Retconning the Space Baby

In the previous review, Walter Curnow and Maxim Brajlovsky had boarded and repaired the derelict Discovery. Now it’s Chandra’s turn at bat. His job is to fix HAL, if that’s even possible. Clearly, there’s a little apprehension about attempting to fix a homicidal robot. Of course, since Chandra’s the man who built HAL in the first place, it doesn’t take him long to figure out the problem.

This was one of the few details taken from the first book, and frankly they did a better job describing the issue than Arthur C. Clarke did in the novel. Basically, the United States government had written an order directing HAL to keep the true nature of Discovery’s mission a secret. This order conflicted with the programming Chandra had given HAL, which emphasized directness and honesty with his human coworkers. The result was a sort of programming loop that ended with HAL going crazy and killing all but one of Discovery’s crew. Now, I don’t know how a programming loop is supposed to end with the robot concluding that it should kill the crew, but this explanation was more agreeable, or at least, easier to swallow than Clarke’s, who said that the robot had basically developed a guilty conscience and had decided to kill everyone to cover up his lie. A programming loop that led to aberrant behavior is a little easier to buy than the toaster becoming sentient.

When Chandra finds the hidden order, he also finds Floyd’s message, which Bowman had discovered after turning off HAL, so, naturally, he assumes that Floyd was in on the government’s scheme. Floyd denies Chandra’s accusation and is genuinely angry. This is for good reason. He’d been the government’s scapegoat for the failed mission when really their actions were what led to HAL’s failure. But despite this explanation for HAL’s malfunction, Floyd still doesn’t want to take any chances. He later tells Curnow to install a device that will shut HAL down should he decide to go rogue again. Floyd carries the remote to this device, which is disguised as a red calculator.

There isn’t much time to dwell on this new information because the crew soon discovers the monolith floating nearby. The captain of the Russian ship, Tanya Kirbuk, wants to explore the surface of the monolith, but Floyd, remembering what happened to Bowman, believes this to be a bad idea. Still, everybody listens to the captain, and poor Maxim takes a probe to investigate the strange object. It doesn’t take the monolith long to respond, and its reaction isn’t kind. It creates a sort of green tornado that causes Maxim’s probe to go careening into who knows where—probably a stargate, but the movie never says this—and, at the same time, another ball of energy shoots from the craft.

This is where the movie begins to become a little strange. Not bad. Not incoherent. Just strange. The film is essentially retconning the space baby concept, which I’m all for, but in one respect, this was a mistake because the marketing for the movie makes the space baby a main feature of the film, when really the creepy little thing only shows up for a couple of seconds. I’m certain this annoyed Kubrick fans, but, narratively, this was a smart choice because the baby was a symbol for enlightenment, not anything tangible enough to actually contribute to a story. In other words, there was no way to use the baby because it wasn’t an active character, just a symbol. How’s a writer supposed to give a mere symbol motivations and a task to complete in a plot?

It turns out the ball of light shooting from the monolith is Bowman. He travels to Earth and first sees his wife through a television screen. They have a brief conversation, then he tells her something wonderful is going to happen, although he doesn’t tell her what that wonderful thing is. Then he goes and sees his mother, who is lying on a hospital bed in a coma. I don’t know if the mother dies because she can now rest easy after seeing her son again, or if Bowman kills her because the movie doesn’t say. If Bowman killed her, that would raise a serious plot hole because why would he do this? Perhaps he is being somehow controlled by the aliens, but if the aliens Bowman is now connected to are malicious enough to kill his mother, why are they guiding humanity at all? I guess one might say they’re pro-euthanasia or something, and if that were the case, I’d call the aliens straight up evil. But for whatever reason, the mom dies after interacting with her son for the last time.

In the movie, it is implied, but not clearly explained, that Bowman has been merged with a hive mind.  The book elaborates on this point, but in both cases, this is nothing short of a retcon regarding Bowman’s fate. In a sense, one might say merging with a hive mind is a kind of enlightenment, sort of an allegory for becoming one with the universe or something, but that’s not how the first movie and book describe Bowman’s situation. Prior to the sequel, Bowman was enlightened because he had become the Übermensch, a man who can control reality and has no conscience. The movie demonstrated this by having the space baby float over the earth while Thus Spake Zarathustra played in the background. In the book, the space baby launches all the nukes on the planet at once. In that scenario, he wasn’t worried about his wife or his mom. In the sequel, Bowman has been connected to some collective consciousness but is in certain respects still Bowman. Kubrick fans may not have appreciated this, but I did, because it made what happened to Bowman actually function in the story. And it added a decent amount of tension because it’s unclear whether or not Bowman is a hero or a villain until the very end.

After Bowman visits those he holds dear on Earth, he makes another appearance—to Floyd. At first, Bowman speaks through the now functional HAL, but when Floyd remains unconvinced, Bowman manifests in front of him. What’s interesting about this manifestation is that Bowman ages to different points of his life while speaking to Floyd, the last image being the space baby, then Bowman disappears altogether. None of this is explained, but I think what the writers were trying to do was show that Bowman no longer has a body, so his existence is sort of chaotically alternating between different versions of himself. I don’t know, but whatever they were doing, the whole thing was an attempt to retcon what the space baby meant because the baby can no longer be a rebirth analogy since to join a hive mind is to merge into something, not experience a new birth. And normally I would complain about such retconning. I always hate it when one writer tries to alter the meaning of another writer’s work, but Arthur C. Clarke went along with these changes, so what can I really say? The changes function better narratively, and the author approved them, so there’s no cause for complaint.

Bowman’s message to Floyd is simple. The crew needs to leave Jupiter in two days. This presents a problem because Earth’s political situation has finally affected the crew. The Americans have been forced to remain on the now repaired Discovery, and the Russians have been ordered to stay on their own ship because the crew’s two countries are about to go to war. Plus, they don’t have enough fuel to get back if they leave too early. Earth will be too far away from Jupiter’s orbit. Bowman doesn’t care. He insists that Floyd and the others need to leave. So, now Floyd has to convince everybody to get out of Dodge before something “wonderful” happens. I’ll cover what that wonderful thing is in the next review.