A Romantic* Fangirl

how long do oxygen last? i assumed that somewhere beetween an hour and half an hour but i am clearly wrong in that assumption.

how long is the original expedition supposed to take?

why no one installed bluetooth on this thing if the people in charge knew it was largely suicidal mission (after what happened with sm-8 they should at least try to install something to download the files from surface)

especially since it's their submarine number fucking 13 so you would thing they learned something

did all the submarines drowned? or just sm-8 and sm-13?

it would make sense if only theese two were lost , but we know there's the Wire Crosser who lost his submarine on purpose so im not so sure

unless they are somehow retriving them...

is the blood related to stars dying?

is the eel related to stars dying? i assume that eel is responsible for blood

how does eden work?

i assume that the quiet rapture took place 20ish years ago (based on the vibe and simons age?), so what was eden doing besides killing people and nothing for two decades?

are they kinda hippies?

what was simon role in eden? he says it's not his fault that the Filament (i think) got blown up so why was he there? to stop his brothers?

why did eden even decided to blow this up? for fun? for demonstration?

why is ge the butcher? who did he kill and why? were that the orders from Eden?

whatever was with him sincr the beggining i am so sure it was hallucination. but if it wasn't then what is it? i had theory for like 5 seconds that The Figure actually gave him the seed and told him to cross wires

no but seriously.

who told him to cross the wires? was that the eel alredy? i dont think so. is he connected to his brothers via mind reading? is the ghost guiding him?

is the ghost hunting the sub? that doesn't make sense, person said that he decided to go die in the quiet of this ocean so he couldn't plant the seed in this sub as he was already dead. i think

this thing bothers me the most actually. about the seed planter and the fucking wire crossing

why isn't the computer already wired correctly?

why can you just blast radiation all willy-nilly on the surface?

why is there a window that can break under pressure? what for is the window if it's gonna be just clesd shut anyway? is the window the door?

who designed this nightmare of machine?

is the sun dead-dead or only dimmed?

why are people even alive if there's no sun?

is there an ice age?

if there was wouldn' that freeze the blood? maybe the blood is boiling

is the radio broken or not? i kinda assumed that whatever happened after the engine went kaput is not 100% real also i rlly hated lightning in that whole segment

how oxygen work on the sub? im actually intrested in logistics, like maybe the blood in the ocean is oxygen full and the submarine's systems filter it out (prolly not but fun thought)

why does simon wear harness? for support? to carry things?

what is the deal with simon and eden? i so don't understand his backstory it makes me feel stupid

why is ava cleaning the window?

ava keeps wiping the porthole window because she’s trying to see simon while talking to him, but the submarine’s hull is covered in blood from having just been pulled out of the ocean and there’s 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?

it’s never specified, but yeah, likely a few hours. it’s not clear how long the expeditions are supposed to last, the implication is that they’re 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 wasn’t supposed to last that long. it’s 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 don’t have any fancy equipment to put in the submarines, especially since these are supposed to be exploratory missions and they’re not sure they’ll find anything useful. the submarines do have black-boxes that record everything that happens during the mission, so if they’re able to retrieve the subs, they’d 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-13’s black-box, so retrieving that would give them access to both the sm-8 and the sm-13’s information.

so it’s not that the coi hasn’t learned how to make better subs over time, it’s that they can’t. they don’t 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 people’s lives.

there are three submarines that we know of: the sm-8, sm-13 and sm-14. we don’t know if they’re 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 simon’s sub works because he activated it when crossing the wires but he can’t log in. it’s not clear how it’s able to connect to the sm-8 computer and download its data. the radio isn’t broken because simon is able to communicate with ava normally afterwards, so the voice he thinks come through the speaker are a hallucination.

simon shouldn’t have been able to use the camera while on the surface, so blasting people with radiation shouldn’t have happened, but one of ava’s 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? + simon’s 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. it’s 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 there’s no evidence for…basically anything, so you’d have to take a desperate man at his word.

fandom speculation around simon’s role in eden is that he was responsible for killing people who were fed to the last tree (hence ‘the butcher’) 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 aren’t 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 simon’s mother is likely because he cared about her deeply.

i think the harness is just for looks lol.

the creature on the sub

is probably simon himself from some kind of time loop. this is really unclear and coming from the eldritch horror ‘you don’t have to understand every single thing’ 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 isn’t 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. it’s a really smart addition to the movie.

the blood isn’t related to the stars dying, the reason they’re exploring the blood ocean in the first place is that they don’t understand how it’s there. how can something like that exist? they’re 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 ‘voice’ 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.

rocky is both touched by the sentiment and disturbed by human medical practices

inspired by this grace quote: