Top left: Pulp Fiction's Mia Wallace and Vincent Vega being waited on, in the Jack Rabbit Slim's restaurant. Earlier we observed that Mia represents yin to Vincent's yang, and that this corresponds to Frank Poole representing yin and David Bowman representing yang, in A Space Odyssey. Top right: Just prior to Vincent (standing on left) taking Mia to the club, he purchased some heroin from his friend and drug dealer, Lance (standing on right). We note that Lance gives Vincent the heroin in a plastic bag instead of a balloon, since he's out of the latter. Small plastic bags are normally used to store cocaine, not heroin. Above left: Some time later, after Vincent and Mia have left the club and after Mia has mistakenly inhaled some of Vincent's heroin, thinking that it was cocaine, Lance rushes to help revive her while being harried by his wife, Jody. Above right: Lance is forced to give Vincent instructions from memory on how to inject Mia with adrenaline, since he could not find his black medical book in time. The point is that if Lance had been able to find the book, Mia might have been 'completely' saved, and Vincent would have therefore saved the feminine within himself. Correspondingly in A Space Odyssey, Bowman would have saved Poole, representing the feminine within Bowman, and therefore, the alien's manipulation of Bowman's psyche would not have been possible, thus preventing the alien from 'combining' with Bowman.
What Tarantino is getting at by portraying Lance, Jody, and the rest of the scenario in Pulp Fiction as he does, is some idea of a source for the whole problem (i.e., the 'perpetual-doom' cycle within which mankind has been trapped). The fact that Lance has run out of balloons, and the fact that Vincent is found 'idling' in the bathroom at several key moments in Tarantino's movie, indicates that Tarantino is depicting at least part of the reason for the problem being men, or at least a certain subset of men, having been pre-occupied, unprepared, and/or flat out incompetent at certain key point(s) in history.
