Most of the posters here already know my feelings about the ending of Tron: Legacy. (For those who haven't been keeping score, I felt bringing programs into the real world introduced more questions than it answered, and whoever's tasked with writing the script for the next movie is going to have their hands full trying to make that work.) Just a minute ago, I was struck by an interesting thought.

What if Quorra didn't really leave the Grid with Sam?
At least, not the way most of us have been thinking.

Like all of us, Sam's walking around with a sophisticated biocomputer between his ears. What if Sam returned to the real world with two 'programs' running on that wetware CPU - his own persona, and Quorra?

Think about it. No one else but Sam has seen her. We haven't seen her pick up or manipulate any physical objects in the real world. She could very easily be a sort of 'digital phantom' inhabiting Sam's brain, capable of being seen and heard only by him in the real world. Transport him back to the Grid and she'll be a separate program again, running on its hardware instead of Sam's brain.

I'll admit that this idea appeals to me, since it addresses my issues with the whole 'programs appearing as living beings in the physical world' thing. Of course, this would also mean that Clu's invasion plans were fated to fail, but I'm willing to accept that Clu had it all wrong. (Though I still wish that Clu's 'invasion' plans had involved trying to escape Flynn's Grid server and sweep out into the Internet on a crusade to make it 'perfect' and 'free it from the tyranny of the Users', with all the chaos that would cause in the real world as a result. A much more credible threat than leading an army armed with glowsticks and killer frisbees out of the basement of an abandoned arcade...)

So yeah, I'm just throwing this out there for people to comment on and discuss. Good idea, terrible idea, crazy idea? (Okay, I already know it's a crazy idea. But still.) Interested in hearing other peoples' thoughts.

/Charon Wrote:I would love if that were the case. But they surely would have made it more obvious if it was... I mean, when people would watch the sequel and be told she was just in his head, they would go "oh cmon thats just a convenient way to avoid addressing the issues it creates.."

True. Though the idea does lend itself to a Sixth Sense-style scenario - leave clues to the truth for attentive viewers/noticeable on repeat viewings (like people not commenting on Quorra's presence or Quorra never picking up anything in the real world), leading up to a big reveal ('What do you mean you don't see her, Alan? She's standing right there!')

Could be fun stuff if handled right!

/Charon Wrote:So I stick to the Quorra-is-made-of-Flynns-matter theory.

Agreed. If she is really walking around in the real world now, the only way for that to work in my mind is if her body was built from Flynn's stored mass. I'm still not sold on the idea of spontaneously-generated 'digital DNA' directly mapping to any sort of functional real-world biology, and none of the explanations I've read or come up with have felt entirely satisfying to me on that front. I'm wondering if they'll even bother trying to explain it in the sequel. I don't want them to handwave it - 'it's magic, don't think about it too hard' - but I'm afraid that's what'll end up happening. : /

That sounds pretty strange...
but at the same time...
very interesting....

I do like the idea of that though... just beautiful...

That is a very interesting concept, something that had not occurred to me before, kudo's for thinking that up!

That said I don't think I like that path as much, simply because Quorra is unique life form, sentience gained within the digital space through the strange interaction induced by Flynns presence on the grid and other conditions being 'right'.

The ability of the laser to generate her from Flynns biological matter and her own programming is unique as well. I don't think any normal program would have been able to make the transition, except possibly Clu, to the real world.

I guess I'm saying that at this point I've accepted the proposition that she is physically in the real world, and now I want to see where that leads.

Besides, in T4, Bradly will come back in time from the future to tell Sam & Quorra that they are fine, but their KIDS.....

An interesting idea, Argent, but I'm not sure it helps alleviate the questions that are raised by the potential of a material Quorra. To me, it seems just about as troubling...

It would require the digitazation system to "rewire" Sam's brain to provide the "virtual machine" within which Quorra would run, then booting Quorra into that machine. Then the virtual machine in Sam's brain has to function in such a way as to make Sam experience coherent hallucinations. And when you get past all that, you still have all the same problems about existence in the digital world vs. the "real" world.

This, as opposed to "simply" running the "rebuild Sam Flynn" program.

It need just about as much cognitive effort to try an suspend my disbelief for "the system rebuilt Sam with multiple conciousnesses, functioning independently, and Sam perceives the not-him consciousness as Quorra" as it does for "somehow the system constructed a new, functioning human being, and it thinks it's Quorra."

