ok, here are some answers. i tried to group them together where it made sense but i think they cover most of your questions
why is ava cleaning the window?
ava keeps wiping the porthole window because sheβs trying to see simon while talking to him, but the submarineβs hull is covered in blood from having just been pulled out of the ocean and thereβs so much it keeps flowing down the window, no matter how much she tries to wipe it (idk if this was intentional or not, but visually i really like how the blood streaks look like the bars of a prison cell)
how long does the oxygen last and how long is the original expedition supposed to take?
itβs never specified, but yeah, likely a few hours. itβs not clear how long the expeditions are supposed to last, the implication is that theyβre meant to be relatively short. ava is shocked that simon is still alive when they re-establish contact after a couple of days, so it clearly wasnβt supposed to last that long. itβs implied the ocean itself had been keeping simon alive. blood transports oxygen through the body, and a cool little detail towards the end is that as the sub fills up with blood the oxygen meter starts going up.
the submarines + equipment
humanity is dealing with extreme resource scarcity after the rapture, so they donβt have any fancy equipment to put in the submarines, especially since these are supposed to be exploratory missions and theyβre not sure theyβll find anything useful. the submarines do have black-boxes that record everything that happens during the mission, so if theyβre able to retrieve the subs, theyβd have access to all that information. the sm-8 mission was a bit different because it crewed by scientists, not convicts, and they had better equipment. if simon is able to download their data, it means that it would be stored in the sm-13βs black-box, so retrieving that would give them access to both the sm-8 and the sm-13βs information.
so itβs not that the coi hasnβt learned how to make better subs over time, itβs that they canβt. they donβt have the resources (for example, they have to use glass that breaks under pressure and install a porthole shield to try and secure it). and it sounds like a lot of valuable equipment was lost with the sm-8 too. which is why they use convicts on these very risky missions and prioritize rescuing the submarines over peopleβs lives.
there are three submarines that we know of: the sm-8, sm-13 and sm-14. we donβt know if theyβre numbered sequentially, how many there are, how many others were lost etc. they likely have normal oxygen tanks on board that deplete over time. the computer on simonβs sub works because he activated it when crossing the wires but he canβt log in. itβs not clear how itβs able to connect to the sm-8 computer and download its data. the radio isnβt broken because simon is able to communicate with ava normally afterwards, so the voice he thinks come through the speaker are a hallucination.
simon shouldnβt have been able to use the camera while on the surface, so blasting people with radiation shouldnβt have happened, but one of avaβs crew (the guy who talks to simon through the radio at one point) admits preparations for the mission were rushed and he must have accidentally wired the camera wrong. human mistakes with big consequences.
how does eden work? + simonβs history etc.
eden was a large space station associated with mars, where simon is from. at one point in the recent past (not clear if right before the quiet rapture or soon after) a guy calling himself the father took over as leader of a cult created around the last surviving tree on the station. his idea was that the tree must be kept alive and the only way to do that is to feed its soil with human bodies, since there were no other fertilizer available. the pendant simon finds on the submarine contains a seed from the last tree. he used to have his own but it was taken away when he was imprisoned.
based on the wiki, the quiet rapture happened 21 years before the events in the movie. 5 years after the rapture, eden attacked filament station (associated with another faction called the consolidation of iron - coi) and ended up killing a significant number of people. itβs not clear why, maybe a show of force, maybe trying to get resources. simon surrendered to the coi and has been a prisoner for 16 years. he says he was framed by his brothers as the main one responsible for what happened at filament station, but thereβs no evidence forβ¦basically anything, so youβd have to take a desperate man at his word.
fandom speculation around simonβs role in eden is that he was responsible for killing people who were fed to the last tree (hence βthe butcherβ) which might have included some eden members, making him unpopular with the others. filament station could have been an attempt to frame and get rid of him. but again, this is speculation to support the idea that he was disliked despite being an important member of eden. he might have also just killed a lot of people and we never found out why.
the guy who told simon to cross the wires is another eden convict who went down in the sm-13 before and somehow recorded a voice message for whoever would come next, in which he told what he thought was the truth about the expeditions, that they arenβt for science, but a way to execute people. he also said he decided to die in the sub, so basically ava and her crew retrieved the sm-13 with a dead body inside before simon went down in it.
the sudden dig at simonβs mother is likely because he cared about her deeply.
i think the harness is just for looks lol.
is probably simon himself from some kind of time loop. this is really unclear and coming from the eldritch horror βyou donβt have to understand every single thingβ side of the movie, but the creature looks a lot like the heavily mutated simon does at the end. could be that in another timeline simon failed to kill the eel and has been haunting the sm-13 since.
are all the stars and planets gone, and how does that work?
apparently they are, but simon says something very interesting, which would explain the questions you raise (how are people still alive, why isnβt everything frozen). he says it would be much easier to explain the disappearance of a few space stations and ships than of the whole universe. basically he assumes that everyone else is chilling somewhere in a normal universe where stars and planets still exist, but he and the handful of people who think they survived the quiet rapture were taken away into this empty nightmare universe. people assume the quiet rapture took everyone else away, but simon doubts this and thinks it took them away from everyone else. itβs a really smart addition to the movie.
the blood isnβt related to the stars dying, the reason theyβre exploring the blood ocean in the first place is that they donβt understand how itβs there. how can something like that exist? theyβre looking for evidence that it could sustain life, because that would mean they could extract useful resources from it. the eel is related to the blood and kind of works as the βvoiceβ of the ocean. the blood is mutagenic and the eel is assumed to be the combined mutated bodies of the sm-8 crew trying to convince simon to join them in the blood ocean.
this got long but i think that more or less covers it. the movie is supposed to be confusing and personally i like that about it, which is why i liked spending time picking at all of these bits and pieces and i still doubt i found them all.
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