Kate Dickie wears an Omega Speedmaster

Here is something we can say for certain about Prometheus. Somewhere in Ridley Scott's 2012 film, on the wrist of one of the crew, there is an Omega Speedmaster. The watch publication Wrist Enthusiast confirms it. What nobody can quite confirm is whose wrist.

The leading guess is Ford. Kate Dickie plays her as the ship's medic, an EMT hired by Weyland to keep the crew alive on the long fall toward LV-223, and she spends most of the film in the background until she is suddenly in the foreground with her hands inside an alien skull. In the briefing scene she sits with her arms folded and a coffee going cold, and there is a round steel watch on her wrist. You can see it. What you cannot do, no matter how far you zoom, is read it. The dial stays a pale smudge. The only person who ever called it a Speedmaster was a watch-spotter on YouTube, and even he asked his viewers to confirm it for him.

So treat it as a maybe. What is not a maybe is why a Speedmaster would belong in a space film at all. In 1965, NASA put every chronograph it could buy through a torture test of heat, cold, vacuum, and vibration, and the Omega was the only one still running at the end. It has been qualified for every American manned spaceflight since, and it went to the Moon on an astronaut's wrist.

That is the joke buried in the casting, if the watch really is hers. Prometheus is set in 2093, and the crew flies a ship steered by an android. Yet the watch someone packed for the trip, the one thing on board with a documented history of surviving where humans cannot, is a design from the late 1950s that earned its place in space by not breaking when everything else did.