Headscratchers / Old

As a Headscratchers subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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• A woman gets pregnant? It takes sperm 30-45 minutes to reach the egg. All organic cells on the beach age a year in 30 minutes. You do the simple math.
• How exactly could the company get away with all this? According to that one character, this is "Trial 73" which means at the least, a hundred people have gone missing without a trace at this resort. Surely, so many people lost to this beach would have gotten some attention from the authorities with family members reporting their vanishing and the common thread of them all visiting this place so how could the company keep so many deaths so secret for so long?
  • Even if there was suspicion, if the company could cover up their own existence and remove all proof of the people who have gone to the secluded beach, then most likely the amount of people going missing would just be deemed a mystery.
    • Except the timeline makes this impossible. Most people die within a day or two and the company is clearly in a rush to develop their drugs. Meaning that at most there is a week or two between each test. Even if we assume each test only has 5 people in it that means in less than 2 years over 350 people all disappeared from the same resort; SOMEONE would have noticed.
    • Speaking about the timeline... How are the tests supposed to work if they can't study the inner effects on people's organs and stuff? The Scientists can't get to the beach, and organs disappear in less than a day. How can they tell if the medicine worked or was it what killed the patients? They have no control group, no way to measure the non-visible effects and no way of knowing if their test group develops OTHER illnesses in their time on the beach! The whole thing makes no sense at all.
    • They could just be a group of sickos and it's all just a elaborate snuff show and all the helping humanity stuff is just something they tell themselves.
  • Even if it was noticed, the bones themselves will disintegrate well within a week with the accelerated timeline. No body means no crime, and the most they could prove is a person case and that beach was their last known location.
  • Even if it was noticed??? I’m pretty sure hundreds of people going missing in such a short period of time would be noticed. Even without bodies, I’m pretty sure that enough attention would be brought to the resort and that continuing the experiments wouldn’t be possible.
    • Its mentioned that the pharma company wiped the home computers of the victims and generally covered their tracks. So its possible, even likely, that there's no evidence of their traveling to the resort in the first place. No doubt they also have some influence with law enforcement and other authorities, and these corrupt/compromised officials might also help with the cover-ups.
    • Except this is 2021. People tell others when they’re going on vacation and even put it on the Internet. No way could they remove all traces of the doomed guests from the resort. There was nothing to suggest that they had influence over law enforcement or other authorities.
    • The entire premise needs to be accepted with a giant Hand Wave (like a work of Sci Fi).
• If the group is aging so quickly, wouldn't they have died of hunger early on? The infant dies in a minute without proper nutrition. Surely, if they're all aging years in hours, their bodies should have given out without proper food.
  • The beach apparently makes it so that the need to eat only applies to people who are increasing in body mass (the kids/pregnant Kara).
• The ending makes no sense. The hotel has figured out how to accelerate aging and is engaged in a massive conspiracy to trick people into becoming their test subjects. There is a massive organization designed to make all this happen. And yet... they are taken down by a single cop? They never thought to have security? Back up plans? Failsafes?
  • While much of the point is still right, it should be noted that the scientists had nothing to do with the beach's effects and are simply using it.
  • Alternatively, the moment that the news left the circle and was in the wider law enforcement, there was no way to put the cat in the bag. Many people who had doubts about the experiments would rapidly flip or confess.
• How does the menstrual cycle work on the beach? It takes around a day for an egg to be fertilized, so the conception of Kara's baby couldn't have happened so quickly if the cycle works normally; however, if the cycle moves as quickly as the aging of the rest of the body, there would be constant cramping and vaginal bleeding.
• How can Kara and Trent have sex when they are still mentally six years old? They are young enough to find it gross.
  • They probably noticed changes and their six-year-old selves wanted to play Doctor. Then hormones kicked in...
  • Puberty changed their brain chemistry. They talk about it in the movie.
  • It changed their brain chemistry, but they still didn’t know how pregnancy or birth worked. They may have matured slightly, but they still acted like children.
    • After Kara is discovered to be pregnant, Trent tells his mother that he thought someone couldn't get pregnant until they'd "done it" ten times. His mother correctly replies that a pregnancy can happen the first time.
