Headscratchers / The Cloverfield Paradox

Spoilers ahead.

• So why did the wall eat Mundy's arm?
  • And how did Mundy's arm reappear, moving under its own power, and intelligent enough to communicate?
  • And how did it know where the gyroscope was?
    • The movie explains that the Paradox merged two realities into one and, due to two things trying to occupy the same space at once, warped all of multiversal reality in the process. Trying to make sense of all the weird stuff happening is kinda like trying to make oatmeal cry.
    • Short answer: physics took a vacation.
    • Possible longer answer: This universe's Mundy and an alternate universe Mundy accidentally got... tangled. Maybe they simultaneously leaned against the same bulkhead in both universes. Either way, the arm we see isn't actually Prime!Mundy's arm, but the arm belonging to Alt!Mundy. Alt!Mundy somehow realizes this, and uses the opportunity to give information learned in that universe (maybe they have a different doctor who was more proactive about autopsying Volkov) to this one.
    • Wait, does that means that someone in some other universe has Mundy's arm giving him the finger?
• What in the hell killed Tam?
  • Artistic License – Physics
    • The answer my sister came up with is that Tam's Cloverfield Station interects with Jensen's Cloverfield Station at the moment - seeing as its crashed into the sea, that's where the water came from.
    • And the external pressure where there shouldn't be an allowed for Space Is Cold up to eleven?
• What in the hell killed Mundy?
  • To all the above, its implied the station itself is trying to kill them for some reason.
  • More specifically, it's established that they're using an electrically reactive nano-particle paste for sealing things. It seems to look and behave similarly to ferro fluids, or a pile of iron shavings. When the powerful magnetic field appeared, the nano-paste started reacting to it, being drawn closer. As to why it pulled Mundy back onto the opposite wall, it might just be artistic license, or maybe the magnetic field ceased at that moment, causing it to try to return to its previous shape, but now with Mundy caught in the middle.
    • Where did the magnetic field come from?
    • He was working inside a particle accelerator (and one which was possibly intersecting with parallel world versions of itself). It's not specifically mentioned, but they traditionally use very powerful magnets to contain the particle beam.
• Why is Jensen the only one of the crew from the alternate Earth to survive?
  • Maybe the Paradox can bypass time too. She could’ve been transported to the main characters’ station before her station crashed 2 days ago.
• How do Schmidt's logs from Earth B end up in Earth A's computer? Did the two computers somehow fuse while preserving all data?
  • Yes.
  • Another possibility is that Schmidt received the same orders, but either refused to carry them out or eventually decided to disobey them to avert a war.
• Why would a spy communicate without any attempt at code language or encryption?
  • It was encrypted. It says so in the dialogue.
  • Doesn't count as encryption if it's broken in the time it takes to say "encryption".
  • An easily solved encryption is still an encryption. A good encryption? Hell, no. But an encryption nonetheless.
• Why does everyone decide to start trusting Schmidt again?
  • Everyone assumes that the evil spy Schmidt is from the other dimension and not the one they have, which is true.
• If the two stations fused, why were they on the wrong side of the sun?
  • It’s implied that, while two different stations were fused, many different realities might have been thrown into the mix. Maybe yet another station from yet another reality was on that side of the sun.
    • Or in the second reality, Earth was in a different orbit than in the first, so it happened to be on the opposite side of "main" Earth.
  • It also seems to be implied that time is being affected, and not just space. Perhaps they manifested in the alternate reality at a different time of year, with the Earth at a different point in its orbit.
• How did Volkov survive that long with a gyroscope and thousands of worms inside of him?
  • Probably in the same way how Mundy's arm survived and could move not attach to a body. Their bodies do not behave naturally anymore.
• How did Volkov so easily override the security that prevents guns from being 3d-printed? Where did he even get the schematics for the gun?
  • It's established early on that Volkov has been acting unstable, hostile, paranoid, and nationalistic. Its shown to be causing friction with the rest of the crew, and seems to have been for a while. He'd probably been working on it as a "Plan B" for some time.
  • Also (see below) he got the plans from his alternate self, who may well also have been working for an intelligence agency just like the Alt-Schmidt.
• Who was Volkov talking to in the mirror before he made the gun?
  • Likely his alternate universe self somehow, probably telling him about the AU version of Schmidt being the saboteur. That would explain his reaction.
• They ran the Shepard 47 times and Tam never thought about ventilation?
