Headscratchers / Everything Everywhere All at Once

• The movie is largely consistent with its explanations of how the multiverse works. However, in the world where Evelyn is a movie star, she stars in a film about her alternate self. So how do the makers of that film know anything about the other Evelyn, her life and the events that transpired at the IRS office? Were they contacted by the Alpha Verse?
  • "Our" Evelyn at one point suggests that "if I can imagine it, it exists out there, somewhere," suggesting that branches form as much from alternate decisions as creating fictions. Which helpfully explains the raccoon as well.
    • If you watch closely, you can see images of an ad poster for hot dogs and a child's drawing of a person with prominently drawn fingers flash by when Evelyn tries to make a jump without fulfilling the right requirements to go to a known node, and creates the hot dog finger world as a result.
  • In infinite universes, eventually one will have those exact circumstances. Or as Jobu Tupaki would put it, it's just a statistical inevitability.
    • Mathematically speaking, given an infinite number of multiverses (I^m), there will also be an infinite number (I^c) of them where Evelyn's exact circumstances occur. Although I^m > I^c, Jobu Tupaki is correct that I^c is inevitable.
• In the universe where life never got a chance to develop, there is a small tuft of grass only a few inches from Jobu's rock, and in wide shots, you can see a gopher hole a few feet away.
  • Possibly Jobu was speaking metaphorically, and it was a world where humans never developed. Of course, the Doylist answer is that a world like that would be harder to film - it would look more like the surface of the moon or Mars due to the lack of an atmosphere.
  • Also consider that Jobu perhaps was talking about sentient life, which neither grass nor gophers would be.
  • Not to mention, she probably didn't get around much on that Earth, being a rock.
• How much will everybody in their respective universes remember, and will there be repercussions? Will Hot Dog Fingers-Deidre remember that her wife coldly rejected her seemingly out of nowhere, driving here to tears? Will Protagonist-Waymond remember, among all the Kafka-esque things he saw, that Evelyn stabbed him? Will Protagonist-Joy remember that her mother tied her to a chair? Come to think of it, what's going to happen to the Protagonist-Verse, full stop?
  • While we never really see what the aftermath of the "Prime" universe was after Evelyn saved Joy from being pulled into the Bagel, it can be assumed that without Jobu constantly possessing Joy every chance she gets, Evelyn, Alpha-Grandpa, and Prime-Waymond eventually explained things to Prime-Joy and things more-or-less stabilized. Part 3 shows that while Prime-Evelyn mostly prefers hanging around in the "Normal" universe where rather than having the big inter-dimensional fight she just drove home and smashed the laundromat window then reconciled with Joy, the final scene implies she still does some Verse-Jumping, likely to ensure things stay mostly stable in her alternate lives after she kind of made a mess of them during her Straw Nihilist phase in Part 2.
  • Regarding the other characters - Surely all of them remember such mind-bending experiences, but what they choose to do with that information (continue to divorce Evelyn, run to the police, etc) will create still more divergent universes.
• How is Jobu Tupaki able to warp reality?
  • Seemingly, she doesn't, instead she has the power to replace objects with their "counterparts" from other universes. Since there are an infinite number of universes, this effectively lets her turn anything into anything.
• What happened to the Alphaverse version of Becky Sregor? With Jobu Tupaki being the Alphaverse version of Joy Wang, whom Becky loved, surely Alpha Becky would at least try to either join or stop Jobu's mad crusade against the multiverse.
  • It's possible she may not exist (in the movie dimension Evelyn and Waymond don't marry and so Joy is never born and Jobu Tupaki cannot enter), or has rather unceremoniously died (the Alphaverse is kind of a Crapsack World where stuff like dairy products are impossible to get), or at least is not be anywhere close to wherever the Alphaverse resistance is headquartered (a controlling parent so focused on research like Alphaverse Evelyn might have prevented Joy and Becky from ever meeting).
• If each new universe is created based off of life decisions, how would sexuality factor into that? Like how is it that Joy is apparently gay in almost every single universe, but there's just randomly a universe where Evelyn is in a relationship with a woman?
  • Joy's not gay in every universe. Jobu Tupaki explicitly calls Evelyn out for being so hung up on her daughter liking girls "in this universe".
• Considering that Jobu Tupaki (and Evelyn) can still enter the universe where human life itself never came into existence at all (i.e. the rock universe), then why doesn't/can't Jobu enter (at least in some fashion) the Kung Fu/Movie Star universe in which Evelyn and Waymond don't marry and Joy was never born? Granted, to answer my own question, coming into that universe as a rock or a tree (or, perhaps, more likely, some kind of split entity consisting of a sperm inside Waymond and an egg inside Evelyn) or something similar wouldn't be all that useful to her goals, so it's likely that she just didn't bother trying. Though, for that matter, even if Joy is killed in any given universe, which Alpha Gong Gong claims "gives her one less universe to access," how would that actually stop Jobu from still entering that universe and, like, possessing the corpse of Joy like a ghost or zombie or something, in the same way that she entered the rock in the rock universe? Even as rocks, they were still capable of movement and of changing things (e.g. Rock-Evelyn's googly eyes), so it seems like Jobu potentially should still be able to act even in universes where Joy is dead or otherwise doesn't exist.
  • Maybe Jobu Tupaki can enter universes that are devoid of life but can't enter ones that have life but no version of Joy. It doesn't entirely make sense but it's an explanation of sorts.
  • It's possible that Alpha Gong Gong is just wrong. He was wrong about other things (eg. Jobu's actual goals.) It could be that Jobu just prefers to only enter universes by possessing the version of herself that is already there, and they've misinterpreted this to mean that that's her only option. It's also possible that they were just able ot find a universe among all the myriad possibilities where the rocks happened to coincidentally be similar enough to them in some way to possess them - which could be used to enter a version of any universe, but not actually any one specific universe.
• What ever came of that whole thing Alpha Waymond was explaining in the beginning, about how Jobu's threat was why everything felt wrong in Evelyn's universe and across the multiverse? Was that true, or a misunderstanding?
• If everybody is utilizing an interdimensional equivalent of Mental Time Travel, and only chaotic beings like Jobu or Evelyn can be an actual Reality Warper capable of creating and changing matter, where do the earpieces come from?