Serenity ending what was that

#|

Is Plymouth a video game or purgatory or both? This naturally poses the question of whether Plymouth epitomizes some sort of purgatorial space akin to the Island on Lost. While Dill spent his days fishing, drinking, and pining over a mythical tuna, should he have been searching for the task that will finally deliver him to the Great Beyond?

He could never have guessed that that task would be conspiring to help his son kill his abusive stepfather from beyond the grave. Not really, but still.

But if Plymouth is both a video game and purgatory, then God, who may or may not be a high-school-aged boy living in an abusive household, is a video-game developer who uses his infinite powers to preach the morality of justifiable homicide. Is Plymouth a marketable video game? But when Patrick returns to the warm embrace of his mother and starts to rebuild his life, what remains of all the work he did to create Plymouth?

Already a subscriber? Log in or link your magazine subscription. Account Profile. Sign Out. Photo: Aviron Pictures. Tags: vulture homepage lede serenity endings twists matthew mcconaughey anne hathaway More. Characters can wind their way through a game in a number of different ways, and when faced with a tricky moral conundrum, a character — and the person who's playing them — can choose to do a number of different things.

In the context of "Serenity," it's clear that Dill's uncertainty about whether to kill Frank is a reflection of Patrick's own internal struggle about what he should do. When Dill ultimately decides to go through with the plan, it's because Patrick has made his choice in real life.

Both Patrick and Dill have done something radical to change their own circumstances. He creates the game to find some control after losing his father and realizing that he can't protect his mother. Ultimately, the game is a way for him to process everything that's happening in his real life, and regain agency over his own narrative. When he decides to kill Frank, he does so after playing the game. Although the twist of "Serenity" reveals the truth — that all of the film's principal characters are trapped in a video game — it does that not just because it's shocking.

It does it to unveil a deeper, more emotional story that's been underneath the whole time. Two distinctly different men with two different sons, right? During a night of heavy rain, he catches up with Baker and reveals a crucial bit of information after drinking some alcohol. Baker's compulsion for fishing is merely a character trait, a piece of computer code.

In the simulation, the now self-aware protagonist, Baker, is destabilized by the ever-changing code, unaware if he should fish or kill. Once Patrick completes the new code, Baker follows through with the command, in part aided by a new character who appears to be a simulated version of the video game creator - Patrick!

On Serenity, Baker finds Justice. We enter the film through the eyes of this young man immediately, though several characters will call him by another name in the digital world: The Creator. Though it's initially thought that his side of the story is being told as an aside by Frank's in-game persona, who complains about having a kid that's on his computer all day.

As we eventually learn, this was programmed into the behavior of his character by none other than said kid on his computer. The similarities don't stop there, as Baker Dill has John's trademark items from the real world: his Purple Heart, his gold lighter, and his combat knife.

Each of those items is in a drawer in Patrick's bedroom, along with a photo of John. Boiling it all down to the basic elements, we have Patrick idolizing his dead birth father, and wishing he could kill his stepfather before he ends up hurting or killing himself and his mother.

In the digital world of Plymouth Island, his father is the one that does the killing; but in Serenity's overriding reality, it's Patrick holding his birth father's knife. While Patrick's world is loud and violent, the sandbox simulator of Plymouth Island is peaceful, and pretty one-track minded. John is no longer dead, but merely took up the alias Baker Dill and started working as a tuna fisher off the island's coast. Baker's world is isolated to this island, and as we slowly find out, it's the only piece of land that exists in the universe of Serenity's game within a movie.

Everything from pursuing the massive tuna fish he calls Justice to his relationship with Constance, it's all pre-programmed in what amounts to a tropical version of Grand Theft Auto. Even the one dimensional characters that play like a teenager's recalling of an erotic thriller on Cinemax come from the fact that the psyche of a young boy who has a very limited grasp of adult relationships is in charge.

Now originally the quest to catch the tuna was Baker's main drive. That was the obsession he was programmed with, and the main goal of his character. But the moment that Karen and Frank show up, the intent of the game is changed.