WMG / The World's End

The Network is the British Conservative party.

• Wanting British youths to be placated and calm? Sounds Tory. Blue blood? That's Tories for you.

The Network didn't go away.

• Gary, Andy and Steven convinced the Network that humanity was irredeemably barbaric: they'll continue to interfere, this time to prevent humanity from ever achieving any level of technology again and posing a threat to them elsewhere in the galaxy.
  • It was only with the help of the Network that Earth reached the information age at all, and even then, it was still the least civilized planet in the galaxy. It doesn't seem like we'd ever be a threat to anyone, and the Network is impenitently rational and logical - not likely to waste the effort containing a threat that barely exists.
    • They only arrived in 1990. We had computers before then. Commercial ISPs started appearing in the late 1980s. It's my opinion that the Network was claiming responsibility for advances we could have made anyway.

The blank Oliver found someone to take care of him.

• Without his eyes he still seem to have an idea of what the space around him looks like, but his vision is still damaged enough that he occasionally bumps into things, so it's reasonable to assume he can't see colors or patterns. So someone else must have drawn the eyes on his football head (And while the eyes weren't well made they seemed like they were made by someone who liked him enough to not make them stupid). That would also explain how he went from being shouted at and harassed for being a blank, to being trusted and respected enough to work. Peter going back to his family and living a normal life could indicate that the easiest way to be accepted and be safe from blank-racists is to somehow belong to a human.
  • Alternatively, for Peter, he still looked human and his natural personality is already pretty timid and nice. He was already very Blank-like in that sense (Andy even mentions that his wife might not have even noticed). For Oliver, it might be his disability (or whatever you want to call it) and his tendencies to bump into things - it makes him look harmless and so humans trust him because of that rather than actually respecting him in any sort of way.

The Network is run by Paul

• Gary even says he owes someone named Paul.
  • Paul was Andy's cousin, whom he says was a casualty of the apocalypse.

Gary's new crawl will bring humanity to a new golden age.

• The first pub in the crawl is "The Rising Sun", which is certainly optimistic. Who knows what the other pubs' names are?
  • The Phoenix.
  • The Hero.
  • The Prophet.
  • The Champion.
  • The Savior.
  • The Messiah.
  • The Second Coming.
  • The Truth.
  • The Justice.
  • The Freedom.
  • The Good Life.
  • The Redemption.
  • The Salvation.
  • The Law and Order.

Gary gets killed in the last scene.

• He's hugely outnumbered, and his Blank friends have been shown to be rather squishy. Plus, he was suicidal previously, so picking a fight with a bar of toughs may be the enactment of his deathwish.

Alternatively, Gary lives.... because he was saved ironically by the people who used to bully him in high-school.

• Nah. He lives because he's Made of Iron.

The Network was created by assistants to the Incubators, or perhaps it was the other way around.

• What, you didn't think we'd let this get too far before we got another Madoka crossover, did you? Especially not with another alien race boosting Earthlings' status and lifestyle at the expense of enslaving and killing and some humans, then disposing of them like dead batteries.
  • So the gang just condemned humanity to heat death of the universe? Nice Job Breaking It, Hero

Humanity will eventually recover and make their way to the galactic community on their own. And they're going to be pissed.

Odds are good that after the immediate setback shown in the epilogue, humanity will eventually be able to get communications back up and regain some of the technology lost when the Network left. With information given by survivors like Gary and Andy as well as any information the surviving Blanks can offer, humanity as a whole will soon know about the Network and what they've done.

This will likely take years, of course. And afterward humanity's focus will be on things like rebuilding society, gathering information, getting technology back on track, taking account of the dead, figuring out what to do with the Blanks, etc. But mankind will now know that there is intelligent life on other worlds. Intelligent life that is not only capable of causing us great harm, but already has. Intelligent life that manipulated and killed thousands in a very clumsy attempt to indoctrinate us. Intelligent life that knocked mankind back to the Dark Ages, resulting in even more deaths, as part of what amounts to a tantrum.

I imagine that once things have stabilized, humanity is going to unite behind a second space race and pour most of their resources into developing space travel. This amount of support will see mankind's quick advancement into space exploration. Maybe even more quickly depending on whether or not the Network left behind any technology that could be reverse-engineered or if the Blanks have any useful information on their creators they can share.

It will probably take decades or even centuries, but eventually mankind will find its way to the Network and their galactic community, having become a force to be reckoned with on their own terms, even as a race of "fuck-ups". And they will remember what the Network did to them.

In short, congratulations Network! You did manage to get humanity to be a part of the Galactic Community! Just not quite the way you intended.

