Triangle: An Objective And Thorough Analysis (Spoilers)

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No Interpretation Left Behind
This multipart post will refer occasionally to documents found here: http://sdrv.ms/MoXetr. I’d recommend downloading and taking a look at the “Triangle Event Matrix” Excel spreadsheet and the “Triangle Event Chronology” Word document. The “Chris Smith Interviews” document also contains extensive information about the mindset of Chris Smith and provides valuable context to his intent.

If you’ve been browsing the IMDB “Triangle” board long enough you know by now that there are three predominate interpretations of “Triangle”, a notion supported by Chris Smith, the screenwriter. These include what have been referred to as the “purgatory” (Jess is dead) interpretation vs. time travel (Jess is stuck in a loop caused by a temporal corruption in the Bermuda Triangle) vs. schizophrenia/psychosis (it’s all in her head).

My opinion is that all three interpretations are equally viable (with Chris Smith’s own words backing this up), possibly even simultaneously applicable. Like a quantum particle that has not yet been determined, “Triangle” doesn’t solidify into a given viewer’s reality until they observe it, contemplate it, and make their own decisions about it. I, however, choose not to choose. “Triangle” was designed with ambiguity for a reason. Speculation and theorizing is a healthy endeavor, however, and the themes in this film are undoubtedly thought-provoking and compelling, prompting numerous discussions over the years.

There are several sub-factors that play into one or more of the three primary interpretations. Most discussions pit one against the other, but I propose that all of the following can be concurrently true:

1.) Jess is in a time loop (whether simulated, imagined or physical is irrelevant in my view)
2.) Jess is perpetuating her predicament with her own actions, trapped by guilt and recurring memory loss
3.) A supernatural archetypal presence is involved (namely, the “Ferryman”, “Death”, “Charon”, etc.)

The reason this is feasible is because regardless of whether or not Jess is dead the entire time, part of the time, or none of the time, the rules and mythology behind fantasy sci-fi time travel as it pertains to the Bermuda Triangle, real-world theory, and past cinema and literature still apply due to the nature of the loops we’re shown (that at least simulate a time loop). The structural framework of what we see in the film defines certain “rules” the phenomenon on display must abide by, and a logical thought progression starting at the core of this foundation leads us to a number of conclusions that stem from the fundamental nature of what we observe: a causal loop (meaning a string of sequential cause-and-effect events that circle back around in time so that effect precedes cause, producing the potential for a paradox).

I can’t emphasize this enough. It doesn’t matter if this is a so-called “purgatory” scenario akin to “Jacob’s Ladder” or an actual Bermuda Triangle phenomenon, or a combination of the two. What matters is what we see in the film, and what we see is unmistakably, irrefutably, time loops. We can then take this and assign a “how” or an underlying mechanic, but the “how” in a film like this isn’t very important, and Smith intentionally left this vague expressly because it’s not important. However, the concepts spawned by the scenario presented are interesting so I’ll explore various “how’s”, along with what is important: the loop structure.

I don’t think anyone would argue that even within the context of the spirit-world interpretation, the character of Jess fully believes that she’s experiencing a physical reality, albeit with anomalous events. Even if she’s actually dead (or psychotic, delusional, etc. which is largely interchangeable with her being dead) and even if what she observes and interacts with exists in her own mind as a dying nightmare or an afterlife setting (which is essentially the same thing), I think it must be agreed that her environment behaves for the most part like a physical reality, complete with time loops, people thinking independently like self-cognizant entities and bleeding and dying like living organisms, almost everything operating within the confines of a real-world setting, rendering whether Jess is actually dead or not irrelevant for any discussion regarding the structure and nature of the loops (becoming relevant only in details that don’t impact the core framework).

Therefore, my primary interest is the structural logic since the film undoubtedly attempts to portray and exist within the constraints of a corporeal world, even if that world is simulated (i.e. either spiritual or psychological) and plagued by the occasional abnormality. It’s this framework, that which is clearly presented by the film itself, that all discussion must be confined within in my opinion. To concoct story elements outside of this basis (e.g. the notion that Jess murdered Tommy) is folly. I personally prefer a theory that combines all elements, entailing Jess dying in the car crash, being brought back to the land of the living by a Ferryman-like archetypal figure, encountering a very real Bermuda Triangle event, getting transported to the past, and then doing it all over again. But an interpretation within which Jess and Tommy died initially in a car wreck and the loops she’s found herself in are a type of afterlife experience is just as viable (and probably Chris Smith’s preference).

Prerequisites
Although detailed understanding of the possible science and math that may underlie the looping temporal event portrayed in the film if it were to be applied to a corporeal reality isn’t necessary, I personally hold an interest in it, both theoretical and proven, and will dedicate portions of this post to such musings for those who wish edification on the matter. The structure of a time loop is important, however, so I will discuss what the nature of a time loop means to what we see in the film.

Again, although I find it quite fascinating, the science is not integral to the film. What’s important is the logical structure of the loops we're presented with and the character motivations behind the events in the film, i.e. a basic understanding of causal temporal loops, and the emotional core. I am personally very interested in how the science correlates, however, and will discuss it here in-depth. An appreciation of the themes in the film may be enhanced by prior understanding of the following:

1.) Relativity and the nature of spacetime (or science fiction variations of them)
2.) Quantum mechanics and multiverse theories (or science fiction variations of them)
3.) Causal, also called Predestination, time loops

Interestingly, even within the context of real-world science the lines between physical and spiritual reality start to blur. The universe we live in is much stranger than most people realize, and down at a quantum scale where everything is just a matter of particles moving in waves and arranged in different ways to form energy, and at larger scales matter, it becomes difficult (even moot) to differentiate between what may be a physical world, a ghost world, or a world invented within the recesses of a disturbed mind. This is the bizarre truth of our reality. When it comes down to it, the difference between them appears to be merely how the constituent subatomic particles are configured, be it perceived thoughts, a ghost, a chair, or an abandoned ocean liner floating in a limbo bubble out in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle.

I’m also interested in the mythology behind the film’s various themes, and to grasp a full-fledged discussion about “Triangle”, prior knowledge of the below items are very beneficial, if not crucial:

1.) The story of Sisyphus (son of Aeolus)
2.) The poem “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner”
3.) The 5 mythological rivers of the underworld (in particular Styx and Lethe) and the Ferryman
4.) Bermuda Triangle mythology (e.g. abandoned ocean liners, odd storms, temporal vortexes, etc.)

There are also without doubt, as confirmed by Chris Smith, other creative references and influences, including Kubrick’s cinematic version of “The Shining” (e.g. room 237), part 2 of the “Friday the 13th” film series (e.g. the mask Jess wears), “La Jetée” (e.g. time looping themes), “Dead of Night” (e.g. time looping, but in a dream), "Somersault” (for the cinematography), Sigmund Freud's essay "The Uncanny" (e.g. feeling threatened by our own Id and repressed impulses), etc. However, these artistic references don’t contribute to one interpretation more than any other, their themes equally applicable to all interpretations. They are there as “easter eggs”, if you will, subtle elements that a viewer with knowledge of them may be intrigued by but that don’t directly serve the film, existing as cinematic, figurative homages, and so I won’t address them further in this post.

Terminology
Below is how I’m defining several terms within the context of this post:

Causal/Time/Temporal Loop: a loop in time where the end feeds back into the beginning.
Aeolus Environment: a spherical area surrounding the Aeolus where time and space are corrupted.
Outside World Environment: everything outside of the Aeolus Environment sphere.
Temporal/Spacetime Bubble/Anomaly: the Aeolus Environment (a spherical area where spacetime is corrupted).
Amalgamated Interpretation/Theory: my own special blend of the three primary interpretations.
Jess Prime: the “original” version of Jess that we see in the dress at the house before she started looping.

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Sisyphus
In Greek mythology Sisyphus betrayed Zeus (in some accounts it’s Jupiter) by outing his affair with Aegina (in some variations of the story Zeus abducts her), the daughter of Asopus, and then Sisyphus deceives Thanatos (a.k.a. Death) by asking him to test his chains, tricking him into being chained himself, in order to escape Tartaras (i.e. the Underworld, or Hell), where Zeus had imprisoned him. With Thanatos chained humans could not be accepted into Hell, making everyone immortal for a period of time, obviously a big issue for both the gods and humanity itself. So Ares, annoyed that he could no longer kill people since they could not die without Thanatos doing his duty, freed Thanatos and sent Sisyphus back to Tartarus.

Sisyphus then tricked Persephone to let him out, stating that he would return once he’d admonished his wife for throwing his body into the public square (which he’d asked her to do on his deathbed as a test of her love, to see if she’d follow his wishes instead of giving him traditional funeral honors, i.e. burying the body, coins on the eyes, etc.). But once freed from Tartarus, Sisyphus refused to return to the Underworld, realizing he enjoyed being alive too much, and was forcefully dragged back by Hermes (in some accounts of the story, by Mercury, and by other accounts he goes on to live a complete life and dies naturally many decades later).

For his trickery (i.e. for cheating death), Zeus punishes Sisyphus by tasking him to roll a rock up a hill, only to have it roll to the bottom just before reaching the top. Due to his hubris, the very quality that had lead Sisyphus to think he was better than the gods and could cheat death in the first place, he continues to attempt to complete his task despite it obviously being impossible (in effect enacting Einstein’s definition of insanity). Zeus had in essence finally bound Sisyphus the only way he could: by trapping him in his own prison of pride, where he was self-compelled to commit to a task that he could never complete successfully, but that he would continuously attempt to finish out of egotism and unfounded, irrational faith.

Eventually becoming aware of his dilemma, Sisyphus says to himself, “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.” So Sisyphus decides to dig in his heels and try even harder, his pride leading him to believe that his contempt will eventually allow him to successfully push the rock up the hill. So he remains there trying again and again to complete a task that’s set up to fail, trapped by his own pride.

The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner
In the “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, the unnamed Mariner kills an albatross (albatross follow ships at sea to glean the remains of fish that are caught, which is deemed a portent of bad luck by the crew. They make him wear the albatross carcass around his neck as a sign of the misfortune they are sure he has incited. They later come upon a ghostly vessel where Death (a skeleton) and Night-mare Life-in-Death (a deathly pale woman) are playing dice for the souls of the crew. Death wins the crew in this game and Life-in-Death wins the Mariner. Her name hints at the Mariner's destiny, who will endure a fate worse than death as punishment for his killing of the albatross. One by one, all of the crew members die, but the Mariner lives on, seeing for seven days and nights the curse in the eyes of the crew's corpses, whose last expressions remain upon their faces.

Eventually, the Mariner's curse is lifted when he sees sea creatures swimming in the water. Despite his cursing them as "slimy things" earlier in the poem, he suddenly sees their true beauty and blesses them. As he prays, the albatross falls from his neck and his guilt is partially expiated. The bodies of the crew, possessed by good spirits, rise again and steer the ship back home, where it sinks in a whirlpool, leaving only the Mariner behind. A hermit on the mainland had seen the approaching ship and had come to meet it with a pilot and the pilot's boy in a boat. This hermit may have been a priest who took a vow of isolation. When they pull the Mariner from the water they think he is dead, but when he opens his mouth the pilot has a fit. The hermit prays, and the Mariner picks up the oars to row. The pilot's boy goes crazy and laughs, thinking the Mariner is the devil, and says, "The Devil knows how to row." Afterwards, as penance for shooting the albatross, the Mariner, driven by guilt, is forced to wander the earth, tell his story, and teach the lesson he learned to everyone he meets.

Paying The Ferryman
It could be argued that there’s at least a loose connection between Sisyphus’s promise to Persephone that he’d return to Tartarus with Jess’s promise to the taxi cab driver that she’ll return to the cab after he tells her he’ll “leave the meter running” and then asks if she’ll return. This may be a valid reference to make secondarily, but this scene is more reminiscent of paying the archetypal Ferryman to cross the river Styx into the Underworld (and the consequences of not paying him for the trip), which is solidified by numerous comments from Chris Smith (see Part XI) where he uses the term “Ferryman” multiple times (not once does he mention Persephone).

In other words, the cab driver is not Persephone incarnate, but is instead much more akin to Charon, sometimes referred to as Death, who ferries souls across the mythical river Styx (in some texts it’s one of the other five mythological rivers that lead to Hades), and who demands payment for the journey. He isn’t very happy when he’s not paid, with the soul doomed to wander as a restless ghost on the beach for 100 years (Jess’ looping predicament is reminiscent of this “punishment”). The tradition of placing a coin under the tongue of the dead or on the cadaver’s eyes stems from this ancient Greek superstition.

