Ash Alien: The Android Science Officer, Played by Ian Holm

Ash is the science officer aboard the commercial towing ship Nostromo, and Ian Holm plays him in Alien (1979), directed by Ridley Scott. Holm is billed sixth in the cast, behind Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton and John Hurt.

The Nostromo is flying home to Earth with seven crew members in hibernation and a cat named Jones when its computer, Mother, picks up a signal from a nearby moon and wakes the crew early. Ash is among the crew who must decide what the signal means and what to do about the wrecked alien ship and the chamber of egg-like organisms found on the surface.

If you are watching in chronological order, you meet the android David in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant before you reach Ash, because Alien (1979) is the third film on that list. In release order he comes first.

Ash is an android rather than a cyborg, and his arc moves from a science officer the crew relies on to the one member of the crew who was never on their side.

The turning point comes early. Dallas, Kane and Lambert come back from the derelict vessel, and Ripley, who decoded the moon's transmission as a warning rather than a call for help, refuses to open the hatch. Ash overrides her and lets the landing party in. Kane is carried aboard with a creature wrapped around his face. When it drops away dead, he wakes and seems well, which gives the crew a false sense of relief.

That relief ends at the meal table, where a young alien tears out of Kane and disappears into the Nostromo. It grows fast, and Brett is its first victim, followed by Dallas, who goes into the air ducts to hunt it.

Only then does the film show what Ash was doing all along. Ripley finds that the company's secret orders rank the creature above the lives of the crew, and that Ash is a machine following them. He turns on her, and Parker and Lambert put him out of action before he can finish the job.

Ash's relationships are defined by one conflict, the crew's survival against the company's orders. Ellen Ripley is the crew member who objects when he lets the landing party aboard, and the one he attacks after she learns the truth.

Parker and Lambert are the two who disable him. Mother, the ship's computer, is the other artificial presence aboard, and Helen Horton is credited with her voice.

His real employer is the company, whose secret orders he follows. Later films show other androids with different loyalties, including Bishop in Aliens and David in the prequels. The wider androids page compares them, and the xenomorph page covers the creature Ash was ordered to bring home.

Ash is disabled by Parker and Lambert after he attacks Ripley, which ends his part in the film. The alien then kills Parker and Lambert, and Ripley is left alone with Jones the cat.

Alien: Romulus (2024), directed by Fede Álvarez, does not bring Ash back, but it does credit a science android called Rook. In the story, Rain installs a chip from the damaged Rook into Andy, and Rook later explains that the station's scientists studied the creature from the Nostromo and made a fluid called Z-01. The credits list Daniel Betts for the facial and vocal performance and Ian Holm for the facial and vocal reference.

The credits name the character Rook, and nothing in them calls him Ash. For the film itself, see Alien: Romulus, and for what may follow, see the next Alien movie.

In my opinion, Ash's best moment is the one where he lets the landing party aboard against Ripley's warning, because it is the decision the rest of the film hangs on. It could be argued that the later reveal is more famous, but the reveal only works because that earlier choice already looked wrong.

My second pick is the discovery that he is an android following the company's orders, which turns a quiet science officer into the most dangerous person on the ship. It also gives Ripley her real opponent, because the creature is an animal and the company is the one that planned for it to be brought home.

My third pick is the fight with Parker and Lambert, which is the moment the crew finally acts on what it has learned. Perhaps the most interesting footnote is Romulus, which credits Holm as the facial and vocal reference for Rook. That being said, the Rook credit does not tell us that the two characters are the same person, and I would not claim it does.