Among the latter are a treasured colleague (William Fichtner) who helps her transmit and receive
radio signals and whose name, Kent Clark, irrelevantly suggests an inverted Superman; a bad father (read: villain) and former mentor (Tom Skerritt) who briefly becomes her boss, then her competitor, and who kowtows shamelessly to the power structure; a religious scholar named Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey) who gives her a Cracker Jack compass, virtually
repeats her father's tag line («If there wasn't anyone else out there [in the cosmos], it'd be an awful waste of space»), and goes to bed with her; and an eccentric billionaire (John Hurt) who lives on a well - appointed plane (recalling Jules Verne's Captain Nemo) and comes up with the funding.