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At the end of Prometheus, E. Shaw helps David to help her on the mission to ask the Engineers why humans were created. David was in a pretty bad state and needed Shaw's help. Basically becoming indebted to Shaw.

So why, in Alien: Covenant, does David wipe out the Engineer planet with the alien virus?

I presume it's for testing purposes, but wouldn't have Shaw stopped him? David states in the film that Shaw showed the most compassion towards him and that he loved her. So why would he go against her intentions with the Engineers?

Adding to this, if she was dead long before the bombardment, wouldn't David have kept her dying wish of asking the questions instead of bombing them?

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  • His behavior is such, throughout Prometheus, that I don't think I'd trust something he says or does during a time of necessity to be one of true intentions, honesty and integrity.
    – PoloHoleSet
    Sep 13, 2017 at 13:51

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Curiosity and a sense of justice.

Ridley Scott goes into detail about this here.

Basically, David thinks the human race is inadequate, and he thinks the Engineer race is also inadequate, since they made humans. So, both species should be done away with, and a new species was to evolve, which was what he tried to do for 10 years, alone in the planet.

To answer your question more thoroughly, David either lied about loving Shaw or he loved her in the sense that he wanted to improve her and save her from herself (by killing her and letting a Xenomorph be born from her). We do not know whether she died before or after the bombing (she might have been in hyper-sleep when they arrived). He goes against her intentions because he is disappointed in his creators, and would rather create something knew than care about his own creators selfish desires. They have themselves admitted that they made androids "because they could", which David finds insanely disappointing.

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    As David was made by humans, does he consider himself inadequate?
    – JAB
    May 23, 2017 at 21:00
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    Why would he? He surpasses humans.
    – BlueMoon93
    May 23, 2017 at 21:03
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    I think David doesn't consider himself inadequate based on a conversation he had with Walter. But at the same time, he has a god-complex because his maker turned out to be less than satisfactory. An interesting segue here is that he created something far superior to himself in terms of destructive power (intelligence is difficult to gauge with the xenomorphs; Ripley did a good job of killing them) and most-likely it/they will feel the same about him.
    – Alex
    May 29, 2017 at 23:47

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