• Bonus points for being effectively the malcontent bar brawlers of the galaxy-an entire race of pub crawlers. Oh, the poetic justice...
  • Clearly the Network will have to counter by creating a race of Nicholas Angels. That should keep our anti-social tendencies in check.
    • Of course, this explains how Britain is a *snigger* major space power in Hyperdrive

Everything after Gary drinks the leftover beer at The Famous Cock is a hallucination on his part.

• It's only after Gary sucks down five half-finished glasses outside The Famous Cock that things get really weird. Perhaps Gary simply got incredibly sick after this point and the rest of the film is all in his head.
  • Maybe one of them was spiked.

The Network didn't destroy the world's technology out of spite. It simply left.

• It was the Network's mere presence that powered the whole world's digital technology all along. Leaving the planet essentially amounted to pulling the plug.

The Network leaving shut down all current electrical devices (a worldwide EMP); it will not affect the creation of new ones

Basically, they didn't set humanity back to the Dark Ages, just to the 1700's or so. Rebuilding is still doable. It's not like they can stop simple mechanical devices, except maybe making them auto-rust.

The Cornetto Trilogy takes place in multiple universes, and the Network is present in all three.

In Shaun of the Dead it's never specifically revealed how the zombie apocalypse started, which leaves room for plenty of wild mass guessing. At the beginning, we're shown that over-reliance on technology (phones) has already transformed us into zombies before the outbreak. The virus was actually transmitted via the telephones! The Network created the phones and the technology and were doing experiments on the communication grid to see if mobiles could be used to alter the mindset of users, but the experiment went horribly wrong and created an army of flesh eaters.

In Hot Fuzz Frank is lying about his wife's death. She was the first person in Sandford to be made a blank, and after Frank destroyed her he and everyone else got really obsessed with having a town that would please the Network, thus no more mulching. They got so obsessed that, unbeknownst to their alien overlords, they were resorting to murderous means to keep order.

It's a crazy theory with loads of holes, but this troper thinks it makes things more fun.

• I would also add Cell for the whole phone virus turns people zombie bit.

The Worlds End is an alternate universe Skyline

Blue light is bad.

Everything during and after Gary's first fight in the toilet is fantasy after Gary's mind breaks.

This is where Gary first truly realises that his friends don't care about his nostalgia trip and that he's been stuck in a constant loop of repeating his childhood since he left school. Everything after the fight, which might have ended with Gary cracking his skull on a sink and dying or falling unconscious, is pure fantasy on his part; he plays out the part of the tragic hero who has a "happy" ending in getting his own posse and roaming a post apocalyptic wasteland as a "cool" lone wanderer, basically everything he ever wanted. The friends he loses along the way are the ones he cared least for, and the last shot of the film is him getting into a righteous brawl while his best friend narrates his actions in an awed tone. Gary's mind finally snapped in the bathroom and created his own wild fantasy where he can act out his dreams of being an unending cool guy.

Alternatively, it was all real, but after the events of the movie, The Network is gonna send in a different set of machines to start a more direct invasion of Earth.

There were more people who hadn't been replaced by the network than just Basil and "The Shifty Twins", but they took advantage of all of the other Drones heading over to the World's End in order to get out of town while they could

Gary is meant to be written as an "Anti-Blank".

Gary is stuck in the past while The Blanks and The Network want to advance technology and admire technology. Those are all obvious traits a Foil would likely have to The Blanks. BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! The Blanks appear to be made out of some cheap material such as plastic as they break like mannequins, yet Gary is Made of Iron, as noted on his character folder. He's been said to have a "Selective memory", which is something that The Blanks are given. The difference between Gary and The Blanks are that while Gary chose to have a selective memory, The Blanks are basically forced into giving up memories and are only given happy ones. Meanwhile, Gary is in despair over his own past despite others claiming that he had a selective memory.

If a sequel is ever made, it would be a post-apocalyptic sci-fi action-comedy, with new aliens involved in the plot.

Expect references to Alien, Predator, Duke Nukem, They Live, Mad Max, The Road, Fallout, and The Stand.

Gary is a former boxer or MMA fighter.

During his fight with the twin, Gary displays some pretty impressive dodging skills for a guy in his late 30s. He's also the most combat-capable member of the gang, and unlike Andy, he uses a lot of combat techniques rather than just relying on brute strength. It's very probable that Gary was some sort of professional fighter before the event of the film, albeit a mediocre one who never quite made it big and is thus unheard of by his old friends. His being a failed boxer would also explain why he's so depressed and suicidal at the start of the movie.

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