YMMV / The Inquest of Pilot Pirx

• Awesome Music: The score by Arvo Pärt and Eugeniusz Rudnik, featuring lots of Numan-esque synthesizer hooks fed through effects pedals. It has been cited by The Prodigy as a major influence on their style, and as such it's a real shame it's never gotten an official release.
• Magnificent Bastard: Tom Nowak is one of the two Ridiculously Human Robots provided for an experimental flight that would determine if mass production of robots is worth starting. Early in the flight, Nowak reveals his robotic nature to the flight's captain Pirx and says that he wants the latter's report to cast robots in a bad light: this way, Nowak will stay unique among humankind and will be able to achieve a lot in his life. When Calder, the second robot in the crew, sabotages the flight and nearly kills the humans aboard, Nowak stays out of the ensuing fight, but when later Pirx, framed by Calder, is brought to trial for criminal negligence, it's Nowak who proves Pirx's innocence by producing a tape from Calder's body that has recorded all of Calder's plotting. Afterwards, Nowak, now claiming to be a human neurologist who pretended to be a robot to make his knowledge of robotic psychology sound more plausible, walks away to have the brilliant career he wants without other robots to hinder him. Calm and calculating, Nowak is baffled by human emotions and morality norms and believes science and technology would eventually outlast it all. Even though he thinks his developers could have done a better job, he is grateful to them, since robotic existence is better than no existence at all (which, however, doesn't stop him from letting his developers go bankrupt by proving Calder's guilt).
• Special Effects Failure: The shot of the spacecraft passing through Saturn's rings consists of a rather obvious miniature filmed against the backdrop of what appears to be an electron microscope photo of someone's fatty tissue or kidneys.

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