This is not the first success of the Source Code project.
Fridge Brilliance: Colter actually keeps preventing terrorist attacks and creating new universes where the project was never used. One day the Colter in the new universe made at the end of the movie will be asked to stop another, different terrorist attack and will wind up dead in that universe, having taken over the body of someone in another new universe.
- Indeed, for it to have worked here it had to have worked before.
- Why couldn't that have been the first time it was used? However, the guess does give more explanation of what Coulter's body and brain were doing in between his disappearance and the beginning of the film, other than the obvious possibility of nothing.
Colter and Christina are going to go to India.
Christina mentions wanting to go there, and if they decide to engage in spiritual reflection with some gurus, Colter can act differently than Sean would, do to "finding himself." Colter died, and went to Heaven.
Or Hell. Or something else. Take your pick, but he most certainly is dead.
- My guess is that the epilogue and only the epilogue is Heaven... Unless that's what you meant in the first place.
- Or: alternate universes are how afterlives are implemented. The Source Code is just an accidentally successful attempt at hacking the already-existing system.
There are already multiple alternate Colters in the world from other successful missions.
This was just the first time that one was willing and able to get in contact someone at the base.
- This would have been an especially Mind Screw sort of ending: The "synaptic compatibility" thing is incorrect, and… everyone on that train was Colter, every iteration.
Colter can only exist in one place at once.
Or rather, his
mind can on exist in one place at once. When he's sent into the "Source Code" alternate timeline, his mind exists there. Once he dies, his mind returns to the original "real world", until he's sent back again. Once his life support is cut off in this "real world", his mind can only exist in the "Source Code" alternate timeline, so he stays, causing a set-up for a new alternate timeline, since this alternate timeline's Colter goes to a *different* alternate timeline.
Colter never even joined the Army.
He just started getting
really high while he and his friends watched
Black Hawk Down. When the film finished, they were a little less high than he was, so they watched
The Matrix, while he imagined being an actual Army helicopter pilot. With The Matrix playing, he begins to imagine that he has crashed and woken up in a box full of computers and then that he's a dead guy in an alternate reality machine. The end of his trip eases out into a just a daydream about hooking up with the hot classmate he has a crush on but never speaks to by taking over the body of somebody else.
Designing such a thing, then thinking it does something totally different and having kind of silly
Techno Babble to explain it, doesn't seem like the thing the machine's creator would do, even after discounting the
Techno Babble from a
Watsonian perspective. I find it likely that Rutledge was given a
Lies to Children style speech from an associate of his who worked in quantum physics
and/or bionics, who had built the thing, who'd then added a bunch of other components to turn it from a
What-If Machine into a
Mental Time Travel mystery-solving device (assuming Rutledge didn't steal it outright with only half an understanding of what it did).
The ending is in Colter's head.
The Source Code program is based on using the brain energies of a recently dead person for eight minutes, right? When Colter's life support gets terminated, his brain is still firing for eight minutes, imagining the end, where he and Christina keep living and he makes a difference in the real world. That is why it goes against how the program is supposed to work, since none of it is real, anyway.
At the end of the movie, Colter actually does die.
After Goodman unplugs his body from the Source Code machine in the prime universe, Colter's soul briefly lives on within Sean's mind to witness the followup to his "perfect moment". However, he can feel that his hold on life is slowly slipping and Sean will soon be back in control, though probably only with hazy (yet powerful) subconscious memories of the event. When he and Christina are standing in front of the Cloud Gate and he says they should stay there for a while, it's because Colter knows his time is almost up. The camera zooming into his reflection as Sean indicates the original personality's return. But it isn't all bad, since Colter can die happy, and Sean's relationship with Christina has taken a big step forward.
It explains what happened to each universe after Bill Murray's mind travels back to the day before, the universe continues without him, and he doesn't wake up dead or anything, he just wakes up as a mind overwritten by Colter (or someone else in the Source Code.)
So, Bill lived the first day as shown in Groundhog Day, then died 8 minutes after waking up by a terrorist attack the next day (say, a nuclear explosion blowing up the whole of Punxsutawney), at that point, the next day his mind is taken over by a Source Code traveler, while Bill's mind is sent to the day before in a different time line (in where he either suicides or dies the next day again, being sent over and over to yesterday.)
Eventually, Bill Murray lives the day so many times that he stops the nuclear attack by accident, his mind isn't taken over, and he can live the rest of his life.
(I know the character is called Phil Connors, but I had to look it up, while everyone remembers it was actor Bill Murray on the role)
Back to the Source Code movie, every time Colter takes over Sean's mind, his mind is sent to the day before, to live the day over and over, he never sees the train explosion, nor knows what happens at the point in where his mind is taken over, it is a mystery. Sean gets stuck living that day forever, or eventually stops the attack by accident (which would mean his mind isn't hijacked), or just doesn't get into the train, at that point he isn't on the train when it blows up, and Colter has to take over the mind of someone else in that timeline (starting the cycle again, until eventually someone is going to stop the attack accidentally for sure, nobody gets on the train, or the attack becomes unstoppable.)
- Or to veer off to the side of the WMG, Phil Connors is experiencing a nasty unknown side-effect of the Source Code program. The Source Code people don't know that each time they repeat it for their subject people with certain matching qualities (genetic, intellectual, whatever) loop. too.
The differences between Chicago Commuter Rail and Metra are due to source code parallel universes
The source code was actually started in the 1950's or so, and as a result of Butterfly Effect on different bodies being possessed by the source code person, the commuter rail systems are organized slightly differently.
Colter's well timed death "launched" him into a new universe like in
Greg Egan's Permutation City
In the book permutation city, it's revealed that simulated humans (known as copies) have the power of "launching" themselves into new universes simply by computing themselves inside of them for a short while. These launched universes are completely detached from the main one and exist independently. When Colter died, the source code simulation of the universe was launched.
If Colter could, theoretically, get out of his "pod" via the emergency exist, he'd wake up
We're already operating on a "Your mind makes it real" basis. Besides, the logic seems pretty sound: The pod is a representation of his comatose body, so if he escapes the pod then he's free. Granted that could also mean that he straight up dies, but at that point Colter would prefer it.