Which is, you know, a lot.

Thematically, it weakens the finale, when Quorra feels the wind on her face and the sun on her skin. There's power in that scene because of Quorra's physical presence to have these new experiences. That power would be lost if the experiences were mediated through Sam's physicality.

(As much as I find issues in the end of Legacy, I think that's a great scene.)

emdeesee Wrote:An interesting idea, Argent, but I'm not sure it helps alleviate the questions that are raised by the potential of a material Quorra. To me, it seems just about as troubling... It would require the digitazation system to "rewire" Sam's brain to provide the "virtual machine" within which Quorra would run, then booting Quorra into that machine. Then the virtual machine in Sam's brain has to function in such a way as to make Sam experience coherent hallucinations. And when you get past all that, you still have all the same problems about existence in the digital world vs. the "real" world. This, as opposed to "simply" running the "rebuild Sam Flynn" program. It need just about as much cognitive effort to try an suspend my disbelief for "the system rebuilt Sam with multiple conciousnesses, functioning independently, and Sam perceives the not-him consciousness as Quorra" as it does for "somehow the system constructed a new, functioning human being, and it thinks it's Quorra." Which is, you know, a lot.

I have less difficulty with this idea because it seems - at least to me - to be a little more plausible, given the functionality and limitations of a system like the Grid based on what we've seen. (It'd be a lot easier if we didn't have to try and square things with the first movie, which establishes some unwritten ground rules that the sequel plays fast and loose with.)

One thing we know for certain is that the Grid server has to be capable of dynamically modelling a User's consciousness. It doesn't have to be a 1:1 simulation of brain function down to the firing of individual neurons and chemical state changes, and it probably wouldn't be - that's hideously computationally expensive, so you'd want to abstract it into something that would be capable of actually fitting onto the server. Something more like a Grid program's persona. The portal also has to be able to update the stored model of the User's brain when they transit back to the real world to reflect the experiences they had on the Grid. If it didn't, they wouldn't remember anything that happened there once they left.

Programs, like Users, apparently possess conscious minds on the Grid. In the case of the ISOs in particular - free-willed entities without a hard-coded purpose - their minds seem extremely close to human. Sufficiently so that I have no problem with the idea of the portal mapping algorithms parsing that abstract model and generating a functioning physical brain model from it.

The problems begin when we start talking about bodies.

We know that programs on the Grid aren't physically modeled like Users, Quorra included. Even if we assume a User's physical body is digitally abstracted from the scanning data as well, there's clearly a lot more being simulated internally - the fact that Sam bleeds on the Grid is very telling. Programs don't bleed, or suffer from blood loss, or even seem to have any sort of functional innards based on what we've seen. They're walking, talking avatars made of glassy voxels that shatter when they take too much damage. And that's a good thing, because trying to simulate the complex biochemical interactions constantly going on in humans for every program on the Grid would be hugely prohibitive in terms of memory overhead and CPU use. Abstracting the physical on the Grid is the smart way to go.

This creates headaches, though. If programs aren't physically simulated like Users, what does the portal software have to work from? With Users, there's that scanned template to rebuild the body from, which is what the portal's designed to work with. Update the "brain" of the template when it leaves so that it has memories of the experience, then reconstruct it in the real world. Boom, done. For a program, it's basically being asked to create a living body from whole cloth, based on nothing but their physical appearance on the Grid (if that). That's where my suspension of disbelief starts to founder. I can accept the idea of generating a working human neural configuration out of abstract program data because it's arguably necessary just to make the Grid work in the first place. But now we're talking about a magic box that lets you feed computer programs into one end and have living breathing people pop out of the other, scratch-built to spec, by a system that was never really designed for that. A tape recorder can store music and sounds and play them back; it's not made to generate music. And the laser, like a tape recorder, was originally designed to record something - in this case, a physical image of a User - and play that back.

(The more I think about this, the more I think Flynn would have had to have something like a leashed, lobotomized MCP running things at the OS level to make any of this function at all.)

I can work around these issues in my head, but nothing I've come up with feels particularly satisfying.

emdeesee Wrote:Thematically, it weakens the finale, when Quorra feels the wind on her face and the sun on her skin. There's power in that scene because of Quorra's physical presence to have these new experiences. That power would be lost if the experiences were mediated through Sam's physicality. (As much as I find issues in the end of Legacy, I think that's a great scene.)

