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Originally Posted by jamesabrown
Okay, so as I understand it, Ash receives orders from the Company (after everyone's been woken up by what might be a distress signal) to get the alien lifeform and bring it back home, all other priorities secondary.
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Dallas mentions to Ripley that Ash was a last-minute replacement for his regular science officer:
Ripley: Did you ever ship out with Ash before?
Dallas: I went out five times with another science officer. They replaced him two days before we left Thedus with Ash.
The "science officer's eyes only" order says the
Nostromo was "diverted" to where it would pick up the signal and the Company placed an android on board to make sure they would bring something back to study - in other words the whole thing was planned from before the
Nostromo left Thedus for Earth.
The Company probably didn't have much information about the alien, because Ash seems surprised at its capabilities, but if you watch Ash carefully you can tell that he has realized what the alien was doing to Kane while in the medical bay (in particular he turns off his gear showing Kane's insides when Ripley comes to confront him), and that he was fully expecting something to happen at dinner (while the others joke he watches Kane carefully and quietly).
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So how did the Company know about the alien? (Or should that be two aliens?
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They must have picked up the distress signal that the
Nostromo also detected in passing, perhaps with a remote drone that couldn't investigate it. It's hard to know what else the Company knows about the alien and its capabilities from just the film.
After the
Nostromo didn't return, whatever mid-level manager ordered them out there in the first place must have shreeded all the records of the plan to pick up the life form to cover his rear, because the Company in
Aliens doesn't seem to know anything about it until Ripley shows up.
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The crew seemed to take the presence of a dead giant pilot on a spaceship quite in stride. More time spent on "What killed it?" over "What the heck is this thing and where did it come from?")
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That's actually discussed in the cast interviews and commentaries. Basically they decided that by the time of
Alien humanity had already seen a lot of strange stuff and encountered other alien species before. So they weren't suprised by the very existence of an alien spaceship or alien life, they just were surprised at how capable and ferocious this particular alien lifeform was.
Ash: Ripley, for God's sake, this is the first time that we've encountered a species like this. It has to go back. All sorts of tests have to be made.
Not the first time we've encountered an alien species, but "a species like this."
Harry Dean Stanton (who played Brett) in particular has said in interviews that Brett going after the cat only really makes sense if humans have already seen a lot of wierd stuff and dealt with it before. Despite Kane's shocking death, the crew seems to think they can handle the alien up until Dallas is lost in the air ducts. That's when they finally realize they're in over their heads and start to panic.
Later in the movie Parker and the others are surprised to discover that Ash is a robot, but they aren't surprised because the idea that a robot that can convincingly masquerade as a human being is something completely out of their experience - they are just surprised that Ash is one.
Yeah, I'm a fan.