Corrected entry: When Bowman leaves Discovery to retrieve the AE-35 Unit, he asks HAL to prepare the "B Pod" and HAL powers up and rotates the middle of three pods. Later, when Bowman asks Poole to help him with a problematic transmitter in "C-pod", they go to the pod bay and enter the middle pod which must still be B-pod as no two pods have left the ship and returned to shuffle their positions. (01:12:30 - 01:22:40)
johnrosa
2nd Dec 2009
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
2nd Dec 2009
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Corrected entry: When Bowman is getting ready to leave Discovery to retrieve the allegedly-faulty AE-35 Unit, he instructs HAL to "open the pod doors (plural), HAL" when he should be well aware it has only one door. He is not asking HAL to open the pod bay doors. (01:12:40)
Correction: Each pod has two doors - an inner and an outer door.
2nd Dec 2009
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Corrected entry: Early in this chapter of the film, we see Discovery has three EVA Pods (from HAL's view, left to right they are C-pod, B-pod and A-pod). When Poole is killed, we see he was using the center pod. Bowman then goes after Poole with A-pod. This leaves behind the C-pod. Bowman gets back aboard Discovery by blowing explosive bolts to release his pod's door. After Bowman deactivates HAL, we can presume he recovers the now-damaged A-pod he ejected from. It can only be placed in either the right or center pod locations, and as we learn in 2010, it is found sitting in its original right-side location. So to leave Discovery for the last time, Bowman must use the C-pod which is on the left, yet is shown emerging from the center doorway B-pod originally launched from. (01:32:50 - 01:59:45)
Correction: Bowman must have made an EVA during the time he was alone on board, and opened the middle door on returning to the podbay. Mistakes are definite mistakes, not ones for which there is a reasonable explanation.
I believe that the last pod departure in the movie from the "wrong door", the center one, was not a mistake but one of Kubrick's subtle visual clues. My interpretation is that it meant the whole end of the movie was Bowman's dream before dying when he was stranded at Jupiter.
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Correction: This could be a character mistake. And it makes sense in the context of the film. It's the exact kind of thing that would make HAL paranoid if Dave and Frank entered a different pod that they mentioned earlier. It's kind of a counterpart to HAL incorrectly identifying the sequence of moves to checkmate in the Chess game he was playing with Frank.
Floyd1977