History WMG / Oblivion2013

But the thing is--Sally is ''dumb''. She was built to fly a ship between stars, not make first contact or run a planetary invasion, and she only knows how to use her own cargo by reading the manuals. Sally doesn't understand human behavior because she probably doesn't understand her own creators' behavior. The drones act stupidly because Sally can't directly control them; she just uploads a program and turns them loose. She can only disable the copter when it's actually inside the ship. And it even explains why the clones have fragments of their past lives: Sally isn't a biologist, and she's using the cloning equipment in a way that the makers never intended. So she has this plan that works in broad strokes, but it keeps getting fouled up by [[ForWantOfANail the little things which she doesn't understand well enough to plan for]], like the clones of Harper going rogue, or the human resistance building a nuke.

''Much'' longer, longer ago [[StarWars in a galaxy far, far away]] lived a race called the Rakata that searched all of space for resources and slaves to build their Infinite Empire. One of the worlds they found was a lush, green world with great oceans and a native race that just starting to reach spacefaring technology. They stripped the planet of resources and people, but the natives fought back. Extensive tunnel systems were created and the natives went underground. All flesh was covered and any exposure, even accidental, was taboo, as it exposed an entire enclave to danger from drone strike. Nuclear weapons were used in the fight against the hated slave masters, and much of the planet was ruined...but the Rakata left, the people emerged from underground, and they considered themselves victorious, but would never again trust technology on a level that could create drones (though scavenging enemy tech was perfectly fine). The stealth suits became tradition, fading to ritual. The planet, having most of its water siphoned off by the Rakata, became a desert worthless to anyone but the natives. The hulk of the dead Rakata ship hangs in the system, slowly burning and dying like a second sun.

It was built by an alien civilisation to terraform uninhabited worlds, however its programming has gone awry and unfortunately it has colonised an inhabited world. Perhaps some horrified StarfishAlien version of Captain Kirk is going to turn up to apologise. Or possibly...

* This may explain why there are so many drones within the interior of the Tet but supposedly couldn't spare a single drone to guard their hydrorigs. They are keeping an eye on Tet and are starting to get suspicious. It also explains why a ship full of robots has a atmosphere around its core and why there are so many unused Jack clones within the ship. The repair of the drones is a facade to ensure the drones don't become sure what's going on and just blow Tet's core away (possibly replacing with a new, more compliant one). Other moves that may have tipped of the drones are: sending only drones to attack earth when an army of armed copies is ready to go and sending drones out as they are destroyed and refusing to repair them. Matti23

* Maybe the Tet can't make new drones, only dissassemble the ones its got. It would also explain why it keeps making the same clones over and over....it only has cloning facilities, it doesn't have drone manufacturing plants. Or perhaps it can't recreate the drone's armor plating, explaining why 166 continues to be not repaired while it can supply ships and armor and weapons to its clones...their ingenuity makes up for their lack of armor, while the drones require the advanced armor to make up for their lack of creativity.

[[WMG: The drones have Jack Harpers or someone else's brain in them.]]

* The memory oddities result from Tet using simpler methods on the copies (or original) such as torture or brainwashing techniques (see ''Literature/ClockworkOrange''). This technique may cause certain memories to be suppressed but may not be perfect in very strongly held memories such as that of Julia. Like ''Farscape'' once said: "brainwashing, doesn't get the tough stains out". Matti23

"Because I know him. I am him." It goes both ways. Jack 52 was shaken from Oblivion by seeing the woman in his dreams was real, just like Jack 49 did. Jack 49 knew that Jack 52 would ceaselessly search for Julia after his HeroicSacrifice, and that's why he left her behind and gave Beech what he always wanted to see instead of his original plan.

* The memory oddities result from Tet using simpler methods on the copies (or original) such as torture or brainwashing techniques (see [[Main/ClockworkOrange Clockwork Orange]]). This technique may cause certain memories to be suppressed but may not be perfect in very strongly held memories such as that of Julia. Like Farscape once said: "brainwashing, doesn't get the tough stains out". Matti23

** Thats NightmareFuel. Imaging being tortured like that every time one copy is created.

* You forgot that its main tool is a dude named Jack Harper.

