John Lithgow wears an unidentified watch

Dr. Walter Curnow designed Discovery's systems and is the only person qualified to bring them back online, which means he has to spacewalk across open space to reach the ship. John Lithgow plays the engineer with a terror that feels genuine. Curnow is not an astronaut. He's a ground-based systems designer who was never supposed to leave Earth, and the EVA sequence in Peter Hyams's 1984 film is one of its best moments because Lithgow makes the fear physical. He grabs onto surfaces like a man who believes he's about to die, which is exactly how an engineer in a spacesuit would behave.

The rest of the film puts Curnow aboard Discovery alongside Bob Balaban's Dr. Chandra, who is there to reactivate HAL 9000. While Chandra has a philosophical relationship with the computer that killed its crew, Curnow's job is purely mechanical. Get the ship running, get it pointed toward home. He's the most human character in a film about artificial intelligence and cosmic transformation, a guy who just wants to fix things and survive. His watch hasn't been identified.