Simon who pats the SM-13 like its a good dog and talks to it, Simon who has a respect for it and regrets when he lashes out at it. Simon who was raised in a space station, where the only thing between him and certain painful death in the void of space is a slowly decaying machine, and thus knows to keep machines well tended and maintained. Simon who has no virtual assistants to talk to anymore, because they had to gut the ships for other uses, but knows it has a soul anyway. Simon who may not understand the systems but does not underestimate them or meddle with them carelessly.
Grace who calls the ship "Mary", and talks to it like a fellow person because for weeks, she was his only companion. Grace who pats the beetles goodbye and high-fives his xenonite miniature before sending them home. Grace who, like anyone with lab experience, has his own rituals because he knows what it's like to have a temperamental centrifuge in the college lab, or a server that must not crash until the simulations are done so you leave a bag of candy over it as an offering. Grace who has small supersticions and is still a deeply scientific person, and that is not a contradiction.
Simon and Grace who anthropomorphise ships and machines like sailors to their boats and gearheads for their bikes and cars. Simon and Grace who get annoyed when equipment doesn't work as intended like a difficult coworker. Simon and Grace who give life to unliving things because it's so deeply human to do.
i don't care what you say, that's AT LEAST a few bruised ribs, but probably they are actually cracked. he fell a couple meters and landed straight on that wall edge like holy shit?? and of course the concussion, can't forget the concussion. massive back bruises for proof, not that we needed any more.
lightened the screenshot a bit, but you can just barely see the tape X on the chair hinge here
Simon-shaped dent on the wall, Y I K E S
that COI badge on the lifesaver is actually hilarious, and the cursive 2 on the canister is cute. cursive lives in scifi dystopia world!!
that black line along the inseam tells me they had to take out the pants to fit Simon. probably a refitting to keep using the item, or he grew past them and needed the adjustment. fitting! also random bit of string on this right leg, not sure why.
the proud little smile when the spit idea worked!!
the frames from the post-shadowman spark btw. it actually shows the engine restart for a single frame, nice and clear! voltage irregularities save the day??
for those who don't know, that's subsistence calories. people need somewhere between 1,800-3,000 a day (depending on multiple factors) so even eating this whole thing, he would still be hungry for most of the movie runtime.
self-correction: i thought they had xeroxed the page with the missing piece to cover their ass, but nope, the paper was just torn after all. my baaad!
that's some really clean lines, both on the actual lines and on the paper trimming. wonder if he used the edges of the folios instead of a ruler?
Xs, xs, x marks the spot. how often will they haunt us....
so here's the thing about tape. if whatever you're trying to stick it to is too hot or wet or both, then it just won't stick. and we know it's hot inside the sub for many reasons, and some of the metal is steaming hot. it's a simpler and lamer reason than "shadowman did it" but, Occam's razor.
a few more shots of the knife holster. on the first one you can see there are faint brownish discolorations on it! it's not just a play of the light, the black dye of the leather has faded a bit from time and wear!
i also spotted a metal eyelet on the cowl, could be from a piece of sleeve or jacket.
also this scene sort of establishes that the sub needs to be out of the red on the depth meter to receive proper radio signal.
considering that radio is an electromagnetic wave (a type of radiation), than that could be a hint of how much radiation absorption the blood ocean is capable of. or that their radio equipment is shitty. maybe both!
just a nice view of the pendant here! also i think it's meaningful that we get this close-up of the seed just before Simon apologizes again for the xray incident.
i do love the framing on this scene. the radio often is shown from above because that's how it's placed, but the way they also frame Simon here really accentuates it. Simon is realizing his time in the sub might be done, but also that he fucked up real bad and they might just kill him the moment they open up the sub again. the way he talks and emotes makes him look like a kid gauging just how bad of a time he's gonna have once his parents are home or smth. he's literally two apples tall here.
love the little halo of items Simon's got going around the control console by this point. not messy, just lived in <3
oh, our little merry band of brothers. the raw screenshot and an edited version where i brightened and adjusted the colors a bit so we can see them better.
even early in the post-Rapture, we're all rocking the Matrix Zion collection. also you can see Simon already has the knife holster on him.
Iron Lung Details: The Dream Sequence and Filament Station
okay so I wanna go through the entire thing and go through possible interpretations, and you all are coming along with me! [picks you up like a mii and drags you down into the read more]
SPOILERS BELOW, LONG POST
First things first, let's go over the Whole Thing.
