Jonathan Nolan may have revealed an alternate ending to the Interstellar story that has no fifth-dimension...and no happy endings?
News***This article contains spoilers about the Interstellar ending.
The ending to Interstellar is certainly the kind of brain-teaser that leaves audiences flummoxed. How did that scene inside the “tesseract” exactly work and who provided that opportunity to Cooper? It is something that can be dissected to every last spoiler detail—which we have done here by explaining the Interstellar ending—however that almost wasn’t the actual finale at one point. Maybe.
Despite a similar conclusion to Cooper and Brand’s arcs existing in the very first draft of the Interstellar screenplay by Jonathan Nolan, dated in 2007, he apparently at least toyed with another ending, according to the Nerdist. Indeed, while attending a media event, Jonathan Nolan, who wrote the first several drafts of Interstellar, revealed that the tesseract angle was his brother Christopher Nolan’s idea and inclusion—and Jonathan Nolan also revealed that he thought of a much more ominous final moment for Cooper.
The Nerdist reports Jonathan Nolan had a much more straightforward ending in mind where “the Einstein-Rosen Bridge [would] collapse when Cooper tries to send the data back.”
The infers that this would leave Cooper stranded in the black hole, sacrificing himself to save Brand; it would also leave Earth doomed with no equation completed by a progeny daughter who was communicating via the fifth-dimension (and her bookshelf) with ghost-dad. It certainly would be a bleaker ending.
I, however, speculate that this is more in inference to the original screenplay of Interstellar where the wormhole (or Einstein-Rosen Bridge) does indeed close, and there is no tesseract.
In that variation on the plot, Cooper is able to send the surveillance drone from the beginning of the script—and which survived into the finished Interstellar film—through a closing, separate wormhole, and with it the data reaches his son Muprh, who then indeed saves the world. There is also a separate, unseen alien race (not future human beings or “bulk beings”) that then allows Cooper to travel through another worm hole where he reaches Earth several hundred years after he left, finding it abandoned and barren in a new ice age. But he is then saved by Earth’s survivors that have abandoned the planet for space stations, leading to an ending where he goes looking for Brand in space, much like the actual ending of the film--albeit, in a much more dire situation for Brand as Cooper has no wormhole to reach her with.
I think the original intent was always to have a sort of “Go to Space, Young Man” finale where curiosity and an intergalactic sense of manifest destiny propels Cooper and the audience to continue searching—if for nothing else than to save Brand on her own lonely planet, a new garden of Eve for mankind, if you will. At some point, Jonathan Nolan may have toyed with the idea of ending on a downbeat note where Cooper dies in the black hole, but the more likely scenario is he is simply referring to how there was no tesseract or fifth-dimensional Morse code in his versions of the story. Again though, if you want to understand that, well we have a whole article written on the subject.
