Mary McCormack wears an unidentified watch

Deep Impact came out in the summer of 1998, a couple of months ahead of Armageddon, and it is the more sober of the two end-of-the-world movies that year. Most of it happens on the ground: a television reporter (Téa Leoni) breaks the story, a president (Morgan Freeman) tells the country a comet is coming, and a lottery decides who gets a place in the underground ark. The louder work happens in space, aboard the Messiah, the ship sent to land on the comet, drill into it, and plant nuclear charges before it reaches Earth.

Mary McCormack plays Andrea Baker, the Messiah's pilot. The crew of six includes Robert Duvall as the only veteran among them, a former moonwalker the younger astronauts resent until they need him, and Jon Favreau as the flight surgeon. The first attempt fails: the warheads only crack the comet into two pieces, and the larger one, big enough to end life on Earth, stays on course. Crippled and out of options, the crew decides to fly what is left of the Messiah into that fragment and detonate the last warheads by hand. It is a suicide run, and it works. Baker meets the decision with the best line in the movie: "Well, look on the bright side. We'll all have high schools named after us."

In the cramped interior scenes aboard the Messiah, Baker wears a large, dark-dialed watch, the practical sort you would expect on an astronaut. The brand has not been identified.