SECTION 1: Simon stares at his bloody hands, as a kid (you can tell by the sleeves). Cut to him surrounded by bodies. Adjusting the image brightness, you can see they are the same kids from the Grove scene earlier. Then his adult hands, also bloody.
SECTION 2: A short scene of a woman (we infer it's his mother) handing him the knife holster, WITH a knife on it. It's notable that we don't see an actual knife anywhere else in the movie, only the holster.
SECTION 3: I gifed this part because the camera work is important. the other sections were in clean cuts and static cameras, but not this one. The camera turns locked to Simon's dazed face. One of the kids, calls to him from behind. He turns, and now it's an adult voice shouting at him to "don't just stand there, do something!" It's a grown man now. A great wall of fire from an explosion burns through the hallway and consumes the man.
Sequence ends and we're back in going-around-in-circles land.
Now, to the speculations. I want to point out that I will raise a number of possibilities here, and how they can work together. As for my own personal interpretation, I'll get to it in another post, so this one can be used as reference and for lore-buiding purposes.
Being a dream, we can't take everything literally. Simon is already losing track of time and the order of events in the real world, and dreams are naturally murky. This does however establishes a few things.
The first section it's pretty cut and dry. Simon has had blood on his hands since he was young, and he feels to blame for what happened to his brothers and Eden. People he was close to are dead, or he believes they are, and he believes it's his fault. It serves as foundation for the other sections.
For his mother giving him the knife, we do not know the exact purpose or intent behind it. It could have been an innocent handing down of an heirloom, or something for him to protect himself, since he's had the holster prior to the Quiet Rapture. We do not know when Eden took the turn into the death cult route, it could have been before the Rapture or immediately after.
Regardless, I'm not entirely comfortable assigning the handing of the knife as entirely cult behavior. Not to say Simon's mother is some naive angel here, she did hand a combat knife to her son at a very young age and he wears it prominently. Not on his belt or boot, but on his shoulder. It's a combat-ready positioning for a dagger. It implies that if this did come prior to the Rapture, the Mars colonies weren't peaceful to begin with and prepared its people for violence since youth. By that metric, turning into a violent death cult isn't that big of a jump.
For the hallway scene. It's hard to see, but this kid has blonde hair and black straps on his outfit, meaning it's the Brother on the far left of the Grove scene. Let's call him Second Brother. The way he's almost as scene-forward as Simon in the group, could imply a few things:
They are of similar age;
They are of similar importance to Father;
They are both high in the hierarchy of the group, possibly leaders;
They were close to each other;
The way Second Brother melts into the Adult Brother heavily implies they are the same person. If we assume they are, then Simon did NOT kill his brothers as children, otherwise they couldn't have grown up to haunt him in his dream. The dead children scene is then metaphorical, he blames himself for their deaths and it taints his memories of their youth.
That said, let's consider the option that he did literally kill them, directly or not. The Adult Brother then is someone he views similarly as Second Brother, either in rank or in closeness. Someone he also killed, even if indirectly since it's heavily implied his inactions are to blame for the death of the Adult Brother.
Now, that somewhat contradicts Simon's later recounting of events, but lets put down what we can somewhat safely assume:
Second Brother and Adult Brother were very important to Simon;
They are dead or Simon believes they are;
They were involved in the attack on Filament Station.
I've also considered if the Adult could have been COI instead, but there's no badge on him, and we know COI loves their badges.
To what this offers in context to the next reveals is very interesting. Simon's short loredumps of the Filament Station make for some interesting stuff.
When talking to the Voice/Elli, he shows some disregard for life and survival. Everything is gone and there's no bouncing back from the Quiet Rapture, so why does anyone care if a station and several people are also gone? Who cares about who dies and who lives, if everyone is not going to make it anyway? That is death cult mentality, and clearly a frustrated coping mentality to Elli's accusing words, "maybe you do deserve this." He's taking up Eden's defeatism as an emotional clapback to his own guilt, it's angry and reflexive. He also says:
"I didn't blow up Filament Station, but the ones who did aren't getting pusnihed. I just drew the short straw, and then I traded one fancy metal box to die in for another, while people I thought were my brothers abandoned me!"
Later when pleading with Ava for a rescue, he says:
"I had nothing to do with Filament Station, I swear! That wasn't part of the plan. They didn't listen to me."
Then during the trip back to the SM-8, we hear Ava recounting that "62 others didn't make it out of Filament Station, and no that doesn't include your compatriots."
