Headscratchers / The One

• If a dead person's energy is redistributed, how come this haven't been discovered earlier? By virtue of people aging to death, that means the surviving versions should get progressively more powerful until one of them becomes "the one".
  • I have always thought that this would amount to older people just being weaker in general and the last one being a bit more peppy and doing well for someone so old. Additionally it would mean that the destruction of a universe/the multiverse because of a person becoming "The One" just wouldn't happen.
  • I've explained it as, most duplicate selves die of old age or even perhaps certain diseases like cancer simultaneously, as the energy shared between them runs out all at once. A few die in other ways but not enough to be noticeable.
  • People dying of natural causes presumably have only negligible lifeforce left to transfer. If they had more of it, they wouldn't be dying of natural causes.
  • Maybe because its a kind of timeline rule, as you age the energy runs out, every version of you has like a limited amount of lifeforce, kinda like predestiny, everyone has a time, so prematurely ending it causes the transfer,also maybe the whole "the one" thing only really works if its yourself killing the other versions, kinda like dimension feedback, it uses your own body as a conduit to distribute the energy due to you being an anomaly in that universe.
    • Except it's apparently All There in the Manual that there have been two previous attempts to kill off 124 copies of the same person so the survivor can receive their cumulative energy, and one attempt was by someone who was doing it to empower another person, not themselves. So it's not the case that it has to be you killing yourself, although just having somebody from your universe do it might suffice as a conduit under this theory.
  • Or possibly the transfer of lifeforce from non-natural deaths actually happens all the time in this film's Verse, with people receiving minor jolts of power due to accidents, homicides and/or suicides that kill off their alternates. The true baseline degree of energy available to the typical one-out-of-125 human would make them really wimpy at best; it's the folks who've had one or more of their alternate selves die young that would be stronger/faster/healthier than that. Because most individuals have only lost a few of their alternates in this way, and would receive infusions of life force in only tiny amounts (0.8% of baseline, for the first few deaths), most people aren't super-fighters or super-athletes or whatever. If somebody is an impressive combatant, whether as a soldier or a bar brawler or a wrestler or whatever, that's not just an indication that they've trained a lot - anybody can train - but that they've trained and are only one-out-of-dozens due to their other selves' fatal misfortunes.
  • I always figured it only factored by how many of your Alt selves die, a quick estimate is that each alt only contributed 1.25% of the whole, you divide that by a further 124, and each gets 0.0100806% each, would you notice that in your daily life? obviously as the number lowers the portion gets bigger, but because each universe seems at least somewhat different, each Alt dies at differing times, as said you won't notice the miniscule increase, at most you would feel a little better than you did yesterday, that means at the time of Yulaw outing himself, he must have killed at least 5-10 Alts for his strength to have been at a factor in which he could lift a box full of very heavy weights whilst still looking like Jet Li not on steroids, also most Alts who may get "lucky" and several other Alts die close to one another, aren't trained combatants, so even then they must just think "Christ, that diet is working out for me" or "I knew it was a good idea to give up smoking"
  • The interpretation I always had was that it wasn't just duplicates dying, but you traveling to their universe and murdering them, that set up the transfer, forging a sympathetic connection between you, the alt you just killed, and all the other alts, allowing the energy to be divided up between them. Yulaw being forced to kill his alt in self-defense is implied to have sent him off the deep end, and he seems to get the lion's share of the energy (Gabe is noted to be almost as powerful as Yulaw). Every alt Yulaw killed, the sympathetic connections grew stronger, until by the time there were only two left, it didn't matter how the other died, the energy would transfer regardless. Or, the MVA agents were just being overly cautious, to make sure neither of them would be "the One."
  • That doesn't work, because in the backstory stuff, it's noted two other people have tried this, and one was travelling the multiverse to kill someone else's Alternates, not their own.
• In the scene where Yulaw tries to deceive T.K. into giving him her gun, she tests his identity by making up a story about how they met at a bookstore; this is a clever move by her. Yulaw fails the test, leading to her pointing her gun at him; this is not a clever move, ultimately leading to her death. Why did she not simply keep up the pretense and buy herself a few more crucial seconds to escape Yulaw later? Gabe already told her about Yulaw, plus she saw his killing spree firsthand through the security cameras in the MRI scene; why provoke Yulaw and lose your only advantage?
  • Because the situation she was in was creepy and terrifying, of course.