TRON: Legacy/Headscratchers

No guns in the Grid?

• Why was Zuse the only one with a gun? His cane shot lasers . . . Why did none of the bad guys see fit to invest in a weapon that was long-ranged (as opposed to thrown) and not filled with all their personal data? It just seems like that would have been really convenient for them . . .
  • The cane never shot lethal lasers. The only time it was used in a lethal manner was when he put it right up against a Black Guard's back and blew him apart. Apparently, no one regularly uses non-disc ranged weaponry in the Grid, though some forms of ranged weapons do exist, i.e. the guns on Quorra's car, the tanks, and the guns on the aircraft. However, there are no infantry ranged weapons present.
  • It probably consumes too much energy and I think in Tron Evolution, guards can create shields. They basically fight with variable weaponry as the discs and batons can be used for many things whereas the cane can probably only shoot.
  • One explanation I've seen is that humanoid programs don't have the "energy" to use guns, which is why they rely on dedicated vehicles that draw energy from their surroundings. Since programs seem to subsist on energy, and a gun doesn't just get energy from nowhere, it would make sense that programs would use melee weapons to conserve their available energy.
    • Even if it's Canon Discontinuity, Tron 2.0 runs with this. The Deadly Disc and the Energy Claw are the only weapons that don't drain your energy reserve, and the gun-style weapons burn through your energy stores very quickly.
  • It is possible that Clu deliberately practiced a weapons restriction policy in the Grid to suppress rebellion. Limiting personal self-defense weaponry to identity discs (which seems to pretty much be unavoidable, as every program should have a disc anyway) and restricting actual weapons to his own troops smacks of common weaponry-restriction policies in feudal societies and modern dictatorships. Edo Period Japan would be a good example of this happening in real life.
  • Additionally, Kevin originally designed the Grid as a gaming environment, as is detailed in Betrayal. It could also be a case of him just not wanting guns on the Grid, as a personal preference or built-in family friendliness.

"Just chill, Clu."

• What if, when Clu asked if he still had to make the system perfect, Flynn had answered "no man, you can just chill and zen"? Would Clu have dropped the coup, and everything bad than ensued would have been avoided?
  • Clu was already plotting a coup anyway. Note how he'd already changed the colors of his outfit. If Flynn could have simply made him stop by telling him to stop, he would have done that already. He was asking it as more of a mockery of Flynn, a sort of "Hey, Flynn, this is what you told me to do..." If Flynn had told him to "chill and zen" Clu's most likely response would have been "Nah."
  • Given Flynn's expression and "yeah..?" response, he clearly suspects things are about to get unpleasant.
    • This troper took the inflection of that "yeah..?" to mean both "of course you're supposed to do that, I told you to, didn't I?" and "wait, what are you insinuating?" at the same time. Which must have been either incredibly difficult for Jeff Bridges to pull off correctly, or a complete fluke. In both cases it's awesome.
  • The events in Betrayal indicate that while Kevin might not have realized exactly how far Clu was about to go, he knew something was up. That and Clu's betrayal had been building up for a tremendously long time, to the point that Clu himself had lost any faith in Kevin's abilities and leadership.
  • The final conversation between Kevin Flynn and Clu did imply that Clu was still able to be halted, modified and reboot with his evil flags turned off. I was waiting to hear from Flynn the old programming adage Computers do what you tell them; not what you want them to do. Instead Flynn just waxed un-programmer-like fortune-cookie philosophy until Clu kicked him.
    • Clu was "doing what Flynn told him", that was the problem. If he had a reboot option, pretty sure Flynn would have pressed it sometime in the past 1000 years. That's also probably why he sounded a little "un-programmer-like", considering he'd spent about a millenia trapped in a world where lines of code come to life and talk to you.
    • Yeah, Flynn waxed non-programmer-like philosophy. This is a setting where you can literally go down into the computer, talk with the program itself, and change it through verbal, interpersonal communication just like a person. Why shouldn't he be trying to talk to the program? That's the interface they use on that level.
  • I took that as Clu trying to find a reason not to go through with it. Flynn accidentally put him into a direct programming conflict by embracing the seemingly chaotic ISO's while ordering him to "create the perfect system," and though Clu might have already been planning the coup, he wanted confirmation that this really is what Flynn has ordered before going ahead and starting the war. Flynn had just gotten so used to thinking of the programs as people rather than computer programs that he didn't realize the significance of answering Clu's question with a confused "uh, yeah".

"Something special?"

• What did Clu mean when he said he had "something special" in store for Quorra? The way he said it almost sounded like I Have You Now, My Pretty. Maybe he recognized her potential and wanted to "rectify" her into a Dark Action Girl / CoDragon alongside Rinzler. Either way, it was never explained.
  • It's likely that he was planning to A) use her to lure out KEVIN FLYNN from WHEREVER HE IS NOW, since he knew that both had a vested interest in Quorra; or, given his general hate-on for ISOs (as particularly established in the prequel materials), he was just going to destroy her specially.
  • From the way he was acting around her, I'm fairly certain the I Have You Now, My Pretty implications were fairly clear what he was intending the "something special" to be. We know programs have sexual urges, after all, and Clu is obviously getting off on the whole power trip he has as a superpowerful dictator.
  • Could be both. After all, what would hurt either Flynn more than to see Quorra raped, brainwashed, and then ordered to kill herself in front of them?

No guards in Clu's HQ

• Clu is kind of a moron. Why did he leave Jarvis and a few Mooks in charge of guarding the Master Disk instead of putting Rinzler there?
  • Rinzler was headed there already with Quorra. It's just that Sam beat him there faster than anyone expected.
  • And, to be quite blunt, because Rinzler wasn't there to be stationed on guard duty. Clu had already sent Rinzler to confirm that Kevin and Sam were dead. Afterward, he was on board his superpowered doom fortress/warship/carrier and it was unlikely that Sam or Kevin would even get there. Note that once Rinzler captures Quorra, Clu sends Rinzler up to the command level and to Clu's quarters immediately after he gets done chatting with her.
  • Considering that Clu's ship is loaded with literally thousands of soldiers, and it would be insane for Kevin or Sam to even be on his ship in the first place, four guards covering the entrance seems enough. The only reason Sam got through was because the Rectifier's crew was assembled for Clu's speech. Otherwise Clu and/or Rinzler would have been up in the command room overseeing everything.

How are IS Os special?

• A lot of things in this movie bugs me: first of all, it's never explained how ISOs are going to change the world. Sam gets Quorra out into the real world and she seems to be no different than a normal human. Are they supposed to be a metaphor for file sharing or info sharing, but that's not the way Flynn describes them. All the ISOs themselves would do is add another race of people to the human world.
  • Kevin said it was about their unique DNA and origins.
  • Note that digitized humans keep their human qualities in The Grid, i.e. Kevin bleeds rather than disintegrate when he's injured in the Games. We didn't see much of Quorra beyond 'riding a motorcycle, awe at the Real World,' but if it works the other way around - if programs retain program abilities in Meatspace - then just imagine the possibilities of a tripe DNA helix! Imagine what could be done if the ability to reprogram/regrow a limb, an organ, or even entire cell-types (preventing cancer and aging, among other things) could be transplanted from Quorra to a human being? If it could be easily replicated? And that's not counting the other aspects, such as the apparently innate ISO ability to learn incredible amounts of information like a program while retaining the 'softer,' more human emotions such as fondness, affection, and love? After all, Flynn did say that his 'miracle' (the ISOs) would alter not just science and medicine but things like philosophy and religion.
  • Another neat thing: By bringing stuff to our universe from the Grid, matter/energy is being added to our universe. Since new stuff can be created out of nothing in the Grid, you could use the thing to create an endless supply of fuel/energy. Not connected to the ISO programs, though, but the existence of information-based life would definitely change things.
    • Not at all. That laser doesn't create matter. It converts matter into energy and vice-versa. There's nothing being added, only rearranged.
      • If that's the case, the laser still has incredible applications. Hook it up to an empty server and digitize nuclear waste and pollution, then shut it down and use the energy to power cities? Awesome. It's ridiculous that the Flynns and ENCOM never capitalize on the real possibilities of digitizing matter.
      • It's probable that it can only work on stable matter, which rules out nuclear waste.
      • Well, Flynn was laser-focused on building the Grid for the majority of his time post-Tron; the comics has him looking at other uses for the technology, but he gets zapped in '89 and that was that. Alan, meanwhile, was busy just trying to keep the company together and maintain something for Sam/if Flynn ever came back; we see in Legacy that he had his work cut out for him just staying on the payroll, much less introducing 'radical new ideas.'
        • The simplest solution may be a medical one. When you enter into the Grid, your body becomes data which is transmitted into the machine, and to leave, the data is transmitted out. So what's to stop a bit of reprogramming? Like, say, "X person no longer has (insert deadly genetic condition here)? And there's no promise a terminally ill person would retain the illness after a trip to the Grid. I'd say Sam's got his life set out for him if he plays his cards right.
  • The other thing is that the ISOs appeared out of nowhere. It challenges conventions of religion and evolution by showing that life can indeed manifest itself without a Creator and that complex life can just appear without evolution. If all this happens in the Grid, an abjectly small and basic system compared to the rest of the Universe, then we have to reconsider everything we thought about what "life" is and what the conditions are to create it.
    • Mainly this. Flynn is as much philosopher as he is programmer and engineer. The idea of life spontaneously forming out of "nothingness" would result in the same sort of scientific, religious and philosophical uproar if we encountered non-Terran intelligent life.
    • But there is a creator. Flynn is the creator. He created the world, and he created the conditions that allowed the ISOs to come into being. It's an argument for deism at the most, not for atheism... thus why he claims it's going to revolutionize those ideas, not destroy them.
      • Flynn created the Grid, but he had no hand in creating the ISOs. All of the other beings in the Grid were programmed by an intelligent designer, but the ISOs just happened. It's not quite the deist's clockwork universe theory since that presupposes that God created the Universe with the intention that it would give rise to intelligent life on its own, without any additional input from the Creator (like the part in Genesis where it says God created Man in His own image). The Grid was never designed to do this, but it happened anyway.
        • The ISOs could not have existed without the world Flynn created and the variables he programmed into it. They may not have been his intended outcome, but he still designed and created the world that they came from, and for extra symbolism, they appear in his image. Again, the ISOs make an argument for deism, not for atheism, unless the argument is that the computer the Grid exists on randomly assembled itself and randomly programmed itself.
  • ISOs are also sentient, naturally-occurring digital life forms. They laugh and cry, feel loyalty and guilt; they have souls. It raises questions about mankind's place in the world when humans are not the only intelligent beings and therefore are no longer exempt from comparison.

Roast pig?

• Where did they get that roast pig from? Is there a bag of infinitely spawning pigs, or did Flynn bring a ranch into the Grid that we never see?
  • Maybe they import it from World of Warcraft.
  • Same with the green beans! And why did they have to eat at all?
    • Quorra's gotta eat too, you know. And I guess Kevin Flynn is a god, because he can apparently create programs that can become proper food. Otherwise, there's no way he would have survived.
  • He manifested a copy of himself out of nowhere. A dead pig is simple by comparison. He does have the master key to the world, after all.
  • It could be that Flynn creates a simulation of food solely for the pleasure of tasting it, and the only part of the meal that really provided sustenance for them was the glowing water, which was established in the first movie.
  • It could also be that he was eating, sleeping, ect., while Quorra was there, to teach Quorra the human mannerisms she would need. After all, she couldn't stay in the Grid. Learning the basics of how to be human meant she would adapt more easily to the real world. Therefore, eating would provide a routine for both Quorra and Sam, helping all three of them get over the 'Oh-my-god-this-is-all-real" shock of the Grid\Sam being there.
  • From the way it looked and Sam's reaction, it was only barely "food" so the idea that it's more for the feel of the thing than any real purpose is probably the most correct.