Another voice right after says "Leave him, we're all dead anyway."
Then TGWTYCW's voice says "You're going to have to kill your own brothers to stop this", claiming they are Simon's words, not his.
Now there's some layers to explore here.
Simon's brothers ditched him at some point during the attack and that's when Simon surrendered. Whether they died or not is a bit up in the air. Ava's words could either mean they weren't in the body count because they escaped, or because they only counted COI members. They assumed they were all going to die because they settled on exploding the station with them inside, or they said this because that's just the mentality of Eden soldiers. Whatever happens, they weren't making it back to Eden.
When Simon says "the ones who did aren't getting punished", it could be a point towards the 'Brothers escaped alive' scoreboard, but Simon could also be talking about the Father and whoever else higher in the command chain decided to blow it up. It could also mean that his brothers got to die in a blazer of glory, thus avoiding any repercussions for their deeds, while he got the "short straw" of going through Convict Realization. The abandonment trauma can have many layers to it.
Simon saying "that wasn't part of the plan", he could have easily been kept out of the loop and the plan was always to blow the station up. However given that the conflict lasted several days, this could have probably been a last ditch effort to grab some pyrrhic victory and Simon was against it.
If we take this route, then the news probably blindsided him and it reflects on the section 3 of the dream sequence. He found out, was paralized by the realization that to stop it from happening, he'd have to kill the people he was closest to. He lost his nerve, and the explosion happened before he could do anything about it.
For how section 1 reflects this, is a bit murky.
Simon feels guilt about all the blood on his hands, especially that of his brothers. This feels like a score for 'Brothers died in Filament' but this could also be that those brothers he knew as a child are metaphorically dead. They are 'dead' to him for having abandoned him, for not listening to him and breaking his trust. It can also be a metaphorical blame, he 'killed' them by not agreeing to the plan and staying by their side. He betrayed them first by faltering and then surrendering.
This is as far as I can push the speculations here, but I hope this was useful insight!
I won't pick apart a possible timeline of events on the fall of Filament Station, but I'll go over my interpretation of things:
Simon was primed for violence by his mother from an early age, something he honed and leaned into as he grew up;
The Butcher moniker was given to him in Eden, possbily by his brothers, not by COI;
He was closest to Second Brother among his peers, and they were both part of the attack on Filament Station;
Second Brother confronted him when Simon was paralized by the plan to destroy the Station, probably during a skirmish;
When bid to "do something", Simon surrendered instead of continuing to attack, and his brothers ditched him instead of joining him or fighting to protect him from arrest;
Being arrested, Simon was unable to stop the plan to destroy the Station;
The fate of his brothers is unknown to him, but he assumes they are dead;
Simon has some very complex feelings about all this, and this are some of them:
He feels betrayed and abandoned by his brothers for not listening or trusting him;
He grieves for his role in Filament Station, and the deaths of his brothers and the station crew;
He resents his brothers and the rest of Eden for giving up and not wanting to fight for survival anymore;
He also resents himself for wanting to live despite having to survive in a hopeless world;
having thoughts about Simon's mom and Ava. also Ellie.
His mother is the promise of a knife, it's having to join a cult because she decide it would be best, but it's also the warning in his head about the looming threat he can't see.
And that warning is woven together with Ava's precious few instructions before he enters the sub. Ava who never wanted to do this (deal with Simon, make use of him) but is more merciful to him in the end, and that mercy is almost cruel.
Are you really being kind by letting a convict live, when the way they can make amends is to put that very life at risk? Are you really doing the best for your son by teaching him violence at a young age, bringing him into a cult just because they have a tree?
Likewise, is it a kindness to show Simon the Light? Is it better to bring Simon into the blood, or to let him die as a man? How much salvation is it really?
i need to cook this more but there's some themes around womanhood and cruel acts of salvation that I wanna get into eventually.
I'm taking the fine tooth comb to this shit cus Mark said nobody spotted any secrets on it so, let's see what we can scoop up! I'm starting from the moment Simon leaves the crawl space after restarting the sub engines until contact with the Voice.
Part 1
Yknow the drill, image heavy so get readmore'd!
We see him use the paper strip for I assume, measuring out the map scale onto the paper. Which is funny cus, he'd have measured them out while making the lines instead, not now? But maybe just a bit of extra double checking, who knows!
This bit of continuity kills me in the best way. When we see the eye in the porthole, the Eel moves over the sub towards the back of it and we don't hear from it again. Until now. Simon is doing a 360 of where he is, and when he turns backwards and takes the shot, he finds the Eel. She's been sitting there behind the sub staring since she moved!
