With the creation of something very dangerous comes guilt, and with guilt comes regret. Oppenheimer makes that absolutely clear.
As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
- After learning of Jean Tatlock's suicide, Oppenheimer went to the woods to have a breakdown. When Kitty learns from her husband what had happened, she shakes him firmly and tells him to pull it together.
- Oppenheimer back at work soon after learning that his friend is dead, deeply shaken and unable to focus — but still facing a looming deadline to build an atomic bomb and a room full of stressed-out scientists whose fights he still has to referee.
- Kitty's mental anguish during the clearance hearing in 1954 as Robert's infidelity was put into public record. The opening up of old wounds manifests in the sequence as her imagining Jean having sex with Robert right there in the chair while staring her down with a look of "he was never yours".
- Oppenheimer's deteriorating anxiety over the future as he saw the direction his country, one he had sacrificed for, was going in by making atomic bombs, and later hydrogen bombs, just another part of the arsenal. Although we don't see another Imagine Spot during the 1950s and 60s, his increasing distraction indicates it was still on his mind.
- Offscreen, but J. Robert Oppenheimer passed away in 1967 of throat cancer. While he lived to see the Cuban Missile Crisis in its entirety, he never got to see the push for nuclear disarmament and the rise of M.A.D. which more or less assured that neither side would dare strike first.
- The revelation of what Oppenheimer (might have) actually said to Einstein that day at the Institute for Advanced Study, which caused Einstein to avoid looking Strauss in the eye as he passed and unintentionally causing Strauss to believe Oppenheimer was working against him. It wasn't even about Strauss, but just some small talk, and some prophetic words regarding the burdens of fame... and then, right at the end, Oppenheimer reminds Einstein of Teller's calculations, that their project might inadvertently cause a chain reaction that would destroy the world. Oppenheimer says they may have been right. And in that moment, Einstein's expression makes sense. He wasn't glaring daggers at Strauss, or even trying to avoid eye contact with him. His mind wasn't there at all. Like Oppenheimer, Einstein was realizing the full implications of his involvement in the Atomic Bomb, a weapon that one day may fulfill its prophecy of setting fire to the world — only, it won't be by accident.
- The second time Rabi offers Oppenheimer an orange and orders him to eat it, Oppenheimer is so rattled and broken by the witch hunt of his security hearing that Rabi practically has to help him eat. The sight of him in this state (plus Rabi's death glare) is enough to convince Lawrence to back out of testifying against him.
- Both Rabi and Oppenheimer take a beat to hang a lampshade on the Call-Back — calling back to a much simpler time, before there was an atomic bomb, when they were just two young scientists sharing a train compartment and an orange on their way to brighter unknown futures.
- One for worker's struggles, but Oppenheimer and many other prominent scientists having to give up their organizational efforts and suppress their leftist political beliefs to be a part of the historic effort to build the a-bomb, then being persecuted years later for those same beliefs.
- As he staggers out of the gymnasium following his victory speech, haunted by nauseating visions of the destruction of the bomb, Oppenheimer passes by two women holding each other and weeping. They could either be scientists on the project, haunted by the same guilt that Oppenheimer is, or they could be a vision of the bomb's victims, mourning loved ones they've lost. It's an incredibly sobering part of an overwhelmingly bleak sequence either way.
- When Truman announces that Hiroshima has been bombed, everyone at Los Alamos who didn't build that bomb is ecstatic. The scientists who did, the people who saw the Trinity detonation and know exactly what that bomb could do, look like they're going to vomit.
- Most of them (including Oppenheimer) are in tears, in an era when it was almost never acceptable for men to cry in public.
- Richard Feynman somberly shakes Hans Bethe's hand, a sobering Call-Back to all of the euphoria and celebratory hand-shaking after the successful Trinity test, when all of the scientists were just as excited as their wives and neighbors are now.
- Kitty suffering badly from what appears to be postpartum depression after the birth of their first child. It gets to the point that Oppenheimer asks Chevalier and his wife to take the baby, implying that he's worried about their son's safety around Kitty.
- Becomes very Heartwarming when Chevalier immediately agrees, no questions asked.
