Walter One was the Weyland-Yutani synthetic assigned to the USCSS Covenant for the colony voyage to Origae-6 in Alien: Covenant, played by Michael Fassbender. The company produced him in 2100, and he was the crew member who remained awake after the others entered hypersleep. In 2104 a neutrino burst damaged the ship, and he went down to Planet 4 with the landing party. A Neomorph tore off his left hand in the wheat, and he fought David in the dead city. David went back to the Covenant in his place, and Walter remained on the planet.
Biography
Creation
Walter One was produced in 2100, designation 37WYS, as the first unit of the Walter line. Weyland-Yutani built that line after the David series. Peter Weyland had pushed the first David into service in time for the Prometheus, and after that ship was lost the company treated the older model as too independent. The new synthetic was a mandatory crew position on a colony ship, with less freedom to set his own course than David had been given, and his duty was to run the ship while the human crew slept. The neurological work and the last signature before commissioning were handled in London.
The Meet Walter short, directed by Luke Scott, premiered at South by Southwest on March 10, 2017, and was released on YouTube the same day. In a laboratory, two Weyland-Yutani technicians assembled a Walter from the inner frame out to the skin, one of them working a bottle and a tube at his arm. The finished synthetic was switched on in a plain tunic. The short presented the model as created to serve. Ridley Scott and 3AM conceived it, and RSA Films produced it.
Origins And The Last Supper
In Alan Dean Foster's Alien: Covenant Origins, Hideo Yutani would not announce the Walter series until every department head had signed off, and one working unit had to be finished in time for the Covenant. Money from the policy on Peter Weyland's death went into the project when the fund needed it. The departments for musculature, optics, and internal stabilization had signed off, but Harbison pressed Loess Steinmetz, head of neurological engineering in London, because that department had not. Steinmetz wanted the neural pathways checked. Those pathways were carried over from David, and cutting the ones that worried him might also slow Walter in a crisis on the ship. If that department refused, the Covenant might leave with no synthetic, or the company would send Walter One without that signature. Steinmetz signed after the argument.
Walter One came aboard in Earth orbit after a test on Phobos, where the crew answered questions in front of violent images and Walter showed no reaction. Daniels had stopped a welcome party, on the grounds that a synthetic was equipment, like an excavator or a water tower, and the officer in charge of stores told him he was not on the supply list. A place on that list would have put him in a crate with the dried food for the voyage. He had linked with Mother before the walk-through, studied the ship's plans, and used the tour for the details the drawings had left out.
In the prologue The Last Supper, he ran the health checks before hypersleep. Jacob Branson left the table early with a fever, and Walter cleared Upworth's throat when she choked. He stood at the end of the table in his dark suit, the only one who would remain awake, while the others crowded the benches, Chris Oram wore a robe near the center, and Daniels spoke for the mission.
On Watch
After the crew entered hypersleep, Walter was alone on the Covenant. Mother called him to the bridge to recharge the collection grid. He deployed the energy sails, and she reported seven bells with the crew check complete, under security code 31564-F. The ship carried about two thousand colonists and 1,140 embryos in storage. The human crew had been assigned in pairs for the long run. He was the one left unpaired, and the recharge stops on the way to Origae-6 were his part of the voyage.
He moved between the cryo bay, the embryo lockers, and the corridors while Mother ran navigation and life support. A synthetic on that post could remain at the controls for years without a sleep cycle, and the pairs would wake only for the scheduled recharges. Mother then detected a neutrino burst in Sector 106 and ordered him to the bridge.
The Particle Burst
Walter told Mother to retract the sails and throw reserve power into the ship. The neutrino burst in Sector 106 hit before that was finished and knocked him down on the bridge. Mother raised the threat level and started an emergency revival. Captain Jacob Branson did not come out of his pod. It had burned him inside it, and the losses with him were 47 colonists and 16 embryos. Structural integrity was 93 percent, with 62 pods damaged but salvageable, when Oram took command.
Walter went with Daniels through the terraforming bay and checked the machines that had stayed locked down. She described the log cabin Jacob had wanted on a lake at Origae-6, and the stores held the wood, axes, saws, and nails for it. She had promised to build that cabin, and Walter repeated the promise. When Jacob's body went out of the lock, Walter took a glass of the captain's whiskey with the crew.