Clu's invasion plan

• Why would Clu think his weaponry would work at all in the real world? A computer world only obeys the laws of physics it is given in the programming. Clu taking his army into the real world would probably disable his magic flying machines and pocket laser weaponry, and you'd end up with 1,000,0000 programs, with no practical real-world training or access to real-life weaponry, no food, and no understanding of real physics.
  • And what would that giant craft suddenly appearing suddenly in Flynn's Arcade do to the building? I daresay (my opinion) the ship would be damaged beyond repair itself.
    • Clu would probably view the arcade as an imperfection, so the ground forces would've taken it out before sending in the cavalry and the air support.
  • And that's a ridiculously small army to challenge the entire earth with, seriously.
  • Clu's knowledge of the real world would be limited to what Kevin Flynn programmed into him, or into the grid where he could later get access to. His whole plan could therefore be a result of his ignorance, and therefore an example of foolish arrogance. And seriously, even if his equipment did work, there is not the slightest evidence from what we see on screen that any of it would be that much more militarily effective than real world weapon systems (which in the event of major conflict would outnumber them at least 100 to 1).
  • That said, if you assume that programs manifested in the Real World retain at least some of their 'powers,' it's entirely possible that Clu planned on using his army as the core of his forces, using the same 'brainwashing' he used to convert them on anyone else he might have encountered.
    • There's no reason to expect that transplanted programs would have any powers, since even the slightest ability on the Grid would require some serious changes to the laws of physics to make them work in the real world.
    • An ISO was created ex nihilo (as in, from out of nothing unlike Users whose "molecules are suspended in the beam") just from going through the portal. And she can interact -- see, hear, touch, move, presumably smell and taste -- with the real world just like any living organism. These are "functions" that were "coded" into her existence when she came into being inside the Grid, and they STILL work in the real world. It's reasonable to assume that other program functions can also work after the transfer.
  • And don't forget that this is NOT The Matrix. In The Matrix trilogy, the physical world is the real world (unless it's a recursive reality, but that's another issue) while the Matrix is a false world. In Tron: Legacy, The Grid IS the world. A very real world where programs are born (or resolved), live, and die (deresolve). Identity Discs alone might not bring world annihilation, but the soldiers can pack quite a punch if they Clu successfully got his army to the real world thanks to their capoeira skills.
    • ...who wouldn't stand a chance against any halfway decent battalion armed with conventional weaponry. An identity disc that doesn't disintegrate humans on contact is fairly useless against an M-16 with a full clip.
  • Likewise, in the real world, Clu would have access to the laser that digitizes stuff. Use the small army he has to secure areas, digitize people en masses, rectify them, grow your army.
  • Clu has been constrained up to now because he was trapped in Flynn's Grid server, which had no connection to the outside beyond the digitizing laser. Once out, he not only gets the real world, he also has access to a network of millions of interconnected computers, each vastly more powerful than the 1980s era Grid server. And military weapons systems are heavily computerized. Were Clu able to rectify those programs....
  • Why wouldn't Clu think his weapons would work in the real world? He has no idea what the real world is like. All he knows is that it's somewhere that he can reach, and he is armed with, by his standards, a military that is the most powerful force in existence. He has no idea that his army would be utterly ineffective in the real world, even if all of their digital powers were transferred with them.
  • One million fanatically loyal soldiers proficient in hand-to-hand and melee combat spawning in the middle of an urban environment is a very bad thing. Sure, they're not going to be shooting down planes or anything, but the impact would be catastrophic. Think of it like a zombie apocalypse: tactically stupid and technologically inferior to any army but they'll still win due to sheer numbers and no fear. Except these "zombies" can learn and impersonate real-world humans. Plus, if Clu can find a way to transport the laser, then he can put it in a truck and drive it into a city, spam units in the middle of the enemy's base, re-digitize them and drive off before the National Guard can arrive.
    • Can people even be "rectified"? They keep their flesh and blood properties in the Grid - wouldn't that make them immune from the brainwashing?
    • Pretty much. Kevin didn't seem worried that Clu was going to win. He seemed worried that Clu was going to enter our world and go completely berserk upon emerging into squishy-space, and then go on a rampage that would kill countless people. Hundreds of thousands of fearless warriors spawning in downtown that proceed to go on a killing spree will inflict incredible damage.
  • The potential for a successful invasion is outside the scope of the movie. Much like the idea of a war between wizards and muggles would end badly for the wizards once the muggles brought to bear the full extent of their military might. In this case a successful world takeover would be an unlikely outcome, but there would still be blood, and the technology that allowed this to happen (and could have, allegedly helped humanity in great and wondrous ways) would be quickly and resolutely suppressed.
    • But this is an unfortunate side effect of a nip-it-in-the-bud conclusion. Possibilities of What Could Have Been remain unanswered, except in Alternate Universe comics and stories. And we don't get to see defined how magic A interacts with physics

Life forming in the Grid?

• Why does the grid spontaneously generate sentient life first? Sentient life on earth arose through eons of time - why were there no smaller bio-digital steps along the way?
  • Because in canon, all programs, even ones with very simple functions, manifest as sentient avatars in the grid. For example, Tron is a Firewall.
    • I believe he's talking about the ISOs. I chalked it up to Year Inside, Hour Outside, whereby it's entirely possible evolution just works much faster in the Grid than on Earth. Not necessarily probable, mind you, but still.
    • Not to mention that the Grid was based on code that Flynn had most likely been playing around with. Perhaps something in Flynn's actions imprinted (for lack of a better term) on it--maybe a subliminal imperfection of some sort.
  • Kevin himself basically admitted that the creation of ISOs was a fluke, and considers it a literal miracle.
  • Why are you assuming that digital life behaves the same way as organic life? Everything in the digital reality is created by artificial construction already; by merely typing in code, humans are creating life in digital reality already. There's no reason to believe that if we're making thinking, intelligent entities by coding things, that we can't accidentally create life. Hell, Betrayal indicates that even bugs in a system's code are living creatures.
  • Right, the reason real life evolution takes so long is because it takes 20 or so years (in case of humans) just for the next generation to pop up, then it takes countless generations for a beneficial and significant mutation to appear, which then takes thousands of generations to propagate... In this virtual world, programs have the ability to essentially modify their own DNA in real time.
  • It's also very likely that he was conducting other experiments with the laser, and digitizing other matter. Remember the orange that Gibbs and Lora used as a test? Flynn could have used anything; the contents of the arcade's trash can, roadkill, takeout that went past its prime, etc. Some of that could have human tissue - skin, hair, blood, etc. At the time, it just went into the Sea as building material, but some of that human DNA could have copied itself and fused with the junk computer code Flynn was also using as building material. So, we end up with creatures who are neither human nor Program; two strands human DNA, one strand computer data.

What are programs in the real world made of?

• What are programs in the real world made of? Human flesh and blood, or are they more like androids? Or some hybrid?
  • Flesh and blood. Programs couldn't come to the real world without Flynn's disk, so it stands to reason they needed a way to translate their code into physical form out there.
  • Then again, Sam was still flesh-and-blood in The Grid, as seen when he spilled drops of blood during his battle with Rinzler. It only makes sense therefore that Quorra is still made of data code and can still shatter if she gets hurt in the real world.
  • Sam was only flesh and blood on the grid in the sense that his program dictated his body respond as such. The machine converted him into code, right down to physical responses. Programs aren't built with that kind of coding, and Quorra is no exception. Getting sent into the real world would require some kind of conversion into human form, which is why Clu was so bent on getting Flynn's disk.

Can Clu even exist in the real world?

• How would Clu 2 have taken over the real world anyway? Could the programs actually manifest themselves in the real world? Quorra is a life form herself so they just Hand Wave that aspect of turning into flesh and blood, but what about the completely digital programs?
  • She's still a DIGITAL life form. Basically, the ISOs are intelligent programs that somehow spontaneously wrote themselves in the Grid. So if the transfer has no problem with them, then it shouldn't have any problem inverting the process. Somehow.
  • I thought this was pretty clearly explained. As a user, Flynn's ID disk somehow came complete with his physical code. Therefore, wearing it and leaping into the portal would let any program somehow come out. How this affects his soldiers, or why he didn't just use Sam's disk... I don't know.
    • He didn't use Sam's disk because it didn't have the info he needed. Clu examines the disk, looks through Sam's memories, and looks away disgusted.
  • Where would their mass come from? I can accept that Sam's been digitized, somehow "stored" and un-digitized (analogized?) again, but they can't just create mass out of nothing. Maybe Quorra's body was created from Kevin's since he never left, but it seems a bit ridiculous that a computer could generate a physical army just because it has a digital one inside it. I'm willing to accept most of the other hand waves, but this bugs me.
    • What I figure is that the laser has some sort of ability to convert pure energy into mass, just like how it can convert mass into energy.
      • Just how much energy would be required to create something with the mass of an adult human? It's pretty clear that the laser in the basement of an arcade would not be directly hooked up to a nuclear reactor. And that's just one person.
  • I doubt Clu's magic laser weaponry would function in the real world. You'd have a million now corporeal programs who never needed to eat before needing real food, real weaponry, and real armor and who are used to fighting under entirely different laws of physics.
    • Then again, it is Disney...
      • Those discs are sharp, though.

Clothing

• Sam had his clothes (or the data that represented his clothes) removed in the Grid. Quorra's data should likely consist solely of her "genome", so likely no clothes there, either. The laser integrator likely re-integrated Sam and Quorra at the same time, and probably put them in the chair he left. This troper will leave the rest to be deduced individually, but the possibilities range from the mildly embarrassing to the downright naughty. Being a Disney movie, it's no wonder this sequence was glossed over.
  • Sam had his clothes/data removed in the Grid, but his Disk has all the data he came in with, so it's possible that he reappeared on earth wearing the same outfit he digitized in.
    • Sam didn't get his Disk until after he was debriefed. We then see it "charge up", presumably with his data, meaning the outer clothes were likely defragged. Though to be fair, he did still have his jockeys.
  • Quorra though did not have her disk, so it's possible that she came out naked. I'll leave the rest to your imagination...
    • Good point. I'd like to imagine Quorra, with her whole "childlike innocence" thing, can't quite understand why Sam is so embarrassed at her sitting on his lap naked. And he has her stay in the Arcade while he goes to find a clothing store open at that time of morning. By the time he gets back, she's found a quarter he dropped and gotten the high score in Space Paranoids. And darn it, I didn't need another Plot Bunny!
    • While Quorra didn't come with her own set of clothing, she did carry Kevin's disc, so it can be assumed she somehow got the female version of Kevin's clothing, as in, when redigitizing, the laser tried to "retrofit" the clothings around Quorra's body.
  • How do we even know that programs even know about human sex? There's Castor/Everyone, yes, but we don't know what sort of "networking topology" programs are into, right?
    • What? You've never heard of "promiscuous mode"?
    • You can clearly see several programs kissing and fondling each other in the nightclub scene.
    • In the original Tron, there was also Tron and his girlfriend (whose name I cannot remember for the life of me) who were kissing. There's even a deleted scene that had them go back to her home, where they were heavily suggested to have had sex.
      • Her name was Yori.
  • Ive seen at least one kink meme prompt along these lines.
    • It could be Circuit Sex, though. We do not know that Programs are anatomically correct, though I've heard good arguments both way. (Even if I prefer the Disney-ized "they don't have those under the clothing, they're just shaped to fill it out right".)
  • The computer is programmed to remember the state someone is in when they're digitized. Remember that in the original one, Flynn was returned to the real world not only wearing the same clothes he was wearing when he was sent to the first Grid, but in the same pose. Clearly the computer is programmed to return someone to the same essential physical state they were in when they were digitized, which would include the clothing.

How did Clu get Bradley's pager number?

• So, for anyone who followed Flynn Lives, how did Clu get Bradley's pager number?
  • We gave him the proper coordinates and data for him to make the page. We almost paid the price as well as a result...
• Better question about the pager: How the crap did Clu even send the page to Bradley? Wouldn't he have had to get out, albeit briefly, to either get to a phone or to connect to a computer that could actually interat with said pager? So, Clu gets out, briefly looks for a way to lure someone, hell, anyone, else into the Grid, and by sheer magnificent luck, Kevin Flynn's son gets drawn in? Is this sounding more like a Xanatos Gambit to anyone else all of a sudden?
  • Actually, Clu did not need to "get out" and find a phone to send the page. The clues left by Kevin Flynn during his last book tour before his disappearance led the Flynn Lives people to a one-time, mass-connect via phone in order to send a massive signal (to make a long and complicated story short), that was supposed to attempt to contact Kevin Flynn - where ever he was. That signal, instead, connected with Kevin's computer in the arcade, and allowed Clu to send the page. As for how he got Bradley's pager number? From Kevin, I'd guess, who probably "gave" it to him - possibly accidentally, along with who knows what other memories and info - when Kevin created Clu.
• Best question about the pager: who still has a pager?
  • Alan Bradley.

