It’s implied that she’s the main breadwinner and works around the clock to afford their basic bills while he stays home listening to Frank’s podcast, yet they still struggle to stay afloat on her salary alone. So how is his salary (which is implied to be less than hers) funding everything they paid for previously, as well as the fee to stay in the Victory simulation, which Jack mentions when he says he has to go out to work in a job he hates so that Alice can stay in Victory? She’s certainly not happy to be there, so it’s doubtful that she willingly entered (then just forgot she was in a simulation). Did Jack attack her in her sleep or forcibly insert her into the simulation another way? In the original script, the pair hadn’t just grown apart but were actually divorced, adding an extra layer of creepiness to the whole thing. If they’re caused by something in Jack and Alice’s apartment, why do the other residents also feel the rumblings? It looks as if real-life Jack and Alice are in their preexisting apartment outside of the simulation, so the residents aren’t grouped together in one facility somewhere. If it’s the men leaving the simulation, why does it happen when Jack is with Alice and we then see all the husbands leaving in unison afterward? If it’s something the men are doing at work, as Peg implies, do they work on the software that upholds the Victory simulation in the real world? Maybe it’s some kind of software update being applied to Victory, but it’s never actually explained, so it’s been ping-ponging around my brain for days. Make it make sense, please! Does he unplug her, take her off the bed and to the toilet, then wipe her memory again afterward? Is the equipment to get her into the simulation portable, meaning that Jack can plonk her onto the toilet while she’s in Victory? Or does she just kinda go in the bed? Or special undies? Granted, it wouldn’t be a glamorous scene to show, but…I just need to know, okay?! It’s implied that Jack goes to work, so he probably isn’t in the apartment with her actual body; then he returns to the simulation immediately after work until he leaves again in the morning — so presumably from about 5 or 6 p.m. to maybe like 7 or 8 a.m. the next day. Even if he works from home and can check in on her throughout the day, he’s lying there next to her for hours when he returns to the simulation, so how are their eyes especially not drier than the Sahara?! And if he’s got some magical super-strength eye drops, can he please share with the class?! Of course, it could just be a turn of phrase — maybe Peg got pregnant quickly after having her last child, meaning that she seems to have been pregnant for ages. But what if real-life Peg was pregnant and that’s why her simulation self is pregnant? What happens when she needs to give birth in the real world? Or did her husband ask for Peg’s simulation to be pregnant in Victory, but Peg actually isn’t in real life? Ugh, I don’t know. I just need to know. Did Bunny and her hubs have to put in a request for two brand-new simulated kids who look exactly like their real kids, please and thank you? Or is it more like The Sims and they had to WooHoo, then wait for the stork to arrive, then raise the kids from babies?? But Jack implies that when the men go off to work, they go off to crappy jobs in the real world that they don’t like. So are the job titles in Victory just a show of status for the wives, and a way for the men to see who’s the most alpha? Or do they perhaps go off to jobs in the real world and actually work on things to do with the Victory Project? But then that sends me down another spiral of questions, because it’s implied that Jack is an unemployed layabout, and surely a job to do with a highly sophisticated life simulation needs a lot of technical skill and experience? I suppose maybe he could be doing something like onboarding new members online. Another theory I have is that Jack and the other men are rewarded for turning their women in if they start to remember things and break the role of the perfect housewife. Jack gets his promotion after Alice gets to HQ and mysteriously wakes up at home in her bed with hazy memories. It’s likely because she returned to her body in the real world, Jack realized she’d found out his secret, and he forcibly put her back in and commissioned the mind wipe. This might explain why Bunny’s husband, Bill, gets his own ring near the start, and why Bunny goes from very pro-Victory to suddenly telling Alice they’re in a simulation near the end of the film. Perhaps her memories keep coming back and Bill keeps sending her off for memory wipes, but she doesn’t mind because it means her grief for her real-life children stays at bay? BUT NO ONE TELLS US WHAT THE JOB TITLES ACTUALLY MEAN, SO MY MIND IS JUST GONNA KEEP LOOPING HERE. Maybe this is an oversight by the writers when they changed the original script, because the first draft had the husbands fake their wives’ deaths before entering the simulation so that no one would come looking for the wives trapped constantly in Victory while the men portaled in and out. Maybe the hallucination Alice has of Jack saying “Don’t leave me” when she’s almost at the exit point is a final safeguard to manipulate her into turning back? Still, seems pretty weak. I do have one theory: The women make it clear that they don’t know how to drive, and it’s likely their real modern-world selves would, so their memory of driving must be erased to stop them from driving to the same exit point as the men do each morning. So that’s a safeguard to stop