Dr. Powell: We had a guy on Earth, named Einstein who said that things can't travel faster than light and you claim to have traveled at 6c?

prot: What Einstein actually said was that nothing can accelerate to the speed of light because its mass would become infinite. Einstein said nothing about entities already traveling at the speed of light or faster.

 

The region of the maximum impact was when Dr. Powell takes him to his brother-in-law who is an astronomer and they quiz him on K-PAX's location, it's orbit and other magnitude of astronomical data. prot draws on the light pad, which gets projected on the overhead planetarium display. It's quite a moment when the astronomers computer simulation coincides with prot's schematics and answers some of the things which have been shrouded in mystery till now. prot, as usual shrugs it off saying this knowledge is common amongst K-PAXians, exactly like the knowledge that earth is the third planet from the Sun. I would have expected the lead astronomer to act a bit more surprised, he looked like he was just doing his job - acting.

 

The movie has five threads of story line running through it:

 

The relationship between Dr. Powell & prot: The entire story revolves around these two characters. prot is obviously the nucleus of the movie and Dr. Powell's character is used effectively to make prot shine brighter. Dr. Powell starts off with prot as an usual patient, but quickly realizes that he is not able to make any progress with prot on the treatment lane. He is quite puzzled and his puzzlement erodes itself into his family life. There is a subtle underflow in story which tries to portray the mental struggle that Dr. Powell is going through - the doctor within him constantly reminds him that prot is a patient with MPD but his conscious is slowly getting pulled into believing in prot's version of the story.

 

Dr. Powell's family life: This line is more of a supplement used to highlight the involvement of Dr. Powell into prot's case and a little to make grounds for pitching in Robert Porter's story from the background. The bitterness that edges into the relationship between Dr. Powell and his wife has been effectively handled to show how deeply Dr. Powell is into prot's case.

 

prot and the psychiatric patients: prot during his stay in the psychiatric hospital develops a relationship with many of the patients. This thread has many fibers, one for each patient and I believe this thread primarily tries to achieve two things: a) Act as a filler and b) Bring out the humanitarian side of prot rousing the emotion of sympathy and good will association between the audience and prot.

 

Robert Porter: This is an interesting line. prot's character has two facets - a patient with MPD and an alien from K-PAX. The patient is a normal person whose life has been riddled with tragic incidents covering his wife's and daughter's murder and him committing the murder of the assailant. prot during his hypnosis session confesses that Robert used to communicate with him via some un-disclosed channel and he (prot) used to come to earth to be with Robert. This story line, although a part of the central story trunk seems quite decoupled and could have been easily replaced by something else. I need to think more on what this line tries to accomplish... maybe just a place filler for the other half of the MPD case.

 

Prot and the astronomers: prot gives the old brainy guys quite a kick in the butt when he spews out scientific data about the binary system near Lyra. Quite a grabbing segment in the movie with some good graphics. Makes a definite point to balance out on the MPD case and firmly plant the doubt of prot's authenticity in the audience's mind.

 

Dr. Powell and his colleagues: As the story progresses, Dr. Powell is shown to believe more and more in prot's story. His conversion is highlighted by his discussions with his colleagues when he openly tries to support prot. I would qualify this thread as more of a highlighter for Dr. Powell's psyche.