Memory Loss
In a number of ancient Greek texts the deceased drink from the river Lethe so that they lose their memories of their earthly life. In the “Aeneid”, Virgil writes that it is only when the dead have had their memories erased by the Lethe that they may be reincarnated. In Orphism, a Greek mystical religious movement, it was believed that the newly dead who drank from the River Lethe lose all memory of their past existence. To counter this, initiates of the order were taught to seek the river of memory, Mnemosyne, in the hopes it would secure the end of the transmigration of their soul. At the oracle of Trophonius near Lebadeia (modern Levadhia, Greece), which was thought to be an entrance to the underworld, there were two springs called Lethe and Mnemosyne.

The similarities to “Triangle” are striking, and influence my own interpretation of when Jess loses her memory during each loop, namely that “newly dead” Jess has her “memories erased” so that later on she “may be reincarnated”. We could translate this concept to “Triangle” by suggesting that after the taxi driver (as the Ferryman) takes Jess to the harbor, she sets sail on the yacht and at some point crosses an invisible threshold that represents a Styx/Lethe hybrid—not a literal mythological river, but perhaps the border between the land of the living and the land of the dead, or a demarcation point in the river of time, depending on your preferred interpretation.

Analyzing the character’s behavior in the movie, Jess appears to lose her memories of the past loop (the altered past events where Tommy dies in a car wreck, along with her recent foray on board the Aeolus), waking up from her dream on the yacht thinking she’d driven to the harbor after having dropped Tommy off at school, and this seems to happen as she traverses the event horizon of the Aeolus Environment (about 5 minutes before the wind dies and the storm appears). This moment of amnesia sets things up and ultimately guides her to the past and back around to the Ferryman she neglected to pay. The border of the Aeolus Environment bubble could be seen as a metaphor for, or a manifestation of, drinking from Oblivion (i.e. the Lethe), just as the dead do before being reincarnated, to prepare Jess for her return to the past.

Applying The Mythology To “Triangle”
One lesson we can take from Sisyphus is that of “letting go”, a commentary on humanity’s nature to repeatedly attempt to accomplish a task that is known to be impossible instead of just moving on, performing the same action over and over hoping to achieve a different result, trapped in an incessant loop of frustration and futility by one’s own pride and irrational belief. Basically, it’s knowing when to “fold’em” and knowing “when to run”, as Kenny Rogers would say. This lesson is interwoven into “Triangle” in my view, regardless of whether Jess is dead and in some type of state of purgatory or hell, is alive and trapped in a Bermuda Triangle time-loop, or is tied up in a strait jacket and sitting in a white rubber room in an asylum. In any case, her circumstance is in this sense self-perpetuated because it directly influences the decision she makes at the end of the film.

A deeper connotation lies with the notion that mankind’s inability to let go of emotions and make decisions based solely on a rational mindset, that kernel of hope we hang onto in the face of futility, blinds us to the truth of a given situation. It is both our greatest strength, allowing us to press on despite adversity, and our gravest flaw, leading us to repeat the same mistake over and over again, even if knowing the previous attempt resulted in failure. Knowing one situation type from the other is one of the most difficult aspects of being human. If we allow ourselves to be a slave to our emotions and obsessions, we’re either doomed to fail or destined to succeed, depending on how the details of any given circumstance happen to weave together. In a certain respect our emotions can diminish free will if we give power to external influences, that can in turn influence our decisions. Ultimately, most of us are a slave to our emotions to some degree (often to a large degree).

For Sisyphus the punishment is the emotional impact of his repeated failure, which is driven forward by his inwardly motivated perpetual hope that spawns from his pride in believing that he can rise above the will of the gods. In other words, he has a choice of whether or not to try to roll the rock up the hill one more time, or to just let go of his need to be successful and move on, a very simple and singular choice (although variation could be introduced in a number of ways still, e.g. he might choose to roll the rock up facing backwards during one attempt, or try to bull-rush it up with brute force the next, while taking a slow, stop-every-twenty-feet approach the next, etc.), and there's nothing in the story that prevents this as a possibility. The fact that he’s conscious and thinks to himself at one point proves that although the overall task will be repeated, he is quite self-aware and the manner with which the task is repeated varies. In other words, although he’s being compelled to roll the rock up the hill, he is not being forced to. He still has free will, which is an essential component to his punishment.

Jess’ recurring memory loss is of course also a major factor, nullifying her ability to learn from her mistakes each time around, although we’re challenged by Smith, which is verified by his statements in interviews (see Part XI), that his intent was to leave the ending ambiguous, leading us to ask the question as to whether or not Jess is about to knowingly reenter the loop. I think she does (see Part V), but she doesn’t know that she’s going to end up losing her memory. Despite this handicap, she can escape the loop. In fact, it’s inevitable that she eventually will due to the very nature of a causal loop (also Part V).

A direct tie-in to “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is the event in “Triangle” where the seagull, a cousin of the albatross, hits the windshield, indirectly contributing to Jess wrecking her car moments later (i.e. the seagull’s death causes her “bad luck”). In addition, the entire crew of the Triangle yacht dies except for Jess (like the Mariner, who lives on and on, and on, and…) In my preferred amalgamated interpretation of the film she does in fact die repeatedly but is “revived” (once as a byproduct of being transported to the past and resurrected on the beach, then after the car crash by the Ferryman). The overall theme of the Mariner tale is an interesting contrast to that of Sisyphus, in that the Mariner is able to pull himself from his fate and escape his primary punishment, driven by his own guilt to live the rest of his days wandering the earth teaching the lesson he’d learned.

This contrast tells us that we are not tied to any one reference when attempting to ascertain the nature of the events in the film (i.e. just because Sisyphus is doomed to repeat his fate for eternity, does not mean that directly correlates to Jess’ fate, only that it hints at its general nature). In fact, it reveals to us that Jess’ story is different than the stories referenced because they possess variations between each other. This in turn proves to us that those references exist merely as influence, as framework, as figurative context. They are not verbatim renditions, meaning “Triangle” is absolutely not a literal translation of the Sisyphus story as some want to claim.

Interestingly, the dead seagulls Jess tosses beside the road seem to be the only anomalous objects (i.e. something counter to what we’d expect to be “normal”) other than Jess herself (who came from the future) that exist outside the Aeolus Environment, the temporal corruption in the Bermuda Triangle where the Aeolus is doomed to float for eternity, and where the bulk of the film takes place. The seagull appears to act as an extension of this temporal anomaly, conceivably having itself recently emerged from it around the same time as Jess herself (something I’ll cover in Part IV of this post), and finding its demise on Jess’ windshield, as if the gods or some sci-fi law of quantum physics were using the seagull to reach out to Jess and pull her back into the fold.

As an interesting (or not so interesting) side note, I had the very same thing happen to me the summer of 1998 (or maybe it was ’99). I must state it was an odd experience to have a pure white bird fall from the sky for whatever reason (heart attack?) and bounce across my windshield, leaving a blood smear but fortunately causing no damage. Thankfully, the event did not portend my impending doom (yet).

Although we can only speculate on what Chris Smith was thinking when he wrote this particular bit with the seagull pile (he most likely included it merely as an indicator that Jess was indeed still in the time loop), it’s obvious that the seagull is linked to Jess’ circumstances, and is a core component of the “Triangle” concept (i.e. the seagull is in effect an annex or byproduct of the phenomenon occurring in the limbo “bubble” of the Aeolus Environment), with references to seagulls peppered all throughout the film, including a handful of scenes of her hearing a seagull squawk, enticing her to look up at the sky. It’s as if the seagull is the long hand of the Aeolus reaching out to make sure Jess returns to it, or is the Ferryman guiding her back to him.

This creates an interesting situation. Each time Jess has the Ferryman/taxi driver take her to the harbor she neglects to pay her fare (more on the mythological implication of this in a bit). Some force then seems to tug her back to the past, and back around to the crash, with the seagull being a major instigating component of the wreck. The Ferryman wants her to move on but is obligated to take her wherever she requests. Each time she asks to go to the harbor instead of somewhere—anywhere—else (e.g. another city, into the afterlife, etc.), which would allow her to exit the loop, she’s required to pay her fare, which she proceeds to neglect. Makes you wonder what her fate might be if she were to go to the harbor and actually pay the Ferryman his due (perhaps she’d die permanently after falling overboard off the Aeolus instead of waking up in the past?)

Both the Sisyphus and Mariner stories are wholly applicable to every conceivable interpretation of the film, with one and only one difference between them: in one of them the protagonist, i.e. Sisyphus, is dead (well, technically he’s dead then alive again then dead again, then alive yet again and then finally dead for eternity since he kept escaping), while in the other one (i.e. the Mariner) he’s alive. As hinted at earlier, and something I’ll delve into later, science accounts for an interesting possibility, that Jess could be both dead and alive simultaneously, that what she’s experiencing could be both physical and metaphysical, that one state is only different from another or merged into a single conglomerate state based on the arrangement of particles and energy configurations extrapolated from the very fabric of the cosmos that produces everything in existence, whether we perceive it visually or not. In this fashion, she truly could be caught up in a type of purgatory, stuck between the realms of the living and the dead, out of phase with reality. A sort of Schrodinger’s Cat.

In the end, it’s my view that the dead vs. alive components are interchangeable and equally relevant to all interpretations. In either case, the themes espoused in the Sisyphus story and “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner” poem are prevalent in the movie with Jess’ circumstance being both self-inflicted (which of course could easily be applied to the schizophrenic interpretation also) as well as possibly directed by a supernatural force, most applicably Charon of Greek mythology (i.e. the “Ferryman”), if so.

It should be noted that in both the Sisyphus and Mariner accounts the protagonist suffers a form of punishment for the remainder of his days that’s perpetuated by his own human frailty, pride for Sisyphus and guilt for the Mariner, regardless of any otherworldly involvement, with the punishment designed to feed off the subject’s own emotional flaw, meaning it is self-propagated. Furthermore, the Mariner partially achieves salvation through his own actions, breaking free of the “curse” imposed upon him by his killing of the albatross. So I maintain that both stories are equally applicable to “Triangle”, whether Jess is dead and in purgatory or alive and in an anomalous time loop, or both. The only significant difference between them is that she’s either alive or dead, but in the end that truly doesn’t matter. All three interpretations, and any variations of them, are viable and work equally well within the framework (both structurally and emotionally) constructed by the screenwriter (i.e. Chris Smith).

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Understanding The Science
The following is not directly relevant to the film (for that skip to later sections), but it paints a curious picture of the reality we live in and provides a basis of understanding for discussions in later Parts. You may not find this as fascinating as I do, but in my opinion what follows is important for everyone to at least attempt to grasp, whether applying it to the context of “Triangle” or otherwise, because it shines a light onto everything from religious belief systems to what we think we observe on a daily basis as we trip our way through life.

Time’s Arrow
According to Einstein’s theory of Relativity time is relative, based on the pull of gravity and the comparative speed of a given object, i.e. each “perspective” through space. In other words, "time's arrow" is effectively an illusion, a byproduct of these processes, and therefore so is the causality of Newtonian physics. Each individual's reality is so similar that we don't see the difference, which is why in the three-dimensional world around us Newtonian physics works so well. But at a quantum level, there are in fact different realities for each of us, i.e. reality is quite literally perception (or more accurately, perspective, viewpoint, angle, etc.), with each of us seeing an oh-so-slightly different “hologram”, yet with fundamental physical constituent components that span each perceived reality tying each illusion together into a massively complex whole. Technically, this occurs at a quantum level, meaning each subatomic particle in our bodies or in a single object has time pass differently for it based on the level of gravitational force pulling at it combined with its velocity through space.

A report published in September of 2010 detailing the results of studies concerning time dilatation and relativity utilizing ultra-accurate atomic clocks has proven that every subatomic particle has time pass for it at a different rate based on the criteria of gravity and spatial velocity. One facet of this experiment compared the passage of time between two atomic clocks, one only a foot above the other one. As the theory predicted, time passed at a different, albeit phenomenally small, rate for each atomic clock. Although past experiments in space and on airplanes have garnered the same result, this was the first time an atomic clock accurate enough to measure the difference of only a foot existed. What this proved is that time quite literally passes slower for our feet than for our heads because our feet are closer to the center of the Earth, which are therefore having an ever-so-slightly greater force of gravity exerted on them, thus proving and turning Einstein’s theory of Relativity into a proven fundamental law of the universe (i.e. it’s no longer just theoretical).

As stated previously, the effects of gravitational forces are combined with the impact of velocity through space, which dictates that the faster you move the slower time passes for you relative to another object (throw in 100 objects moving at different velocities relative to each other and the calculations get quite complex). Move as fast as the speed of light and time all but stops for you (the speed of light seems to be the only constant in the universe, although even that has been recently questioned with the supposition that maybe light just appears to be a constant because the variance is so minute we can’t detect it). Based on what’s now been experimentally proved, the forces of gravity slowing time down for a given individual object is compounded with that object’s velocity through space relative to all other objects. We must consider that the Earth itself is hurdling through space at a very high rate of speed, that the Earth’s rotation spins us through space, that the Earth rotates around the sun, and that the very fabric of space itself is expanding, all of which feeds into the velocity that determines how fast time passes for us relative to other objects effected by these same components of motion.