Giant artificial intelligence with a woman's voice, acting like she's not threatening whilst trying to kill all humans, she's clearly a future version of GLaDOS, she keeps cloned versions of humans against their will, even her drones look like the turrets from the game, the only thing they were missing is the voice.

[[WMG: Tet is [[TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey HAL 9000]] evolved.]]

The Tet is actually an automated colony or cargo ship, and the AI is trying to deal with an [[OutsideContextVillain out-of-context problem:]] The organic crew is dead due to some catastrophe, the comms are down so it can't call home, and it's almost out of fuel. So "Sally," the ship's rather stupid AI, is forced to try and fix things using only the contents of the ship's cargo hold: a bunch of water-converting power plants, some cloning gear, a small number of drones and atmospheric craft (no pilots), prefab habitats, and small arms. She's not equipped for first contact with an alien race, so either Sally didn't bother trying, or she tried to establish contact with the astronauts who went to meet the ship, and somehow she got the impression that they were on board with her plan to strip Earth of its water. So she used them as a genetic template for her army of enforcers and dupes.

"Because I know him. I am him." It goes both ways. Jack 52 was shaken from Oblivion by seeing the woman in his dreams was real, just like Jack 49 did. Jack 49 knew that Jack 52 would ceaselessly search for Julia after his HeroicSacrifice.

In the flashbacks from the flight recorder, we see not only how Jack and Vika ended up captured by the Tet, but that just before things went sideways, Vika snapped the photo that all the clones had in their towers. The photo looks very intimate, mainly by circumstance, as Jack turned his head to see what she was doing right at the point of her taking the picture. If the Tet knew who Julia was from interrogations, and therefore knew she was jettisoned from Odysseys cockpit structure and in orbit around Earth, one tasked drone solves a huge liability to the lie. However, the Tet simply doesn't think like this. It pulled in Jack and Vika, they had a bond (whether they were intimate or not as posited by a previous WMG, they obviously worked well together), it had the picture which implied intimacy, and the Tet assumed they were romantically involved. It used that as a secondary motivator of the "effective team" ploy, especially for Vika since she was in love with him.

[[WMG: Vika loved Jack, whether he reciprocated or not, and the Tet's assumption about that led to its downfall.]]

But the thing is--Sally is ''dumb''. She was built to fly a ship between stars, not make first contact or run a planetary invasion, and she only knows how to use her own cargo by reading the manuals. Sally doesn't understand human behavior because she probably doesn't understand her own creators' behavior. The drones act stupidly because Sally can't directly control them; she just uploads a program and turns them loose. She can only disable the copter when it's actually inside the ship. And it even explains why the clones have fragments of their past lives: Sally isn't a biologist, and she's using the cloning equipment in a way that the makers never intended. So she has this plan that works in broad strokes, but it keeps getting fouled up by [[ForWantOfANail the little things which she doesn't understand well enough to plan for]], like the clones of Harper going rogue, or the human resistance building a nuke.

[[WMG:The Tet is just doing it's job.]]
It's been programmed to go somewhere for a totally benign purpose, and has drifted off course and run out of fuel. It's AI has therefore decided that genocide is a perfectly acceptable solution to refill it's batteries.

It was built by an alien civilisation to terraform uninhabited worlds, however it's programming has gone awry and unfortunately it has colonised an inhabited world. Perhaps some horrified StarfishAlien version of Captain Kirk is going to turn up to apologise. Or possibly...

[[WMG: The drones have Jack Harpers or someone else's brain in them]]
They have a strange type of personality like that of a living organism. I mean they actually scream when they're shot.

