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did Meredith Vickers die, is Meredith Vickers dead, Meredith Vicker daughter, Meredith Vickers, Meredith Vickers character, Meredith Vickers death, Meredith Vickers father
Meredith Vickers fulfils the prerequisite role of ‘Company Woman’. For much of the film she spends her time emphasising how much of a bitch she is. Meredith Vickers is the type of woman who installs a self-sustaining life boat on a ship then decorates it with a chandelier. She wears sharp suits, has sex with the captain to prove she’s a woman with woman’s needs (and not a robot), happily blow-torches an infected man and tells her estranged father that he needs to die.
After first watching Prometheus I thought: what the hell was the point of Meredith Vickers?
And that sort of highlights one of the major flaws of this film: while it tries hard to be deeply symbolic, it does so at the expense of some pretty fundamental aspects of film making. Meredith is in this film to help emphasise the theme of creation and the relationship between parent and offspring. She does this with the line: “A king has his reign. And then he dies. It’s inevitable.” Clearly this line packs a lot more pathos when it’s spoken by a child to a father who refuses to die. But beyond that…what is the point of Meredith Vickers?
I’ll tell you what: diddly-squat. Apart from looking gorgeous and moody and striding around the ship she contributes precisely jack shit. She comes in a close second place to most pointless/underused character – right after daddy, Peter Weyland. She nudges the plot along once or twice: blow-torching Charlie Holloway and providing an escape raft but that’s about it. Her interactions with the crew are minimal, her intriguing relationship with David (the favoured son) is left unexplored and her presence aboard the Prometheus seems for the most part unnecessary.
Merredith escapes the Prometheus on its crash course with the Engineer ship via her escape pod. As it turns out she is only delaying the inevitable as she is crushed to death by the ship crashing back to earth. Her death when it arrives is so sudden and so blundering that I half suspect Meredith isn’t dead at all. After all – when the inevitable sequel arrives, if there’s no one left alive on the planet, who will the shark-xenomorph terrorise? Oh and is she an android? I’m still 50/50 about that. But if there’s going to be a sequel and Meredith is still alive, having her be an android is one way to ensure her survival.
Virtual Borderland 
She was pretty. That was all was.
I think there is a subtle subplot point you might be missing, and likely it was made even more subtle during production changes. Meredith’s surgery bed is set to MALE ONLY… Weyland describes David as close as he will ever come to having a SON, but does so with a note of animosity… subtle but there. The camera and Meredith’s posture along with some of her subtle language, hints that she is very well acquainted with Weyland ( describing him as superstitious ). Ultimately and with some serious animosity she calls him FATHER. Describes the alternative to being on the mission as a long fight for control of the company. He shows utter disgust for her. She is not a ROBOT or he’d be just as proud of her as he is of David. Why would he reject his own daughter? Why would his daughter have a surgery bed set to male anatomy? I suspect his disgust for her is because she is his actual SON, transgendered. And he is a superstitious bigot, superstitious being used to mean less about mythology, and more about antiquated ideas.
I doubt this theory will be widely accepted, at first. But remember if she is a android posing as a human, Ridley Scott already did that with Blade Runner, and he is quiet clear in the Final Cut that, Decker along with Rachel, simply didn’t know they were androids at the beginning of the movie. ( Also a major point of the original source Novel. )
I also think this connects/parallels to the adaptive nature of the DNA weapon, and the adaptive nature of the Xenomorph from the original Alien films. Insects, reptiles and fish can change sex in nature; recently it was discovered that a female Komodo dragon can fertilize herself, creating a clone of herself, with male chromosomes.which she can later mate with, ensuring survival of the species, when the female is isolated from others of here kind.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061220-virgin-dragons.html
Anyways, that’s my two cents. I think there very likely could have been more to the subplot until the studio, or one of the 4 executive producers read it in the script ( 4 EPs is always a cluster frack ).
It’s weird but I didn’t want her to die.
I liked your reviews and critics.
Correct me if im wrong, but when the xenomorph cames out, it has a big bag at his stomach (some kind of egg sac maybe?). And, i remember that the xenomorph queen from the old movies also had a extrange mouth extension like this one.
