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What is the basis for the plot stating that the "fake Ethan" character dies when he runs into the barrier? He just seemed stunned to me. There's a few other leaps of logic making assumptions about how the house worked, which seemed to have been very ambiguous in the movie. Walterego (talk) 07:12, 8 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Fully agree. It seems that there are many people contributing from an "in-universe" perspective. Some people just can't wrap their minds around what art is and feel compelled to view the film's universe as consistent in itself, which it very likely is not in the case of this film.
Another example is the ending of the film, where it is actually clear that "Ethan A" (the original) left with "Sophie A", not with "Sophie B" as many erroneously assume. Anything else wouldn't make sense from a storytelling point of view anyway, but it's actually clearcut because when the men run out of the house and the women follow them, the Sophie on the left side of the screen (the one Ethan A later leaves with) asks the other Sophie what happens if Ethan B manages to leave, to which Sophie-on-the-right says that she doesn't know.
So this clearly marks Sophie-on-the-left as "Sophie A" and Sophie-on-the-right (who later stays) as "Sophie B".
The moment at the very end, when Sophie offers to cook Ethan bacon is just the denouement of the very premise of the film, a weekend retreat from which the couple is supposed to return as "new" (i.e. changed, different) people.
This is next to impossible to write up as plot, because these elements do not form a straight, self-consistent plot that lends itself to being retold.
The choice of bacon is not accidental in the plot. Visceral dislikes—especially olfactory—are not something people casually change because they had a weekend social re-adjustment (through a nauseating incident, the smell of fried tempeh (which I used to enjoy eating) is nothing I could learn to tolerate again, sad to say. No shrink is going to fix that). The hopeful success of that planned adjustment was the initial 'premise' (if that term is applicable) of the movie, and indeed things indeed were proceeding as though it were working out.
There is nothing ambiguous about the ending, and the writers had no intention of some (artistically) ambiguous puzzle for the audience to worry over. Nor is it important whether Ethan II was killed or just knocked out (although the latter would be the likelier outcome of a restraining means by the property's designer, the likelihood reinforced by the wavy appearance of the barrier upon an apparently cushioned impact). The point is that Sophie, in her final resolution, stuck by the Ethan that so delighted her in the way the original could not, and never would.
But returning to the very end, we grasp that Sophie (x) = Sophie II by the very device of the olfactory stench that Sophie I not only could not abide, but would have no reason to treat as though she'd been casually making it all her life. It wasn't important to the therapeutic regimen, and in fact was so (designedly) trivial as to evidently have never come up as a Sophie-fact to be duly rehearsed ('I DETEST BACON, I DETEST BACON', ie) in Sophie II's doppleganger-training-sessions.
"Ethan stares at his bedroom wall in horror realization."Ethan's (penultimate) astonishment is not that 'Sophie' has gotten over bacon, but that it isn't Sophie. The final step reveals that Ethan (and we) then understands that he has finally, actually, let go of Sophie; a satisfying thematic symmetry: Sophie likewise remains with Ethan II.
Finally, having frustrated the purposes of the talk page thus far, we should recklessly ask that professional critics remove the labels 'sci-fi' and 'Hitchockian' from the discussion. This movie leaves tons of things unexplained, in the Twilight Zone tradition. It is a fantasy, pure and simple. Who was the therapist? What was he really trying to do? How was the barrier made? For that matter, how were the copies created? We're talking a billion-dollar, probably impossible, and completely pointless, endeavor whose only function appears to be to drive hapless couples more into failure than marital success, and wind up imprisoned until they can effect the failure of the next victims. The whole thing is Serling and Kafka, not Arthur C. Clarke. JohndanR (talk) 04:17, 12 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
