Column SFF Bestiary Jonesy Versus the Big Bad: Cat Power in the Alien Franchise The xenomorph may be one of the great monsters of modern cinema, but Jonesy the cat has serious advantages… By Judith Tarr | Published on February 2, 2026 Credit: 20th Century Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: 20th Century Studios The most beloved character in the first Alien movie barely has any screen time at all. And yet he’s an icon: the ship’s cat of the Nostromo, Jones or Jonesy, or as Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley calls him the sequel, “You little shithead.” Jonesy  lives on in a whole alternative universe of fan fiction and related works, including retellings of the story of Alien from the cat’s point of view. The film follows the starship’s crew as they wake up unexpectedly from cold sleep to respond, not exactly willingly, to an emergency beacon on their way home to Earth. The crew finds out the hard way that the beacon is a warning. It’s all downhill from there, with plenty of blood, creeping dread, and grossout horror. Jonesy’s presence seems to be kind of random at first. He’s a classic ginger cat, draped over a console or eating at the table with the rest of the crew. Nobody pays him much attention. He’s just there. Presumably he’s on board to do what ship’s cats have done since time immemorial: keeping the ship clear of vermin. Though if that’s the case, the alien is well above his pay grade. Or maybe he’s a pet and companion, probably belonging to Ripley, who takes responsibility for him. Gradually he starts to play more of a role in the plot. It’s been pointed out that he’s always somewhere around the xenomorph, as the alien is called in the later films; there’s even a fan theory that he’s collaborating with it. When the crew uses a tracker to go hunting for the alien on the ship, it pings on the cat instead, which leads to the death of Brett, the crewman who goes searching for Jonesy and gets ambushed by the alien. Inadvertent? Or deliberate? When the tracker first pings and the humans approach with weapons at the ready, they fling a locker door open on a wildly hissing blur of cat. Later when the alien stalks and grabs Brett, we get two shots of Jonesy hiding in the wall, watching, with his round ginger face and his round greeny-yellow eyes. He looks more rapt than terrified. The alien doesn’t seem to be a threat to the cat. Maybe he’s too small to serve as a host for baby aliens. Or maybe they’re secret soulmates. A cat is an ambush predator like the xenomorph, and an obligate carnivore. He’s lightning fast; his teeth and claws are deadly weapons. He reproduces at a rapid rate—not as fast as a xenomorph, but one pair of cats can become dozens in a matter of months. Cat and killer alien have a surprising lot in common. One of the most suspenseful sequences in the film is the race at the end to get to the shuttle and escape before the ship blows up with (the humans dearly hope) the alien in it. The three remaining members of the crew split up, Ripley to get the shuttle ready and the other two to collect as many coolant canisters as they can for the life support system. Ripley gets sidetracked by a desperate quest to find the cat and get him in his carrier. Any cat person knows that level of desperation, even without a horrifically dangerous predator on the prowl. Though if you ask the cat, the carrier is a trap and the monster is the vet, which is usually where the carrier is headed. It doesn’t help that cats have the ability to disappear into alternate universes. You can search your whole house or starship from top to bottom and find nothing. Then when you’ve collapsed in a heap of despair and/or mounted a full-on search of the planet, there he is, yelling for his dinner. The xenomorph may be one of the great monsters of modern cinema, but when it comes to survival strategies, the cat has serious advantages. He’s small and portable, and he has physical attributes that make him highly attractive to humans. He’s soft, furry, and to the human eye, he reads as cute. Humans want to take him in, feed him and pet him and serve his every whim. In Alien, when science officer Ash is unmasked for what he is, and the surviving crew learn of the company’s nefarious plan to bring back a live alien at any cost, Ash says of the xenomorph that it’s “a perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.” It’s “a survivor unclouded by delusions of conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” I would submit that a cat is at least as perfect. It has no need to be hostile. It doesn’t have to have a conscience. After all, it’s not the xenomorph who curls up with Ripley in the pod and gets to go home. It’s the predator with the purr.[end-mark] The post Jonesy Versus the Big Bad: Cat Power in the <i>Alien</i> Franchise appeared first on Reactor.