Why didn't Flynn tell anyone what he was doing?

• This whole tragedy could have been prevented with a key, a one-page letter, and a maybe a VHS tape. We saw in Betrayal that Flynn was pushing himself to exhaustion trying to run the company, being a single dad, and experimenting with the Grid. He also wasn't idiot enough to think the Grid was harmless. Gridbugs, a potential lightcycle accident, tensions with the Isos and Programs, some Program deciding he wants to be Master Control 2.0...any number of things could have gone wrong. Judging from the WMG below, Clu's rebellion may not have been entirely unanticipated, either. Alan, Lora, and Roy were loyal friends. Alan and Lora risked their careers to save his butt in the first movie. Roy was devoted enough to spearhead the "Flynn Lives" movement, despite ridicule. Alan kept that goddamn pager on his person for twenty-one years. And Flynn apparently thought so little of the people who loved him (including his parents and his son) not to leave behind a "In case I vanish/die" letter with a spare key to the Arcade in his safe deposit box?!
• Flynn is impulsive and doesn't necessarily think everything through. Even as CEO of Encom, he's not the kind of person who precisely thought out all available contingencies, and he was arrogant on top of that. In fact, said arrogance is what led to Clu's rebellion in the first place. Also, as you noted, Flynn was being pulled in so many directions at once, he might not have even considered making an "In case I die" message. Ultimately, though, I think it comes down to the simple fact that Flynn's dominant character flaw was his hubris; he thought the Grid was under control. He thought he could create perfection. He thought everything was fine. He had no need to tell anyone because it was all okay, and he was on the cusp of revealing the Grid to everyone anyway. And that hubris cost him.
  • OP here, and while writing Fanfic, I had a Fridge Brilliance moment. Maybe he did try to explain what he saw, but everyone dismissed it as a product of his vivid imagination or thought Flynn was smoking things he confiscated at the arcade.

Clu invading through a tiny basement

• If Clu wanted to send his army through the portal, wouldn't they all end up smushed in that tiny room? And don't say he'll send them one by one, because it's clear he has little idea of what lies on the other side. But let's say he does know (somehow). If that's so, how will he fit the tanks and ships through the room? They wouldn't even fit! Another thing, since when Quorra went through to the real world and got real clothes, what would happen to all of their grid tech, weaponry, and armor? And YET ANOTHER THING (yes, I'm as tired of it as you are), How could the programs possibly take over Earth when the best weaponry they have is either a frisby of doom or a staff. Maybe the staff shots lasers or something, but still, the earth would still overtake that army due to how small it is (we only see a couple thousand programs. Humanity would just need to pull a Zerg Rush and crush them).
  • Well, Tron City has a population of 16 million and Clu was trying to conscript the majority of the population...
  • Why is Clu just Clu and not Clu 2.0? Restored from a backup!
    • He was made from scratch. We saw him.
  • Has it occured to anyone that Clu has no real idea what's on the other side? He's existed in the Grid his whole life. You're asking questions that are obvious to anyone who knows what's outside the Grid, which most emphatically does not include Clu. He has no idea that the computer is in a room underground, no idea how big the outside world is, and NO real idea what the outside world is like. All he knows it that travel is possible between one to the other, and he's working on the assumption that the worlds are similar enough. His plans makes sense to a person operating on the assumption that the real world is similar enough to the Grid. Too bad for him.
    • He read Sam's disc, which had all of his memories on it. No doubt he knew what lay on the other side and spent moments offscreen reworking his plan.
  • Sam's disc only contains memories of his time in The Grid. That part of their purpose is explicitly stated, so the disc having data on Sam prior to his arrival is...impossible, actually.
    • Actually, it appears to contain some of Sam's memories. When Clu is looking at the disc, he sees flashes of Alan's face and other real world locations.
    • Which is even more brilliant. When Clu reads (or copies) data from Sam's disc, he says he "expected more" and dismisses Sam. On first watch, the audience would be fooled into thinking that a father would have expected more from his son. But when we realize it's not Kevin but Clu saying this, it could mean anything from "I expected more from the son of my Creator" to "I expected the User World to be more of a challenge." And keep this in mind: a program developed to bring order to the Grid doesn't need to know what Earth looks like. Yet Clu had all this info available. Which means that he DID read Sam's data on the User World, and he was still going through with his invasion plan. So either he's completely blinded by arrogance, or he actually has a clue on how to make his army work on the other side of the laser. Given how movie logic works, the latter is more likely.
      • That is now my favorite Fridge Brilliance idea about the movie, that Clu might have been saying "I expected more of a challenge from your world". Also, we don't know how the conversion process would've worked for him. I'd imagine the laser would need to scan and store an equal amount of matter in order to create Clu's warship, so it wouldn't just be a bunch of soldiers appear in the arcade: it'd be that whole neighborhood vanishing as the laser sweeps up its matter and then getting replaced by the warship. And if the ship has scanning lasers of its own, they can keep zapping and digitizing more and more of the world, and converting the mass into a bigger and bigger digital army.
  • Yeah, even if he got stopped by the military, he's gonna end up doing lots of damage before then.
  • I suspect that Clu probably intended to send some scouts through first, or go through first himself. He'd get out, see what was on the other side, return to where he can plan, retool his army, and build up far faster than the human military could, exit and proceed to use his knowledge of coding and computers to begin subverting operating systems across the globe. Then he'd begin smuggling his troops out and possibly into other operating systems to take them over, and use his control over the Internet to build up monetary and political influence. The fact that he can operate hundreds of times faster than any human in the real world would give him a massive advantage. I suspect Clu's smart enough to switch gears from a military invasion to a campaign of electronic subversion, especially if he can get an Internet connection to the Grid. If he hooks the Internet up to the Grid, humanity is fucked beyond measure.
    • If the Grid gets connected to the internet, it will be overrun by shady marketeers and porno programs.
  • Part of the limitation on Clu's army was that, apparently, he couldn't create new programs/A Is, only "rectify" existing ones. But it seems like that's something he could fix when he got to the real world—he could write (or duplicate) new programs using Flynn's computer directly. That's assuming the reason he couldn't write new ones in the Grid was because he lacked the powers or user permissions or something, not that he lacked the programming skill. But seeing as a simple accounting program from 30 years earlier could act like a full AI, it probably wouldn't be that impossible for Clu to learn to write them himself. So at least he could assemble an army of billions if he needed, though there's still the small problems of the materialization bottleneck (only one laser, in a basement room), and if it would even function under the laws of physics in the real world…
  • Because there's no way he could just build another laser. In a crappy basement. WITH A BIRD BURD
    • It was a "problem" not "insoluble problem." And either way it's still going to slow down the invasion fleet while you build and position new lasers...unless you could just blast a hole in the arcade roof and use the laser to materialize the invasion fleet in midair...
  • I think everyone's missing the real danger of Clu being in the real world: he looks just like the founder of a major computer corporation. He doesn't need his army. A genius like Clu could easily learn about the current legal situation with ownership of the company, hire a team of lawyers, and figure out a way to take control of it from the board of directors while pretending to be Flynn. He could just invent a story where he's been all this time, and that plastic surgery and face-lifts worked wonders for his appearance, (or in the very least use make-up to look older than he is). Shouldn't be too difficult for Clu to manufacture evidence of ownership, or secure it for himself. He could probably walk into a meeting, introduce some new technologies, and the board of directors would be ecstatic to turn control over to him after considering the world-shaking applications. With the money, influence and resources of ENCOM company taking over the world would be much easier than just one army. Hell, he could order the manufacturing of more digitizing lasers to digitize the world, make more Grid worlds using copy and paste onto large servers and then digitize those into the real world to make an even larger army or just use his genius to change the current state of the world by manufacturing new technologies (energy/matter converters) and humankind might even welcome their enslavement to him through the elimination of want.

Kevin's amazing maintenance-free computer and arcade

• Kevin Flynn's Grid server is an amazing machine -- it ran 20 years nonstop without a reboot, disk crash, or power failure. Even the cooling fans are still operational.
  • Possibly not. When Sam discovers the Grid system in the basement, the top left window on the screen shows the system uptime... 8 days. However, this just raises further questions.
    • Actually, as Sam swipes dust off the screen, it shows an uptime of 20 years, 11 months, some days, seconds and fractions of seconds (don't remember exactly).
  • Likewise the arcade has been sitting there without preventive maintenance and has not sprung a roof leak or had any issues.
    • It's implied that Alan been paying for some of the maintenance of the place, probably in the hope that whatever Flynn's been working on had something to do at the arcade. The guy could easily have have kept paying for at least some semi-regular maintenace, what with being a major shareholder of a huge company and all.
    • The fact that the place is still there, combined with how much money Sam has and how little he's spending on himself, probably means that Sam's been paying for upkeep in case he ever builds up the motivation to reopen it or even just out of nostalgia. As for the computer...erm...I have no idea.
  • The computer can most likely be attributed to Kevin's genius. He came up with the idea of wireless internet decades before it was implemented, so it's not out of the question that he developed super efficient computer parts specifically to run the Grid.
    • That, or the computer just backs up its data and reboots itself every couple of weeks. Nobody inside notices because, well, why would they? Still impressive.
    • Alternately: It was in a low-power sleep mode. The programs were still running, but it doesn't register on the computer's "uptime" counter. It would be really bad if the computer went into total standby while Kevin was inside, after all.
    • I believe someone somewhere (yeah, helpful, I know) suggested that the computer was probably a top-of-the-line, military-grade computer, built to run for long periods with little-to-no-maintenance. Granted, 20 years is an awful long time to go without any maintenance at all, but this IS a movie, after all...

• Flynns pager number has been disconnected for years - but someone's still paying the electric bill for the arcade?
  • Power is often left on for "closed" buildings, to run security lights and systems or fire alarms. The cost is small compared to the damage vandals or a fire could cause.
  • I kind of figured Alan Bradley - explicitly the only person who still believed Flynn might come back - was paying for it (see the entry above). Whatever income he has been pulling from Encom is probably enough that it wouldn't strain his finances to do so. If he wasn't paying it, then presumably Sam (probably the official owner of the place following his father's disappearance) was.
    • And I wondered for a moment why whichever one was paying the bills didn't notice that the building was using more power that it should have been with only bare-minimum functions such as the alarm system going. Then I realized that whomever it was, probably had his accountant or PA actually writing the checks, and was almost certainly never seeing the bills himself at all. And the accountant/PA probably didn't know or care what was functioning in the arcade. They were just told to pay the bills at such-and-such address, so they simply did so without question.

Clu's Guards Must Be Crazy

• Something that bugs me: Clu has a huge army right? Why the hell did he did not detect intruders on his rectifier ship? Are there no cameras or any security system whatsoever? And what the hell are the troopers doing? Can't they spot a few intruders running RIGHT ABOVE THEM??
  • Let's assume the Rectified were cyber-lobotimized, and are dumb. I was actively looking for Sam and Kevin, and I still didn't see them. I do wonder if they have radios on the Grid, since Clu's secretaries should've been able to contact him instead of just sealing themselves off. Clu himself was focusing on the troops and his speech.
  • And the security is pretty lax in the place too...I only see a few guards and secretaries...
  • There really aren't any cameras in either movie, or other security systems. It's actually quite easy to move around in the ENCOM server/Grid, as the best surveillence capability they have is in the form of guards. As for the troops on the Rectifier, they're all assembled for Clu's speech. And aside from that, the Rectifier is freaking huge and Sam and Kevin are avoiding confrontation.

• Another scene that bugs me: Clu and his Quirky Miniboss Squad shot off in planes to catch Flynn and his son as well as the Living MacGuffin Quorra, why don't they get reinforcements? They should have called in more planes to chase them, and perhaps block them off or shoot the tron off their wings!
  • Time was precious, and they nearly won anyway. In the real world, five fighters following one transport/bomber/whatever it was is usually overkill.
  • Except that it wasn't a transport, it was a heavy fighter; cannon out front, Tailgunner Joe turret out back, and pretty deft and maneuverable for its size. Not an uncommon heavy fighter configuration.
    • That still leaves the question of simple numbers. If it weren't for Rinzler overcoming his Rectification, Team Flynn would be dead. It's also not clear how much more time it would've taken for them to get backup.

