Please be kind, rewind
Interstellar, time loops, Will’s vanishing, and… flickergate?
The duffers admitted to have been inspired by Christopher Nolan in s2 (his movie The Dark Knight). In the s4 inspiration board, The Dark Knight appears again. Christopher Nolan’s most famous film is not The Dark Knight, but Interstellar. You know, the one with time loops, time travel, and a “oh lord, it was right in front of me this whole time, it had been him since the start” moment.
I need to start putting spoiler warnings, so, spoilers ahead.
The movie is about Joseph Cooper, who lives in a futuristic world where humanity fears extinction because of dust storms and crop blights. He works on a farm with his children and wife, and even tho he used to be an astronaut, he retired from it. So, when his daughter notices weird patterns caused by the sand in her room (like, very unusual and unnatural), he notices it’s binary code and decides to translate it into geographic coordinates, which takes them to a secret NASA facility. Normal.
(Doesn’t it kinda remind you of the cali plot, with Will, Mike, Jonathan, and Argyle trying to find NINA through coordinates?)
The head of the facility tells them about a wormhole that appeared near Saturn 48 years prior, which lead to another galaxy, which could have habitable planets (for humanity to move into, since earth was practically killing them). Other astronauts went there to investigate and all went well, so our guy Joseph decides he’ll get back to work and do it. After all, he would help save humanity.
His daughter isn’t happy about this and she’s scared of him going, but he goes anyway (despite the fact that he hates to leave her). She doesn’t even tell him goodbye, because she’s mad and hurt and she’s just a child. He leaves her a wristwatch, so that when he comes back they could compare the time in her watch vs his, since in space it works differently.
While in space, Joseph receives videos and messages from his family, and he sees them grow up, get married, etc, while time for him goes so slowly he doesn’t age and doesn’t feel the years pass. A bunch of things happen that aren’t relevant to this post, and eventually Joseph finds himself (while on space) in a tesseract, which looks like a bookshelf, and he realizes it’s the same bookshelf as the one his daughter had in her room, but that there are multiple timelines. Through the tesseract, he can communicate with his daughter. His daughter from the past. The weird patterns in the sand were made by him, in the future. He was trying to communicate with her, and with his past self, to tell him to not go on the mission, since it was doomed since the start.
His daughter figures it out, once she’s an adult. He tells her through Morse code by moving the wristwatch he gave her (which she always held on to, because she loves her dad). He says “STAY”, trying to get his past self to stay. Eventually he makes the patterns in the sand, since he knows he can’t change the past (that would be a paradox, since if he never went to space, he wouldn’t even arrived to the tesseract so HOW could he communicate from there).
Other things happen, like Joseph and his daughter eventually reuniting, while he is the same age as he was before he left while she’s an old lady, but let’s leave it here.
Ok don’t go so fast. What?
Well, I’m just saying it wouldn’t be the first time a fictional character tries to send a message to their past selves (or past versions of people they know). We have Joseph Cooper as an example. To not even mention Back to The Future, see picture above. That’s Marty McFly, our time-traveling friend, time traveling and seeing himself just before he time travelled for the first time. It also resembles the scene of Joseph seeing himself in the past through the bookshelf. And it also resembles that strange and unexplained picture of Will, on the night he vanished, looking into the glowing shed? For some reason? Seeing himself get kidnapped, apparently.
Let’s look at them again
They’re so similar, it’s insane. And I’m also gonna go and add some twin peaks similarities, with Mike being present at the time of Laura’s (who Will is paralleled to) death (which happened inside a shed), trying to stop it (and being unsuccessful).
(I think Will could time travel back in time (either alone or with company) to try to stop his disappearance, and while watching it he will be surprised (since his memories of the ud are fuzzy, and those of his vanishing probably are aswell), because it was a Vecna vision! Ok that’s my theory, it could very well not be, but whether it was a demogorgon, Vecna, Vecna making himself look like Lonnie, Lonnie, the lab, a Vecna vision, or whatever, the audience will FINALLY KNOW and it will be the reveal.)
(And of course, Will will be unable to stop his disappearance since it was always meant to happen etc. And also because maybe his disappearance was the best possible outcome, and Vecna was saving him from something even worse smth smth he wants to kill everyone but me (ok this is also one of my theories))
There are some dialogue in the movie that made me go 🤨🤨
The bridge. You mean like this bridge?
And, when TARS (his robot friend) asks him how he’s going to communicate with his daughter, he says
And then he realizes he can tell her through the watch, in Morse code.
Love is the key. Key. Like this key?
Love is the key to communication. Something something, the only part of Will’s body he could control while deep into his possession was the hand that Mike held, and through it he managed to communicate in Morse code. Or, you know, whatever.
Personally, I don’t believe in flickergate. It’s very fun and I definitely will be very happy if it happens, but I don’t think so. However, I do support the idea of someone (likely Will) in the ud in s5 trying to communicate with the past (and likely succeeding, even if the past characters don’t notice/understand). Maybe through light flickers, who knows. However, interstellar gives flickergate a little basis to stand on (as long as the flicker was intentional, and they were intentionally trying to communicate with past Mike and Will, trying to stop Will from going home, aka: STAY (which is what Joseph sends his daughter through Morse code, before realizing it’s futile, it was always going to happen)
(@bugssavetheworld)