It's a great image, and I really like it on that level. Sadly, it also creates some serious issues for me. I can't help but think that the writers liked that ending so much that they decided to throw plausibility to the wind. 'Erm... um... if people can go in, programs can come out! Yeah, that's it. Now check out this ending! Isn't it awesome?!' Rule of Cool alone isn't enough to carry that ending, IMO. Especially not given the can of worms it opens.

How does the laser get your consciousness anyway? Especially without being hardwired in? I could see it if you were sitting in a chair wearing some sort of VR helmet that could read your brain waves, etc. (a la The Matrix, sorta, actually) but to do it just by breaking down your *physical* matter with a laser beam? I dunno about you, but my brain's not Bluetooth-enabled... (are we now getting too far into the "what constitutes a person's identity/personality/soul" thing?)

Good points both. I guess the MCP didn't just delete Flynn because his core routines were programmed around a game and thus why he did what he did.

Hmmm ok so the grid is a 3d environment that loads the 'user model' and issues an initialize command to. The model itself is fully encapsulated running its own 'unique' code (we can't think too hard on this otherwise the whole movie premise falls apart). Thus when the laser prints out the template, it contains the current state of the model which contains the new experiences which is why they remember their grid experience.

Does that work?

Argent Wrote: I'm guessing that after the events of the original Tron, one of the main things Flynn set out to do when creating the Grid was to reliably reproduce whatever method the MCP had used on the Encom system to allow him to remember his visit when he was reassembled in the real world afterwards.

Here's an interesting thought. Flynn was the first man to get inside the ENCOM grid in 1982, thanks to the MCP when he should'nt have. In a way the MCP made a huge mistake in digitizing Flynn into his world because Users can't die in there (metaphysically, maybe).

When he got to the MCP and jumped into Big Mr. Kool Aid Man's head (. . .now I think of it. why did'nt they do a commercial Kool-Aid Man as MCP back in '82 to promote the product?), he returned back to the real world.

Now, the MCP was alive and actively using the Digitizer on Flynn, but if he got shut down, how can he actively zap Flynn back without any access to the device?

When Lora used an orange to zap it in and out, did the MCP see the orange in front of his face or did it land into 'welcoming center' where Flynn arrived OR what? I'm sure the red guards probably got confused and said to Sark, "Well, we saw this orange like ball in that room but it disappeared on us. Looked like a glitch, maybe?".

The point is that after he returned to the real world, he probably had some PTSD for a long time, not willing to tell anyone about his unique experience. It shook him up for sure and I think over time, he wondered about his digital friends and had a sense of kinship for them. He wanted to see how they were doing, but he could'nt just get inside ENCOM.

So I think he missed that world and developed his own Grid at the arcade lab to ensure that no one hacks into it, especially knowing that it can fall victim to corporate sabotage from rivals. He had to build it from scratch as if it was his own "Sim City" to play with.

In a sense it was Flynn's "Sim City in the Grid". A digital playground until he realized that it was the ultimate research lab to conduct studies but in the same time, I think he got addicted to it, losing sense of time, and ultimately losing control of managing his life at work, his family, and so on. In fact, I think when his wife died, this is what triggered him to be a bit more of a recluse and wanting to escape away from the real world to cope with his wife's passing.

But would she have known about his digital experiences, if he was able to confide in her? It was implied she died in a car accident (comic book), but not in the film. My take is that, coming from the Marvel 2-parter comic, when Flynn gave his wife a 'brick cell phone' to call him in case of anything. It is possible that when CLU got the phone number, seeing it display in front of him during the page, he must've used it AFTER Sam was born.

The phone call probably distracted her while she was driving with that brick phone. That's my theory. I know the lack of explanation from the film is a bit lazy on the writers' part but it would've been very interesting had they provided some detail to it in connection to the story.

So again, in '82, he develops PTSD from having visited the ENCOM grid. I would if that happened to me and would've visited it again if I wanted to hide away from the real world from creditors, cops, negative people, and so on.

It's like someone in a village, say in Ireland, going off into the woods and meeting fairies for real. The experience would shake him or her off. Once back to the village, that person will be thinking long about that woodland adventure and make an attempt to return back there to see if they're still there.