One question about the ending...

OK, when Brad gets back to the present, and Julie takes him home, he turns the TV on and sees the news broadcast with the religious fanatic and Dwayne Twillis debating. Now, at the beginning of the movie, when he and Julie were going through the yearbook, Brad mentions that Dwayne had died from AIDS during the 80's. So, how is it that he's in the debate?

Is the debate just a hallucination he's having (for that matter is the whole movie just a "fever dream" as it were)? Or has Dwayne somehow escaped his unfortunate fate?

I know in the deleted scenes section on the DVD, there's the bit in the scene where he gives his big speech at the Blue Jean Ball, where he warns Dwayne to always wear a condom when having sex (WHY did they cut that out? It'd only have made the movie about 10 seconds longer! And it would have made what follows in the movie make at least a little more sense).

So, if it wasn't "just a dream", and if he really did go back in time, does this mean he somehow altered history with his safe sex, well, sermon isn't the word for it, because he just says two sentences. But one assumes that with the deleted dialog in mind, Dwayne, presumably took those two sentences to heart, and lived to the present.

But then, ok, so how is it that what happens in this altered reality affect our own reality? I mean, I initially had the idea that Brad how some ended up in an alternate universe of some sort? One wonders if Brad's alternate universe doppelganger (let's call him Straight Brad) didn't do the same thing, and go through the same adventure that Brad did (only that he starts off dating a girl, and then finds him wanting to be Roland, Dwayne, or whomever), and as he prepared to leave, turned to Dwayne and gave him the same warning (because, presumably in the alternate reality there's an AIDS like plague that initially appears in the straight community). Hence, both realities are affected, and in both, Dwayne lives.

Or am I reading too much into the news broadcast thing? Given the behaviour of the moderator (who eventually tells the religious zealot to "SHUT UP, YOU BREEDER!!!"), one wonders if it's not just a delusion, just happening in Brad's head, and that Dwayne didn't live. That's maybe the one fault with the audio commentary, that Marc Moody doesn't actually explain Dwayne's presence in the debate (instead, he's just chuckling over the "Christians Opposed To People Who Disagree With Us" line). Oh well, I guess any good movies needs to leave something up to it's viewers to decide. :-)