The Alien franchise has long been a fascinating spectacle of mixed returns, but observing the reactions and course corrections following Prometheus and Alien: Covenant has been an especially interesting time. After audiences balked at the Xenomorphless, Blade Runner-tinged themes of Prometheus, Ridley Scott and 20th Century Fox redirected the franchise with a distinct shift toward the hard R horror (and the familiar title) of installments past. Even so, it’s clear that Scott is committed to telling the creation story of the deadly space critter we met in Alien, and it seems the Engineers still have a role to play.

In an interview with MTime, Scott revealed that the Engineers will return to discover the aftermath of David’s Ozymandias moment and the film will take us to… the planet. What planet exactly, is not very clear. There’s a running theory that David and Shaw didn’t actually land on the Engineers’ home planet but another of their Earth-like creations. I kind of buy it, so maybe Scott might mean we’ll finally see their home planet. Or maybe not. He could also mean LV-426, where Ripley and co. first find the Xenomorph in Alien. Again, it’s hard to tell what exactly he means.

“We’re being written now,” Scott says in the video interview below. “There’ll be three or four different players coming in to investigate. One of which will be the Engineers arriving back to find their planet decimated. I think those ships come and goon regular intervals. I see them as the gardeners of space… Where we go next is obvious. We’re gonna actually go to the planet.”

via Collider