• The pharmaceutical company goes to great lengths to make people disappear, but wouldn't Prisca's boyfriend have blown the whole deal? Like, it's implied she was texting with him during the trip; wouldn't he have been suspicious if she just up and disappeared?
  • Huge numbers of people would notice: co-workers, relatives, and friends. This is the fundamental problem with the premise. Just Remember.
• If Mid-Sized Sedan was at the beach the night before, why isn’t he dead or at least much older?
  • He probably got to the beach earlier that morning.
• The scientists can't safely get to the beach which is why the "trial groups" are observed at a distance. Within a day or so, all the bodies have decomposed and disintegrated, which is why there are items left at the back of the beach from earlier victims. But where are the other stuff earlier groups brought? Even if we were to assume that blankets and clothes decompose, that does NOT hold true for plastic food containers which are NOT biodegradable. Are we supposed to believe "Trial 73" was the first group to bring one?
  • Best guess: Someone swims through the coral to clean up after the last group as quickly as possible; the extra items are missed due to the limited time. Alternatively, the aging effects of the beach only "activate" when you pass through the canyon (or swim ashore from the ocean), so passing through the coral is safe going both ways.
  • Second best guess: Drones and remote controlled rovers are used to quickly clean the beach of as much large non-organic trash as possible. Obviously, they can't get everything which is why all the small stuff the kids found were in the back, but big stuff like the food containers are retrieved. Probably one of Jeff Bezos' side projects.
• If they needed test subjects, why not go the SCP route and use condemned prisoners with medical conditions, or other people that wouldn't be missed? Every tourist they send to the beach is another person with family and connections that could come looking for them - why risk sending all these unrelated people there when they could just send a few people with the exact medical conditions they need to test with instructions to keep taking the medicine so they can test it properly? Even just telling prisoners "Take this, go stay on that beach for an hour, then swim back through the coral so we can evaluate you." would give them loads of helpful data they could use in their studies. No need to leave anyone there.
  • For one it ruins the plot. Two the government probably isn't compliant in this. The group might be privately owned. Three they might be worried they'll lose all rights to it if the government found it.
  • Also, it's pretty sure that if the government discover that this beach had this effect on people there would be very few solutions. Either the area is secluded or ... the island will end like Island Nublar in the Jurassic Park Novel, in other words ... an explosion.
    • But if the government and it's officials aren't compliant in this, wouldn't this create another can of worms in that without the government to help them it would be much ore difficilty to cover up the tracks of the missing people, since these misterious disappearances would sooner or later reach the president and other powerful members of the government? Sure, they might be a powerful pharma company but i'm pretty sure even Nestle would struggle with deleting the tracks to an entire family suddenly going missing every week in a establishment even if they just had the hotel and possibly the local police working for them.
• How does the six year old nephew not only know about the top secret beach tests, but know the only way to escape is through the coral?
  • He had probably snuck into the lab a lot. The manager might be scolding him for being around tourists because he suspects this. The nephew must have overheard everything, especially of how wary the manager is when talking about the corals.
  • It's never stated outright that he knows about either. He doesn't say that the coral is an escape route, only that his uncle doesn't like it.
• It's stated that hair doesn't grow on the island due to it being dead, but Trent grows armpit hair and a 5 o'clock shadow.
  • Isn't it only stated hair doesn't grow at the super-speed rate?
• How are Crystal's bones breaking, healing, and re-breaking in only a couple seconds? Broken bones take between six and twenty weeks to heal. Even accounting for Rapid Aging, it would still take a couple minutes for the bones to set in a given position, yet her flailing death is over in about thirty seconds.
• Why is Time-Passage Beard averted? Wouldn't they have overgrown their hair and nails, lose their baby teeth, et cetera if they kept aging?
• Why didn't they try Jarin's idea of attempting to leave very slowly? He did say that they didn't want to lose 20 years of their lives but it was better doing nothing and much more sensible than trying to swim for help. Besides, with a bit of experimentation they could have found it would take less than the 8-10 hours he predicted.