the women from escaping via that route, but the security on the other exit that Alice touches to escape still seems pretty lax. Anyway, I digress. Alice’s memories are coming back when she’s driving for her life, so maybe she was a darn good driver in the real world and that all came flooding back? Or are they more like NPCs (nonplayable characters) in video games, programmed to have only a certain number of interactions with the characters? It would explain why the bus driver man refused to go off route and didn’t seem to know how to respond to Alice’s shouting about helping the people in the plane crash — he is literally not programmed to understand, and Alice was essentially messing up the code of the simulation. Likewise, it could be why Frank was only told that the doctor was dead, when there were several men in red who would have died in the same crash. The electroshock stuff must happen in real life so the simulated self can accept their surroundings as real, hence why the return of Alice’s real memories seems to mess with the simulation. But does that mean that real-life Jack has to let the men in red into their apartment? And if so, surely they’ll bash the door in and get to Alice pretty quick after she escapes Victory (especially since she’s strapped to the bed) — unless it takes longer to rally the troops to get to her after Frank’s death? There’s so many “ifs.” The flashback of Jack and Alice in the real world shows him being annoyed with her after she returns from a 30-hour shift because she hasn’t cooked him dinner (even though he’s been in the house all day), and then looking hard done by when she shrugs off his affections to go to bed because she’s exhausted and has to be back at work in six hours, so the foundations for the character’s incel nature were definitely being laid…but some things just don’t add up. I guess it could just be a sort of power play/ego trip? He knows he won’t be rejected in Victory, so while Alice might turn him down in their home, she won’t say no even at somewhere inappropriate, like a work party, because she’s basically programmed not to? I doubt he’s doing it because he feels guilty for trapping her, since he genuinely seems to believe he’s given her a happy life and seems not to feel any remorse for throwing her into Victory without her consent. My last guess is somewhat gross. If Jack has sex in the simulation, his real-life body might be a bit…messy when he reunites with it? Was Alice getting some kind of exhibitionist kick out of it, or had Frank done something with the women simulations that would keep them placated if he did decide to be a creep and watch them in intimate moments? Near the start, we see the main characters drinking, and pregnant Peg’s husband says she needs more alcohol because it’s good for the baby, which is another reason I think the food and drink have no real impact — it’s all just another line in the code of the simulation. (Or maybe Peg’s not really pregnant? Now we’re back at question 6 again…) So my question is, if they don’t get any sort of nutrients/effects from food or alcohol, what would have happened if Margaret or Alice had taken the medications they were offered? Would the drugs actually have done anything, or would they have been more of a placebo? Or are they more sinister, perhaps like a little antivirus scan to fix the bug in the sim’s code and make them nice and docile again? I just have so many questions. What was that all about? Maybe it’s just because she’s the big boss’s wife, so they’re on their best behavior. Or is there something in the coding for the women sims that prevents them from reading certain things? And if they’ve thought to go to that level of detail to protect the Victory Project’s secrets, then, again, WHY is there not more security around the exit portal to prevent women from escaping and exposing the whole thing?! Maybe she was aware of it all and perhaps didn’t like it but didn’t have much choice in it. It makes sense that as Frank’s wife, she may have been the first test subject for Victory. Over the years of watching women be forced into the simulation without their knowledge or consent, she may have grown tired of Frank’s scheme and been plotting his downfall. So maybe “It’s my turn now” is Shelley seizing the opportunity that Alice presented, taking out Frank and maybe plotting a Victory that’s kinder to women? I don’t know. And I really need to! Is it because she subconsciously feels trapped, so maybe that’s what the window smooshing scene was trying to demonstrate? Is her remembering things mucking up her simulated self’s code and causing strange glitches? Or is Frank programming a series of torments from behind his computer screen, tricking her into thinking she’s losing her mind so she’ll submit to the electroshock therapy? Maybe all the wives have had multiple rounds of electroshock therapy, and the return of the memories is a regular occurrence that the men “fix” each time? That would explain why Peg didn’t seem to remember what happened to Margaret, and why Bunny went from being pro-Victory, and alienating her best friend because of it, to suddenly telling her that she’s in a simulation and disclosing the route to escape. There’s also a theory that it was Margaret trying to get a message to the women of Victory before she got her memory wiped, and using her son’s red toy plane as a symbol, because it was found in the desert near HQ before Margaret was caught. The film, however, doesn’t tell us what the plane was all about, so we’re left to wonder, and wonder we shall!
