Build a movie plot around this: Which spacecraft is returning to Earth? the spacecraft USS Palomino
In the year 2130, the deep space research ship USS Palomino is on a search for intelligent non-human life on other planets. The crew is comprised of Captain Dan Holland (Robert Forster), Lt. Charles Pizer - the hotshot first officer (Joseph Bottoms); utility droid LF#396, informally known as VINCENT (voice of Roddy McDowall); Dr. Alex Durant (Anthony Perkins) - navigator and science officer; Dr. Kate McCrae (Yvette Mimieux) - medical officer and empath, who maintains a telepathic rapport with VINCENT via her ESP; and embedded journalist Harry Booth (Ernest Borgnine). After five years of fruitless searching, the Palomino is now on her way home for a refit when VINCENT notices a large, swirling blue accretion disk and recommends a course correction. VINCENT identifies the disk as a black hole, the largest discovered in recent history. While the crew nervously discuss the destructive potential of black holes, VINCENT reveals something else: an apparently derelict ship standing off from the black hole's event horizon (line of no return) and somehow able to keep station, when it almost certainly should have been sucked in. Pizer and Booth are more shocked to see a ship so far from home (when the Palomino should have been the first spaceship to reach this deep in space) than they are to see the black hole. VINCENT identifies the ship as USS Cygnus, with the German scientist Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell) commanding, which disappeared nearly 20 years earlier after apparently failing to heed recall orders after its mission, the same as Palomino's, was declared a failure. (In addition, Booth remembers Reinhardt as arrogant, pompous, and utterly heedless of the value of taxpayers' money.) The Cygnus, however, holds another significance for the crew of Palomino: its XO, Frank McCrae, is Kate's father.Against his better judgment, Holland accepts the recommendations of Pizer and Durant and comes about to rendezvous with Cygnus. As they approach, they come under the influence of the black hole's tremendous gravity. But...