Fridge / Moon

• Sending a single guy to the moon — what if something goes wrong and he needs backup? Oh, wait...
• The fact that the base was on the far side of Luna is perhaps a fairly inane decision. Most of the material that they're supposedly mining from the surface would have ended up on the near side; the choice to put the protagonist on the far side, out of reach of direct communication, seems like a lame excuse for a plot point — he needs a reason to have a communications satellite before it can break down and isolate him. There were probably political and economic considerations. People had probably complained about the mining operation potentially "disfiguring" the side of the moon we're familiar with.
  • Word of God has confirmed this. There were ecological considerations as well — they didn't want to screw up Earth's wildlife by changing the reflectivity of the visible lunar surface, through installing solar panels for the base or whatever.
  • We also see the visible damage the harvesters are doing in one overhead shot: the scrapes of the harvesters are clearly visible and significantly lower albedo than the untouched regolith.
  • Its also entirely possible there are bases on the near side, run by their own clones. (Possibly more Sams, possibly other people.) Lunar Industries would certainly have good reason to hide their existence from the Sarang base Sams, and we only see things from their perspective.
  • The original Sam is implied to have made it back to Earth. 15-year-old Eve calls for her Dad at the end of the video call. Since the whole point of the scheme was (apparently) to save money, it's likely the clones were designed to only last three years because that's how long they need to last. The original Sam had to actually agree to go up there for three years, and actually come back. Each subsequent clone had to believe the same thing, since the whole point of the cost-saving was that they could inherit the original Sam's memories.
  • What if Sam never went up there? The crash landing is just a bit of memory tampering, which they seem capable of.
  • GERTY mentions that the clones have edited memories of the original Sam. It is entirely possible the original Sam was involved in an Earth based accident of some kind, and the company could have come in, and offered him free healthcare or something, in return for harvesting his memories. He may not even know there's clones of him floating around. This ensures he can never threaten to expose everything, because he doesn't know.
• At one point, Sam, with a marker, draws a series of smiley faces on one of the stainless steel walls in his bathroom facilities. The way the wall is lit, you can see the smiley faces before he draws them in, like the surface is smooth where the drawing would be. This isn't an error since the base is reset after every "shift". The smiley faces are erased, and the next Sam draws them on. It's been done so many times it's damaged the wall.
  • Further to this, parts of the base are utterly filthy, including GERTY, as these are the bits GERTY can't reach or see (including his own body). It's a clue that each and every Sam has had the same lack-lustre approach to cleaning over the last fifteen years.
• There's a Post-It note on GERTY's front with something along the lines of 'service rover 3 boom' written on it. How come Sam never noticed it was written in what is presumably his own handwriting?
• Given that Lunar Industries is one of (if not the) leading suppliers of energy for the Earth,^note  according to the technician voiceovers heard during the film the energy density of He 3 and the size of canisters being used for transport, and the speed of harvesting, it's almost a certainty that Sarang is not the only facility in operation on the lunar surface. It's also suggested by a voiceover crediting Lunar's success to "people [plural] like you." If that's the case, then each base possibly has its own batch of Sam clones to keep it running. Why go to the expense of training and templating another actual human when the Sam pattern works so well? There's no way to know just how many clones Lunar has blown through to date.
• In the credits, Sam Rockwell's name can be seen mirrored through the window, with a fainter copy of it in the background. Clever foreshadowing before we even meet Sam.