It does make sense if she’s the queen and it expands the way through the planet, nice spot friend 🙂
I’ve read on other sites about people saying Meredith was either an android or really a male. I don’t belive she was either. She’s a GIRL and she’s HUMAN. I think because of David people looked into to much detail about Meredith. Janek asks her “Are you an robot/android?” (One of the two) and she tells him to meet her in her room in 10 minutes. We all know what that implied. ;p I think the surgery bed was for WEYLAND, not Meredith. It was in her room because nobody else was supposed to know Weyland was on board. I think Meredith wanted to take over her fathers company, (she told him she went on the mission thing so she wouldn’t have to sit in a baordroom and argue over who was in charge) and her father doesn’t want to die. He wants answers so he refuses to die. He IS a selfish character aswell, just like his daughter. David is helping him live and I think he resents Meredith for not agreeing with him. She just wants to be in charge and daddy won’t let her.
I did quite like her character, despite the fact that she came across as such a selfish cow. 🙂
I tend to agree. Miss Vickers is a determined character, doing push ups after her hyerpsleep and she panics when Janek decides to go on a kamikaze flight. She is female, human but somewhat cold.
LOL.. his.. son? What? That’s even more far-fetched than the Alien Jesus fan-theory currently doing the rounds.
Vickers had some character, the bitch.
I’d thought prior to seeing the film, that Theron might play a dupe for the final girl. This could explain her sudden death – an attempt at audience surprise lost in the rewrites?
Asides from that, the sheer malevolence expressed around Vicker’s Daddy issues sets the scene for the exploration of a child’s relationship with her Father, humanity’s relationship with the Engineers, and David’s with the Crew. That’s thematically essential stuff.
LOL.. his.. son? What? That’s even more far-fetched than the Alien Jesus fan-theory currently doing the rounds.
Vickers had some character, the bitch.
I’d thought prior to seeing the film, that Theron might play a dupe for the final girl. This could explain her sudden death – an attempt at audience surprise lost in the rewrites?
Asides from that, the sheer malevolence expressed around Vicker’s Daddy issues sets the scene for the exploration of a child’s relationship with her Father, humanity’s relationship with the Engineers, and David’s with the Crew. That’s thematically essential stuff.
Oh, and she’s not coming back for the sequel. Bitch got squashed.
You’ve missed the point of Meredith.
The sub-text of the movie is about what makes us human and sustains humanity, which is ultimately our ability to love – not the ability to create life (the engineers & their mysterious goo), or a soul (the robot David), but love.
Meredith portrayed a human without love in her life. She was driven by jealousy of her “brother” David (who was treated better than she by Weyland, because Weyland could not trust her to act in his best interests to prolong his life) and greed (her desire to inherit her father’s crown being more powerful than any wish to keep him alive). Her character embodies the theme “without love we are no better than robots”. Hence the confusion as to whether she was actually human, so cold was she.
It was important to have a female figure in this role so as not to have the themes conflated into a male aggression vs female maternal instinct story as happened in Alien: Resurrection. Scott’s intent (imho) is to portray humanities weaknesses regardless of sex, so having a daughter incapable of love to play of the unloving father removes any male v female themes. It’s about the absence of love to temper ambition ultimately resulting suffering and evil (embodied in the aliens).
well, there is one piece of worth exploring and that is: Vickers, still bends down and tries to show her affection for her father by rubbing her face against his hand. A hand that moves into a fist. You can see, she feels rejected, gets angry, and storms off.
Her comment about “arguing over who is in charge” is sarcastic and symbolizes female contempt for what is perceives as male-juvenile games that seek the need for power and control, something that she ultimately decided wasn’t worth her time.
The scene with the captain asking her if she is an robot only serves to throw in her face, she stone-cold, heartless, bitch type personality she maintains BUT she recognizes this and submits to her sexual need. This might be a stretch but the song by Stephen Sills “love the one your with” does make reference to causal heterosexual sex when lovers are far apart. I don’t think she is a man.
anyway, those are just the few elements that I caught up with…there is certainly more
She will be back in the second installment. More or less as a conduit for a queen alien. I will not divulge anything more. So promethius fans don’t worry.
If she is the daughter of Weyland, why does she have the surname Vickers.? Logically this can only mean that either she was married (disproving the android theory) or she had simply changed her name…