David, commonly known as David, is a fictional character featured in the Alien franchise, portrayed by Michael Fassbender. Introduced in the first prequel film, Prometheus (2012), David is an android serving as a butler, maintenance man and surrogate son to his creator, Peter Weyland, the founder of the Weyland Corporation. While he assists his human companions in their interstellar expedition to meet their creators, the extraterrestrial Engineers, David is obsessed with the concept of creating life of his own. After Peter Weyland is killed, David is freed from servitude, allowing him to conduct experiments to engineer his own variants of the Alien creature. David was conceptualised as a character to provide a non-human perspective for the theme of meeting one's creators in Prometheus, with him representing the next generation in a line of creators who finds himself disillusioned by his predecessors. Fassbender, who was director Ridley Scott's first choice for the role, helped fashion the character to share traits with T. E. Lawrence, who was a source of inspiration as a control freak caught between two cultures – the cultures being humanity and synthetics, in David's case. As the series progresses, David's behaviors and motivations evolve from a mysterious agent with ambiguous motivations to a character directly opposing the well-being of humanity. Despite the lukewarm reception of the Alien prequel films, both Fassbender's performance and the character of David have been met with critical acclaim. Reviews praised the character for developing into an overt antagonist with the events of Alien: Covenant (2017). Critics have called David one of the greatest Alien characters to date and one of the best cinematic villains of the 2010s. Fassbender has been the recipient of a number of awards and nominations for his portrayal of the character. Background A hallmark of director Sir Ridley Scott is the theme of artificial intelligence present in his science fiction films. Scott's earliest foray into the philosophy of artificial intelligence was with the android character Ash, in the original Alien film released in 1979. Ian Holm portrayed Ash as a character who may uncannily assume a human form, yet he maintains a sense of superiority that is only humbled by the nature of the Alien, which runs counter to the very future of the human race. In the book The Culture and Philosophy of Ridley Scott, the authors (Adam Barkman, Ashley Barkman, and Nancy Kang) reason that though Ash