Line #7 Fridge/Tenet


1	!Per wiki policy, Administrivia/SpoilersOff applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. Administrivia/YouHaveBeenWarned.
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4	!!FridgeLogic
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6	* At the film's end, Neil says he's known the Protagonist for years -- although it's been just a few weeks from the Protagonist's perspective up to that point -- and it's further explained that the Protagonist is the one who established Tenet in the first place. This means at some point in the future, he took TheSlowPath and spent years in isolation to travel back far enough in time to get a well-funded and heavily equipped intelligence network and army in place for when he himself gets recruited into the organization he founded.
7	* Inverted cars probably shouldn't work: they need outside air in the same way a person does. Moving normal air through an inverted engine properly, and whether it would react with inverted gasoline, means an inverted car doesn't work without major modifications, if it could be made to work at all. The explosion at the end of the chase has the same issue, it is inverted gas burning with normal air. Battery powered cars would work, however, since the battery is entirely contained in the car. If only it took place a decade later...
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10	!!FridgeBrilliance
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12	* When The Protagonist is holding Sanjay at gunpoint and explaining how he deduced it was Sanjay, Sanjay responds with "a fair assumption..." He wasn't wrong; The Protagonist assumed that the arms dealer was Sanjay whereas in reality it was Priya.
13	* During the restaurant scene, Kat claimed that when she saw another woman diving off the ship, she "never felt such envy" for her freedom. Not for long... that woman was in fact her future self, so in the end, she has her cake and eats it too.
14	* Neil appears way too well-informed as well as much too friendly at his first meeting with the Protagonist, clearly putting him off. The reason is, of course, that from Neil's point of view, he has known the Protagonist for years, and just for a moment Neil has forgotten to wrap his head around the fact that for the Protagonist it's their first meeting. Which promptly turns their friendship into another layer of FridgeBrilliance when it works in the same way as the temporal pincer - Neil is friendly at first but then becomes more distant (as he needs to reign himself in from revealing too much), while the Protagonist warms up to Neil over the course of the film. This is reflected in their arm patches: The Protagonist's red and Neil's blue.
15	* The Sator square is a sequence of five Latin words arranged to read the same up/down/backwards/forwards (SATOR, AREPO, TENET, OPERA, ROTAS). All these words appear in the film:
16	** The antagonist is named Sator ("SATOR" means "seeder" or "founder"; he's the one who kicks off the plot).
17	** The forger is named Arepo (no meaning has been given to this word; but if we were to consider "Opera's" meaning, in the context of the film Arepo would be a "creator/laborer of false works").
18	** Tenet, the central word of the Sator Square, is at the core of the film ("tenet" means a principle that one believes in).
19	** The first action sequence is at a Kiev opera house ("opera" means "work" or "labor").
20	** Rotas is the freeport company used to hide the first turnstile the Protagonist encounters ("rotas" refers to rotation or turning things around), and there's a scene where an inverted Sator emerges from it.
21	* The two teams' colour coding in the final battle references the phenomena of redshift (for an object that is "going," i.e. moving away from observer from the point of view of the standard flow of time) and blueshift (for an object that is "coming," i.e. moving towards the observer from the point of view of the standard flow of time).
22	* "Tenet" is both a TrustPassword and the name of the organization which uses said password. Tenet knows (and uses) time inversion. The word "Tenet" is a palindrome; together with the interlaced-fingers-gesture that accompanies it, the word with its central unrepeated letter also represents the temporal pincer tactics employed by the organisation. Also Tenet sounds similar both forwards or reversed. Which would make it easy to hear if Tenet members meet each other while moving in different directions of time.
23	* The Tenet organization's interlacing of two hands is noteworthy when you look at the final shot of Kat taking her son's hand. Kat represents the present, whilst her son represents the future. Kat's survival through Priya's death is probably the final thing that connects the present and the future.
24	* The final battle might appear confusing with the uniforms making it very hard to tell individuals apart, but this is intentional, as uniforms as well as enclosed vehicles have been used for this purpose several times before: During the freeport raid, the uniforms making it hard to tell people apart is first used to conceal that two men are the same man, once inverted and once in normal time flow. The FridgeBrilliance even becomes doubled when it is eventually revealed who the uniformed man at the freeport actually is.
25	* What's happened's happened. Neil describes this as the mechanics of the world, which can be defined as fate or reality. Fate is what will happen and generally applies to the future, while reality is what has happened and applies to the past/present. Within the context of time inversion, the two views are depicted and interlocked through the actions and dynamics of Neil and the Protagonist.
26	* The Protagonist's fight at Oslo is a self generating time loop. Neither of them started the fight: forward moving protagonist sees inverted man jump out of the turnstile and start wrestling and messing with a gun, inverted man sees protagonist grab him and threaten him with a gun.
27	* The first time he was in the Oslo freeport, the Protagonist failed to find and destroy the forged [[Creator/FranciscoDeGoya Goya]], meaning that Kat was still trapped. The second time, he and Neil succeeded in getting an inverted Kat in and out of the freeport Turnstile, effectively saving her from Sator's control (since Sator left her for dead and thus had no reason to think she would survive).