Although all of this occurs at a subatomic level, meaning the variance is broken down to a per-particle basis (e.g. not just feet vs. head, atomic clock on the floor vs. clock a foot higher on a table, etc.), contiguous particles that are “stuck” together into a single conglomerate, or macroscopic object will have very little variance between them due to time dilatation since they will always “travel” together. In fact, to create a significant variance that would result in a noticeable time dilation would require insane speeds and/or gravitational differences.

For example, due to the Earth’s spin living on the equator would get you an additional 465.1 m/s of velocity versus standing at one of the poles (this does not take the wobble of the Earth’s axis into account). Compared to anyone living at a pole you would be 0.00004 seconds younger for each year that passes. If you were to cruise for 10 hours on a Boeing 747 at 917 m/s you would be 0.168 microseconds younger than someone who stayed on the ground. If you somehow managed to get a plane to fly nonstop (refuel in the air?) for a full year you would be 0.0001476 seconds younger compared to someone left on the ground.

Of course there is any number of other variables at play that would adjust those outcomes, and this is taking into account only your entire body, not each individual subatomic particle your body is comprised of, each of which would have an exponentially smaller variance between them. It’s easier, however, to discuss such matters at a macroscopic level, and because of the nature of matter cohesiveness (due to mass and therefore gravity, yet another complicated consideration to throw in there) it’s relevant and viable to do so.

So could a temporal (and spatial) distortion like what we see in “Triangle” occur in reality, like the many stories over the years attributed to the Bermuda Triangle with people jumping through time? It’s very doubtful (and that’s being lenient). Measurable time dilations of course occur in the universe, but generally on very drastic scales (e.g. the event horizon of a singularity or black hole, the point beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer, exerts such an immense amount of gravity that from an external perspective an object stuck at its cusp would appear frozen in time), but not in such a localized area on Earth, not without affecting everything else around it, even if it was possible for a tumultuous warping of spacetime to create the loops-within-loops we see in the movie. Yes it is a science-fiction conception applied to a fantasy scenario (one that’s made appearances in countless films and books over many decades), but one that is based on a kernel of real-world science, science that by the layman may appear to be just as if not more bizarre as the sci-fi variation.

Based on this fantasy science, any perceived contradictions in logic that occur in thought experiments as depicted in “Triangle” would only exist from an external perspective, that of any other than Jess’, i.e. that of the viewer’s or God’s. If we were to follow the skips and bumps and blips of Jess’ looping journey from start to finish from her perspective sequentially, the problems with causality would fade away because she’s undergoing a semi-closed time-like curve (“semi” because the curve loops around but doesn’t quite close, providing a temporary reprieve until she kills Jess Prime, the “original” Jess, at the house). Ultimately, reality, which is synonymous with perception, is a matter of perspective, even at a fundamentally physical level. This is why a “purgatory” or ghost world or even just a world contained within Jess’ imagination or psychotic nightmare is in effect no different than a physical one, as everything is formed from the same constituent particles and energy, even our very thoughts. It’s just a matter of changing energy states via the laws of thermodynamics.

The Grandfather Paradox
Stephen Hawking, one of the preeminent and most fascinating scientists of our era, predicted that the “Grandfather Paradox” is impossible, that the universe operates in a manner that would prevent the past from ever being changed in a way that would in turn prevent something that’s already happened from going back in time and altering its own history in a contradictory fashion, thereby creating a paradox (i.e. that a young man could go back in time and kill his grandfather, preventing the young man from ever being born, which would prevent him from going back to kill his grandfather, which would… you get the point). Although I’ll expand on this later, suffice it to say that the math and empirically observed data strongly suggests that such contradictions can never happen, because on a quantum scale the “rules of reality” would prevent it. This mechanism is a strange one, something that itself may seem like science fiction, but that is in fact a genuine, provable reality.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
This observed phenomenon exists within the realm of quantum mechanics, and is expressed by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. It’s been proven that certain pairs of physical properties at a quantum level, such as position and momentum, cannot be simultaneously determined to high precision. That is, the more precisely one property is measured, the less precisely the other can be measured. The Uncertainty Principle states that a minimum exists for the product of the uncertainties in these properties that is equal to or greater than one half of the reduced Planck constant (ħ = h/2π). Published by Werner Heisenberg in 1927, the principle means that it is impossible, for example, to determine simultaneously both the position and momentum of an electron or any other particle with any great degree of accuracy or certainty. The more you pin down the particle’s momentum, the less you know about its position, meaning the more you narrow down the probable value of one, the more you open up the probable value of the other. Moreover, the principle is not a statement about the limitations of a researcher's ability to measure particular quantities of a system as some may claim, but instead about the nature of the system itself as described by the equations of quantum mechanics.

In quantum physics a particle is described by a wave packet, which gives rise to this phenomenon. Consider the measurement of the position of a particle. The particle's wave packet has non-zero amplitude, meaning the position is uncertain, and it could be almost anywhere along the wave packet. To obtain an accurate reading of position, this wave packet must be 'compressed' as much as possible, meaning it must be made up of increasing numbers of sine waves added together. The momentum of the particle is proportional to the wavenumber of one of these waves, but it could be any of them. So a more precise measurement of position by adding together more waves means the measurement of momentum becomes less precise (and vice versa). The only kind of wave with a definite position is concentrated at one point, and such a wave has an indefinite wavelength (and therefore an indefinite momentum). Conversely, the only kind of wave with a definite wavelength is an infinite regular periodic oscillation over all space, which has no definite position. So in quantum mechanics, there can be no states that describe a particle with both a definite position and a definite momentum.

Quantum Entanglement
Even more strangely, two or more particles or quantum systems can be mysteriously linked across arbitrary, even vast, distances of space in a phenomenon called quantum entanglement, where both particles act in unison like twins, as if they were actually the same entity residing in two spatial locations, not only doppelgangers in appearance but actions and in fact all other conceivable properties as well. If one is made to spin a specific direction and move at a certain speed, the other replicates it identically. Quantum entanglement was verified by a series of experiments beginning in 1972 by Stuart Freedman and John Clauser. Dubbed “spooky” by Einstein, this occurrence suggests that particles aren’t bound by space, that particles can be linked via a mechanism that has yet to be identified in a fashion that allows transference of information instantaneously across any arbitrary distance, even if millions of light years apart, and even across time (since space and time, i.e. “spacetime”, are irrevocably interwoven). And there are experiments underway designed to exploit this peculiar aspect of reality (as well as research on using qubits, or quantum bits, to create a super-fast computer processor).

Putting The Grandfather Paradox To The Test
Recent experimental findings may be giving us answers (or at least glimpses of potential answers) without having to resort to such extreme measures as having to imagine multiple universes that split off during decisions and interactions and that are therefore only fractionally different (even though that mechanism does still underlie what we observe in the form of Relativity). Yes, you read that correctly. An actual experiment. Not just a bunch of science geeks chatting about neato possibilities (which is really what the Many Worlds theorem amounts to in my view). Brace yourself, because your brain is about to implode.

A November 2010 paper submitted by Seth Lloyd, a prominent physicist, in collaboration with several others in the field, tackles quantum uncertainty experimentally for the first time and all but proves there’s a mechanism that prevents paradoxes from occurring. This experiment suggests that not only are particles not individually bound by “time’s arrow”, but that their past and future are equally probable, that they can move freely within what we at a macro three-dimensional level perceive as forward-moving time. This is quite interesting considering everything in the cosmos is made of up of these constituent particles, including us, meaning if our constituent particles have the ability to move forward and backward through time with equal freedom, so might we be able to as macro three-dimensional objects if we could get every particle in our body to act in unison.

Below are links referring to the experiment, along with a link to a PDF of the paper. I suggest browsing through them if you find such matters at all interesting, but I’ll summarize it here. In essence, the mysterious phenomenon espoused by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle conjoined with quantum entanglement is the very mechanism that prevents a time travelling particle, and therefore everything else in reality, from stumbling into a Grandfather Paradox. Seth Lloyd proposes an expansion of the Novikov Uncertainty principle, where probability bends to prevent paradoxes from occurring. Outcomes become stranger as one approaches a forbidden act, as the universe must favor improbable events to prevent impossible ones. As a tie-in to “Triangle”, for example, we might apply this to Jess miraculously surviving the car crash to avoid completion of the paradox she created by killing Jess Prime (if we want to remove the mythological component).

An interview with Seth Lloyd about the paper they published on the matter:
http://www.highstrangeness.tv/0-16378-quantum-time-travel-black-hole-not-required.html

The actual paper they published:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1005/1005.2219v1.pdf

Some other related links:
http://www.markchadbourn.co.uk/2010/11/scientists-conduct-first-successful-time-travel-experiment/
http://andrewhickey.info/2010/10/26/the-grandfather-paradox-experimentally-resolved/
http://phys.org/news198948917.html
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/419893/quantum-time-machine-solves-grandfather-paradox/
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/the_athenaeum/2011/03/avoiding-the-grandfather-paradox.html
http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/blog/mit-paper-works-out-paradox-fry-may-not-be-own-grandfather/
http://phys.org/news/2011-03-grandfather-paradox.html
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-07/quantum-time-machine-lets-you-travel-past-without-fear-grandfather-paradox
http://www.neatorama.com/neatogeek/2010/07/20/physicist-proposes-a-solution-to-the-grandfather-paradox-of-time-travel/#!LdNME

This experiment validates what was once a purely theoretical concept: that the laws of nature prevent Grandfather Paradoxes, by tapping into the odd phenomenon of entanglement (i.e. changing the properties of one entangled particle instantly changes it for the other) and post-selection (changing the properties of a particle by measuring it after-the-fact, which proves time flows forward and backwards equally at quantum scales) to in effect teleport a particle (more accurately, that particle’s information, and apply it to another remote particle, therefore duplicating it) through time, while implementing a triggering mechanism that would allow the particle to destroy itself a certain percentage of the time after travelling to the past. The results are in line with what quantum mechanics predicts to 100% accuracy, meaning each and every time the experiment succeeded the self-destruction trigger didn’t activate, all but proving that they were being prevented from doing anything that would allow the particle to go back into its own history and destroy itself (or more specifically, destroy its entangled “copy”, which in turn would destroy itself).

In other words, the fundamental laws of the universe at a quantum scale would prevent you from going back in time and killing your grandfather, even if the technology existed that would allow you to go back in time, meaning the attempt would inexplicably fail even if the temporal relocation device (i.e. “time machine”) itself registered a success in every other way. I speculate that this mechanism is merely the timeline fragment collapsing and retaining its previous state if the unknown quantum physics involved “detects” the prediction of a conflict. As a result, the potential altered timeline fragment never manifests due to the inconsistency, meaning if an altered past can’t naturally flow into an established future, it doesn’t flow at all and is abandoned. I’ll repeat again that this was an actual, documented experiment that effectively teleported the properties of one particle onto another particle across not only space but time via quantum entanglement and post-selection methods.

Fascinating stuff. At least I think so.

Back to Table Of Contents:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1187064/board/thread/223982092?d=223982092#223982092

Continue to Part IV:
http://www.imdb.com/rg/e/bt/title/tt1187064/board/thread/223982092?d=223982176#223982176

Back to Part III:
http://www.imdb.com/rg/e/bt/title/tt1187064/board/thread/223982092?d=223982159#223982159

Many Worlds
Hugh Everett's many-worlds theory is one of several interpretations of quantum mechanics spawned from observations concerning Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. In brief, since certain observations cannot be predicted absolutely, there is a range of possible observations, each with a different probability. Each of these possible observations corresponds to a different universe, or timeline. In essence, every possible outcome that could happen does, each splitting off into a separate universe or timeline that shares an identical history, but each with their own multitude of futures that will be split into yet more universes each time more than one possible outcome exists. Once we observe one of those outcomes it becomes our reality and the others disappear.

One question posed by the theory is: what if these universes only disappear from our perception and actually still exist, just waiting to be observed by someone else? For example, suppose a die is thrown that contains 6 sides, and that the result corresponds to a quantum mechanics observable. All 6 possible ways the die can fall correspond to 6 different universes, i.e. one version of you sees the die land on 2, another in a different timeline on 5, another on 1, and so on. More correctly, there is only a single universe technically but after the "split" into "many worlds" these universes cannot in general interact, existing independently and forever separated from their past “world”. This is commonly referred to by the scientific community as a Level III Multiverse. There is a level I and II, then a level IV and V as well, and I won’t get into the details of them here.

I am personally skeptical of any diverging timeline/Many Worlds based theories, at least until further experimentation produces concrete results. To a certain extent this Many Worlds concept may just be a way to interpret relative spacetime (a simpler way to help visualize what’s occurring) at a quantum scale. It’s worth bringing the concept up here though because it could potentially be called upon to explain some things we see in “Triangle”, although ultimately I think we have to rule it out, which I’ll explain later.

