The Ranger flies through the clouds of Dr. Mann’s planet. They briefly bump into a cloud, which cracks, indicating that it’s frozen. They land on a cold, grey planet covered in thick ice and rock. In the distance, they see Dr. Mann’s settlement. They enter it, find Dr. Mann asleep in his hibernation chamber, and wake him. When he regains consciousness, he embraces Cooper and begins to sob.
Wrapped in a blanket, Dr. Mann tells them how good it was to see another human face. He says he’d run out of hope and set no timer on his hibernation chamber, meaning he would've been in it indefinitely had they not saved him. Cooper and the others update Dr. Mann on their situation and ask to know about his world. He says it’s cold, but beautiful. His description becomes narration as we watch he and the others venture out onto the planet in their space suits, surveying the endlessly stark rock and ice. Then, back in his shelter, Mann explains that the air where they are has too much ammonia in it to breathe, but that down by the surface the air is breathable, with the potential for life. He says he’s made several expeditions to the surface, though his TARS-like robot KIPP, now destroyed, did most of the work.
TARS receives a message for Brand from Earth, and Brand opens it to see Murph’s message telling her of her father’s death. Brand begins to cry softly, but is shocked when the second half of Murph’s message reveals that Plan A was a sham and that there’s no way to save the humans still on Earth. Cooper and the others watch from behind her as Murph cries helplessly, wanting desperately to know if her father knowingly left her to die.
Brand is near speechless, saying her father dedicated his whole life to Plan A. Dr. Mann, though, seems to understand. He admits that Professor Brand solved his gravity equation before the Lazarus missions even happened, but that it didn’t allow for Plan A. They’d need to see into a black hole to potentially make it work, but the intense gravity makes that impossible. Mann says that fooling everyone into thinking there was a Plan A helped bring people together to focus on the mission instead of saving themselves and their children. He calls it an incredible sacrifice on the professor’s part to take responsibility for such an unforgivable lie, but Cooper says that the humans on Earth are making the true sacrifice by being forced to die. With this new knowledge, Cooper now plans to go home.
Murph and Dr. Getty drive to the farmhouse. Murph tells him that what Professor Brand had was only half the answer, but that you’d need to see into a black hole to figure out the rest. They pass a long line of cars strapped with luggage fleeing the town. Everyone pulls over as another dust storm hits. While they wait for it pass, Getty tries to convince Murph to tell the world the truth that there’s no hope, but she says she hasn’t given up and won’t incite a panic. She has only a feeling to go on: her ghost from her childhood. She says she didn’t call it a “ghost” because she was afraid of it, but because it seemed like a person trying to tell her something. She thinks any answer to gravity will be found in her old bedroom.
Aboard the Ranger, Romilly tells Cooper of an idea he has: Gargantua is a “gentle” black hole, and therefore a probe crossing its event horizon may be able to survive and relay the quantum data it records inside back to Dr. Mann’s planet, providing the answer they need to solve the gravity equation. He suggests sending TARS as the probe.
Outside, Romilly tells Dr. Mann that they need a part from the body of KIPP for TARS’ journey. Mann protests, but Romilly agrees to oversee TARS’ inspection of KIPP to ensure he doesn’t compromise any archived data, so Mann hesitantly agrees. Cooper proposes that they secure three bases: two for habitats and one for a lab for Brand. He brings along a long-range transmitter to talk to Romilly and Brand back at the shelter.
Cooper and Mann traverse the desolate surface. Mann suggests that Cooper remain on their planet as an engineer. As they talk, CASE flies by in the Lander and Cooper uses the transmitter to tell him to slow down. Next, we switch to the farmhouse, where Lois invites Murph and Getty inside. (For the next several minutes, we switch back and forth between these two scenes as they occur simultaneously.) Mann muses about the strong emotional bond humans share with their loved ones as Murph enters her childhood bedroom and surveys the bookshelf, recalling setting her father’s watch on it when he left. Downstairs, Dr. Getty inquires about Lois’ cough.
CASE arrives in the Lander (the Endurance has two Rangers and two Landers, one of each of which are now on Mann’s planet). Inside the shelter, Romilly and TARS inspect KIPP. Meanwhile, Mann and Cooper use small thrusters attached to their arms to control their descent down the planet’s rocky slopes. Mann tells Cooper that humans couldn’t use machines to carry out these great expeditions because they can’t be programmed with a fear of death. Mann suggests that the last thing Cooper will see before he dies will be the faces of his children.
Dr. Getty inspects Lois’ and Coop’s lungs and tells Murph that the two can’t stay there. TARS experiences issues booting up KIPP. Mann tells Cooper that he thought he was prepared to die when he left Earth, but that he never considered that his planet might not be humanity’s next home. Suddenly, he tears Cooper’s long-range transmitter from his helmet and shoves him over the nearby ledge down toward a great chasm. Cooper yells and grabs ahold of the slope to stop his fall.
