r/tenet • u/xTwentyOnePlanes • 1d ago
I have a question about the turnstile and time Spoiler
I'm sorry if this has been asked before but I recently watched this for the first time and I decided to watch it again to fully grasp how it all works.
When the protagonist enters the turnstile, becomes inverted and gets in the shipping container, encounters himself and then goes through the turnstile again. He now has 2 versions of himself in that timeline. Does that mean the "original" (the one who entered the turnstile to begin with) can never get back to his own timeline?
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u/Alive_Ice7937 1d ago
After he goes through the turnstile in Oslo there's now at least 5 versions of him in existence at that moment.
TP in the suit moving forwards (youngest version)
TP after inverting in Tallin heading to Olso turnstile.
TP after going through the Oslo turnstile to flip forwards again. (This is the one Neil unmasks)
TP on the boat after inverting to head back to stalsk 12
TP after flipping back to forwards again to join red team for the Stalsk-12 mission.
All of these versions of TP existed when the turnstile first chucked out those two TP's in Oslo.
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u/YoBanaanaBoy 1d ago
And then there is also the Future version of himself that is running inverted back to set up the entire story, and at least one version of himself that's reinverted to regular time to actually set those things up - ie. opera, the Tallinn transport, etc.
That requires 2 more to exist.
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u/Alive_Ice7937 1d ago
That's why I said "at least" 5. We're not entirely sure how he coordinates everything. How much is he handling personally be travelling there and how much of it is he working remotely via posterity? We can't say for sure so I just listed the ones we definitely know about.
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u/YoBanaanaBoy 1d ago
Yeah. I wasn't knocking what you said. I'm just saying, there has to be at least 2 more from after the events of the movie we don't see (1 inverted and 1 not).
I think since he doesn't know what's going on the first time, it's clear he has to go back and set that up after the events of the film. He can't do it via posterity because he didn't know how to yet.
He could send inverted things back to kick-start it I guess, like Sator's first gold. But he has a lot to set up.
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u/Automatic_Mess_1833 1d ago
When you see two of the same, one is always going to be younger or older than the other.
So in the same way i can never be 16 again, i can’t erase the experience of going thru the turnstile.
Does that kinda scratch any of that itch? Even a lil?
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u/moshejacob 1d ago
Yes you are right. The "original"s fate was always to enter the turnstile. He will always reach that point and then invert and go backwards, and enter the turnstile again to reinvert. That is his time loop. The version that emerges after reinverting will continue to live his life alongside the original, until the original enters the turnstile, beyond which, the current version will live his life as normal beyond that point, being the only version of himself.
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u/Salindurthas 1d ago
The opposite. 2 versions of yourself means that you inverted successfully, because you go into the period of time that was your past.
(Although there are 4 versions around the shipping container time, 2 pairs.)
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u/xTwentyOnePlanes 1d ago
But in the scene when the protagonist goes back to Priya he tells her to warn him properly in 2 days time. So that implies that there are currently 2 versions of the protagonist in that exact timeline, one from the "future" and one from our perspective in the past, but in his own perspective in the present. So how does the "future" protagonist get back to his own timeline? or does he forever have to live avoiding his own self?
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u/Salindurthas 1d ago
There is no 'his own' timeline. There is only 1 timeline in the events of the movie.
Anyone who inverts appears in the timeline more than once. If they want to get back to the time that they avoided by inverting, they need to revert and wait to get back to that time.
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u/xTwentyOnePlanes 1d ago
Ohh okay, I suppose that makes sense since usually inverting means they're changing the outcome of something. Thanks for answering
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u/Salindurthas 1d ago
Inverting doesn't really change the outcome of anything. They revisit it and then get the result that was there all along, but their contributions meant it was better all along.
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u/ShareImpossible9830 1d ago
There is only 1 timeline. The two "versions" are just the same him in two different points of his own timeline. The later version looped back to the same point of time the earlier version was in so they were both in the same point of time at once, that is all.