  • They never got far enough in the tests that it became an issue.
• After 47 failed attempts at activation, and a 48th that went disastrously wrong, how could they be so sure that it would work the way they needed?
  • They were fucked either way so they didn't really have a choice.
• Why, when Jensen has the gun on Ava and Schmidt hit her leg with a wrench, does Ava run instead of tackling Jensen while she was down?
• The gravity on the station presumably came from the rotation of the rings- but where the hell did the gravity come from on their spacewalk?
  • Even inside the rings, the rotation pulls them to the "side" of the ring, not "out" as centrifugal force would.
• How big is Clover's species to even dwarf over clouds?
  • This is a case of Fridge Horror but rather simple, J. J. Abrams and Matt Reeves, the director of the first movie, explained during promotion of the first movie that the Clover monster seen was a baby, similar to King Kong in the MonsterVerse, and looking for its mother. Needless to say, a fully adult-sized Clover monster would have been massive... and whose to say this wasn't its mother looking for her baby?
  • In the original Cloverfield, the ARG implied that Clover's species was some sort of massive deep-sea megafauna that fed on a naturally occurring super-serum (the same kind that goes into Slusho, the soda that's in a lot of JJ Abrams' movies and shows). Since they were envisioned as living off of magic super chemicals, the answer is "huge."
• How didn't Mission Control have enough time to warn the survivors about the monsters? They clearly had communications up, and after the cheering over the stable beam they had comms even up to them being in the escape pod.
  • Its possible the comms were too distorted to warn them about the Kaiju invasion since they were trying to figure out what was still happening.
  • Because it was added in at the last minute.
• Why did a bunch of astronauts, upon finding themselves lost, not think to check the damn stars? It's pretty easy to narrow down whether you've been teleported across the galaxy or not by checking for any constellations.
  • They were too busy trying to fix the station enough to keep it together to check.
  • All they had to do was look out a window.
  • It’s pretty easy to forget the simple solution when you’re panicking.
  • They had technology for star sighting, and it was broken. How many people know how to do dead-reckoning with a map now that GPS is common? And considering how urgent the mission was, they may have skipped that part of astronaut training for specialists who were primarily going up to operate a stationary particle accelerator.
    • It doesn't take special training to check for the Big Dipper.
    • That’s true when someone is on a populated area of Earth, where light pollution limits the number of visible stars, and there are consistent reference points like “north.” In space, staring at a dense star field and at an arbitrary orientation, you literally wouldn’t know where to start looking.
    • Or they could have found it but thought they were just relatively close to our solar system. By the time they saw Cassiopeia, they must have known they were still near our sun, since they immediately knew to look past it.
• How did Mina know where the gun Volkov printed was?
  • How did she know it existed at all?
  • As stated on the wmg page: She printed the gun in her own universe, which is why she knew where it was. The logs were hers and she masked them as Schmidts'. She managed to emotionally manipulate Hamilton into letting her go back to her Earth. She was combat trained and able to take out multiple people.
  • Mina implied that alternate Volkov died in her universe, it can be safely assumed that he also printed a gun to confront Schmidt and that the rest of the events transpired the same way as the earlier scene. She would have been present with the rest of the crew to see the gun locked away.
• Escape pods designed to get from low orbit to Earth are going to get to Earth from the other side of Earth's orbit? How could they possibly carry the supplies needed for such a journey, and why would they?
• How does a gyroscope work when not in the gravity well of a planet? Even worse, while inside an area having artificial gravity? And what does "We are upside down" even mean when you are floating in space?
  • The first can be chalked up to shoddy movie physics allowing the spinning rings to create gravity. Because spinning always works. The second could possibly be in reference to their orientation to Earth. Where before if you were standing on the floor of the station your head would be pointing at relative north to the Earth but now you're pointing at the south pole instead.
  • If they were orienting themselves in relation to the sun, Cassiopeia would look upside down from what they expect (that is, they'd expect a star to be at the edge nearest the sun, but it's actually furthest from it). Since the constellation looked like it was upside down, they just carried the term over to themselves when realizing that's they were in the wrong place.

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