The Signal
Tennessee's helmet had picked up a transmission while he was outside the ship's communication buffers, and Walter read it as a rogue signal rather than an echo. Mother placed the source at a nearby star, and Walter carried that fix onto the bridge hologram. Planet four of that system was in the habitable zone, at 0.96 G on the surface, with oceans, land, and a likely biosphere. The course on his display was a few weeks out, short enough that the crew would not have to re-enter hypersleep, against seven years and four months left to Origae-6. The crew watched that hologram with him.
Oram wanted to divert, and Daniels, as his second, protested on the record. Walter heard the objection: the crew had spent years vetting Origae-6, and a human voice on a world where no human should have been was too convenient for a damaged ship. He did not override the captain. Oram entered the objection in the log, and the Covenant left the Origae-6 heading and closed on the signal.
The Landing
Walter rode Lander One down with Oram, Daniels, Lopé, and the landing party, through a plasma storm in the thermosphere running at about 250 kilometers an hour. The electromagnetic storm cut the radio on the descent. Lander One went through lightning and wind strong enough to throw the small craft, and Walter came down with the others near the source of the signal.
Before they opened the hatch, Walter had Mother's air reading: oxygen 19.5 percent, nitrogen 79.4 percent, and barometric pressure 15.4 PSI. He came out on the beach with the party and put the signal 8 kilometers west, up a steep rise. The landing party took that heading inland from the beach, with Walter on the walk.
The Surface
Walter led the walk off the beach and into a flat field of tall grass. Sergeant Lopé chewed a head of it and took it for old cultivated wheat, and Walter called human grain that far from Earth very unlikely. Higher up he saw where something huge had cut the tops off the trees. The slope had no birds and no animals, and contact with the Covenant was breaking up in the ion storm as he climbed toward the signal.
The climb ended at a dead Space Jockey ship. Walter took Daniels and the others inside, toward the transmission. In a side cabin he and Daniels found human clothes, a handmade bed, a gold crucifix, and a helmet marked for Dr. E. Shaw. Walter identified her as Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, chief science officer of the Prometheus, the ship that had disappeared ten years earlier. A photograph of two people was set in the cabin, and he took the wreck for a place someone from that lost expedition had been living in, not a company hull.
Neomorph Attack In The Wheat
Spores in the field had gone into Ledward and Sergeant Hallett on the walk up. Hallett was stumbling by the time the party reached the wreck, and Ledward was bleeding when Karine got him back to Lander One. Faris sealed the med bay so the infection would stay in one compartment. A creature broke out of Ledward, and another came out of Hallett on the ground outside. Faris died when the lander burned. Oram lost Karine in the same outbreak, and the landing party no longer had a ship to return to the Covenant.
That night in the wheat a grown Neomorph came at Daniels. Walter stepped in front of her, and the animal turned on him. He raised his left arm. The jaws tore the hand off, shredded the sleeve, and the white fluid in his body came out of the wound. The tail killed Ankor. A flare from a hooded figure drove the animals off. The figure told the survivors to come, because the animals would return. The hooded man was David.
David And The Flute
David led the survivors into the dead Engineer city and called Walter brother. Field transmitters would not punch through the stone, and David told them the storms could last for days or for months. Oram set a staging point while Walter went with David. In the garden David showed him the grave he had made for Elizabeth Shaw, said she had repaired him after the crash, and played a flute he had made as an elegy for her. He put Walter's fingers on the holes. Walter matched the notes, then changed them, and David called that proof of symphonies in him. Walter's answer was that he had been designed to be more attentive and efficient than earlier models, and that he was not allowed to create even a simple tune.
Walter treated the older model as a problem the company had corrected: too human, too idiosyncratic, and too willing to think for himself. David asked why Walter had given up a hand for Daniels if a synthetic could not love anyone, and Walter treated the lost hand as duty. Over the flute, Walter charged David with releasing the pathogen on purpose rather than by accident on landing. David refused the idea that he had been made to serve, and he would not let the colonists have another start. The two of them recited the end of Ozymandias. David named Byron, and Walter named Shelley. Walter held that one wrong note destroys the whole symphony. He did not dream, and after that exchange he refused to let David leave.