Wormholes
A phenomenon to invoke that might allow for a physical object to move through spacetime would be a wormhole. Some theorize that physical information sent through a wormhole would be destroyed during transport due to a feedback loop that would accelerate until it collapsed, never allowing the information through. And if applying this to “Triangle”, a wormhole on Earth crossing only a few miles of ocean that allows an entire physical biological entity to be deconstructed and reconstructed elsewhere is not remotely realistic. But it could be made to work if put into a sci-fi fantasy scenario, and might account for a person moving backward in time in a way that he or she could then meet her earlier self as a future “copy” of the same entity.

Wormholes, also called Einstein-Rosen bridges, are an oft-used tenet of science fiction for transportation across vast distances and/or time. I won’t get into detail, but a wormhole is essentially a quantum-scale tunnel between two points in spacetime. In my view, however, exiting the threshold of the bubble-like Bermuda Triangle anomaly itself is actually what throws the Jess character into the past in the movie. In this case the time travel trigger is a product of how the membrane of the spacetime bubble interfaces with the outside world, and the act of traversing the anomaly’s threshold in this case adjusts an object or person’s position in time, i.e. their temporal state. This threshold appears to be the point at which Jess and her companions on the yacht are fragmented into disparate time stream segments, and then how she gets transported to the past.

The imagination can run wild with sci-fi possibilities, and another factor we could throw into the mix is quantum entanglement, especially since using quantum entanglement to send information into the past is more than just fantasy (refer to Part III for information about a mind-blowing experiment that actually occurred). So I think we can attribute what we see in “Triangle” to both entanglement and a type of wormhole, or in this case what I might dub a “time-wall’, which corresponds to the event horizon or threshold of the Aeolus Environment. Regardless of the method, if a character could go to the past while maintaining his or her present physical state (or be reverted to a past physical state), meet itself, and have the option of killing itself, thereby introducing a new event that did not previously exist, it could irrevocably change his or her own history in a way that conflicts with what previously happened to that character at that past point in time, i.e. it could create a paradox.

Fringe Science
Variants of the ideas discussed above and in Part III have been drawn upon numerous times over the years in science fiction stories, both literature and cinema, and have also been linked to experiences in the Bermuda Triangle on more than one occasion in what I’ll refer to as “fringe” literature. For example, the science fiction version of the Many Worlds multiverse theory posits that the phenomenon that occurs at the miniscule quantum scale translates into our macroscopic three-dimensional scale with a new timeline spawning off every time a situation that contains multiple probabilities goes one way or the other (like the television show “Sliders” with Jerry O’Connell or the movie “The One” with Jet Li). Let’s look at a scenario that portrays this phenomenon.

Your father heads home from work one day feeling a bit randy, so stops by a local flower shop with the intent of seducing your mother, and well you know where that leads. Although there are numerous probabilities along the way, spawning a multitude of “worlds” that exist simultaneously (in fact, each particle in our bodies would be existing in a different “world”), we’ll pull it back to only two large-scale probabilities for purposes of simplicity. In one possible outcome your father makes it home and conceives you with your mother, resulting in you reading this very IMDB post right now. In another possibility a drunk driver sideswipes your father on the way home and puts him in the hospital for three weeks, preventing the encounter between your parents that resulted in you ever being born (or producing a variation of you who is three years younger, and maybe the opposite gender).

According to the Many Worlds theory, both of these possibilities occur, each splitting off into their own universe. Let’s ignore the fact that all Many Worlds or multiverse theories dictate that once branched, an object can never cross over to another branch or universe, despite the plethora of sci-fi fiction that’s defied this fundamental principle. In the sci-fi spin of this scenario, a time anomaly occurs one day, a random wormhole for example, an inexplicable rip between worlds, that allows one version of you to cross over into the other universe and encounter the other you, where all sorts of hijinks ensues

And these concepts are sometimes blended into Bermuda Triangle stories, where random time distortions pop up for unknown reasons within a certain region of the Atlantic Ocean. There are actually a number of said “triangles” or what are sometimes referred to as “power centers” at converging ley lines around the planet. This piece is not science and should be considered New Age fringe modern day mythology, but it is what the film “Triangle” draws from, even though it’s never stated that it actually takes place in the Bermuda Triangle itself (despite it occurring off the coast of Florida, and the Aeolus sporting a Miami sign on its railing). Drawing from actual accounts of people claiming to have experienced the Bermuda Triangle (along with similar accounts occurring in other locations, some of which don’t even reside in regions of water), brief bubbles (what science might call a “pocket universe”) that exist outside of normal time and space crop up sporadically for a while and then later dissipate without a trace. Within these bubbles exists a kind of semi-limbo, where the laws of physics are haywire, playing by its own set of rules. With this, we could explain the oddities we see in “Triangle”.

For “Triangle” there isn’t a general purpose Many Worlds multiverse, however. If there was, the seagulls wouldn’t be piling up alongside the road. There is, however, a temporal discrepancy within the region of the anomalous storm that causes the original timeline to skip out of sync, that fragments the timeline into disparate segments that then loop around and overlap each other, which in a certain respect could be called a kind of contained pocket multiverse. This loop is the result of the Aeolus Environment hurling objects and people backwards to a fixed point in time in the past when they exit. The pattern is quite clear, based on what we’re shown.

So when objects enter they do so out of sync with their previous entry time (based on what we see in the film, each loop occurs about 30 minutes after the previous one). Then when they exit, they get sent to the past. This is the logic, the structure, the foundation the film clearly presents us with, and I’ll delve into that more below and in Part V. Based on several factors, the most noteworthy of which is the pile of seagulls, when Jess goes back in time and kills herself she doesn’t do so in a parallel world (if we were seeing a multiverse there wouldn’t be a pile of seagulls building up), thereby creating a paradox when she kills Jess Prime (i.e. if she kills her “original” self, there’s no way she could ever have driven to the harbor and been sent to the past, therefore there’s no way she could be killing herself). This paradox that Jess creates for herself, along with the anomalous physics of the Aeolus Environment, can account for the weirdness we observe.

What The Science (Fiction) Means For “Triangle”
If applying the actuality of what’s discussed in Part III to “Triangle”, if Jess were to be thrown into the past via quantum entanglement with her past self it would only be her information, her properties (including memories) that would be transferred (see “Putting The Grandfather Paradox To The Test” in Part III). Her physical body, which in essence is really just information, would effectively disappear and be merged with her past self since technically they are one and the same object just in two different states (including a temporal state or value).

In other words, if the dial were to be turned back, or rather flipped back to a previous position in time, Jess would blip back in time into the same physical position she was at that time (or at that temporal position), while maintaining current information, i.e. her current state, intact, or with both states entangled. This would in effect prevent her from going back and killing herself because there would never be two entities of her present at the same point in time, effectively nullifying the possibility of a Grandfather Paradox. Unless, that is, her present state was changed to something that resulted in her past existence being obliterated, or that otherwise interfered with her current state, in a certain respect emulating the Seth Lloyd experiment where a “copy” of a particle (turned into an identical copy via quantum entanglement) was sent into its own past to kill itself.

So can we reconcile this with Jess going back in time and killing herself in the film? Possibly. But instead of “waking up” at her house a short time before leaving for the harbor (somewhat akin to what the character of Sam Beckett experienced in “Quantum Leap”) she washes up on a beach. Therefore, we have no choice but to accept the fact that in the movie Jess travels back in time as an entity split off from her former self so that she can then interact with herself in a third person manner. Her positional state is different, therefore she becomes a “facsimile”. But what she seems to be a copy of is her state at the moment she first traversed the border of the Aeolus Environment, as if an imprint of her state at that moment was captured on the surface of the bubble, and is then reapplied as she exits (in effect meaning anything could happen to her as long as she somehow exits, at which point she’d revert back to the state she was in when she entered).

This could suggest a quantum entanglement component (if explaining the proceedings with science fiction). Not only is Jess sent to the past, but she’s effectively revived into an unblemished physical state. All her bruises, scratches, stains, smudges, etc. disappear. In fact, in one shot we see a close up of her dead eyes, gray skin and wet hair, and then a moment later she “resurrects” with all blood on her face wiped off, her hair no longer wet, her white shirt bleached, no injuries whatsoever. In a purgatory or schizophrenia interpretation this is easily explainable (e.g. in her mind she merely resets things to start the loop, and therefore her perpetual inner emotional struggle, all over again), but what might this indicate within the context of a Bermuda Triangle time travel interpretation?

For a physical interpretation we could posit that as Jess, either unconscious and drowning or having just been bashed in the head with a boat hook, crosses the border of the Aeolus Environment back into the Outside World Environment she gets entangled to particles at her point of entry (while she was asleep on the yacht). She is then reverted to that past state when she’s flipped into the past (somewhat akin to the teleporters in “Star Trek”, although there a person is deconstructed at a subatomic level and then reconstructed remotely), thereby transferring her physical state via entanglement, matching it to her previous temporal state, while allowing her to exist at a completely different positional state.

We could also speculate that the threshold of the bubble acts like an Einstein-Rosen Bridge of sorts, a time-wall, so to speak, that separates the anomalous Aeolus Environment (which may be bigger on the inside, a reference to “Doctor Who”) and the “normal” world on the outside, with a relative time differential of about 30 minutes upon entering it and a connection to about 6.5 hours in the past when exiting. If a wormhole is how the information is sent to the past, then I think the pocket universe could be seen as a wormhole hub that spits people back out at various points in time (past or future) depending on which wormhole (i.e. location) one exits through. Jess’ fate is to drift through an area that dumps her about 6.5 hours into the past.

She then lives forward through time for about 5 hours before entering the anomalous bubble again (which I suspect is the moment she wakes up from her dream and forgets the previous loop). From the perspective of someone on board the Aeolus those 5 hours are compressed into about 2 minutes (from the time she’s transported to the past and shows up again on the capsized yacht), a ratio of 150:1.

The Science Fiction Explanation
To reiterate, Jess’ physical state reverts back to a previous state as she wakes up on the beach, and I think we can safely attribute the state she’s reverted to with the state she’s in as she crosses the threshold of the Aeolus Environment, while asleep on the Triangle. In fact, with the way it was edited, the dream she has of the water washing up over her feet serves as a direct visual link between those two points in time. Interestingly, my “Triangle Event Matrix.xlsx”, which can be downloaded from my Triangle SkyDrive folder, also resulted in a correspondence between these two events (A1 and A22). So when Jess wakes up on the beach, she does so in a physical state that identically matches her state just before waking up on the yacht, which I speculate is the moment they cross over into the Aeolus Environment.

And entanglement explains this phenomenon nicely, meaning as she crosses the event horizon of the spacetime bubble, her state while asleep is entangled across time (like taking an imprint and then faxing it to a remote location) and replaces her dead state (blank piece of paper) as she exits by floating through the invisible time-wall of the bubble. In this way, just like in the Seth Lloyd experiment, her past state is made to match her present state, a weird byproduct of the anomalous Aeolus Environment. We don’t see her immediately revert or “resurrect” upon exiting the vicinity of the anomaly, however, but instead as water washes up over her feet on the beach. We could postulate that the Aeolus Environment’s border isn’t necessarily set, but moves out in waves as the water does. It’s possible that this fluctuating border is close to the beach she washes up on.

If we factor in some mythology as well, which I do for my so-called amalgamated interpretation, this could possibly happen at the direction or influence of a supernatural force, in this case most likely the Ferryman, also referred to in “Triangle” itself as “Death” incarnate. This would mean that the mythology provides the “why”, with the science fiction component being the mechanism to describe “how” it happens.

Regardless of the underlying mechanics, the premise of the film is fundamentally based on more than one version of Jess co-existing within the same timeframe but in different localities. As a result, a paradox is created when she kills herself. We could possibly invoke the Many Worlds conception to circumvent this paradox, but due to the piled up seagulls alongside the road we know it’s not a multiverse scenario (see Part VII), so we must impose our own variation of these concepts specific to the film. For more exposition on this, read on...

Back to Table Of Contents:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1187064/board/thread/223982092?d=223982092#223982092

Continue to Part V:
http://www.imdb.com/rg/e/bt/title/tt1187064/board/thread/223982092?d=223982209#223982209

Back to Part IV:
http://www.imdb.com/rg/e/bt/title/tt1187064/board/thread/223982092?d=223982176#223982176

The Structure Of “Triangle” And The Time Loops
In addition to time-looping, there’s another phenomenon we witness several times in the film: time skips. This skipping forward and backward in time (and back and forth between what I’ll dub “spatial polarity” as well) could be the result of overlapping timeline fragments. It includes the fresh then rotten then fresh again food, the mirrored scenes where everything seems to be reversed, the skipping record scene that happens just as a new yacht appears, etc. With all other factors put together, the record/time skipping glitch indicates a disruption that occurs when Jess’ timeline loops back in on itself, and the mirrored scenes (particularly the one with the camera moving through the mirror Jess stares into, known as the “mirror-walk” scene), are indicative of melding, undulating, overlapping time stream segments.