No Tron

• Am I not the only one who wants Tron to come back at the epic finale and fight Clu once more as Sam and Kevin, along with Quorra escape?
  • You are not the only one. "Rinzler" being Tron was telegraphed from early enough in the movie that I was hoping Kevin (or, failing that, Sam) would defrag and restore him in time for a climactic end battle. Let's just hope he gets his own back in the sequel.
  • It was pretty disappointing that Tron's face only appeared for a few brief shots in the flashback sequence. Definitely a Secondary Character Title, so I'm kind of hoping there is another movie where he gets more screentime.
    • The original was a Secondary Character Title too, if you recall. The primary focus was on Flynn, with Tron not introduced as a character until later and given only secondary focus throughout.

ENCOM OS 12

• What about Encom OS 12, aka Flynn OS 12? If it's anything like Windows, the legacy code goes back to DOS, when Flynn was still writing it. Is it possible that a portion of that code is capable of doing what Clu did to the Grid? If I was Sam, I'd install a copy on a non-networked computer and digitize myself into it for a quick check...
  • Clu was a specific program with a specific purpose. He had to be programmed specifically by Flynn to do what he did. Theoretically, someone else could program up another Clu using that code, but by itself Encom OS-12 can't do that.
  • Encom OS 12 would more likely have portions of the MCP in it, since it's been stated that Dillinger Jr was the main programmer behind it.
    • Hmmm, most popular OS in the world. Sam puts OS-12 online for anyone to use. OS-12 installed on tens or hundreds of millions of interconnected computers worldwide. Dillinger Jr wrote a large portion of OS-12. Can you say Sequel Hook?
    • Oh, no! Skynet!

Clu and Kevin's hideout

• Why did Clu did not dispatch troops to go to Kevin's home in the wastelands?
  • It's implied that it was hidden from him; he only went there after Sam drove the old-model lightcycle onto onto the Grid proper, creating a trail which Clu was able to trace back.
  • And Clu was suspiciously slow in sending troops when he traced back to Kevin.
    • Suspiciously slow? Sam had barely even gotten to the club when Clu personally marched into Kevin's hideout, and that's a scene after they report tracing the bike. If he were to be any faster, Clu would need to be teleporting there.
    • Teleporting there sounds like a good idea. Can't programs do that?
    • Er, no? Programs have never demonstrated the ability to teleport in either Tron movie.
      • In the first Tron, the participants in the light cycle game had to be teleported onto the arena. (The two sides started off next to each other, but materialized on opposite ends of the huge playing field.)
      • It's probable the teleportation there is a property of the field, and not of the programs themselves.
      • Considering how they need to use vehicles and ships to get everywhere for the rest of both movies, it's quite clear that the teleporting process in the first movie was unique to that particular game grid.
      • Or teleportation is solely under the control of whomever is in charge, since the act of teleporting onto the Game Grid was involuntary on the part of the Programs. And, since it was used so seldom, there must be some kind of restrictions: energy or complexity of function or something. On the other hand, it IS a movie, and sometimes, Hollywood Logic isn't...logical. :)

Zuse's betrayal

• Why did Zuse betray Flynn? What did Clu offer him in return? (and Zuse is a quite unhinged too, just look at the scene where Quorra and Sam Flynn fight Clu's troops in the End of the Line Club.)
  • Didn't Zuse flat-out say that he had made a deal with Clu, that gave Zuse control over the city (presumably while Clu was out trying to take over Earth)?
  • Yes, Zuse did say that he was doing it to get into Clu's favor and gain control of the city while Clu went on to the outside. He states this, very clearly, when he's talking with Clu after the battle in the club. I'm confused as to how this was overlooked, considering how much they discussed it.

Light jets stalling

• Why do digital planes stall out?
  • Obviously the physics engine in the Grid doesn't allow unlimited lift.
  • For the same reason why falling a long distance results in derezzing, why lightcycles fall down, users and program eat and drink, there's weather, and all the other laws of physics in the real world generally apply. The Grid behaves like the real world.
    • No, magically returning frisbees and light cycles prove that it doesn't behave like the real world. It, like a video game, behaves similarly enough to the real world to enable humans to interact with it, but not all the way there.
    • No, it does behave like the real world, except where noted. Unless we explicitly see something shown or explained to be different from how things act in out world, it is safe to assume that they behave the same way.
  • This troper had a theory about that which is now listed in the WMG entry.
  • I'd assumed, for no good reason, that the Grid used some kind of physical simulation system with positions defined by limited-precision floating-point numbers. Go too high and it can't accurately define your position any more, so it breaks. The heavy fighter got higher because, as a larger object, it needed slightly less precision to define its altitude. (Seriously, this was the first thing I thought while watching it.)
  • Flight simulators were the amongst the earliest physics engines used in the digital realm. The light-planes are probably the most realistic of all the physics objects in the Grid.
  • It's mentioned earlier that the bad guys' light cycles can't go beyond a certain point without shutting down. I had just assumed that the planes had a certain functional altitude that they couldn't exceed, and we were seeing what happens when this distance is exceeded.

Books in the Grid

• How did Kevin Flynn get all those books by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Verne, etc inside the Grid? The Grid wasn't connected to the Internet, he couldn't have accurately remembered all of them in order to recreate the texts, and it seems unlikely he would've gone through the trouble of transferring them all into digital form (especially considering that in the 1980s this would've meant typing them all by hand into his computer) before he got stuck in the Grid, just in case something like that might happen.
  • Seriously? He got the books there the same way he got in there: that nifty digitizing laser that can transfer real world objects into the Grid. You know, only the single most important phlebotinum in the movies? You don't need to type out the book by hand if you can just zap it and send it to the Grid. He probably brought them in while creating the Grid to educate the inhabitants, particularly the ISOs.
  • Alternately, he already had a huge PDF library which he moved to the directory that corresponded to the book shelves in his hideout. It would certainly explain why books aren't necessarily seen in the rest of the Grid.
    • Well, PDF was created in '93, and Flynn disappeared in '89, but this is more of a semantic thing than anything. He could've had scans in another format.

Kevin's apparent age

• Clu looking younger than Kevin Flynn is seemingly explained by the fact that Clu doesn't age, since he's a program. But why would Flynn age inside the Grid either? Inside there, they're both just computer code, so the real Flynn would have no biological age any more than Clu had. And even if there was some odd reason for Flynn to age, why has he aged approximately the same amount of years he's been away from the "real world", even though time inside the Grid runs at a different speed?
  • User bodies act like realworld bodies while in the Grid. See: Sam bleeding and both Sam and Kevin needing to eat. We can presume that Kevin's advanced age may have been slowed down by being in the Grid; his age probably corresponds with his "real world" age.
    • Yeah, it looks like user bodies act like real bodies in the Grid, but it wasn't explained why this was the case. Once he's inside the Grid, an user is a piece of code just like the programs, so there would be no need for his body to have any biological functions. So it seemed Kevin Flynn specifically changed the code so that users would have these functions (in the first Tron movie Kevin didn't bleed, and he drank the same "pure energy liquid" as the other programs), and there was no explanation why. If Kevin would've been inside the Grid long enough, would he have actually died of old age?
    • From what I gathered, the users act like any other program inside the Grid - and programs in the Grid have similar functions to the biological ones users have. They're implied to have sexual urges, along with biochemical-analogue ones (the mere presence of emotions in the programs proves they have this). We can reasonably assume that a digitized user's body still acts like it does in real life, with the exception of aging; aging seems to progress at the rate of temporal passage in the real world, so Kevin gradually aged twenty years. Of course, the problem is that we don't really know exactly how realworld entities interact with the digital world, as this is never explained. We can only draw conclusions based on observations of how they act. In this case, the aging thing isn't inconsistent with what we know about the Grid, as this is the first time we've ever observed a user spending prolonged times in digital form.
  • There is actually an incredibly simple reason why Flynn ages but Clu doesn't. Let me mangle a bit of C to get the point across (though it's not quite proper syntax):

namespace User.Object.Flynn
{
private class bioDefinitions
{
private int bioAge
{
return DateDiff("years", Now, birthDate);
}
}
}


So basically, Flynn's User program contains the notion of "aging" itself, and it's calculated as a measure of his original age against time spent inside the Grid. Realtime, so it's a calendar date as opposed to cycles. Clu, an actual program, was written in Flynn's likeness but without User namespace properties that include "aging", and like a photograph, his appearance will never change.

• • Dude... C doesn't have namespaces, classes, private members, or properties.
    • "Mangled" C does :p Think of it as pseudocode, used to illustrate the example, and not any attempt to actually write real code for it.
      • It's so mangled to the point that absolutely nothing about it suggests it's even C anymore :P (there is no C specific syntax in this code at all) C++ maybe. No big deal just thought it was funny to point out.
        • Knock it off, you nerds! Don't make me come up there with the football team!
  • Or perhaps it's simply Flynn's "Residual Self Image"; as the cycles wear on, he feels older, so he looks older. Simple as that.

Rinzler's Heel Face Turn

• I didn't quite get Rinzler's/Tron's Heel Face Turn... Was he secretly working for the good guys all along? If not, what prompted his turn? It came seemingly out of nowhere.
  • When Kevin and Tron saw each other, it triggered Tron's memories of his past; this can be heard when he's flying the jet immediately afterward and hears his old memories from when he was fighting for Kevin when Clu defeated and turned him. Heroic Willpower took care of the rest, and he was able to override the changes to his programming. It may have been possible that Kevin himself, being a user, was able to influence Tron indirectly. Don't forget that Rinzler/Tron reacts differently to users than to normal programs; when he was fighting Sam and Sam started bleeding, he immediately held back and kept him alive instead of killing him, so there is some precedent there for Tron/Rinzler responding differently to users than to normal programs.
  • There's precedent for eye contact overcoming code that rewrites a program. It happened in the first movie when Tron encountered Yori, who was initially just another program serving the MCP until he made eye contact with her. She was able to override the coding that made her a slave of the MCP and return to her normal self. Tron and Kevin made eye contact during the air-to-air battle, and a similar event happens.
    • Actually, in the novelization of the first movie, Yori implies (if not states outright) that MCP is hoarding energy and restricting it from everyone else, and that her reactions when Tron first finds her are due to her saving energy by working in a "minimal" or "energy-saving" mode that leaves her apartment nearly unfurnished and she herself acting like a zombie, able to complete her assigned tasks and that's all. When she finally processes who's standing there, she "wakes up" from energy-saving mode to interact with him more normally.

Clu, the portal, and Kevin's disc

• In the final battle, why was Clu content with getting Kevin Flynn's memory disc? It was only after he realized Sam had his father's disc that he tried to get to the transfer beam, to get the disc back. Since it had been established that no one inside the Grid could activate the transfer beam, and that once Sam got out he could erase Clu, shouldn't getting to the beam have been Clu's number one priority? In fact, since the transfer beam had been active for many hours before the Flynns and Quorra arrived there, why hadn't Clu entered it already, or sent some of his minions to scout the real world? Wasn't activating the beam the reason Clu lured Sam into the Grid?
  • If he had the disc, he had won. Sam couldn't exit without the disc, and even if he did, Clu would be right behind him. Remember, Grid time runs far faster than real world time; by the time Sam had stood up from the chair Clu would have been in the beam and would be in the real world with him. Clu hadn't entered the beam already because he needed to transfer his army to the portal as well, and he had to make his big speech. He was willing to take his time getting there because he was confident he had won and that Sam and Kevin were either dead or out of the way, so he could take his time, give his bombastic speech, and transition to the portal at his own leisure.
    Also, possession of the disc gives Clu user access and full control of the system. If he has Kevin's disc, Clu can lock Sam out of the system. He can pretty much ignore any attempts Sam makes to control the system, because he controls the system and can think and act faster than Sam in the real world.
    • Why couldn't Sam have exited without the disc? It was never said he needed his father's disk to exit the Grid. It seemed Kevin gave it to him just so that Clu wouldn't get Kevin's memories, and that Sam would have something to remember his father by (and possibly to resurrect him with). Also, it didn't look like possession of Kevin's disc gave Clu "full control" of the system... If that would've been true, wouldn't he have won the moment he got the disc? Yet even with Clu possessing the disc, the Flynns and Quorra were able to sneak in and steal it back; it seemed the only way to to truly control the Grid was to get outside and access the computer. I think the movie was extremely unclear about what exactly were the advantages Kevin's disc would give to whoever possessed it.
    • Because Kevin's disk controls the reversal process of the Gate because he originally programmed the Gate. It was mentioned before the big argument between Sam and Kevin. It was also quite clearly mentioned that Clu needed that disk because he was not programmed with the knowledge to control the Gate since Kevin never envisioned having him exit the Grid. Clu needed the control protocols for the reversal process of the digitization to exit the Grid. That's the only reason why his invasion didn't begin sooner.
    • It does give Clu full control of the system. This was stated repeatedly in the movie. Clu doesn't use it to attain godlike powers for the same reasons that Flynn, who possesses complete user access to the Grid, can't. Presumably, Clu actually needs to stop and spend some time sifting through the contents of Kevin's disk anyway to find what he needs, but he's got the time to do that with Kevin and Sam either dead or on the run.
    • I was under the impression that only Kevin's disc contained the data needed to materialize a digital lifeform into the real world, which was why Clu wanted it so badly. Kevin gave the disc to Sam because he intended to use it to materialize Quorra, as well as deny it to Clu.
    • It seemed that the dreadnought was unpowered until the disk was inserted, and guessing that Flynn wouldn't have a reason to make one, it might be possible that CLU corrupted some program to make it, but needed the disk to jumpstart it. Also, doesn't Flynn mention that he locked the exit protocols in his disc to prevent CLU from escaping after the coup?

