Less of a theory and more of a set of Easter eggs picked up on by eagle-eyed audience members, but fun (and a little weird) nonetheless. Interstellar started life as a treatment put together - at the behest of Steven Spielberg, no less - by by film producer Lynda Obst and theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, with the latter being the one ultimately responsible for all the brain-bending scientific concepts that appear in the finished film. Many of which actually have a basis in reality, or at least real research thats going on right now, even the fifth dimensional beings things. Crazy, right? To honour Thornes work on the film, it was originally intended to get him in for a cameo appearance - possibly as himself, working in that underground, clandestine NASA. That didnt happen, but he still got a shout out, if you believe this theory: KIPP, the robot Matt Damons space mad astronaut tears apart, is apparently named for him. By the same logic, TARS comes from pioneering philosophical sci-fi director Andrei Tarkovsky (whose films often deal with memory, which makes sense since he ends up in the tesseract with Cooper) and CASE from astrophysicist Carl Sagan. Who Thorne was mates with, funnily enough.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