Tom comes home and finds Getty and Murph still inspecting his wife and son. Mann climbs down toward Cooper to throw him further into the chasm, saying he can’t let Cooper go home because they need the ship to complete the mission. Cooper uses his arm thruster to knock Mann loose and the two go sliding down the incline together until it flattens out.
Getty tells Tom that they can’t stay at home anymore. Tom punches him in the face. Murph tries to reason with Tom, but he refuses to budge. Meanwhile, Cooper realizes that Mann faked all of his data, that there’s no habitable surface on the planet. Mann concedes that this is true, that he sent out his “thumbs up” signal only so that he would be rescued, and that he knows he’s a coward. He lunges at Cooper and the two wrestle. Murph tells Tom to let his family go, that their dad was never coming back. When she says he’s going to lose another kid if he doesn’t act, Tom tells her to leave and never come back.
Cooper and Mann wrestle violently. Cooper tries to let out Mann’s thrusters, but Mann slams his helmet into Cooper’s, cracking the glass and letting out his oxygen. Cooper falls back as he begins breathing the toxic air. Mann says Cooper was never tested like he was.
Murph and Getty drive away from the house, passing another line of vehicles fleeing town. Mann watches Cooper slowly begin to suffocate and says he’s going to save everyone. He turns away, refusing to witness Cooper dying, but keeps talking into his transmitter so Cooper can hear his voice as he dies. Mann asks if Cooper sees his children, and begins reciting “Do Not Go Gentle.” His recitation turns to narration as Cooper slowly inches his way to the discarded long-range transmitter. After a moment, Mann turns off his helmet transmitter, unable to listen to Cooper’s desperate gasps any longer.
Cooper finally reaches the transmitter, places it back on his helmet, and screams for help from Brand. Having just turned off his own, Mann doesn’t hear this and ascends the ledge, leaving Cooper behind. Brand tells Cooper to hang on as she and CASE take off in the Lander to rescue him. At the same time, Murph has an idea and turns her jeep around. She drives into the middle of a cornfield and pours a large container of gasoline over the stalks. She then sets them alight with a flare and drives off.
TARS informs Romilly that KIPP’s security lock requires a human to open it. Brand continues to talk to Cooper through her transmitter, telling him that they’re almost there and to breathe as little as possible. She spots him up ahead and jumps out as the Lander touches down. She brings him a temporary oxygen device to breathe into.
Tom sees the corn burning from his house and heads out to investigate. Romilly opens KIPP’s data and finds that it makes no sense. Brand gets Cooper back in the Lander, where Cooper explains to her that Mann was lying about his data. Brand desperately shouts to Romilly through her transmitter, but he doesn’t hear her in time. A booby trap inside KIPP explodes, destroying the shelter and killing Romilly instantly. Mann watches the explosion from nearby. He turns his transmitter back on and hears Brand’s cries.
Cooper and Brand strap into the Lander as CASE informs them that there was an explosion. Mann takes off in the Ranger back into space. TARS runs out of the destroyed shelter and joins Cooper and Brand aboard the Lander. He tells them Romilly didn’t survive the explosion. Cooper says Mann is trying to maroon them.
Murph and Getty return to the house, where Murph gathers Lois and Coop and has them wait in her car while she goes to her bedroom. Meanwhile, Cooper and Brand chase Mann back into space. TARS has disabled the Ranger’s autopilot so that Mann will need to dock with the Endurance manually, which he doesn’t know how to do. Mann turns off the communications from Cooper that warn him not to attempt it. Murph finds her father’s old watch. Getty watches the flames in the distance.
Mann arrives at the Endurance and tries to dock with it. He finds the auto-docking disabled and performs an imperfect manual dock in which the two vessels’ ports lock together improperly. An alarm informs him of this, but he opens the ports anyway. Cooper continues to try to communicate to him not to open the Endurance’s inner hatch, as the airlock will depressurize, but Mann can’t hear him. Cooper pulls the Lander back out of range, fearing the worst. Brand has CASE broadcast her transmission as an emergency PA aboard the Endurance. She tells Mann not to open the inner hatch. Mann turns his transmitter back on and tells Brand that he plans to take control of the Endurance, after which they can discuss completing the mission. In the middle of his sentence, the airlock depressurizes and the entire port explodes, killing Mann, obliterating the Ranger, and sending the crippled Endurance into a death spiral.
For a moment, there is quiet, but then Cooper fires up the Lander’s engine and heads for the Endurance. He and CASE begin spinning the Lander in synch with the Endurance to match its rotation and line up with another one of its ports. Brand briefly loses consciousness as the Lander spins faster and faster, but Cooper succeeds in bridging the ports with a perfect lock-on. With the two ships now connected and spinning simultaneously, he engages the Lander’s retro-thrusters, countering the spin to bring both to a standstill, while also pushing the Endurance out of orbit just as it is about to pass into the planet’s atmosphere and burn up.
