Alien: Romulus Fans Have a Big Question About These Characters’ Fates

Alien: Romulus has been a big hit for the Alien franchise, but some fans have lingering questions about the film that are just as big. Some of the bigger mysteries (like what initially happened on the Renaissance space station, and the fate of the original Alien movie xenomorph) have been answered by supplementary material like the Alien: Romulus prequel comic. However, as Alien: Romulus continues making waves on streaming platforms, viewers are picking up on more and more of the film’s finer details.

As such, there is one detail about Alien: Romulus that has left a lot of eagle-eyed viewers asking what’s going on – and it has to do with the fates of two major characters in the film.

The first one of Rain Carradine’s (Caile Spaeny) friends to die on the Renisance station was Navarro (Aileen Wu), the crew’s pilot and the adopted sister of Bjorn (Spike Fearn), the obnoxious cousin of Rain’s ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux), and secret baby-daddy of Tyler’s sister, Kay (Isabela Merced). Navarro is the unlucky one in the group who gets infected by a facehugger, and dies when a xenomorph Chestburster hatches from her body. Bjorn is the next to die after he tries and fails to kill the Chestburster during its cocooned stage of transforming into a fully-grown xenomorph drone. Both Navarro and Bjorn die early on when the group of would-be raiders are still on the Remus side of Renaissance Station – and yet, when the surviving members of the group make it over to the Romulus side of the station, they discover an entire pack of xenomorphs have built a hive within the bowels of the station. As eagle-eyed fans have noticed, the xenomorph hive includes the curious decoration of Navarro and Bjorn’s corpses.

Why Are Navarro & Bjorn’s Bodies in the Xenomorph Hive?

Alien fans have been debating this detail with some gusto over on the franchise chat threads. Alien: Romulus director Fede Álavarez was notoriously obsessive about packing Romulus with Easter eggs from all over the Alien franchise, and there’s very little chance that a detail like this was some on-set error. A cast prank is certainly a possibility: an earlier sequence of Alien: Romulus saw Álvarez sneak in an Easter egg appearance in the film, as a corpse with a blown-out skull, hanging in a tangle of wires within the room that gets overrun by facehuggers. That’s all to say: playing dead was an established situation on the Alien: Romulus set.

The easiest answer is one of the grimmest takes: the xenomorph hive needs food to sustain itself, and food is hard to come by on a deserted space station. The xenomorphs have a proven track record of ‘waste not, want not,’ and they tend to make smart use of any biological material lying around. If a fatal trip to Renaissance Station wasn’t bad enough, Navarro and Bjorn suffered the additional Hell of having their bodies almost end up as a xenomorph buffet.

[RELATED: Alien’s Xenomorph Origin Story Explained]

Alien: Romulus is now streaming on Hulu-DIsney+.