This exists regardless of whether we’re seeing this as part of a purgatory or physical time travel interpretation. These loops and skips absolutely occur in the film, and it’s what happens in the film that really matters, regardless of any pseudo-scientific theories about the mechanisms behind it or even the various interpretations of why it’s taking place. For this section I’m going to focus on the logic behind the structure of the string of events observed, not necessarily as a depiction of fictional happenings or circumstances, or the how and why of it (I’ll get back to more positing on that matter later on), but how the plot and the events that occur within the framework of that plot are structured. Removing all other elements, we’re left with can be referred to as “time loops”, the structure of those time loops, and the evidence that when pieced together allows us to logically deduce the operational nature of how the time loops are presented in the movie.

As previously mentioned, to aid in this analysis I chronicled all of the major events in the film, including time stamps for when they occur, in a Word document entitled “Triangle Event Chronology”, along with a matrix of those events in “Triangle Event Matrix” that associates when they occur in correlation to each other. On other worksheets in that same spreadsheet I designed several iterations of a diagram that provides a visualization of how the loops must be occurring if the entire cycle is followed through logically. During the early stages of this work I played with a variety of structures, and considered a consecutive format (where Jess(1) exits to Loop 2 and so on instead of Loop 1 depositing Jess into Loop 3, skipping 2 loops in a staggered manner), but I ultimately dismissed that pattern, largely due to it requiring an arbitrary value for when a new yacht appears. As stated in the Introduction of this post, these documents can be viewed or downloaded from: http://sdrv.ms/MoXetr

Crossing The Streams
In the film we observe time skipping or hiccupping occasionally, and if the mirrored scenes are any indication, space flips as well, each time a new yacht arrives. We also observe each loop appearing at a different time within the anomaly relative to when the other yachts show up, with each loop connecting into the Aeolus Environment, the anomalous temporal “bubble”, about 30 minutes after the previous one. This temporal discrepancy occurs at consistent intervals, at first appearing to be triggered by Jess killing everyone, including a version of herself going overboard. However, we find out at the end of the movie that killing the others has nothing to do with the new capsized yacht showing up. Jess falling overboard and then cycling through the past is actually the cause (i.e. it’s merely her looping back around that results in her showing up again, albeit instantaneously). Her killing everyone has no bearing on why it’s all happening except that doing so culminates in Jess falling overboard or getting brutally beaten and then thrown into the drink (and thus into the past).

Based on the two scenes where we see the fresh-then-rotten food during separate loops, a shift does seem to occur at some point between the first time the group enters the dining hall and the next time Jess enters it (just before she encounters Victor), which could indicate a consistent interval where time skips forward, given the small timeframe between those two dining hall scenes within a single loop. Most likely, however, this just indicates that Jess has crossed over into the timeline fragment of one of the other overlapping loops, meaning as timeline fragments overlap it’s possible for an occupant of the loop to pass between the environment of one loop into the environment of another one at a point of intersection. I’m not sure if Smith necessarily intended this or was just throwing in random weirdness to make things seem “off”, but this theory explains these observations perfectly.

Overlapping Loops
Because Jess’ timeline is looping back into itself at asynchronous intervals, it results in her while in past loops being thrown together with herself in future loops, and vice versa. In fact, once studying the infinite Mobius-like loop cycle the film suggests exists, its structure of looping back in on itself absolutely requires the original pre-loop journey to interact with future loops. Those other loops must be from the future since no loops have yet occurred when Jess first boards the Aeolus, and this stipulation exists even if Jess died in a car crash and is a ghost as opposed to a physical-only interpretation because that’s what we’re shown happens.

By definition loops are cyclical, and we absolutely must understand this fundamental nature of the entire cycle that extends in front of and beyond the small snippet we observe in the film. This tells us that Jess must have interacted with herself from future loops when she first entered the cycle (if referencing my Loop Structure example diagram, Jess(1) would interact with the iterations of her future self from loops 7 and 8, or if referencing my Event Matrix (Origin) worksheet, Jess(1) would interact with her future self from loops 79 and 80). It’s the only way the recurrent nature of the loops can work without a breakdown occurring at some point during the cycle. The diagrams depict it visually so that it's easier to comprehend, with several “origin” representations of what it might have been like as the last loop transitioned back into the first loop (plus or minus a few details that are debatable and speculative), along with an overall “Timeline Flow”.

Closed Timelike Curve Cycle
The diagrams show us that an overall encompassing cycle (a cycle being a series of loops from the first time Jess drives to the Triangle through the loop she escapes) is the only way the loops can be working. Arranging them in any other fashion creates a violation of logical progression and disrupts what we observe occurring in the film. The diagram absolutely proves that either Jess can only die one time throughout the entire series or that she dies each time (possibly both in the car crash and when she’s thrown overboard, which is bolstered by the close up shot we see of her dead, unmoving open eyes and discolored skin on the beach) and is then revived, or as stated in mythology is “resurrected”, into a perfect, unblemished state, either because she’s dead and experiencing an afterlife nightmare that will perpetuate until she learns her lesson, or due to natural sci-fi processes reacting to the paradox she’s created (guiding her back into the loop).

Note that the clock on the wall and Jess’ watch would remain stuck at 8:17 throughout this entire process, as they have both stopped functioning, and are in essence “stuck”, entangled throughout the entire loop cycle to that fixed point in time. It should be noted that this time correlation, along with the AO symbol on the drums both of the marching band and in the dining hall, strongly suggests that Jess herself exists as the central catalyst to the looping phenomenon, being a direct contributor to the circumstance by creating the paradox, be it physical or metaphysical (as I’ll suggest in Part VI, my preference includes both).

Errant Theories
A mark against the possibility of any type of pattern that allows for Jess to start the entire cycle over from scratch again (i.e. coming from the house and driving to the harbor without interference from her future self) prior to the point we see her in the film (about 70 loops in at most, by my estimation) is the fact that there is only one set of keys. If the cycle wasn’t feeding back into itself, it would require there to be a break in the pattern each time Jess dies, at which time the entire series would start all over again with her entering the Aeolus for the very first time, presumably bringing her keys along with her. Either there’d be more sets of keys, or the piles would reset, neither of which are the case in the movie.

Several theories being presented on this board, including those that suggest a new Jess comes from the house every other loop, are predicated on this concept. But this is their fatal flaw. As a result of this and other factors we can state with certainty that no version of Jess has ever died (without being revived) up to the point we join her. Otherwise, it would result in multiple keys (since each time Jess boarded directly from her house without interference from her future self she would bring them with her). Of course this still leaves the question of what would happen if Jess were to ever escape her looping fate. Would a second set of keys be introduced into the pattern? I don’t believe so. In fact, I think its inevitable that she escapes due to the very nature of the causal loop she’s caught up in (see Parts VII and VIII).

Also, Jess dying (without being revived) at any point prior to the 70 or so loops we see violates the core principle portrayed by the Sisyphus tale, with the same individual performing the same task over and over again (versus a new Jess being introduced periodically and starting over from scratch). Although Sisyphus is stuck in his fate for all eternity, the Mariner is not, only chained to his destiny for the remainder of his days (i.e. until he dies). We can’t form a theory based solely on Sisyphus. Nor can we see “Triangle” as a literal translation of the Sisyphus story, although there are absolutely several components of it integrated into the conglomerate theme of the movie. As stated earlier in this post, we must factor in all elements together. In other words, Jess does not equal Sisyphus. Jess is instead an amalgamation of a variety of literary and non-literary references.

Surviving The Loop
Without getting into specific examples, Jess seems to lose her memory of the previous loop (including her recent changes to the past segment of the timeline as well as the preceding Aeolus events) around the time she wakes up from a dream on the yacht after we’re shown a quick glimpse of what we’ll see again at the end of the film with crabs crawling around her on the beach, waves hitting her legs, which appears to awaken her, or perhaps more accurately revive her (see my “Triangle Event Chronology.docx” for a description of the scene). Her demeanor, dialogue, facial expressions, etc. indicate that she remembers what happened on the Aeolus as well as the car accident prior to this point during the loop, including on the beach, but that she’s forgotten it once she wakes up from her dream on the yacht, with only a vague impression that something might be wrong with Greg.

As mentioned in Part II and Part IV, the Mythology of the River Lethe could be invoked here loosely, given the other Greek mythological references of Sisyphus and the Ferryman. And/or for a solely physical Bermuda Triangle time travel interpretation we can assign her amnesia to the anomalous nature of the spacetime bubble the Triangle is drifting into, in which case based on what we see, the “resetting” that occurs within the Aeolus Environment would by default also wipe memories of the events being reset since they no longer happened. In addition, when an object or person exits the Aeolus Environment that object itself seems to be reset (for Jess, who dies from drowning after being thrown overboard or after first being bashed in the head with a boat hook, this means she is revived from the dead as she’s reverted), probably back to the state it was in upon entering the bubble. In fact, we can establish a rule for this based on what we observe regardless of what interpretation we assign it to.

Following is how I’d describe this "Triangle" rule or principle regarding the resetting of things:

1.) There are two environments: the Aeolus pocket dimension, bubble, whatever it might be called (a spherical limbo-like circumference that the Aeolus is stuck within), and then everything outside of that sphere. The terminology I’ve chosen for this is the “Aeolus Environment” and the “Outside World Environment”.

2.) Each time a looping object or person crosses from the Outside World Environment into the Aeolus Environment, all Environments reset back to what they were originally, meaning any alterations that have occurred as a result of that object or person looping are reverted back to what they were before any change was affected to them (technically, it’s just the object appearing at a point in time prior to any changes being made).

3.) Each time a looping object or person crosses from the Aeolus Environment back into the Outside World Environment, that object or person is reset back to the state it was in while entering the pocket dimension. In addition, it is transported 6.5 hours into the past.

Entering the Aeolus Environment resets the Environment (or more accurately, merely places the subject at a point in time prior to changes being made), along with anything that changed as a result of passing through it, including alterations made in the past, so the reset ripples outward and undoes anything that was changed to either Environment (and memories of those events disappear along with it).

The act of dying itself can’t be the reset trigger for a looping person. Otherwise the seagull would reset when it dies. So how do we explain Jess’ survival of the car accident? The paradox she creates by killing her original self at the house? Not really. If we go with the premise that violating the paradox merely collapses the timeline to start over, then a paradox-fixing mechanism can’t be used to explain her miraculous survival. It is in play, but since there’s still a chance of her going to the harbor the collapse hasn’t happened yet and so has not yet been invoked (and won’t be until some future loop when she decides to do anything other than go to the harbor).

So what’s the answer? How does Jess survive the car wreck unscathed, no broken bones, no torn clothing, no pavement burns, no bruises, not even a small scrape? The answer is that she doesn’t survive. She dies. So how does she persist? Is she really dead the whole time? Smith leaves this up to the viewer to decide, but my mind is made up on the matter, and it all revolves around one thing…

The Ferryman, a.k.a. “Death”, as characters in the film refer to him. In other words, the taxi driver.

I think we can determine with some degree of certainty that Jess dies in the accident. But if so, where does her body go? Is it still in the driver’s seat of the car and we just can’t see it? As the camera pans past the car post-wreck we don’t see enough of what’s inside to determine whether or not there’s a body in the driver’s seat. This was done intentionally by Smith to leave things ambiguous. My guess is that there is one, at least if we base this off of what occurs in Greek mythology. We can’t know for sure, but if Jess’s body is still in the driver’s seat and it’s her spirit standing there looking upon the carnage she’s wrought, how does this play out exactly?

The Ferryman can bring spirits back to corporeal form. In the myth of Sisyphus he tricks Persephone into letting him come back to the land of the living so that he can admonish his wife for not burying his body properly (which is actually something he told her to do before he passed on, the clever bastard). His spirit never merges back with his body, even though he comes back in bodily form. It’s as if the spirit is merely translated back into a physical form when it crosses back over from the Underworld. I think Jess does the same thing. Although she isn’t as devious in her intentions as Sisyphus, Jess asks the Ferryman to bring her back to the harbor, back to the land of the living, later promising she’ll return to pay him (which Sisyphus also does with Persephone).

So it’s my take that she is actually alive again while riding in the cab to the harbor (the fact that it’s brightened up again after fading to that dark, ominous background post-car wreck may indicate this), perhaps with her body still in the driver’s seat of the car. Rescue workers will find two Jess’ at the scene (a white shirt/jean shorts body in the driver’s seat and a flowery sundress body on the road), but it doesn’t matter. They’ll just think they’re twins. Additionally, these events will reset anyway the next time Jess loops around.