Quorra and Zuse

• Quorra and Castor/Zuse know each other from "many cycles ago," but how do they know each other? Their exact relations are never mentioned. Quorra sends Sam to him, thinking Castor/Zuse might be able to give Sam safe passage, but Castor/Zuse looks visibly uncomfortable when Sam mentions Quorra to him and ends up being Evil All Along. When Quorra appears at the End Of Line Club during the fight, Castor doesn't seem too bothered by Quorra or her losing an arm and is more bothered by Flynn's return. But perhaps Castor/Zuse was the "sympathetic system" who smuggled Quorra out during the Purge, and he eventually got corrupted? That's the only way I can see Quorra sending Sam to a guy who sells them out.
  • It may have just been differing points of view. Castor may have had his own agenda for helping Quorra escape the ISO genocide, while Quorra may have incorrectly interpreted his motives as philanthropy and naturally assumed he was trustworthy.
  • If it is a difference in perspective, I'm just wondering why Castor helped Quorra in the first place. It doesn't seem like he had gained anything from it, other than gain the trust of the last ISO.
  • This troper always figured that, after so much time, he lost his faith in Flynn and did it out of spite.
    • It's been, from the perspective of the inhabitants of the Grid, more than a thousand years since the genocide and the establishment of Clu's reign. I'd be surprised if Castor/Zuse hadn't changed in that time.
    • The way Quorra pointedly says "sympathetic system" in front of Sam, plus Zuse's reaction to her name, opens up an unseen plot thread where Zuse and Quorra were an item then Zuse (having faith in Kevin and his promises) gave Quorra up to Kevin in order to keep her safe. Kevin and Quorra then don't contact Zuse for several hundred grid years and whatever promises Kevin offered never materialise. By the time Sam shows up (sent by Quorra, for extra irony), Zuse is an unhappy camper indeed.
  • He did say that he used to believe in the Users.
  • This is dealt with in Tron Evolution.

Clu has a point

• Doesn't the Strawman have a point here? Obviously Clu's too crazy to get out, but if a program can think, plan, and grieve, shouldn't they be awarded the respect any sentient being would? Why shouldn't they be allowed to leave the Grid if they wanted? If power is a problem, why not let humans be digitized? I'm positive plenty of people would like being able to play around with lightbikes, or living thousands of subjective years. Imagine a society where you could live on either side, or program anything you wanted, then bring it out into the non-digital (no longer the only "real") world. But instead Sam just shuts the whole thing down at the end, and neither he nor Kevin ever told anyone about this technology. *headdesk*
  • Yeah the "strawman" had a point. At no point did anyone at any point say that Clu's desire to escape the system was, in and of itself, wrong. And the rest of the movie didn't exactly have time to delve into the moral implications of the existence of a digital world with thinking beings. Kevin appears to have seriously considered it. He was, after all, making big huge speeches about changing the world with the Grid, and Sam does continue his work by bringing Quorra into the real world. And we don't know that Sam didn't tell anyone about the technology; the movie ends right afterward, but Sam and Quorra are strongly indicated to be preparing to utilize the special nature of the ISO at the end.
  • Sequel Hook.

Digitizing computers

• Can you digitize a computer? What about another digitizing laser? Could you make infinite layers of Grids?
  • That reminds me of the immensely complex pattern in Conway's Game of Life that functions like a computer capable of playing Conway's Game of Life.
  • "It's not enough. We have to go deeper."
  • Yes. But the inner layers would be increasingly slower from an outside perspective, not faster. You can do this in real life if you have nothing better to do.

Digital ocean

• What's at the bottom of the digital ocean?
  • Probably a digital ocean floor. Otherwise Tron would be falling endlessly.
    • And, since the ocean was actually a "Sea of Simulation", it probably originally had "fish" and other "aquatic life" in the form of half-finished programs and stuff. According to "Betrayal", the ISO's came from the Sea of Simulation, so Clu poisoned the Sea so no new ISO's could emerge. I'm guessing therefore, that the Sea is now "lifeless" and the bottom probably just a flat surface. (Said poisoning may also be the reason Clu can't create new programs, if they ALL came from the Sea when they were created.) However, this brings up another problem: what will the poison do to Tron? Will he be corrupted/damaged in a different way than he was before?

ENCOM running UNIX

• Ok, this may be minor compared to other plot holes, but... Encom writes its own O.S., right? Then why in the world are they running UNIX on their servers? And why is Flynn doing exactly the same on the server in his secret lab? That would be just as silly as portraying Microsoft running Mac OS on the company network and Bill Gates using it on his home computer.
  • Was UNIX even mentioned in their world? Maybe, in the movie's universe, Flynn came up with it and it takes the place of UNIX in our world.
    • Wait a minute, though. Who says Flynn/Encom OS isn't just Unix-like?
    • From what we see of the code, it's pretty much exactly like UNIX. If both exist together, they'd be accusing each other of plagiarism.
    • One of those terminal windows on the ENCOM system clearly said "Ubuntu"...
    • There's no such thing as a "UNIX" OS anymore. UNIX is a specification, not an operating system. Many O Ses follow it, like AIX or HPUX or Solaris or Encom OS.
    • Apple's OS X runs on top of a heavily-modified FreeBSD subsystem. There's nothing stopping ENCOM from writing their own OS/Application layer on top of some other UNIX-like system. Besides, Flynn "thought of (wifi) in 1985" so why couldn't he also have thought of basing his original OS on a UNIX-like semantic 15 years before Apple did.
    • Also, in this alternate universe who's to say Flynn wasn't the man who invented UNIX?
    • Thinking how Linux fits into IBM's present-day scheme, it runs as a guest OS within an LPAR (think virtual machine). The Unix-like OS would probably be running as a user task under ENCOM's hypervisor. Within an LPAR or VM.

Flynn's sacrifice

• Anyone else feel like the ending with Kevin and Clu was a Stupid Sacrifice with absolutely no justification except that it created drama? Even with the arbitrary, Drama-Preserving Handicap of “deleting him kills you too,” why didn’t Kevin just subvert it by creating an army of infiltration/assassin programs to kidnap/kill him? My Alternative Character Interpretation is that Kevin said “I may be a Physical God, able to do any of a bajillion things to stop Clu, but I’d rather spend the next 20 years hiding in a cave with Olivia Wilde.”
  • Kevin outright says that he did try to fight Clu. Any attempt he made to kill Clu simply made Clu stronger. That and Clu is stronger than any other program on the Grid; he proved this when he casually defeated Tron. Anything Flynn makes, Clu can defeat, especially as Clu has demonstrated the ability to survive things that would kill any other program. What we're seeing in the movie is a Kevin Flynn who has been trapped in the Grid for a thousand years where every attempt he makes to resist Clu only served to make Clu stronger. By the time we get to the current point in the movie, Kevin has given up on fighting Clu in a series of counterproductive struggles and instead has simply removed himself from the equation, allowing the resistance forces to fight him instead. If the resistance forces fight Clu, he doesn't get any stronger.
  • Plus, with Clu's tendency to corrupt and rectify other programs, sending an army of combat programs to fight him will most likely result in Clu turning them right back around at him. In fact, this is possibly how Clu got his army in the first place.
  • ...And come on, cave with Olivia Wilde.
  • Kevin also says that he was maintaining his distance to protect Quorra. Since she was the last ISO, she was the last bit of his "miracle" that he could preserve. Kevin seemed to have felt that it was better to protect and hide Quorra than to continue a futile struggle against Clu.

Digital clothes

• In the original, when Flynn digitizes, he spontaneously dons program clothing. Why does Sam have to discard his real-world clothes in favor of program armor? Is the Legacy-era clothing simply not intrinsic to the programs? If so, why was it in the original?
  • In Flynn's flashbacks to his time in the Grid, he is shown wearing normal clothing as well. Presumably, he altered the Grid and the laser to keep his normal clothes; the original laser and Encom mainframe probably weren't designed to do this (as the MCP digitizing Flynn was a desperation move). With Kevin setting up the Grid from the ground up, he could easily alter the settings of the laser and the Grid to keep his clothes.
  • Sam was dropped into a sports arena. He's wearing a uniform. All the programs in the game wear the same outfit as him.

Vehicles in the Badlands

• How was Sam able to ride Kevin's lightcycle on the terrain which Quorra said that lightcycles will malfunction on?
  • Kevin's model could have been built for all terrain, or she could have meant that the lightcycles that the competitors used were designed to stop working to keep them from escaping.
  • She specifically said "their vehicles" malfunctioned. She said nothing about "all" vehicles malfunctioning, or lightcycles in general. Implication there that vehicles operated by Kevin and Quorra are designed to operate on rough terrain. It would be rather idiotic of them to have a vehicle that couldn't operate on off-Grid terrain when they're shown to have the capacity to modify vehicles to do so.
  • I vaguely remember Quorra flicking a switch and the wheels changing to something suitable for a rougher terrain. Kevin Flynn may have simply modified that specific vehicle to work that way.
  • Aside from Kevin's energy manipulation at the bar, the first film showed how he can empower entire programs (Ram) or subroutines (the derelict Recognizer.) Outside the City, in the Wastelands, there is no power for the vehicles to run... except for Kevin's original lightcycle and the light runner, which run directly on HIS power (and would probably last for a LONG time.) It's not a stretch to think that, when Clu followed the lightcycle's trail, his vehicles fed on that energy trail just to get there.
    • It is explicitly shown that they were using aircraft to reach Kevin's hideout. Most likely, the aircraft use their own power source instead of running constantly on the Grid's power supply.
  • It is very possible that arena vehicles were specifically engineered to only run on the grid, what with so many incidents of escape attempts whenever a wall collapsed due to damage. The runner did feature all-terrain tires, and the old prototype lightcycle was based on the ones from the original movie, which could drive anywhere.

Why aren't more IS Os being created?

• The IS Os spontaneously created themselves because the system would allow for their creation, so why is it that IS Os weren't being spontaneously generated all the time?
  • It's explained why in the prequel comic. The ISOs were being generated all the time from the Sea of Simulation, until Clu had it poisoned by a virus sometime before his rebellion.
  • Even without the prequel comic, it's not like Clu can't simply have his minions roaming around the Grid, stopping every program and checking their arms, and then derezzing them if they have the ISO symbol.

Tron drowning and umbrellas

• If water is energy, why did Tron die at the end?! Shouldn't he just, you know, be recharged or whatever? ... On a similar note, that chick wouldn't need an umbrella, as rain is also energy. Um, oops.
  • "Water" was energy in the original system of the first movie. However, it's quite clear that the Grid is not exactly the same as the old system due to advances in computing and Flynn's programming.
  • Water != energy. Pure sources of energy glow bright and shiny, while the Sea of Simulation is dark. Also, who said Tron died at the end? And the same applies to the umbrella; it does not necessarily need to defend against rain (umbrellas can be fashionable or to block light, etc.) and rain is not energy.
  • Check out the Tron Legacy WMG page and you'll find that there is no guarentee that Tron is dead.
  • Sequel Hook anyone?
  • There is a visual difference between the waters of the Sea of Simulation and "energy" - the latter is dark while the former glows a faint green-white or blue color. You can see this in the drinks in the End of Line club and in the pool and drinks at Flynn's hideout in the Badlands.