They celebrate momentarily, until CASE informs them that they’re now heading into Gargantua’s pull. They quickly board the Endurance, where alarms sound and debris flies about. Cooper decides to let the Endurance slide as far into the black hole as they can. The back-up generators stabilize the ship as Cooper informs Brand that they can no longer go home, but can make it to Edmunds’ planet by using Gargantua’s gravity to slingshot around it, though the time slippage will be great. They plan to launch TARS inside one of the Landers into the black hole to shed the weight.
They approach the colossal black hole. They engage the escape thrusters and the Endurance lurches forward. They next engage the Landers’ and remaining Ranger’s engines in tandem. Cooper says that their journey will cost them another 51 years. TARS’ Lander runs out of fuel and they detach it from the Endurance. TARS bids them goodbye as he falls into the black hole. Next, the remaining Ranger, inside which Cooper sits, runs out of fuel and prepares to detach as well. Brand is horrified, not having realized that Cooper planned to sacrifice himself to shed the weight. He reminds her that they agreed on 90% honesty and detaches from the Endurance, leaving her to head to Edmunds' planet alone.
Section 5 Analysis
In Section 5, we meet “the remarkable Dr. Mann” and see all that he has become on his cold, unforgiving planet. When Cooper and the others wake Mann from his cryogenic sleep, it draws a direct parallel to Lazarus, a man brought back to life by Jesus Christ four days after his death, according to the Gospel of John in the New Testament. As Mann hadn’t set a waking time on his sleep chamber the last time he had gone under, he effectively killed himself, only for the others to wake him again. Considering that his entire original mission was named the Lazarus mission for the hope of bringing humanity back from the dead, this is an example of considerable situational irony.
And, of course, the revelation that Dr. Mann was in fact lying about the habitability of his planet, faked all his data, and sounded a false positive signal in the hopes of being rescued tie directly back to Cooper and Brand’s earlier conversation about the evil that mankind brings into an otherwise amoral universe. It does not seem as if Dr. Mann was a malicious person before his time on this planet, but the bleak conditions and the realization that he was going to die there twisted him into a calculating aggressor obsessed with self-preservation. And he even acknowledges this, along with his own cowardice. It is perhaps the great irony of the film that the scientist touted as the most remarkable, and the “best” of those who pursued a new home for humanity, ultimately becomes an example of man’s great capacity for selfish wrongdoing. And the fact that his name is literally Mann, a nod to the fact that his fate could’ve potentially been any human’s, is just further proof of this.
In one of the only such instances in the film, section 5 shows us an example of concurrent scenes switching back and forth, in this case between Cooper’s fight with Dr. Mann and Murph’s fight with Tom. The parallelism here is overwhelming: Dr. Mann and Tom have both been tested by loss, fear, and the devastation of hopelessness. They lash out in (once) uncharacteristically aggressive ways in a futile effort to protect themselves and, in Tom’s case, those they love. Murph and Cooper, on the other hand, represent reasoning, stability, and the preservation of hope. Cooper believes in getting home to see his family, and later in seeing the mission through to the end. Murph believes she can still solve the equation of gravity and so tries to reason with Tom. He, however, like Mann, has given up inside, while she—and Cooper—have not. This parallelism is another testament to the connection between Murph and Cooper: despite being countless lightyears away from one another, they still maintain hope and fight for what is right.
Romilly’s death at the hand of Mann’s booby trap is a quick but tragic loss. He’s arguably the film’s most sympathetic character. He displays a dislike for the spinning of the Endurance and for the thin walls separating them from outer space, a sign of his sensitivity, and yet soldiers on when abandoned aboard the Endurance for the 23 years that Cooper, Brand, and Doyle visit Miller’s planet. He becomes a fragile, lonely older man, but is determined to live out his life nonetheless (as opposed to Mann, who eventually settled into an indefinite sleep in his cryogenic chamber). When his friends return, Romilly is once again able to focus on the mission despite the years of crippling solitude. His loss is an emotional shock, to say the least, and a further example of the cruel consequences of Dr. Mann’s selfishness.
There are many similarities between Interstellar and Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 epic science-fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and one such similarity occurs when Cooper endeavors to spin the Ranger in tandem with the broken, spiraling Endurance in order to dock with it mid-spin and prevent its descent into Mann’s planet’s atmosphere. According to Christopher Nolan, this scene was inspired by and draws parallel to the Pan Am spaceplane’s method of docking with the Space Station V in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the plane similarly matches the station's spin in order to dock with it. The Endurance even bears a resemblance to the Space Station V, both of which are wheel-shaped structures designed to replicate gravity on board by spinning.
