Why Didn't the Alien Kill Jones the Cat?

Spared. Another day in the yard!!!! Everybody on the Nostromo dies except Ripley. And the cat. The creature had Jones in reach again and again: in the locker, a few feet away while it took Brett, and with its teeth a few inches from his carrier. The most liked comment this channel has ever had is about him, so I went through the 2003 Director's Cut, the June 1978 shooting script, the people who made the film, and the biology its life cycle was built on. Two of the three theories die on the film's own evidence: being harmless never saved anyone on that ship, and a cat that hisses and hears up to 85,000 Hz is not hard to notice. The third is in a scene nobody in a cinema saw for 24 years. The creature isn't killing the crew, it's collecting them, and it turns a whole grown man into one egg. The writers built that life cycle on parasitoid wasps, and real parasitoid wasps measure a host before they spend an egg on it. Jones is smaller than one of Brett's legs. Verdict: TOO SMALL. CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:57 The eighth crewman 2:24 Four times in reach 4:12 Two theories down 5:45 The cat in the shooting script 7:25 The cut scene: keeps him alive 9:09 The wasps 10:52 Alien 3 and the verdict Narrated by: Me :) SOURCES - Alien (1979), 2003 Director's Cut. The cocoon scene (Dallas and Brett in the nest) is only in this cut. - Walter Hill & David Giler, ALIEN, Revised Final shooting script, June 1978 (story by Dan O'Bannon & Ronald Shusett): the cast list that ends with the cat, the cat at the mess table (a scene the film doesn't show him in), and the cat box at the shuttle. - The Beast Within: The Making of Alien (2003): Sigourney Weaver, Jerry Goldsmith, Ivor Powell, Tom Skerritt, Derek Vanlint, Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett. - The Alien Legacy (1999): H.R. Giger on giving the creature no eyes. - Ridley Scott, Alien Director's Cut interview (2003): "what I call the nest". - Ronald Shusett on the wasp life cycle, Cinefantastique, via Alien Explorations. - Haspel, Rosenberg & Libersat (2003), Direct injection of venom by a predatory wasp into cockroach brain. Journal of Neurobiology 56: 287-292. - Eberhard (2000), Spider manipulation by a wasp larva. Nature 406: 255-256. - Schmidt & Smith (1985), Host volume measurement by the parasitoid wasp Trichogramma minutum. Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata 39: 213-221. - Wylie (1967), Some effects of host size on Nasonia vitripennis and Muscidifurax raptor. The Canadian Entomologist 99: 742-748. - Heffner & Heffner (1985), Hearing range of the domestic cat. Hearing Research 19: 85-88. - Alien 3 (1992): the dog host (theatrical) and the ox host (2003 Assembly Cut). A later film, counted as a pointer, not as evidence for 1979. - Comments quoted from under our video "Every Spaceship Movie Gets This Wrong (Except Alien)": @RCAvhstape, @Marek-o3u. FOOTAGE Film clips are used under fair use for commentary and criticism: Alien (1979, 2003 Director's Cut) and Alien 3 (1992). Clips and footage via: DVDXtras (The Beast Within), h0ll0wm9n (The Alien Legacy), HitmonTom (Ridley Scott, 2003), JoBlo Movie Network (Alien 3 trailer), studioADI (Alien 3: Dressing the Whippet), Team Candiru and Bristol Zoological Society (jewel wasp), Entomological Society of America (jewel wasp), Filming VarWild (Trichogramma), University of Rochester (Nasonia), SciNews (wasp larva on a wolf spider), Singapore Geographic (wasp laying eggs on a spider). Journal records: Crossref. Script page: library copy of the June 1978 draft.