenant could send down the Cargo Lift, and Tennessee had doubts before agreeing. Then he asked to say a quick hello to Faris. Daniels had to tell him that Faris was dead, killed when the first Neomorph attack ended with the lander exploding. Ricks and Upworth could not hear the conversation on the bridge, but they read it in his face. He had heard her frightened calls during the attack without knowing what was happening to her.
He went ahead with the rescue. Strapped into the lift's operator's chair, he told Ricks to run the fuel mix at a hundred percent, because anybody could fly a cargo lift straight down, but it had to punch back through the atmosphere. He asked for the docking clamps to be released without a backup countdown. The hold's air rushed out with the lift as it left the ship, and he steered clear of the hull before starting down toward Planet 4.
The Cargo Lift Rescue
The rain at the landing site had stopped by the time Tennessee arrived. From above he saw a Protomorph attacking the survivors and pushed the lift past its limits to get down. He kept the thrusters running on the ground and lifted off again as soon as Lopé, Daniels, and Walter were aboard. The creature came with them. It climbed around under the platform and appeared outside the cab window in front of him, and the badly balanced lift nearly hit a tower, smashing away part of its roof.
Daniels clipped a tether to her harness and went out onto the open deck to fight it. When the lift lurched, she slid off the edge on her tether while Tennessee shouted warnings and fought the controls. She called for a hard tilt to port and for him to release the crane arm, then used the crane to get rid of the creature rather than let it reach the ship. Tennessee righted the lift and flew them up to the Covenant.
Ejecting The Protomorph
Back aboard, Tennessee and Upworth treated Lopé in the medbay. Tennessee refused to wake any of the colonists to help, because the rules allowed it only in an emergency, and he said Lopé would be the first to refuse. Later a second Protomorph killed Ricks and Upworth in the shower room. Tennessee and Daniels followed its trail to the armory and then toward the terraforming bay, while Walter used the ship's doors to herd it there. In the bay they suited up, and he picked out an F90 rifle for her.
Tennessee tethered himself to the deck behind containers near a control console while Daniels lured the creature onto a truck hanging out of the open bay. When a stalled excavator held everything back, he grabbed a tool and slammed it down on a row of emergency release controls. The braking blocks flew loose, and the vehicles went out into space. The creature leaped for Daniels, but it was carried out with them, and Tennessee called over his pickup to ask whether she was all right.
Back To Hypersleep
With the ship back on course for Origae-6, Tennessee went into hypersleep before Daniels. In the novelization he was already dreaming when Walter told her that she was the last one awake. In the film the synthetic who closed the pods was David, who had taken Walter's place on Planet 4, and Daniels realized it only as her pod sealed. Tennessee did not learn of the switch. As of December 2104 he was asleep aboard the Covenant, with David in control of the ship and its colonists.
Personality And Traits
Foster's novels present Tennessee as easygoing. Oram envied the way he lounged in his bridge seat and saw it as the ease of someone comfortable with himself. He could usually bring a heated discussion back to an even keel. He called Daniels "darlin'" and "Danny", whistled through spacewalks, and liked old music and antiques, enough that Faris described a rough landing to her passengers by asking whether any of them knew what a pinball machine was. His crew message shows a man who drank, joked, and had a record of arrests.
He was also careful when it counted. Daniels said he would go over all the angles and talk with the others before committing to a plan, however desperate things were. After Branson's death he and Faris came to Daniels's cabin with the captain's favorite whiskey and repeated his rule: "No ice, no water, no chase, no shit." When others wanted to wait out the storm, he pushed the ship closer, and when he learned that Faris was dead, he still flew the lift down to Planet 4 for the survivors.
Behind The Scenes
Danny McBride played Tennessee in Alien: Covenant, directed by Ridley Scott and released in 2017. He also played the character in the promotional shorts The Last Supper and Crew Messages. Fox released Tennessee's crew message in April 2017, alongside those for Rosenthal and Lopé, after the Daniels and Oram messages had come out earlier that week. It runs a little over a minute and is the main source for his hometown, his younger brother, and his arrests. Amy Seimetz played Faris.
Alan Dean Foster's Origins gives Tennessee more to do before launch than the films do, with the jamming field against Sasaki and the lander intercept against the Earthsavers. In that book Faris also calls him Ten. Foster's novelization follows the film but adds his work on the collectors with Ankor, his override code, and his argument with Upworth over taking the ship toward the storm. Neither book uses the crew message details about Lynchburg or his record.
Famous Quotes
- "I have been arrested three times, I have stolen a vehicle and I also punched a police officer's horse in the mouth on St. Patrick's Day."
- "That's fucking John Denver. That's 'Take Me Home, Country Roads.'"
- "I never kid about John Denver."
- "Whatever's down there, it isn't Scylla, and it isn't West Virginia, either."
- "That's our crew down there."
- "Anybody and anything can fly a cargo lift—as long as it's straight down."
- "You all right, Danny? Are we all right?"
Conclusion
Tennessee Faris was the Covenant's pilot and the husband of its other pilot, Faris. He came from Lynchburg with a record of arrests that the company had missed, picked up the transmission that led the crew to Planet 4, and stayed in orbit while Faris flew the expedition down. As acting captain he forced the ship closer to the storm to reach the expedition, and after Daniels told him Faris was dead, he flew the Cargo Lift down for Daniels, Lopé, and Walter and helped Daniels get the second Protomorph off the ship. He went back into hypersleep without knowing that David had replaced Walter.
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)
Tag Categories: Alien Universe Characters | Alien Lore | Xenomorph Encounter Survivors