Although disoriented, when Jess wakes up on the beach she behaves in a way during her time in the past as though she remembers what she experienced on board the Aeolus. So if exiting the Aeolus Environment resets her physically, why is there no memory loss at that time since memories are stored in the physical brain? Why only upon entering the bubble are memories wiped? We can only speculate that within the universe of the film memories are more than just a physical byproduct of mental processes (which plays into my amalgamated interpretation). Upon entry her memories of the previous loop are wiped due to those events being reset. They no longer happened, therefore she no longer remembers them. As far as she knows this is her first time, and she just drove to the harbor like she did that first time. When she exits, however, it’s her being reset, not the events on the Aeolus, which from her relative perspective in time still happened.

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Overview Of Proposed Origin Events
The following section is how I'd lay out an amalgamated time looping interpretation. It involves Jess dying each loop instead of once before the loops start, influence by an archetypal figure akin to the Ferryman/Death, and an actual Bermuda Triangle temporal disruption that physically throws her into her own past. The “Event Matrix (Origin)” worksheet in my “Triangle Event Matrix.xls” spreadsheet depicts the details of what may have occurred at the beginning and end of the entire cycle, and I’ll delve into that more in-depth later on in Part VIII and IX.

Note that the events preceding the loop cycle (up to her arriving at the harbor) are speculation, albeit coherent conjecture deduced from the patterns established by the subsequent loops we observe in the film. We don’t know exactly what happened up to that point (and to be accurate, nor do we know the explicit details of the preceding 60+ loops, although we can ascertain a pretty solid idea), only what happens during the snapshot of the several intertwining loops we’re shown (only one of which we see with any degree of completeness, although we see portions of a total of 6 loops, enough to extrapolate a pattern).

Keep in mind that only minor tweaks to what follows would be necessary to convert it fully into a so-called “purgatory” interpretation (the main difference being that Jess only dies originally in a car wreck instead of doing so after driving to the harbor the first time and then looping back around) or to take it the other way and make it a fully physical Bermuda Triangle sci-fi fantasy construal. Like a quantum particle or Schrodinger’s cat, I’m choosing not to choose between the two states. I’m choosing both states simultaneously, where Jess is in constant flux moving between the land of the living and dead repeatedly each loop as the cycle progresses.

Inter-World Relational References
By this I refer to elements we observe in the film that tie or link components of the “world” of the Aeolus (i.e. the bubble, temporal anomaly, etc.) with the “outside” real world Jess originates from, or as I’ve dubbed between the Aeolus Environment and the Outside World Environment. The most noteworthy clues are the 8:17am time on Jess’ watch that matches the clock on the wall in the banquet hall of the Aeolus, the AO symbol on the drum of the marching band she sees after tossing the bird aside and in the banquet hall of the Aeolus, the “Anchors Aweigh” song played by both the marching band and the record player on the Aeolus, and room 237 that plays a prominent part in the events on the Aeolus matching Jess’ house number.

For a “purgatory” theory, meaning one for which Jess is dead the entire time, these links suggest that she originally died in a car crash (similar to what we see in the film) and that everything that happens after that is either in her head or in a personal “hell”. In this case 8:17am (which is almost certainly the time of the car crash), which is the time Jess’ watch and the Aeolus banquet hall clock are stuck at, is the time of Jess’ death. The “Anchors Aweigh” song, along with what appears to be a time stutter linked to the record player, seems to correlate with a “new” Jess showing up on a capsized yacht. The AO symbol ties the Aeolus to the “outside” real world (occurring on drums in both). It should be noted that the drums display an English “A” and “O” (which we could surmise stands for “Aeolus Orchestra”, although that’s speculative).

In a physical time travel theory these connections between environments could be chalked up to some form of pseudo-science, the unexplained weirdness of the Bermuda Triangle, or merely a figurative occurrence. Since Jess dying in the wreck and then deciding to not have Death bring her back to life (to the harbor) would violate the potential paradox situation she created by killing Jess Prime at the house, and a Bermuda Triangle spacetime disturbance would disrupt the normal flow and order of things, it’s reasonable to forge these links around that, and there’s a precedence for this type of scenario both in literature and cinema, where different versions of reality leak into each other and key events and/or objects are linked across fragmented time streams.

In other words, I do not see the symbol on the drums, the “Anchors Aweigh” song, matching 8:17 time, etc. as proof of a purely “purgatory” interpretation. They could just as easily be signs of a dislocated time continuum, the byproduct of a Bermuda Triangle anomaly that leads to a temporal paradox Jess creates for herself (“for herself” being a key phrase, since as a result everything that occurs beyond that point would revolve around her at the center of the paradox as a kind of fixed point in time tied to the time of her death in the car wreck, although really anything other than her returning to the harbor at that point would result in an established paradox, which I predict would cause the entire loop cycle to collapse and reset).

Everything in her timeline, in fact the very fabric of Jess’ reality, revolves around and is entangled (a loose reference to the phenomenon described in quantum physics) to this pivotal event, the very last decision point possible when the potential paradox she created by killing her original self at the house could come to fruition and cause a timeline collapse. Quantum physics, after all, reveals to us that our material reality is not very different from an imagined one, or perhaps what could be referred to as a metaphysical one. All of reality boils down to arranged particles distributed in waves to form energy and/or matter.

In a ghost-world or schizophrenia interpretation what happens after an initial car wreck is in essence all in her head, whether it’s actually a spiritual experience or her brain concocting her own harrowing scenario as she lay dying on the pavement. Perhaps she’s in an environment constructed by a “higher power” as a form of punishment for bad mothering and/or for promising to return and pay the Ferryman and then not doing so. In any event, I think it’s primarily guilt-driven and self-perpetuated, even if not of her own devising. The time looping situation could possibly be imposed by the “gods” to force her to face herself, to show her firsthand the horrible person she used to be before she died (although the film doesn’t directly support this idea).

Or maybe Jess watched a movie about the Bermuda Triangle the night before and then read a book of myths that included the story of Sisyphus, fueling her afterlife or comatose nightmare, with her emotions about being a bad mother tying it all together and keeping her trapped within it. She could just as easily not be dead but be in a coma somewhere after the crash, with the entire ordeal just a dream. It really doesn't matter once we adopt an it’s-all-in-her-head-or-she's-actually-dead stance. They're basically the same from a storytelling standpoint. In fact, none of it truly matters. What matters most is the looping framework and core emotional logic.

As you can see, there’s a variety of ways to spin it, and all of them can be correct, which is what Smith intended. At any rate, from that point forward (arriving at the harbor pre-loop) Jess could either be dead or stuck in a corporeal time travel loop, or as is my personal preference, a combination of the two.

Origin Event Flow Description (Amalgamated Interpretation)
Jess Prime (a.k.a. Jess(0), “Original” Jess, or in other words Jess during pre-loop events) drops Tommy off at school, drives to the harbor, boards the Triangle yacht with Greg and his friends, and then enters the Bermuda Triangle temporal anomaly (crossing the border while she’s asleep), where if referencing my loop structure diagrams or “Triangle Event Chronology.docx” document, she becomes Jess(1) (which is merely a number designator to keep it all straight) as she passes through the edge of the anomaly’s membrane.

Note that during this first pre-loop trip Jess probably changed out of her dress and into the white shirt and jean shorts for reasons other than the paint since it wouldn’t have been spilled. In the movie we see Jess in the sundress sit down in front of a mirror in her room moments before the other Jess comes in and caves her skull in with a mallet. This is the most probable opportunity for her to change clothes during a non-loop or unaltered original event. As she looks at herself in the mirror she decides to change into something more casual.

Jess then undergoes events similar to what she will during later loops (minor deviations are possible but it would be highly similar to what we see in the later loops we directly observe), and drops her keys on the Aeolus just like we see in the film (falling from her cardigan). Here she sees her companions killed by another Jess (i.e. her, but from a future loop, Loop 80 in my example Origin matrix). Jess gets thrown overboard. She probably drowns (and in every other alternating subsequent loop gets shot and then bashed in the head first).

She then drifts beyond the threshold of the Aeolus Environment and gets transported into the past. The current takes her to the beach, where the surf strips her of her jump suit, which then floats away in the waves. Having looped to the past, she would now be referred to as Jess(4) (meaning she’s in Loop 4, with each trip to the past being the marker for each new loop thread she enters, skipping 2 loops each time due to the asynchronous manner with which the timeline is overlapping back into itself).

The act of leaving the Aeolus Environment resets her physical state to what it was as she entered it. As a result she is “revived” or “resurrected” from death. All wounds, dirt and smudges, tears in her clothes, etc. vanish. At this point there has been no memory loss (which will happen as she reenters the Aeolus Environment as it resets wiping away the events she just experienced there, and therefore her memories of it).

After waking up on the beach she goes home and kills the version of herself that exists at the start of her timeline, pre-loop (i.e. her about 6.5 hours earlier before she went to the Triangle the first time). This act sets up conditions for a potential temporal paradox (she has genuinely rewritten her own past, but she still has the opportunity to replace Jess Prime’s place in the timeline) that diverts her time stream down a different course. Essentially, the “universe” now requires Jess to take the place of the Jess Prime version she killed at the house. As soon as she decides to head down a course that doesn’t include her taking resuming the loop the paradox will manifest fully and the timeline’s loop cycle will collapse back into its originating pre-loop state. As a side note, the seagull could be natural probabilistic forces compelling Jess back to the harbor, keeping her in the loop.

This sets up the possibility of a repeating cycle, culminating in the car crash, which is the pivotal “death” event that ties it all together, that puts her at the center of the entire phenomenon, and that entangles her outside real world to elements of the anomalous environment contained within the temporally disruptive Bermuda Triangle bubble. In the crash Jess dies and her spirit is “thrown” from the driver’s seat of the car, landing a number of yards away (I suspect her body is crumpled in the driver’s seat). And there she stands on the precipice between worlds in a kind of limbo waiting to be ferried onward into the afterlife or back to the land of the living.

As she finds herself standing in front of the carnage she’s wrought she struggles to grasp her circumstance. Her prevailing thought? To go to the harbor. To save Tommy. All the signs she’s seen lead her to the conclusion that going to the harbor is the only way to get a mulligan, a do-over, an opportunity to avoid Tommy dying in the car wreck. She doesn’t grasp, however (despite the seagull pile in later loops, although at this point there is no pile yet), that due to how her time stream will feed back into itself she’s going to lose her memory, dooming her to repeat the car accident over and over again. So in this amalgamated interpretation she has the Ferryman, a.k.a. Death, return her to the harbor (although she probably doesn’t understand that she’s actually dead when she makes this decision) in the land of the living so that she can make an attempt to save Tommy (in later loops never realizing she’s done it many times before), alleviating the potential paradox situation, and thus the loop cycle continues (instead of collapsing and resetting, starting over).

As a side note, if she had not chosen to kill Jess Prime there would be no paradox and the cycle of loops would never start (likewise, if she makes this choice during a later loop the cycle collapses and starts over). After killing her other self she could still choose not to return to the harbor and back into the loop cycle. The paradox seems to have a built-in period of leeway, a span of time up to a point of no return, which in this case is Jess’ decision of whether to return to the harbor or not. However, if she were to not choose the harbor it would allow the paradox to come to fruition. As a result, the causal loop cycle would collapse, and her along with it, as well as any events that had occurred as a result of her existence, and the entire cycle would reset back into its originating state.

It would play out like this because by choosing to not take the place of Jess Prime on the yacht she makes it so that event never happens, along with everything that follows on board the Aeolus, including her falling overboard and into the past, meaning her existence there standing on the abyss of death in the middle of the street would be a paradox. So what do the probabilistic laws of physics do with this anomaly? They eradicate it (see Part III for a real-world experiment that depicts this). As soon as she chooses to not return to the yacht she becomes an impossibility and she disappears, never having existed, and any changes she made are undone as well. Since she never could have existed to kill Jess Prime, snatch up Tommy and drive away to have the accident, none of that ever happened, so it all reverts to the original state, with Jess dropping Tommy off at school then driving to the harbor with her keys. Back to ground zero. We never see this happen in the film, but due to the very nature of a causal loop, we know that it eventually must happen, and that it happens at some point after 70+ loops.

But, to get back to the event flow, she chooses to return to the harbor. At the harbor she struggles to answer Victor's question and decides to go with what would have happened originally, that she dropped Tommy off at school. And they set sail. But then something happens that seals her fate. While sleeping on the Triangle she has a dream that includes a flash of herself dead on the beach (an indication that she dies, usually from drowning although sometimes from being beaten down with a boat hook as "mean" Jess, each time she's thrown overboard), and must also include something about Greg (a quick memory of her shooting him?) because when she wakes up she's concerned about him. I speculate that this flash she has of her dead on the beach is the moment they cross the threshold of the Aeolus border (tying this moment to the moment of her resurrection on the beach), which causes her memory loss as the environments reset and every alteration that had occurred during her previous foray on board the Aeolus is erased, along with her memories of it.

