a further twenty years before being rescued (see Aliens). Interpretation and analysis Otherness Kaveney characterizes Hill's and Giler's "menacing robot" as a counter-revisionist robot, from an era where the image of the robot in science fiction was reverting to its pre-Isaac Asimov characterization of "a competitor to humanity who would sooner or later turn on us or pass for human and mis-lead us". The revelation that Ash is, in the words of crewman Parker at the crux of the fight scene, "a goddamned robot", is a pivotal point of the plot of the film, that forces, for the audience, a retrospective wholesale reinterpretation of all his prior actions. Moreover, as Nicholas Mirzoeff observes, with Ash, Alien recapitulates the idea central to Invasion of the Body Snatchers that "the most frightening monster is the one that looks exactly like other humans" and that "the replica human is almost as threatening as the extraterrestrial itself". Indeed, in a direct echo of Body Snatchers, when Ash is first hit by the canister, causing him to go berserk, he emits a high-pitched squealing noise, just as do the aliens in Body Snatchers. Like the alien organism itself, Ash (and indeed the sentient ship's computer, named "Mother") is presented as, in the words of M. Keith Booker, a "distinctive mode of intelligent existence that seems alien to our own", and is in fact (if one counts the dead pilot of the crashed spaceship) one of a number of sentient non-humans that humanity encounters in the film. Roz Kaveney believed the revelation that Ash is not human is "in a sense no surprise". It comes as a shock to the characters in the film, however. Byers disagreed and placed the revelation as one of the film's "most shocking scenes", where Ash's difference from the other crew members is "shown to be a difference not simply of degree", as the audience might have theretofore supposed, "but one of kind." (It is Ash who points out, at the start of the film, that their contracts with the Corporation require, under penalty of total forfeiture of shares, the crew to investigate any signs of intelligent life. It is Ash, not yet revealed to be an android, who follows the secret Order #937 stating "crew expendable", apparently, at that point, loyal to the Company even to the extent of sacrificing his own life.) Ash's unmasking shows him to be a