Great observation!
Upon reading your post and thinking about the two scenes, for me the connection between the two moments is clear.
First, your assessment of the second scene echoes my own thoughts about it - I completely agree, we are in Ripley's heaspace when Ash enters the Mother room, so as she is completely and utterly shocked, she cannot process any sounds from the outside.
So if we go with that, about the earlier scene, we can say that Ash is fascinated by the xeno, and is completely immersed in studying it. So in a way we are in his "headspace" in the scene where Ripley suddenly appears - creating another parallel between the two (I never noticed this before, thanks!) Ash is far from a simple "robot"), and the viewer is retroactively clued in by many things, but most prominently this very scene. He is programmed to preserve the alien, and maybe he is programmed to study it, but he is most certainly not programmed to be astonished by it. Yet, he is, so much so, that he does not hear Ripley coming in. Clue!
Also, I don't think Ash has a "few wires loose" at that point. His malfunction begins in the second scene that we are dscussing, when Ripley finds out what order 937 is, and she grabs him and smacks him to the wall. I think the malfunction is partly mechanical and partly logical. The mechanical one is caused by the physical shock of Ripley smacking him to the wall. The logical one is not spelled out in the movie, but we can infer that an android on board of a spaceship must have some inhibitor, preventing him to cause harm to a human. It is never mentioned, but it's a logical step on behalf of the programmers - even for W-Y :-) So this comes into direct conflict with order 937 itself, but earlier no one on the crew knew about this. Now Ripley knows and Ash knows he needs to kill her in order to keep the secret. But this is in direct conflict with the "do no harm to a human" directive, that runs deeper than order 937.
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sati_84 (467)
a year ago
... so those two instructions come into conflict, resulting in his weirt twitching, sweating operational fluid, and choosing a very weird and ineffective way to choke Ripley (the rolled up magazine).
In any earlier point of the movie, he was not malfunctioning yet - in my view. He was genuinely fascinated by the xeno.
And one more thing: there is even a callback to the first scene in Aliens! Remember when Bishop studied a facehugger they found in a "jar"? Bishop is hunched over a microscope, loooking at the structure of the xeno, and a soldier steps to him, and asks if he needs more equipment - and at first he doesn't hear the question! The soldier has to repeat the question to an androiid! That means Cameron also caught that moment in the first movie, and at that point in Aliens, we (as an audience) harbor bad feelings towards androids on account of the events of Alien, and just like Ripley, we don't trust him. And now we see that he is equally fascinated by the facehugger to the point he doesn't register anything from his environment. That provides us with the uneasy feeling of "this one is just like Ash, so Ripley should keep an eye on him". But Cameron is smarter than to just repeat a story beat like that, so Bishop gradually earns Rip's trust and outright saves him at the end.
Nevertheless, the "andoid character is fascinated by studying the xeno" scene can be found in both movies :-)
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