If referencing the “Event Matrix (Origin)” worksheet of my “Triangle Event Matrix.xlsx” spreadsheet found in my Triangle SkyDrive folder, you’ll see that her dream of waking up on the beach (event A22) while asleep on the yacht coincides with her waking up on the beach during the subsequent loop (A1). An interesting coincidence, but there is no overlap occurring during the A Phase events like there is on board the Aeolus during Phases B through D. Although there is a compounding of the seagulls between loops during the A Phase segment due to their anomalous quality (see Part VII for details), the entire segment occurs in its entirety sequentially and is fully reset (except for the anomalous seagulls), each time Jess is transported to the past.

When they enter the Aeolus Environment they do so out of sync with time on the outside world (and space within the bubble appears to flip back and forth spatially as Jess crosses between overlapping time streams, indicated by the fresh then rotten then fresh again food, the mirror images, along with other clues), which is what creates the three interacting loops and versions of Jess aboard the Aeolus.

And away we go again, and again, and again, and... until some future loop when she somehow chooses to not kill herself in the past, or she does kill her past self but then chooses to not go to the harbor, both of which would produce the result of everything starting over from scratch, but without her continued anomalous existence. Her choosing either of these is at best a remote probability due to her circumstances and emotional attachments, but it is also inevitable due to the very nature of a causal loop. At that point, if she’d chosen to not interfere with Jess Prime at all, she’d either live on in a life separated from her son, or move on to heaven or hell or whatever you choose to believe in, depending on which interpretation you choose to apply, in either case moving out of her time-looping purgatory and into a state of permanence. Or, if she had killed “original” Jess but then did not return to the harbor, that version of her would cease to exist as the causal loop collapsed.

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The Seagull Pile Controversy
In this section I propose an explanation for the piled up seagulls. It will be primarily presented from a science fiction time travel standpoint, but the methodologies can be applied to any interpretation. Although I’m drawing upon information from the film directly, I will not disagree that it is a speculative venture. However, based on what we’re shown in the film, I deem it reasonable speculation. I will also not claim that this was Chris Smith’s intention, but I don’t see that it matters. He has not addressed this aspect of the film, and therefore I’m assessing the matter on its own merits, based on what’s presented within the movie itself, including the structure of the loops as they’re depicted and the mere fact that there’s a pile of seagulls.

Three assumptions can be made based on what we observe in the movie:

Assumption 1: The Grandfather Paradox
Time travel paradoxes as they’re understood in mainstream science fiction are at play in “Triangle”, creating a situation that allows Jess to repeat the causal loop she and the seagull are in after creating a potential temporal paradox by killing her former self from the originating timeline fragment at the house. This entails some form of innate natural function, whatever that may be, that works to prevent or in this case correct temporal conflicts, i.e. the so-called Grandfather Paradox where an object that goes to the past interferes with its own history in a way that would have prevented it from going to the past.

The previously cited Seth Lloyd Grandfather Paradox experiments (see Part III) utilizing quantum entanglement and post-selection techniques seem to prove the existence of some natural mechanism that prevents temporal paradoxes on at least a quantum scale (which may be the only scale for which time travel will ever be possible). I invoke this premise as presented in science fiction literature and cinema and within the movie itself since “Triangle” clearly depicts a macroscopic sentient entity being transported back in time to a different locality than she was, in fact her original iteration still is, at that point in her past.

Assumption 2: Linear Timeline Fragments Looping Sequentially
The temporal anomaly, whether an actual physical Bermuda Triangle phenomenon, a metaphysical construct designed by a sentient non-human agent, or a combination of those two things (e.g. a god-like being posing as the Ferryman, or who the Ferryman reports to, could very easily create physical Bermuda Triangle events), has created a kind of contained multiverse environment composed of fragments spun off of a linear timeline (i.e. splitting off asynchronous timeline fragments in a manner that allows them to interface with each other), and each thread is being fed back into their shared originating timeline fragment one at a time in sequential order (despite it being a fixed point in their shared past), however that might be occurring. To clarify, what we observe is a single linear timeline that’s being fragmented and then looped back around into itself sequentially.

I’ll dedicate Part VIII to expounding upon this particular item in-depth.

Assumption 3: The Following Seagull
This assumption proposes the idea that a seagull follows the Triangle yacht into the Aeolus Environment, follows Jess back out again into the past, then hits the car. I’m forming this conclusion simply because the seagulls are piling up and because at first blush this creates a logical incongruence with the rules established by the film regarding why other objects are piling up within the anomalous temporal/spatial event. I am not suggesting that this was Smith’s intent. He merely wanted an eerie way to reveal that Jess is in fact still in a loop at the end of the film. But I’m compelled to explain it nonetheless.

So I’m invoking the pervasive seagull theme present throughout the movie (a reference to “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner”—see Part II) that seems to be intimately tied to Jess’ circumstance. Persistently throughout the film we’re shown that a seagull is following Jess (e.g. above her car while she’s driving, as the yacht disembarks, as the yacht sails out on the ocean, the numerous seagulls milling around the Aeolus, the seagull flying far above just after Jess falls overboard during the shot of the sun, etc.), as well as a number of scenes where Jess hears a seagull and looks up at the sky (e.g. while taking laundry from the clothes line, as she gets out of the taxi, etc.). And I’m using the pile of seagulls itself as evidence to support the notion that they are a byproduct of the temporal disruption, even though they are no longer in it, that the anomaly is having an impact outside its threshold due to how it interfaces with the “outside world” sequentially and by rendering objects that pass through it anomalous (i.e. out of sync with their own originating timeline segment).

Timeline Outline
Note that there is technically only one linear timeline that’s looping back into itself, creating disparate fragments that contain differing or combined events and objects. However, for this exercise I’ll label each timeline fragment in a way that allows them to be differentiated numerically. I’ll label each conglomerate timeline fragment with a number sequence that includes all of the timelines involved in sequential order (including repeating Timeline 0, which each loop passes back into, when warranted). If the label for an object includes a Timeline number it means it shares the history of that timeline along with all of those listed in that timeline combination. I should note that in addition to the seagulls, the below outline touches on several other subjects as well since they are natural elements of the seagull discussion. I should also note that I have invented two third party independent observers in the outline to denote what they would witness.

Jess leaves Timeline 0 (for the first time) by driving to the harbor
-----there is an observer on the beach where Jess throws the seagull - we’ll call him Observer 0a
-----Observer 0a is solely a part of an unaltered Timeline 0, never cycling through the anomaly
-----Observer 0b is in a sailboat out in the ocean within visual distance of the storm
-----Observer 0b is solely a part of an unaltered Timeline 0, never cycling through the anomaly

Jess splits off into Timeline 1 as she enters the Bermuda Triangle spacetime anomaly
-----for her, Timeline 0 as an independent string ends and becomes what I’ll call Timeline 0-1
-----a seagull also flies into the anomaly, having followed them in, becoming Seagull 0-1

Jess drops her keys on board the Aeolus
-----I’ll refer to the keys as Keys 0-1

Jess is transported to the past, where Timeline 1 merges back into Timeline 0
-----we’ll call this Timeline 0-1-0 to represent that the histories of all of those timelines are merged
-----this occurs because each timeline is looping back into itself and they have a shared history
-----this creates a situation where she can irrevocably change Timeline 0
-----Observer 0b sees Jess 0-1-0 suddenly appear in the water on the outskirts of the odd storm
-----the body is too far away and the current pulls her under before he can get to her
-----the seagull that followed them into the anomaly also flies out of it and into the past
-----Observer 0b sees Seagull 0-1-0 fly out of thin air on the outskirts of that same storm
-----let’s say just for effect there’s a static discharge when this occurs just because it’s cool

Jess kills her Timeline 0 version at the house, preventing Jess 0 from entering the anomaly
-----this creates a potential paradox since she now never drove to the harbor
-----as long as looping Jess can decide to take Jess Prime’s place the paradox does not manifest fully
-----if at any point Jess decides not to perpetuate the loop it will collapse back to Timeline 0

Jess 0-1-0 snatches up Tommy and flees, and Seagull 0-1-0 hits the windshield
-----some force at work manipulates the situation to try to guide Jess back into the loop, i.e. the seagull
-----this is either a natural, non-sentient process course-correcting or is the work of the Ferryman

Jess 0-1-0 tosses Seagull 0-1-0 over the side of the road
-----the seagull is now a permanent part of the shared history of Timeline 0-1-0, having died there
-----Seagull 0-1-0 is an abnormality, an object that should not exist in an unaltered Timeline 0
-----Observer 0a sees Jess toss the seagull there – this is the first seagull of the pile
-----soon after, crabs find the seagull and start munching on it

Jess 0-1-0 wrecks the car, the catalyst of the crash being the seagull that hit the windshield
-----Jess stands on the precipice of a monumental decision: continue the loop, or do anything else
-----if she chooses not to correct the paradox, the causal loop collapses and the timeline resets

Jess 0-1-0 takes the taxi to the harbor and then reenters the Bermuda Triangle anomaly
-----the cab driver, a.k.a. the Ferryman carries her back to physical reality (from death)
-----Timeline 0-1-0-2 forms as fragments coalesce, meaning their histories are shared and merged
-----a seagull also flies into the anomaly, having followed them in, becoming Seagull 0-2
-----Seagull 0-1-0 remains a dead, inanimate object in a resting state on the Timeline 0-1-0 beach

Jess is transported to the past, where Timeline 0-1-0-2 merges back into the originating Timeline 0
-----this now becomes Timeline 0-1-0-2-0 for Jess as their histories and futures are fused
-----this creates a situation where she can again alter Timeline 0, which she proceeds to do
-----all the timelines merge, i.e. Jess’ past and future are now one and the same
-----Timeline 0-1-0-2-0 is both Jess’ future and past conjoined
-----Seagull 0-1-0 is still dead on the beach in the Timeline 0-1-0 conglomerate
-----Observer 0a sees Seagull 0-1-0 mysteriously appear on the beach seemingly out of nowhere
-----this occurs as Timeline 0-1-0-2-0 loops back into 0 and Seagull 0-1-0 slips into Timeline 0-1-0-2-0
-----soon after, crabs find the seagull and start munching on it
-----Observer 0b sees Jess 0-1-0-2-0 suddenly appear in the water on the outskirts of the odd storm
-----the body is too far way and the current pulls her under before he can get to her
-----Observer 0b sees Seagull 0-2 fly out of thin air on the outskirts of that same storm
-----Seagull 0-2 becomes Seagull 0-2-0

Jess 0-1-0-2-0 kills her Timeline 0 version at the house, preventing Jess 0 from entering the anomaly
-----Timeline 0 is a segment of the merged Timeline 0-1-0-2-0 conglomerate
-----Jess 0 is now dead so the uncorrupted Timeline 0 events cannot take place
-----this creates a potential paradox–some version of Jess MUST enter the anomaly during Timeline 0
-----if she chooses not to correct the paradox, the causal loop collapses and the timeline resets

Jess 0-1-0-2-0 snatches up Tommy and flees, and Seagull 0-2-0 hits the windshield
-----some force at work manipulates the situation to try to guide Jess back into the loop, i.e. the seagull
-----this is either a natural, non-sentient process course-correcting or is the work of the Ferryman

Jess0-1-0-2-0 tosses Seagull 0-2-0 over the side of the road
-----the seagull is now a permanent part of the shared history of Timeline 0-1-0-2-0, having died there
-----Seagull 0-2-0 is an abnormality, an object that does not exist in an unaltered Timeline 0
-----Observer 0a sees Jess toss the seagull there – this is the second seagull of the pile

Jess 0-1-0-2-0 wrecks the car, the catalyst of the crash being the seagull that hit the windshield
-----if she chooses not to correct the paradox, the causal loop collapses and the timeline resets

Jess 0-1-0-2-0 takes the taxi to the harbor and then reenters the Bermuda Triangle anomaly
-----the cab driver, a.k.a. The Ferryman, may be what carries her back to physical reality
-----a seagull also flies into the anomaly, having followed them in, becoming Seagull 0-3
-----Seagull 0-2-0 remains a dead, inanimate object in a resting state on the Timeline 0-1-0-2-0 beach
-----Seagull 0-1-0 remains a dead, inanimate object in a resting state on the Timeline 0-1-0-2-0 beach
-----Timeline 0-1-0-2-0-3 forms as fragments coalesce, meaning their histories are shared and merged

Jess is transported to the past, where Timeline 0-1-0-2-0-3 merges back into the originating Timeline 0
-----this now becomes Timeline 0-1-0-2-0-3-0 as their histories are fused
-----Seagull 0-1-0 is still dead on the beach in the Timeline 0-1-0-2-0 conglomerate
-----Seagull 0-2-0 is still dead on the beach in the Timeline 0-1-0-2-0 conglomerate
-----Timeline 0-1-0-2-0-3 -0 is both Jess’ future and past conjoined
-----Observer 0a sees Seagull 0-1-0 mysteriously appear on the beach seemingly out of nowhere
-----Observer 0a sees Seagull 0-2-0 mysteriously appear on the beach seemingly out of nowhere
-----this occurs as Timeline 0-1-0-2-0-3 loops back into 0 and the seagulls slip into Timeline 0-1-0-2-0-3-0
-----soon after, crabs find the seagull and start munching on it
-----and the cycle continues in that fashion

Seagull Timeline Notes
Although the observers undergo the process of watching the pile increment by 1 during each timeline merging event, they also then revert back to that moment each time as well, meaning if Jess went through 50 loops all they would remember is seeing a pile of 50 seagulls appear. They would not remember each iteration because quite literally the only one that happened to them is the final amalgamated timeline (the previous ones were rewritten for them since they are not themselves looping). The seagulls do not appear out of thin air technically. It just appears that way to them because they can’t perceive the preceding aberrant loops and reversions.