28	* The main events of the film are visited in chronological order, then reverse-chronological order. The 14th of the month is the day that the Kiev opera siege, the FinalBattle in Stalsk-12, and the yacht incident in Vietnam took place. Next is the Oslo freeport infiltration, and the Tallinn truck heist after that. The film visits these events as follows: the 14th, Oslo, Tallinn, Tallinn, Oslo, the 14th. The bulk of the plot of ''Tenet'' is palindromic.
29	* After the interrogation, the protagonist says "he would have shot her anyway". Makes sense on its own for a spy movie, but he can also see this from the inverted bullet hole.
30	* Neil brings up the grandfather paradox to explain the mysterious future antagonists' goals. There's another popular idea about time travel known as the bootstrap paradox, in which items or information is present in a StableTimeLoop with no point of origin outside of it. Tenet, Sator and the future antagonists all operate on knowledge gained from observing inverted time states, making the entire film a bootstrap paradox in action.
31	* In Kat's final scene with Andrei on the boat, she makes a point of putting sunscreen on his back, enough to leave a huge smear. After she's shot him, she's able to drag him across the floor much more easily because of the slippery sunscreen; you can even hear it squishing. She also removes the rail cords and wets down the deck in advance to make it easier to slide him overboard.
32	* A small one, but the reason that the protagonist is so easily able to disassemble the pistol he disarmed an enemy of in the Opera scene isn't just RuleOfCool - if you look closely, their handgun is the same model that he carries himself, so of course he would know how to disassemble it. Doubles as foreshadowing to the inverted fight where he disarms himself of the same model of handgun.
33	* When Ives is first introduced, he seems to suggest that Sator is the only one who has functional turnstiles in the present, and therefore the only way of inverting or uninverting people. We later see that this isn't the case, as Tenet has a number of turnstiles of their own and have been training soldiers in inverted combat for some time, meaning Ives was deliberately withholding this information. But there's a much more immediate clue, as well: Both Ives and Wheeler already have an intimate understanding of the turnstiles and how they work despite supposedly having never used one before.
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35	!!FridgeHorror
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37	* The movie offhandedly mentions that NeverTheSelvesShallMeet is in effect because touching your inverted self would result in something akin to matter-antimatter annihilation. One kilogram of antimatter annihilating one kilogram of normal matter releases the equivalent of 43 megatons of energy. For comparison, that's three times as much as the strongest-ever US nuclear bomb ([[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo Castle Bravo]], ~15 MT), almost as much as the most powerful man-made detonation ever ([[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba Tsar Bomba]], ~50 MT), and 3,300 times the Hiroshima bomb (13 kT). The first two examples vaporized entire islands with their detonations, and what the third one did shouldn't require explanation. You wouldn't even need to scale this up to an average human of ~75kg to get a "device" capable of destruction beyond comprehension, and all it'd take to set this off [[ParanoiaFuel anywhere in the world]] would be one inverted suicide bomber shaking hands with their normal self at an agreed-upon time and place. Considering how easy it appears to be to invert people, the consequences of this technology falling into the wrong hands become even more nightmarish than they already are.
38	** It is a matter-antimatter reaction, Neil seems to allude to ([[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe John Wheeler's one electron universe]] where backwards movement of the electron results in the existence of positrons.
39	** Which creates some Fridge logic: touching yourself and annihilating creates a grandfather paradox, You would have to touch your inverted self, invert, than touch your original self, but your original self annihilated after touching and can't go on to invert.
40	** In the airport scene where the Protagonist has a bare-knuckle fight against an inverted faceless goon who is later revealed to be himself, the "main" one (who at the time didn't know he would meet himself) is very lucky he didn't tear his opponent's jumpsuit or ripped his mask, which could have caused a skin-to-skin contact between two versions of the same person, not only prematuraly killing the Protagonist(s) and Neil, but also annihilating a civilian airport and all the workers and travellers inside it.
41	* A small one, but when Andrei takes off his cufflinks in the bedroom on the yacht, he doesn't put them into the lockbox where Kat's just hidden the Protagonist's gun, as we're made to believe--no, he sticks them into his belt and wraps it around his hand, clearly intending to ''beat Kat with it''.
42	* Kat calls the Protagonist out on his bullshit about Arepo by telling him there's no way he and Arepo could have met, as he's crippled, presumably since Sator had him crippled. Protagonist tells her that they spoke on the phone, to which she responds "he can't do that either". Later in the film, Sator describes his [[ComplexityAddiction rather complex plan]] to slice Protagonist's throat and stuff his own testicles inside it. [[NauseaFuel Well, now we know why he can't talk on the phone either]]--and not just because he's very likely dead.
43	* The future is trying to destroy the past because their world has gone to crap. Unless this information is wrong, the movie's fixed timeline means it is guaranteed to go to crap, even with Tenet and others knowing this. They were apparently unable or unwilling to stop the environmental destruction even knowing it would occur.

Context Fridge / Tenet