Pagers

• This troper remembers pagers. When you called a paging service you had to key in the callback number that you wanted sent to the pager. It did not use caller ID like today's digital cell phones. Receiving a page from a nonexistent or disconnected number would have been quickly dismissed as a prank or a mistake.
  • Except the page came from the old office where Kevin worked at. This is, y'know, kind of important and is the entire reason why Alan even noticed where the page had come from.
  • The point is pages don't really "come from" anywhere - they just relay a number entered by the user, who can be calling from any phone. Anyone who happened to know Flynn's old office number could have sent that page. (I guess we could always assume no one else knew the number...)
    • It really depends on the pager. I've encountered pagers that automatically flash the caller's number without needing to input the number being dialed from.

ENCOM and Dillinger Jr.

• Why the HELL would Encom trust the son of Edward Dillinger? From what I gathered from the original Tron's ending (saw the sequel before the original, so please bear with me), it's implied no one at Encom would let Ed Dillinger near them again, not to mention the likely disgrace to his name that followed. But to hear the CEO greet Dillinger Jr. as (paraphrasing) "the son of the man who helped make Encom what it is today" seems completely ridiculous, given Dillinger was an intellectual thief and border-line megalomaniac. Not to mention that his son seems like a Jerkass with an entitlement complex...
  • It's not unheard of for businessmen and politicians to make insincere or unsubstantiated flattery for their erstwhile business allies. Besides, the first movie ended in the 1980s. No one at Encom back then would want Dillinger back. However, a lot of things change in over 20 years, especially considering the upheaval the company went through after Flynn disappeared. the movie outright stated that, despite Sam and Allan's efforts, most of the people on the current Encom board of directors want to take the company in a direction Kevin Flynn wouldn't allow them to. To do that, they have to make a consolidated group against Allan and Sam. Who else would make a perfect ally than the son of one of the guy Allan and Kevin booted out, since they would be absolutely sure that such a guy would have a sufficient grduge against Allan and Flynn to back the board against them completely? Also, being a jerkass is not sufficient grounds to bar anyone from being hired into a company if he's done nothing illegal. Ed Jr's Dad may have done a crime, but you can't rightfully prevent a person from getting hired on the basis of a crime someone else did -- even if that someone else is related.
  • Preview materials on the Blu-Ray for Legacy indicate that Dillinger Jr. is Up To Something, and in communication with his father about the Something. Precisely what is up in the air.
    • Which doesn't change anything. How is anyone going to know he's definitely up to something when he applies for a job unless they're psychic? They can't. They can suspect that he might be up to something, but the only reason for doing so would be because he's Dillinger's son. As mentioned, you can't rightfully prevent someone from being hired because of the crimes of his relatives unless you have solid, undeniable proof that he's up to something. If they'd said "we won't hire you because you're Dillinger Sr.'s son and we don't like that asshole" Junior would have been well within his rights to sue them for discriminatory hiring practices.
• You'd be surprised how much of what we'd consider serious crime is, in the executive echelons of the corporate world, just considered being rambunctious. Dillinger Sr.'s crimes would only show that he was an aggressive player, not that he (or his kid) couldn't be trusted with the wellbeing of Encom and its shareholders. Now with the Flynns, it's a personal vendetta, so Sam should probably lay junior off immediately.
  • Sam holding a vendetta against Dillinger wouldn't make much sense. The vendetta between Dillinger and his father was just between them, and it was mostly resolved before he was even born. It wouldn't make much sense for Sam to be vindictive towards the Dillinger line, especially considering his rather laid-back personality. Hell, I would be surprised if Kevin really held that much of a vendetta against Dillinger. He doesn't seem the type.

Why do you need the portal?

• Why do you users even need the portal to go back? It seems an awful lot of effort to get back to the real world and in the orignal Tron, Flynn returned to the real world when his Clu body was destroyed. So couldn't they commit suicide ala Inception to return to the real world?
  • That's how Flynn set up the Grid to work.
  • Flynn didn't have a "Clu body" in the MCP's Grid. Flynn was Flynn in a digital Flynn simulacrum, the best interpretation that the (then) primitive digitizing process could make of his organic body (though obviously improvements in processing power and memory allowed for further detail in his own Grid, to the point that people can even preserve the data for their clothing.) Oh, and this simulacrum wasn't destroyed. If you'll look closely, the MCP itself is an I/O Tower, like Dumont. When Tron derezzed the MCP, the I/O Tower was free to access and Flynn hitched a ride on it to get back to the real-world laser interface. At which point the data stored in his simulacrum was used to reconstitute his physical body, like the orange at the beginning of the film. So yeah, according to Legacy, it's possible that Tron or Lori could've been "written" into real-world organic bodies if they had gone up the beam with Flynn.
    • If the original MCP can link like that to the real world then why bother with he other towers? MCP seems to want to put everything under it's direct control and give itself more power so it really doesn't make sense to have the towers around. Even Dumont said that they do occasionally make use of the towers so there is obviously some kind of need for them to be around.
      • The original MCP can link like that. He has a direct line to Dillinger, for starters. The other I/O Towers exist so other programs can communicate with their Users, which is why Tron made such a big deal of getting to one. It's even mentioned that the MCP only kept them around for as long as they were useful, and they weren't really "free" --hardly anyone used them anymore, probably because the MCP was trying to stamp out the belief in "Users" and very few programs would want to take the risk. Dumont himself doesn't even want to let Tron use the tower because it'd bring the MCP's wrath on him in a flash. And when the towers proved a liability (such as Tron successfully contacting Alan-1) the MCP simply had all the remaining Tower Controllers rounded up, and he started assimilating them and their functions.

Why not take Clu's disc?

• If a disc has all your data on it, then why didn't they think to steal Clu's disc and just mess up his code.
  • Aside from the fact that stealing Clu's disc isn't guaranteed to work, stealing Clu's disc requires getting within arm's reach of Clu. Clu, the superstrong, unkillable ruler of the Grid who is constantly surrounded by guards and Rinzler. Taking Clu's disc would be an extreme desperation move, and a last resort.
    • But if they all ganged up on him and distracted him then they might pull it off. Heck they could replicate how Flynn got his disc stollen by using one of those grapplers and catching him unaware. Either way, it seems a better last resort than self-destructing...
    • No, they would not be able to pull it off. There are three of them, against Clu, Rinzler, and Clu's entire army. They would not be able to "gang up" on Clu when he has hundreds or thousands of minions available and a bodyguard who can trivially defeat Sam and Quorra.
      • Well near the end. Sam and Quora take out Rinzler and Sam is good enough to take on multiple guards and win. But towards the end it is 3 against 1. Sam stupidly attacked CLU without the use of his disc so if he actually used his disc in the fight and Quora snuck up from behind, then they could steal the disc and screw up his code, stopping him.
    • Again, this is CLU. Clu was able to trivially defeat Tron, who, in turn, wiped the floor with both Quorra and Sam. He would casually kick their asses without really trying. And even if they did get the disc, what were they going to do with it? Removing his disc doesn't make Clu any slower or weaker, they're on a narrow bridge, and the only thing keeping Clu from crushing them like ants is because Kevin is talking to him. By the time anyone is able to do anything with that disc, Clu is going to be beating them to death with his bare hands.
      • CLU got snuck up from behind in the flashback so it could happen. Sam and Quorra were able to beat Rinzler and that was when Quorra was in cuffs as well. CLU maybe super strong but he can be tackled to the floor and mometarily distracted enough, that you can take his disc and then mess up his code, beating him. Just keep repeatingly hitting him with their discs which would still force him down, whilst they take his disc, screw him up and then leave.
    • This "plan" of yours still involves getting into close combat with Clu, which is the last thing these characters are going to want, especially when they've already got a far easier plan. The only time anyone is in any position to fight Clu directly, they've got the portal right there in easy sprinting distance. They can either try your horribly risky idea of attacking Clu, with limited chance of success, or they can run for the portal, which will allow Sam to eliminate Clu with a keystroke. Given those options, I'd go for the portal.
      • Between them they have 3 discs and Quorra has a baton and a grappler. All they need do is hit CLU either up close or at a distance, whilst someone else steals Clu's disc. The other plan didn't work anyway because CLU was blocking the path to the portal so they might as well have tried to steal his disc rather than allow Flynn to sacrifice himself.
      • Once again, Clu was strong and skilled enough to take down Tron. And he's had thousands, if not millions, of cycles to hone his skills --he does participate in the Games, after all-- so he's probably even MORE skilled than when he first rebelled. Sam and Quorra would be no match for him. Yes, there's three against one, but they're ALL vital targets: if he gets a hold of Flynn, it's over for everyone. If he catches Sam, Sam's dead. If he catches Quorra, she's dead. Just like there's three of them against him, he has three vulnerable targets, and he needs only one lucky shot to bring the fight to a deadly end.
    • He doesn't even need to get lucky. They're on a narrow bridge, and Clu has superhuman strength. A casual blow from him can easily send any of them flying off the bridge to their deaths. It doesn't matter what melee weapons they have, the fact is that they're still melee weapons, and to fight Clu they have to take him on in terrain that strongly favors him, in close quarters, against an enemy who is stronger, faster, tougher, and altogether more skilled. Or they can run. The former is risky, time-consuming, and runs the risk of either running out of time to get out through the portal, or for the rest of Clu's army to arrive, and is unlikely to succeed (it's also highly dependent on the notion that Sam and Quorra could seriously distract or hold off Clu, which is a dubious proposition considering how he stomped Tron). The latter requires a bit of agility and a short sprint, and is guaranteed success. Which one is more likely to succeed? Stopping to fight Clu is only a viable option if they can't escape, which they can.
      • The time limit on the portal doesn't matter so long as you have Flynn's disc. CLU doesn't really participate in games often and you can tell by the fact that he gets a special announcement every time he enter the arena. In the beginning, CLU is all relaxing up on his flagship. He doesn't really need skill, because he's so strong and invulnerable anyways. Rinzler has skills such as tricking but CLU doesn't. The plan to get to portal was jepordised because CLU was blocking the path anywas, so SOMEONE had to do something. We all say that CLU is superstrong, and though he is pretty strong it was at least a bit of a struggle to nab the baton of Rinzler when they were in freefall. Had they have all used their discs to srike him at a distance whilst someone nabs his dusc they could have ended it. Remember discs can be thrown!
    • The time limit on the portal doesn't matter so long as you have Flynn's disc. Yes, it does. Flynn himself says that you cannot open the portal from the inside. If he could have, he would have escaped already.
      CLU doesn't really participate in games often and you can tell by the fact that he gets a special announcement every time he enter the arena. So? That doesn't mean he doesn't participate regularly in games, it just means he likes to have a big grandiose announcement when he enters.
      We all say that CLU is superstrong, and though he is pretty strong it was at least a bit of a struggle to nab the baton of Rinzler when they were in freefall. And? Clu had a little bit of trouble taking down Tron in the flashback too, that doesn't mean he's suddenly impotent, especially when Tron has easily defeated both Sam and Quorra and Clu crushed him when they fought.
      Had they have all used their discs to srike him at a distance whilst someone nabs his dusc they could have ended it. Repeating this claim ad nausem does not make it true.
  • Rewatching the sequence of events, I don't really see any point where they could have engaged in this plan of yours. Kevin tries to talk Clu down first, and he seems to be succeeding up until Clu attacks Kevin. Quorra goes to check on Kevin while Sam flips out and attacks Clu with his bare hands, to predictable results. Clu throws Sam behind him. This is about the only point where they might be able to attack Clu from multiple directions where he isn't in a position to beat them senseless, but Sam is opposite Clu, and Quorra risks hitting him with her disc (and she's not throwing that disc, because it's Kevin's) Clu is advancing on Sam, and Kevin is down, and Quorra needs to get the disc to the portal, so she grapple-hooks around to the other side of the bridge. They're in close-quarters with Clu at this point; if they try to retreat, Clu runs them down. Kevin draws Clu back by tempting him with what Clu thinks is his disc. Clu starts toward him, but as Kevin is on the oppsoite side of Clu, Sam is not willing to throw his disc; ditto for Quorra. This eventually leads to Clu jumping across the chasm, and by the time he's in any position to be directly attacked, Sam and Quorra are in the portal beam and have essentially won.

