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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures,

ideas, and monsters in time.

I'm returning this week to the alien universe, specifically to one of the minor creatures

from the 2012 film Prometheus. Just to refresh, the film follows a high-tech exploration expedition to the distant planet LV-223

to investigate the possibility of an ancient interplanetary civilization responsible for seeding life on Earth.

Guess what?

They find it.

But the crew of the Prometheus, including directed panspermia zealots,

propped up by a longevity-hungry CEO,

get more than they bargain for when they encounter engineer ruins and the deadly alien pathogen agent A-03959x.91 slash 15, or as we commonly refer to it, the black

goo. As I discussed in last year's multi-part series on the creatures of the alien universe,

the black goo can be thought of as a biological AI that reprograms everything it touches. Perhaps following specific instructions,

general directions, or maybe it's just left entirely to its own generative impulses. Whatever the

case, it weaponizes organic life and spreads rapidly through an ecosystem, producing in its

extremes deadly strains of xenomorphic life.

I already discussed some of the forms this winds up taking in Prometheus, but one of the earliest

we see in the film is that of the so-called Hammerpeed. The mission's woefully enept biologist

Milburn initially interprets the organism as reptilian, and it is indeed an

elongated, a limbless creature that we might well compare to a serpent, though I get a strong

...