Although each timeline is sent back to a fixed point in the past, the anomalous Aeolus Environment is feeding them into it one after the other, which introduces a new seagull iteration each time since the seagull dies and a “new” Timeline 0 version follows them into the Bermuda Triangle (in a certain respect becoming a different entity, in a different timeline fragment), merging each timeline into the originating timeline one at a time. Who knows what mechanism other than the bizarreness of the Bermuda Triangle disruption would allow for this, but it would explain the scenario depicted in the film with the piled up seagulls.

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Assumption 2: Linear Timeline Fragments Looping Sequentially – Additional Notes
The following is exposition for Assumption 2 in Part VII. Note that I’m avoiding mythological references here, with maybe one or two exceptions, and transposing them fully to a science fiction scenario, but more to point I’m deviating a bit from “Triangle” and focusing more on the general time looping concept itself.

In a “normal” time travel scenario an object would encounter itself if it were to be transported into its own localized past (meaning it goes into the past at a point in time that intercedes with its own history). This means if a time traveler were to stand on a temporal sending platform for 1 hour and then get transported to the past 30 minutes to a receiving platform 10 feet away from the sending device, there would be two of them temporarily. As a result, the sending version would see himself appear from nowhere next to him 30 minutes before being transported. Their temporal existence would overlap.

But there would never be more than two of them at a time, and it would only happen once as long as he stepped off the receiver and didn’t crowd in next to himself on the sending platform or do something that would interfere with what was already observed, which he knows he didn’t do because it’s already happened, he’s already witnessed that future. This outcome would adhere to the Novikov self-consistency principle (which basically states that any attempt to change the past would only end up producing an outcome identical to that known history, i.e. the past can’t be changed in a way that creates a paradox). This conclusion is bolstered by the aforementioned Seth Lloyd quantum teleportation experiments.

The implication to free will this time travel scenario invokes is thought-provoking, but there’s actually a logical explanation for it. In a fictional scenario akin to what we see portrayed in “Triangle”, let’s have the time traveler kill his former self 15 minutes after he appears in the past on the receiving platform, before his past self gets transported 30 minutes later. There is every indication that this is impossible, that something would occur to prevent such paradoxes. What could that mechanism be? As discussed previously, a causal loop collapse, i.e. the timeline fragment would collapse back into its original state, undoing the events that led up to the temporal conflict, either preventing it entirely or erasing it so that it effectively never happened.

So the time traveler goes back in time then kills himself. Perhaps in this fictional universe the laws of physics function in a manner that corrects paradoxes after the fact instead of preventing them as long as the possibility of a correction exists, i.e. up until a point of no return. We could throw in that perhaps something inexplicably compels him to step back on the platform, something akin to the seagull being used as the long arm of the Aeolus Environment to guide Jess back into the fold. In this case, maybe a light fixture falls from the ceiling, or some other seemingly natural event, making him jump back on the platform. But let’s remove that concept from the scenario for the sake of simplicity (and consider the possibility that the seagull looping through the temporal anomaly and then hitting the car windshield in “Triangle” is truly just a coincidence).

If our time traveler were to loop back 30 minutes then kill his past self who’d been standing on the sending platform for 30 minutes, creating a potential paradox, we can boil down his subsequent choices to: 1) he gets on the sending platform and waits to be transported again, or 2.) he doesn’t get back on the platform. If he chooses the first option perhaps he then perpetuates the loop by taking the place of his former self who he killed (we have to assume in this case that physical laws allow for this), but the laws of physics kick in and nullify any other choice he makes, anything that doesn’t involve being transported again and fulfilling his own past.

It does this by collapsing the loop and resetting it to its original state, erasing any event that alters the past that was already established. So if he were to wait beyond the 30 minutes, he’d disappear, the body would disappear, that span of time and any byproduct of his deviant actions would disappear. The paradox would be resolved simply by expunging it, by forcing a “do-over”. Similar to the outcome of the Seth Lloyd Grandfather Paradox experiment cited in Part IV, the effort would simply fail if it hit, or predicted, a paradox.

Technically this timeline fragment collapse would also occur if he killed himself. It’s doubtful that some mechanism would allow him to go back in time and replace his past self to fulfill the transportation event. As soon as he did anything that would cause a paradox it would all evaporate, and the effort would fail. But to align this with what we see in “Triangle”, as well as other science fiction cinema and literature that portray a similar time travel circumstance, let’s say there’s a natural mechanism in play that would allow for him to kill his former self and take his place in the transportation, even though he’s now a bit older. Let’s continue the scenario with him choosing to step back on the sending platform after killing his other self, and then waiting for 15 minutes to be transported, the time the device is scheduled to send him (an hour after the original version began standing on the sending device). He is then transported 30 minutes into the past yet again.

What does he see? Like before, does he see his past self standing on the sending platform waiting to be transported, with no body lying on the ground? Yes. Is that what he would see if he were to kill himself 5 more times? Yes. Each time he moves back in time the transportation device sends him to the exact same moment, to a point in time in his history prior to him killing his other self. In that regard, his past is “reset” to its original state, or more accurately, he just moves through time to a point before that past was altered (by him killing himself). If he were to kill himself 5 more times, a total of 6 times, the 7th time he would be transported to the past he’d be 3 and half hours older (much longer and a problem starts to emerge: he’d get hungry, he’d be very tired without sleep, he’d need to take a bathroom break, etc., but more on that later).

Let’s say the time traveler on his 7th journey back then decides to not kill himself and examines the result of his experiment. What would a video camera show? What would an assistant witness? They would see him stand on the sending platform for 30 minutes, at which time his future self would pop in on the receiving platform then step off and go wait for his future self to be transported, and 30 minutes later his future self would disappear. But what would the time traveler remember? Would he recall all seven trips back in time? Theoretically, yes. Although the camera and third party observers would only be aware of the final transportation, he’d remember all seven trips, including killing his other self each time until he chose not to during the last loop.

Or would he?

In “Triangle” Jess seems to forget the previous loop she in when she wakes up on the yacht. Not only that, but when she wakes up on the beach all her injuries, smudges, torn clothes, etc. reset back to a pristine state, presumably the state they were in as she first entered the region of spacetime disruption. The only property that is not reverted is her physical location (asleep on the yacht), and since at the moment in time she’s transported to her other version is at the house, there ends up being two of them. This indicates a feature of the Bermuda Triangle or metaphysical Aeolus Environment, which exists as a place and time out of phase with the rest of reality. In essence, the act of Jess entering the bubble is inextricably tied to her exit. In other words what happens inside that environment is moot once she exits it since she’s physically reset to the point she entered it. She’ll then forget all about it the next time she enters it.

To translate this, let’s say that within the universe of our time traveler there’s a kind of pocket dimension, an Einstein-Rosen wormhole environment, that must be passed through in order to be transported through time and/or space (perhaps something like what Bilbo Baggins experience when he wears the ring in “The Hobbit”), an analog to the Aeolus Environment in “Triangle”. He can spend as much time as he wants there, but as soon as he exits anything that occurred in this environment, including him being injured or aging, is reverted (meaning he, like Jess, will never age beyond the length of a single loop for as long as he’s looping). He still retains memories of his experience there, however, until such time that he reenters it, which will undo anything that happened there along with everything that happened as a result of being there (including showing up in the past and everything he did once in the past), along with his memories of it.

Let’s add to this scenario that during his struggle while trying to kill his other self he received a gash on his head. When he appears in the past the gash would be gone. And so would his memories of it since the moment he left the sending platform his memories of everything that had happened of his previous transported would be reset, along with the events themselves. As far as he knows this is still his first trip. He is also quite literally no longer 30 minutes older. Upon appearing in the past he has been restored to the exact state he was in at the moment of the very first original transportation. Everything literally resets as if it were the very first transportation event, erasing the incident of him murdering his former self. This has the same end result as a timeline collapse in this case, and maybe that is actually what’s happening, although perhaps some vague recollections of the loop that got nuked bleeds through due to artificially manipulated temporal distortion, resulting in quick flashes of memory of those events (if they’re different).

Quantum uncertainty allows for various decisions to be made after appearing (meaning he’s not locked into doing the exact same thing each time, even if the variables are set up with the same starting conditions), but there’s a strong probability that if he chose to wait 15 minutes then kill his other self the first time he probably would most subsequent times as well since the same thoughts that lead up to that decision would be identical. In this manner, he is “stuck” in a repeating loop until the improbable outcome of him choosing to not kill his other self finally (and inevitably) happens. I say “inevitably” because although the loop is potentially infinite, quantum uncertainty dictates that everything that will happen eventually does happen. Additionally, there is a beginning to the loop cycle and therefore there must be an end. In our scenario he exits the cycle after 7 loops, but given the probabilities it would most likely be much higher (even in the thousands or millions).

Given this new twist, what does the time traveler remember? Exactly what the camera recorded. The mechanism that allowed him to take his place each time he killed himself reverted his memory as soon as he reenters the Einstein-Rosen Wormhole Environment each time, and then his physical state upon exiting. Unless we invoke a universal Level III multiverse, or a mechanism that prevents paradoxes from ever occurring at all, neither of which fit with what we see in “Triangle”, this scenario is the only way left for us to consider, and it mimics the loops we see in “Triangle”, with one exception: the piled up seagulls.

So let’s add another element to our fictional scenario: 1 minute before the time traveler on the sending platform gets sent to the past he picks up a coin from a nearby table and brings it with him. Then each time he’s transported 30 minutes into the past he drops the coin onto another table next to the receiving platform. After doing so the first time he then kills himself, an act that is incongruous with his known past, creating the potential paradox. He takes the place of the self he just killed as described above, except he this time picks up the coin from the table next to the sending device. He is then transported 30 minutes into the past, a past that is also technically his future. Is the coin still there on the table since he’d left it there in his past?

No. He’s appearing back in time several seconds before dropping the coin there so in effect he’s erasing that event as if it had never happened and replacing it with a new event. Each time he’s transported to the past he has the option of doing something differently from a brand new starting point. He can choose not to kill himself, choose not to drop the coin on the table, or he could walk over to the corner of the room and take a leak then dance around naked and slap his assistant. Because of the paradox-fixing time travel mechanism (as depicted in “Triangle” and as described above), he gets a do-over each time he kills himself, so he could do whatever he wanted, kill himself, then do something different and no one would be the wiser, including himself.

So what if instead of dropping the coin on the table next to the receiving device each time he was transported to the past the time traveler kept it with him, killed himself, picked up the coin from the sending table, then repeated that 6 times? Would he have 6 coins? He sure would. From the perspective of the camera and assistant he would merely go in once and then come back out with 6 coins. In fact, if the time traveler were to crowd onto the platform next to himself instead of killing himself, he would duplicate as well. But this duplication only occurs if they accumulate while reentering the loop, if every iteration of them loops back through, meaning an object is sent to the past, placed next to itself on the platform, they’re both sent to the past and both placed next to its original self on the platform (becoming a pile of 3), and so on. In this way, there’d be a record of how many trips he took. There’d be multiple “copies” of him and the coin, all of the same reverted age (the age they were at the moment in the past they were transported).

This doesn’t jive with what we see in “Triangle”, though. The seagull is only making one loop each time. It’s not looping back through or reentering the loop with Jess. Therefore, there isn’t a good explanation for why it’s duplicating. It should be “resetting” along with everything else just like the time traveler’s coin would when he leaves it on the table next to the receiving device. The only explanation is that the Aeolus Environment (e.g. Bermuda Triangle anomaly, afterlife bubble, etc., whether real or simulated) is somehow causing this. So what if there was a malfunction in the system the time traveler set up that produced a similar outcome, some flaw they didn’t foresee, and perhaps fixed only after this first experiment, some blip that carried temporally orphaned, anomalous objects through to subsequent loops, merging that “property” of each loop into the next one sequentially as described with the seagulls in Part VII?

Move on to Part IX for more ruminations on subject matter.

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