But after Dave Bowman goes on a space walk and brings the AE-35 back in, neither he nor Frank Poole can find anything wrong with it. As a precautionary measure, HAL also terminates the life functions of the three hibernating crew members. Outside the spaceship, Bowman argues with HAL over the radio, demanding to be let back in. That's when the wily Bowman maneuvers his space pod to Discovery 's emergency airlock, blows the explosive bolts, scrambles inside, seals the door, and repressurizes the airlock. Finally, Bowman makes his way into the core of HAL's brain and disconnects his higher brain functions, one by one.
Discovery never returns to Earth.
The mission ends in failure. Still swinging clubs When Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick created the film 2001 almost 30 years ago, they subscribed to a kind of scientific realism. Repulsed by the space operas that had come before, they depicted spaceflight as slow and silent. Likewise, Clarke and Kubrick tried to make the HAL 9000 as advanced as they thought a computer could possibly be in the year 2001, while still remaining plausible. Perhaps this will come to pass in another 30 years, but it seems unlikely.