Sam and User Powers (Warning! Wall of text!

• How come we never get to see Sam try any user powers? Flynn had all sorts of special powers, unique to him simply on the merit of being a user. It's not as if Sam isn't already computer literate and skilled in hacking.
  • Sam doesn't know how to use his user abilities. Kevin only realized he could do what he can do in the digital world by accident.
    • Yes but Sam knew about the Grid because his Dad (Flynn) told him stories about it. So he should have known that users have special abilites within the Grid.
    • Again, Sam doesn't know how to use his user abilities.
      • But he doesn't even try? His dad told him stories at how users have special powers and he doesn't even take one moment in the movie to try. Flynn discovered his user abilities by accident and yet he's making more use of his mighty user powers than Sam.
      • Like it's said below, Sam is only a User, not a sysadmin like Kevin. In the original Tron, all Kevin could do was directly manipulate energy --rebuild a derelict Recognizer, absorb some ID data from a control program, redirect the Solar Sailor beam, keep Sark's cruiser and Lori from derezzing completely, and distract the MCP by leaping into the beam-- but it didn't give him any particular advantage against Sark, the MCP, or even the random mooks. He didn't have the reality-altering powers he has in his own Grid, nor could he save Ram the way he saved Quorra. So while Sam probably could have learned (or at least discovered) how to manipulate energy the same way "Young Flynn" did, there was no opportunity nor reason for him to do so during the movie. There was no energy flow he needed to redirect, nor any vehicles that he had a need (and time) to rebuild.
        • Actually Flynn could take more damage then normal programs. When that actuary program was badly damaged he wasn't and when Yori took a staff hit, she was mortally wounded whilst Flynn wasn't. But Sam could get easily taken out, such as at the end when CLU just casually tossed him aside. But Flynn was only in the midst of discovering what a user could do and there was no defined limits to what they could do, so far as directly manipulating the surroundings. The whole Grid is surounded with energy anyways like in Tron: Evolution where you run off walls to recharge, so he should have at least tried. Oh and Sam didn't even try to use that cameleon ability that Kevin used to made him appear in red, even though he was trying to snake around the Grid.
    • Again, Sam doesn't know how to use any of these abilities. We don't even know if he even realizes he has these abilities. Nothing indicates that Kevin told Sam that he had superhuman powers inside the Grid, Sam is never really in any position to use any of the user powers, and its not even certain that the Grid operates under the same principles as the ENCOM servers, so its not even clear if Sam can use those abilities. In addition, I'm not sure the ability to assume the colors of another program would be terribly useful; rectification appears to be a far more severe process than simply changing colors like what Flynn did int he first movie, so it's iffy if it would work.
      • But again, I will say that he never bothered to try despite the fact he was told stories by his dad about what users are capable of in the grid. The whole point of the last movie was to show that users were like Neo in the sense that they could freely play around with the world. It may be a different grid but it was certainly based on the original, where users could do many things.
        • For all we know, Sam's fighting abilities against programs ARE a manifestation of his User powers. Clu's army seems to have been reformatted specifically for combat, and Rinzler is, well, Rinzler. All we know about Sam is that he's into extreme sports, not that he's particularly adept at fighting, so being able to fight combat programs and win could very well be due to being a User. As for other types of User powers, instead of asking why he never used them in the abstract, how about a concrete listing how and where he could've used them, to avoid circular arguments?
          • Ok well I made the example before that Sam could have used Kevin's colour change ability from the first movie when he was trying to sneak around. We say that users can manipulate energy, well when he is standing under the portal he could have, I dunno redirected the energy to blast CLU. Sam's ability to fight is a bit off a half-half in that it is as you say that Sam is physically fit and good at extreme sports and yet he's fighting epeerienced programs that have more specific training and skills such as Rinzler's tricking. Sam kinows that users are more innovative as he says "I'm a user, I'll improvise", that is something he does a lot and yet he never takes it to the level of trying his user powers.
    • Regarding the color change, Sam never encountered any guards before entering Clu's sanctum, at which point the color change would be useless. There's no evidence that the portal's "energy" (such a lovely, ambiguous term) could be used in that manner. In fact, if it were capable of being used as destructive force, Sam would have been rezzed the second he stepped into it. There's no real evidence that users are any more innovative than programs. Sam's just boasting when he says that.
      • Forget that, he could have turned blue or green. Ok the portal is the closest thing to the energy that Kevin used in the first film as it is a stead, continuous beam of light, again he didn't even try. Sam wouldn't have gotten rezzed as Kevin redirected some of the more lethal energy from the Solar Sailor beams away, albeit it weakened him. Users clearly are more innovative than programs as Sam was causing quite a stir in the game grid when he was hoping all over the place, Jarvis even pointed out that this was odd.
    • Why would he change his colors to blue or green? The only time he's ever in any position to consider using that ability, he's on Clu's ship, surrounded by red-uniformed programs, and they react aggressively to anyone who isn't wearing their colors (and again, he never encounters a guard whose colors he can steal). Again, there is no evidence that the portal's "energy" could be redirected like that, or that the "energy" can be destructive (or worse, turning it on Clu could send him to the real world). There's no evidence that the beams used by the solar sailors was lethal. Sam was causing a stir in the game grid because he was violating the rules and rampaging around. That doesn't make him "innovative", as anyone can do that. It doesn't take a goddamn user, just anyone with a well-placed disc.
      • No he gives Kevin's bike to that homeless program so he might as well tried taking on his colour. It doesn't matter if he could turn the beam into a disintgrating death ray, just so long as he could send CLU flying off into oblivion, but again he doesn't even try. It probably couldn't take him back to the real world or maybe he could use a kind of teleporting dissection and send Clu's bottom half to the real world and leave his top half. The Solar Sailor beams are highly energetic which is why Flynn was pretty much risking his life just to use them. Yeah Sam was rampagin about but he's obviously innovative as he's capable of beating Cl U's henchmen, despite them having faster bikes. So if the Computer Is a Cheating Bastard, it means the player/user has to outsmart the computer.
    • No he gives Kevin's bike to that homless program so he might as well tried taking on his colour. That would provide him precisely nothing in terms of disguise, as Sam already looks like any other program, and he has said program's cloak. Plus, it would involve rezzing the program, like what happened with Sark's guard when Kevin took his coloration. Sam isn't a Heroic Sociopath, and on a more practical note, he needs someone to drive the bike away and draw off attention.
      It doesn't matter if he could turn the beam into a disintgrating death ray, just so long as he could send CLU flying off into oblivion, but again he doesn't even try. No evidence that the beam can even do this.
      It probably couldn't take him back to the real world or maybe he could use a kind of teleporting dissection and send Clu's bottom half to the real world and leave his top half. Okay, now you're just making shit up. There's no evidence that a portal can even be used like that, and all indications are that the portal can bring back anyone who steps in through it as long as someone is using Flynn's disc - which Sam was.
      Yeah Sam was rampagin about but he's obviously innovative as he's capable of beating Cl U's henchmen, despite them having faster bikes. Or it could be that he actually rides bikes regularly and those programs are conscripts who don't have experience riding stunt bikes.
      • It's a freaking programme, Sam's already killed programmes and it's not the same as killing people. Programmes probably aren't permanently deleted anyways but sent to a recycle bin. Everyone knows that it is hard as , to delete something permamntentyl froma computer. There is no evidence that the beam does this and yet you have to stand fully within the beam, that is why Quorra was clinging on extra tight. She wouldn't be clining on so ridiculously tight unless it was neccessary for he to do so. Sam could have used his user powers to manipulate the beam and finish off CLU. Okay Sam isn't some kind of dirt bike champion. These programmes have training, specific training and they happen to work under CLU and R Inzler. Do you think that either of them would expect nothing but the best programmes to work under them? That is the whole point of why CLU reprogrammed Rinzler and made him his right hand man because Rinzler was evidently the most skilled, capable and competant one around. Let's not forget that Sam is capable of quickly formulating strategies that involve team work in order to finish off CLU's henchmen.
    • It's a freaking programme, Sam's already killed programmes and it's not the same as killing people. So what, you're pulling out the "its not human so its okay to kill it" card, even though we know programs have thoughts, emotions, and otherwise look and act exactly like humans? Not to mention that prior to that scene, the only programs he killed were trying to kill him too. (and of them, only the one gladiator was not one of Clu's rectified troops)
      Programmes probably aren't permanently deleted anyways but sent to a recycle bin. Everyone knows that it is hard as , to delete something permamntentyl froma computer. That doesn't appear to be how deresolution appears to act in this setting. Deresolution is death, and it is treated as permanent death by everyone. No program has ever in the course of the series been restored after being derezzed. Not a normal program, not an ISO, not Sark, not the MCP.
      There is no evidence that the beam does this and yet you have to stand fully within the beam, that is why Quorra was clinging on extra tight. She wouldn't be clining on so ridiculously tight unless it was neccessary for he to do so. And this indicates that the beam can be lethal....how, exactly? Quorra hugging Sam doesn't mean that the portal slices someone apart if they're partially outside of it. Maybe she's just hugging him because she's afraid or otherwise emotional or just doesn't know what's going to happen next.
      Sam could have used his user powers to manipulate the beam and finish off CLU. Once again, repeating this claim over and over again does not make it true.
      These programmes have training, specific training and they happen to work under CLU and R Inzler. Do you think that either of them would expect nothing but the best programmes to work under them? There's no evidence that any of them are anything other than the standard mooks that Sam kills so easily their deaths are shown offscreen. None of them are Black Guards. They have not demonstrated exceptional skill or ability, beyond your baseless claims.
    • It doesn't matter what they think and feel if it's all simulation. Should someone feel guilty for destroying something that isn't real? Sam as a computer genius should know that it is real hard to delete stuff. Remember programmes can be ressurected in a manner such as how Yori was brought back by Kevin. Even if it is a programme that was destroyed they can just create a another one.

Now you're messing up by saying that Quorra was afraid when only moments before she was staring down CLU and before that she was defiant when he was all like I Have You Now, My Pretty. It's reasonable to assume that this beam has some of range in which data will be transported to the real world. You keep saying repeating a claim doesn't make it true well neither does repeating that it is a repeat make it untrue. Its drawing back on what we know about users from the first movie but also with the knowledge that the sequel does not explicitly rule out user powers. Its a possibility that hasn't been ruled out but what makes it a plot hole is that it is a better alternative than Kevin pulling a self-sacrifice.