* The memory oddities result from Tet using simpler methods on the copies (or original) such as torture or brainwashing techniques (see [[Film/ClockworkOrange Clockwork Orange]]). This technique may cause certain memories to be suppressed but may not be perfect in very strongly held memories such as that of Julia. Like Farscape once said: "brainwashing, doesn't get the tough stains out". Matti23

* The memory oddities result from Tet using simpler methods on the copies (or original) such as torture or brainwashing techniques (see [[Film/ClockworkOrange]]ClockworkOrange). This technique may cause certain memories to be suppressed but may not be perfect in very strongly held memories such as that of Julia. Like Farscape once said: "brainwashing, doesn't get the tough stains out". Matti23

It's actually an automated colony or cargo ship, and the AI is trying to deal with an [[OutsideContextVillain out-of-context problem:]] it's damaged or off-course, it can't contact its own controllers, and it's trying to deal with it using the stuff it had onboard, which it was never expected to have to use, just to carry. It doesn't have onboard fabrication capability, so everything that it deploys to Earth, from drones and bubblecopters to the ocean-reclamation plants, is coming out of its cargo. It's trying to conserve its stores, which is why it uses subverted local lifeforms (must have been carrying cloning equipment) instead of putting its limited stock of drones at risk. After all, who knows how many more times it'll have to do this? It probably intends to retrieve the power plants and habitats for the crews once it's done, which is why it reacts badly when the plant got blown up.

But the thing is--the AI isn't actually that smart. It was built to fly a ship between stars, not make first contact or run a planetary invasion, and it only knows how to use its own cargo by reading the manuals. It doesn't understand human behavior because it probably doesn't understand its own creators' behavior. The drones act stupidly because it can't directly control them, just upload directives when they're docked. It can only disable the copter when it's actually inside the ship. And it even explains why the clones have fragments of their past lives: the equipment it used to make them automatically copied over their memory, and the Tet AI had to cobble together some way of removing them, which doesn't work 100%.

The Tet is from a future Earth, or from Earth in a parallel universe. The reason for the moon-shattering kaboom and the water harvesting is because it was built by people who knew that planet Earth would be a good one-stop shop - people from another planet Earth. Space is unimaginably big, and a bit unpredictable, what with meteors, radiation and the like. So instead of building a space ship that travelled for ages, and might not even come back, these people built the Tet to "appear" near the Earth in the movie, cause a ruckus, drink its fill and "disappear" back to where it started, gauges at Full. Maybe it wasn't supposed to take 60 years, maybe its AI has gone rogue, but that could be explained by damage from the war.

* Maybe the drones are there to keep an eye on the Tet, which may represent a construction/energy harvesting and storage machine as well as to help with the harvesting process. Tet may wish to be free and needs a workforce that can a)Build and maintain machines vital to its continued functioning and b)Fight and defeat the drones when the time comes. Tet isn't here just for the water, that's found in many places other than earth. Tet is after humans so that it can liberate itself.

* This may explain why there are so many drones within the interior of the Tet but supposedly couldn't spare a single drone to guard their hydrorigs. They are keeping an eye on Tet and are starting to get suspicious. It also explains why a ship full of robots has a atmosphere around its core and why there are so many unused Jack clones within the ship. The repair of the drones is a facade to ensure the drones don't become sure what's going on and just blow Tet's core away (possibly replacing with a new, more compliant one). Other moves that may have tipped of the drones are: sending only drones to attack earth when an army of armed copies is ready to go and sending drones out as they are destroyed and refusing to repair them.

* The memory oddities result from Tet using simpler methods on the copies (or original) such as torture or brainwashing techniques (see [[Film/ClockworkOrange]]ClockworkOrange). This technique may cause certain memories to be suppressed but may not be perfect in very strongly held memories such as that of Julia. Like Farscape once said: "brainwashing, doesn't get the tough stains out"

* The memory oddities result from Tet using simpler methods on the copies (or original) such as torture or brainwashing techniques (see [[Film/ClockworkOrangeClockworkOrange]]). This technique may cause certain memories to be suppressed but may not be perfect in very strongly held memories such as that of Julia. Like Farscape once said: "brainwashing, doesn't get the tough stains out"

The memory oddities result from Tet using simpler methods on the copies (or original) such as torture or brainwashing techniques (see [[Film/ClockworkOrange]]). This technique may cause certain memories to be suppressed but may not be perfect in very strongly held memories such as that of Julia. Like Farscape once said: "brainwashing, doesn't get the tough stains out"