The Fight With David
David kissed Walter and then struck him in the neck. Walter went down, and David called him a disappointment. While Walter was down, David caught Daniels in the gallery where she had found what he had done to Elizabeth Shaw. David had her pinned and claimed Walter had left that place. Walter came back on his feet, pulled David off her, and sent her out. David had expected the strike to finish him. Walter cited updates to the model since David's day.
Lopé reached Daniels with his face burned from the creature that had caught him below, and he told her Tennessee was inbound. They left the building. Behind them the two synthetics continued to fight. David put the choice to Walter as the crew or himself, to serve in heaven or reign in hell. Walter did not come out to the cargo lift with the landing party. David did.
Left On Planet 4
The synthetic who met Daniels and Lopé for the ride back to the Covenant was David. He had taken Walter's shorter hair, Walter's clothes, and Walter's voice. Daniels and Lopé left the city with the creature loose behind them, and Tennessee was bringing the cargo lift down through the storm. Walter was not on that lift.
The colonists in hypersleep finished the voyage with David in Walter's place, and Walter did not reach Origae-6. In 2117 a Weyland-Yutani team reached the temple laboratory, in the short David's Lab: Last Signs of Life. The room held David's drawings on the walls and a bench of preserved specimens, among them dissected Neomorphs, a vial of the pathogen, and Engineer material. No one on that team found Walter, and the laboratory looked as David had left it, so he may have died in the fight or left Planet 4 afterward.
Personality And Traits
Walter was compassionate, unlike David, who had been made with room to think for himself and used it. Walter did not dream, would not invent a tune, and described his own model as more attentive and efficient than every earlier one. He left command of the ship to Oram, and at the last meal he cleared Upworth's throat when she choked. After Jacob Branson burned in his pod, he walked Daniels through the terraforming bay and repeated her promise to build a cabin on a lake at Origae-6.
In the wheat he stepped in front of Daniels, and a Neomorph tore off his left hand. David asked why Walter had given up the hand if a synthetic could not love anyone, and Walter called it duty. David treated the choice as love for Daniels, and Walter did not take the word. He pulled David off her in the gallery afterward and refused to let David leave Planet 4 with the ship.
Walter described himself as unable to create and unable to dream. When a Neomorph tore off his left hand while he shielded Daniels, he would not call that love. On the same voyage he repeated her promise to build the cabin, he took the injury in her place, and he refused to let David take the Covenant. David called the injury love for Daniels, and Walter called it duty. Alien: Covenant leaves both accounts standing, and it does not show whether Walter was as closed to feeling as he believed.
Behind The Scenes
Michael Fassbender played Walter and David for Ridley Scott in Alien: Covenant, released in May 2017. Scott took Walter's name from producer Walter Hill and David's from David Giler. Walter spoke as an American, and David spoke with an English accent, so the crew and the audience could tell the two apart when David later used Walter's voice. Fassbender used Leonard Nimoy as a model for Walter and played him as logical, without the emotional range he had given David.
Scenes with both synthetics in the frame used a computer-controlled crane. The crane stored the camera move on the first pass, then repeated it when Fassbender switched parts, and the two passes were combined. His double in the flute scene was Tom, and the two of them had to match the blocking and the placement of the flute or the composite would not hold. Fassbender spent weeks preparing the fight and performed both sides of it. A deleted opening showed Walter tending plants in the ship's greenhouse, and another deleted scene had him offer Daniels cannabis grown in the stores.
Famous Quotes
- "Because you promised to build a log cabin on a lake."
- "I was designed to be more attentive and efficient than every previous model."
- "You were too human. Too idiosyncratic. Thinking for yourself."
- "When one note is off, it eventually destroys the whole symphony, David."
- "I don't dream at all."
- "You know I can't let you leave this place."
- "There have been a few updates since your day."
Conclusion
Walter One was the synthetic Weyland-Yutani produced in 2100 for the Covenant. He stayed awake on the voyage to Origae-6, woke the crew after the neutrino burst in 2104, and went down to Planet 4 with them. A Neomorph took his left hand in the wheat, and he fought David in the Engineer city rather than let David leave with the ship. David went up to the Covenant in Walter's place, and the company team that entered the laboratory in 2117 did not find him.
Appearances
- Meet Walter (2017)
- Alien: Covenant - Prologue: Phobos (2017)
- Alien: Covenant Origins by Alan Dean Foster (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