And of course she moves again to leave, causing the sub to tremble. Simon introduces himself and we get this combo which feels rather poignant. Are Xs tied to survival, or resilience? Let's keep track for later.
Somebody please tell Simon that if he wants to maximize the strenght of the tape, then he needs to NOT do this TAT Given his reaction and the mound of wasted tape on the floor, he's been trying to crack this for a while.
Given the expansion on the earlier map, he's been driving for a while now. Probably got fed up with stopping all the time to check for walls and map out the environment. Also in comparison to his earlier driving attempts, he's been moving in longer, more confident strides.
Current coordinates: 927, 802
It's also worth noting that the shots have significatly gone wider. We see more of the ship overall, there are slightly less close-ups, and the shadows don't seem as opressive and limiting. Compare these two shots from before and after the stranding.
It matches the shift in Simon's mentality, he's no longer detached from the sub and seeing as just another prison, a tool to be used as quickly as possible and then be freed of it. The sub is now his domain for as long as he needs to survive, the awareness of the camera matches his awareness of the sub's space and mechanisms. He knows this place now, and he'll make use of it as much as possible.
He gives up on the tape (or more acurately, runs out of it) and puts his trust on the sub's proximity radar. The music picks up, and the shots get cut faster to show how anxious he's getting. His mind wanders to all the other things he could be doing rather than being sat driving, and he snaps to attention when the proximity bleeps so he doesn't crash. Both times, he almost looks sheepish in a "yeah that was a close one" way.
He needs to keep track of his positioning, so he places one of the folios on the forward throtle and heads over to the map to update it.
I also noticed this dent on the ship panel. From an earlier shot, this is post-stranding, so it's likely this is damage from one of the Eel's teeth when she dragged him to the cave system.
Simon's face at the alien bullshit will never NOT be funny. We also see that at this point, the bandages are starting to get bled through which is kind of wild for a scrape injury. Even with constant movement the bleeding wouldn't be bad enough for this, especially since it's a pretty thick bandage coverage. It makes me wonder if the mutations had already begun even back then.
Current coordinates: 939, 854
Navigation continues and we reach the in-the-zone section of it. We see the depth meter dipping further as he travels. Boredom and exhaustion are setting in. We also see how much he's used the stick so far, as the bend is far closer to his grip than before and the tip is well-rounded.
I LOVE that in some shots we get a full view of the x-ray photos and they seem to cave into themselves. We're in Simon's POV as the pictures stop being flat objects but rather actual, tridimensional, visualized space. There's no middle ground between him and his understanding of the geography anymore, he might as well be looking through a window. The camera might as well be his eyesight.
Current coordinates: 899, 824
The camera goes off while he's sitting on the console. Remember there is no tape, Simon is losing track of time and order of events. The action of going to the button and back is being omitted in his perception.
We get a sudden cut from him holding the throttle forward (something he's already figured out how to avoid doing by using the folio) to him sitting at the console, staring at nothing, before he shakes himself and seems to realize he's drifted off-task. His breathing is weary. His line are growing curved, tilted like his perception. The camera is bobbing from side to side like a head heavy with sleep.
Current coordinates: 704, 678
Simon begins to drift asleep, and we get the Dream Sequence. I've gone over it on another post so I'll omit it here. I will say, there's an almost subtle smile on his face as he drifts off.
We cut right back into it and the music picks up again. Simon almost crashes into something, and that's where he finds the SM-8, and the computer connects with the black box.
While he does, the console bottom panel spits out some sort of code, I have no idea if it means anything or if it's that legible but here are some frames if you feel like giving it a go?
He goes through the photos his own sub took, only now seeming to realize the freaky shit on some of the images. Apparently he was way too out of it to see anything but the path ahead, or he might have taken the pictures and not looked at them for some reason or another.
Current coordinates: 725, 501
He's gone in a circle. Worth noting, his depth meter shows him some notches higher than the last time we've seen it before. Also, another dent on the opposite wall. A few scenes after, it's gone back down again. Continuity error? Simon's perception being weird again? Who knows.
Also, another dent on the opposite wall.
When Simon takes the other tunnel, we get another view on the depth meter and see it go up about halfway into the red, when the Voice starts to static in through the radio. It's been shown before that he need to be barely in the red for signal to be clear, so that's already a foreshadowing the radio shouldn't be working besides the bonkage.