• • • It doesn't matter what they think and feel if it's all simulation. Should someone feel guilty for destroying something that isn't real? Wat. Are you seriously arguing that the living, thinking, active entities that can physically interact with users in the Grid and are capable of transitioning into the real world aren't real? I guess the whole thing is a hallucination on the parts of the Flynns. Programs within the Tron setting are very much real, discrete entities that can permanently die, and it is quite clear that Sam and Kevin Flynn both believe that this is the case. They're not going to derezz programs just to gain a diguise.
      Sam as a computer genius should know that it is real hard to delete stuff. Remember programmes can be ressurected in a manner such as how Yori was brought back by Kevin. Tron programs are different from real world ones. If a program is rezzed, it's dead. Yori wasn't rezzed; she was close to it, but she hadn't faded completely like Ram did. Kevin could save her, but he couldn't bring Ram back. No program has ever been brought back after complete deresolution.
      Even if it is a programme that was destroyed they can just create a another one. And even if a human is killed, we can just make a new one. Try making that defense in a court of law during a murder trial.
      Now you're messing up by saying that Quorra was afraid when only moments before she was staring down CLU and before that she was defiant when he was all like I Have You Now, My Pretty. ...and? Quorra being defiant at those points doesn't mean she wasn't feeling fear. It only means she was pretty good at keeping it under control. Anyone in Quorra's position at that point should be feeling fear, or at least anxiety.
      It's reasonable to assume that this beam has some of range in which data will be transported to the real world. That doesn't mean it can be used to Portal Cut someone. You need to provide proof of this.
      Its drawing back on what we know about users from the first movie but also with the knowledge that the sequel does not explicitly rule out user powers. Its a possibility that hasn't been ruled out but what makes it a plot hole is that it is a better alternative than Kevin pulling a self-sacrifice. Except you still have yet to provide any real evidence that A) Sam knows how to do that, B) that the portal can even be redirected like that(considering its purpose and function is completely different), and C) that doing so won't simply send Clu into the real world with no ill effects. Portals in Tron have never demonstrated the ability to Portal Cut anything.
      • I want to know when "redirecting the portal beam" became an offensive option. The portal beam is a portal beam, that's is all we know about it. We don't know if it could Portal Cut anything, we don't know if it could be used to "finish off Clu," all we know is that it transports Users, IS Os, and (by implication,) programs from the Grid into the real world as long as Flynn's access codes are loaded into it. Sam was already in the beam by then. We DO NOT KNOW whether he can redirect it at all (Solar Sailor beam != portal beam) and even if he could, we DO NOT KNOW what effect it would've had on Clu. For all we know, since Sam is already accessing the portal with Flynn's disc, hitting Clu's fifth eyelash could have teleported the whole of Clu into the real world, or it could've severed Clu's fifth eyelash. We do not know. And neither did Sam. Oh, and when young!Flynn "resurrected" Yori? That's because she WASN'T derezzed yet. He couldn't do diddly squat for Ram, or for the innocent Red Mook whose colors he took. Flynn saved Yori from the brink of death, not from death itself. So yes, it's also reasonable to assume that a program's deresolution means permanent death in the TRON universe and by TRON universe laws --repeat, the TRON universe, not the real world where data is harder to get rid of.
        • Oh come of it. Like I said its just a programme and whe grid and the Tron universe must operate on some of the same principles. Look this is what we know: Users in the first film are adept an maniplating energy beams, Kevin in the first place semi-manipulated the powerful MCP who someone on here stated had direct access to the real world and was the closest thing to a portal, the portal has a limited range for beings/things to be within to be properly teleported. So if Sam could at least try to manipulate the portal beam and then perhaps he could take advantage of the fact that the beam only teleports whatever fits within its narrowed range. Its better than Kevin sacrificing himself.
        • We also know this: the portal is active only for a limited window of time, Clu is already pulling himself up, and Sam doesn't know how to use User powers. Figuring out how to manipulate the portal beam (IF the beam can be manipulated at all, and IF manipulating the beam doesn't modify it past usability as a portal) would have taken him some time --time which he does not have. By the time Flynn was diverting Solar Sailor beams and hitching rides on the MCP's I/O beam, he already had ample experience reconstructing Recognizers (which he had a lot of time for, and practiced at it mid-flight) and absorbing program functions. You're asking Sam to be an Instant Expert at something he has never done once in his life, in the few seconds it will take for the genocidal uber-program to get back on his feet.
    • Not to mention that it took Kevin some time to redirect the sailor's beam. Sam doesn't have time to do that, he has no experience manipulating energy in the Grid (hell, he might not even be able to manipulate the Grid in any real fashion, as he's never demonstrated that capability at any point in the movie), he has no guarantee that he even can redirect the beam like that considering its construction and function, and he has no guarantee that using the portal like that while he and Quorra are in it won't backfire spectacularly, he has no guarantee that it will even do anything to Clu beyond sending him to the real world, and he has no guarantee that he can even control the beam in such a manner that he can hit Clu to do damage to him even if he could. You're essentially saying that it is a plot hole that Sam didn't utilize a skill he has never had any practice at, using a piece of Grid architecture he has no real understanding of, to do something he has no idea would even work, at potentially lethal risk to himself and Quorra, and he has to come up with all of this in the span of the few moments between Clu pulling himself up and running toward them. That's fucking ridiculous.
      • It took well no time to manipulate and distract the MCP so again it might not take so much for Sam to do it. It's not as if Kevin had much experience in the GRID his powers either, he just tried stuff and it worked. I'm saying its a plot hole because the alternative is worse, that is why it is a plot hole. Sam was told about the GRID by his dad and so he should no that users have powers. User powers are pretty instintucal anyways.
    • It took well no time to manipulate and distract the MCP so again it might not take so much for Sam to do it It took several seconds before the MCP's defensive barriers shifted to give Tron an opening after Kevin jumped in.
      It's not as if Kevin had much experience in the GRID his powers either, he just tried stuff and it worked. Kevin had actually used his user powers several times before, whereas Sam had never used any such abilities at any point in the movie, which gives him a significant advantage over Sam at that point.
      I'm saying its a plot hole because the alternative is worse, that is why it is a plot hole. There is no "alternative" here. Once again, you are asking Sam to utilize an ability he has no experience at (and he might not even have) to do something he's never done before, with a piece of grid architecture that might not even be able to do what you're suggesting, which might not even work, might even backfire on him or kill him if he does it, in the instants between Clu pulling himself up and Kevin acting in response. This isn't an alternative. It's fucking stupid. You're basically asking Sam to Ass Pull a Deus Ex Machina.
      Sam was told about the GRID by his dad and so he should no that users have powers. We don't really know how much Kevin told Sam about the Grid or what one could do in them. And that doesn't change the fact that Sam has no experience with user powers up until that point.
      User powers are pretty instintucal anyways. So? You're still asking Sam to do something he's never done before, in a manner that might not even work, that he doesn't know if it will work, in a potentially self-defeating or self-destructive manner, within a couple of seconds. No amount of "instintucal" understanding of user powers is going to let him do that.
      • It didn't take time to distract the MCP because all Kevin did was jump into it^[1]. After that, it was all Tron (and once Tron made the MCP go blue, the fight was over. Kevin didn't have to do much to "manipulate" it afterwards.) Kevin DID have a lot of experience --the Recognizer reacted to his presence, so he deliberately got up and started trying things out, and is shown concentrating and explicitly reapplying his User powers to keep the ship from falling apart (so it was definitely NOT instinctual.) However accurate his "Physics 101, a beam of energy can be redirected" quote is, he REASONED the solution for the Solar Sailor problem before implementing it. Again, not instinctual. And even if Sam was told about User powers, he needs time to figure them out, just like Kevin did in the original movie. The only moment when he would have had the time to experiment with them was at his father's hideout or on the way to intercept the Rectifier --anywhere else, he was being assailed from all sides and wouldn't have had time for anything. And even at those two times, there was no need for him to do so.
      • Actually, now that I've thought about it: Let's say, for the sake of argument, that Kevin told Young Sam all about User powers. He described them in detail. He said exactly what he (Kevin) did, how he did it, when he did it, and what it caused. And Sam's a programmer! He could even hack into ENCOM's servers and all that. Now... let's say Jackie Chan tells you exactly how to perform a complicated martial arts maneuver. Does that make you instantly capable of performing it with no prior experience, too? After all, you know how to kick! You can jump! Surely you can do a back-flipping butterfly kick on your first try, twenty years later, during an emergency, in the span of two or three seconds.
        • • It didn't take years of training to do what Kevin did though. But of course user powers are mainly about experimenting and discovering by accident, there is no handbook. Kevin messed about and reconstitued the Recogniser before he knew he coulod do that, plus how did he know juming into the MCP would work? What experience had he form manipulating programmes? Let alone adminsitrative ones. Experiments aside, Kevin discovered stuff by accident. Experimenting is when you have at least a hypothesis of what might happen. If Sam has at least the idea of what might happen by expermenting with the beam then he should have gone right ahead, all experiments have some element of risk and perhaps Kevin could have derezzed when he jumped into the MCP but it was all good. But yeah, users are supposed to be more durable as well so Sam could probably handle it.
    • It didn't take years of training to do what Kevin did though. But of course user powers are mainly about experimenting and discovering by accident, there is no handbook. No, but it took Kevin some work and practice to pull off the things he did with the Recognizer. Sam has no practice or experience.
      Kevin messed about and reconstitued the Recogniser before he knew he coulod do that, plus how did he know juming into the MCP would work? He had no idea it would work at all.
      If Sam has at least the idea of what might happen by expermenting with the beam then he should have gone right ahead, all experiments have some element of risk and perhaps Kevin could have derezzed when he jumped into the MCP but it was all good. So, because Kevin did something idiotically desperate, Sam should do something equally idiotically desperate too? Even when Sam has less experience with using those abilities and is in a position of relatively minimal risk, and doesn't have time to formulate a plan, and said plan has no real guarantee it would work for countless reasons? Once again: You're asking Sam to utilize powers that he has never employed before, that he might not even realize he can do, to do something that might not even work with that particular piece of Grid archtecture, to do something that would have an unknown effect on Clu, with unknown effects on himself and Quorra, and to come up with this whole thing in the span of a couple of seconds.
      • The rcognizer was different as he was completely reconstituting destroyed rcognizer. Nothing has a good guarantee to work in these ecxperiments but if the alternative is worse than might as well. Either Sam thinks of a way to deal with CLU, or his dad gets done over by him.
    • The rcognizer was different as he was completely reconstituting destroyed rcognizer. So? Flynn still took a significant time to learn how to use his abilities. You're asking Sam to use powers which he has never utilized before.
      Nothing has a good guarantee to work in these ecxperiments but if the alternative is worse than might as well. Either Sam thinks of a way to deal with CLU, or his dad gets done over by him. You're not providing an alternative. You're providing a giant pile of "ifs" and "maybes."
      • • • • Once again, you're asking him to risk his only way home to do something he doesn't know will work in order to do something that he doesn't know will happen in the span of a few seconds while probably having an adrenaline rush. For all he knew, tampering with the beam could cause it to shut down, for all he knew, it could send them back inside-out, it could even bring back CLU as a whole instead of in pieces. Point being, He was at too critical a stage to try to do something that could screw it all up.
  • They aren't user abilities. Kevin is System Administrator.
  • User abilities are, for the most part, pretty nebulous anyway. It's not terribly clear how they work. Not to mention that just because Kevin can do something in the ENCOM server doesn't mean that Sam can do the same in the Grid, as the two are completely different systems, with the latter having been built by Kevin. For all we know, he could have disabled user powers for anyone except him, being sysadmin.
    • I thought the whole point of user powers are much like the Matrix where you can mess around with the world, bending or breaking rules. Again, Kevin used the old system as a template for the new one and he obviously retained a lot of the original elements.
    • No evidence that this is how user powers work, or that the Grid is the same as the ENCOM servers.
    • I always thought of 'user powers' as essentially simply another form of user interface -- nothing magical as such, simply a handwave to let accidentally digitized humans still do the same things from the Grid that they could from the outside despite the obvious general lack of handy screens and keyboards (not needed because, well, you're already in the system). Now in the first movie, Flynn was a professional developer zapped into a system that still recognized him as more-or-less legitimate and that he was still very much familiar with from work, so he stood a plausibly decent chance of puzzling out what he could do once he got his bearings; in the second, he's even the original admin of the dedicated Grid server. Sam, meanwhile, may be computer literate in general and have some idea what the Grid is all about as a concept, but hasn't really encountered this particular machine and setup ever before. Thus, he doesn't have the 'powers' he might if he actually knew what he was doing.
  • It is possible that Sam simply couldn't use any of those abilities, because of how Kevin designed the Grid. Remember that the Grid is not the ENCOM system, Kevin designed the Grid from the ground up, and Kevin is in possession of his disc, which contains the master key to the entire system. Sam does not have the same capabilities as his father - this is explicitly shown when Clu is looking at Sam's disc and doesn't find what he wants on it. Kevin appears to be the only user who has the ability to manipulate the Grid in any way.
  • This troper agrees. Sam had no idea what he was doing and no time to find out. The action suggested was stupid and he knew it, which is why he didn't even try. Yes, it's a shame that Kevin Flynn "derezzed", but just because you are desperate to save someone doesn't make it right to try an action when you not only don't know what the results will be, but you know that they could be catastrophic, and Sam knew it. If you think it's ok to destroy the world to save your father, horrible as that is, then I'm sorry, but the WORLD needs YOU to NOT have your hand on the switch!

Kevin's Badass Decay

• For that matter, Kevin's Badass Decay really bugs the bits out of me. In the original movie he's a determined genius who doesn't hesitate to repeatedly hack ENCOM, hijack a Recognizer, blend in with Sark's guards, create new Solar Sailer energy beams, jump into the heart of the MCP, and in general flex those superuser privileges he has. In this movie, he's content to just sit on his hands and fret, even though he clearly still has the ability to warp the Grid to his will. The Kevin Flynn from the original movie would have spent 10,000 years of subjective time coding up some badass digital gear to overthrow Clu, instead of wasting away those idle cycles whining like a third-rate accounting program.
  • This has been discussed already on this page. Kevin did fight Clu. He says as much. The problem is that everything he did to fight Clu just made him stronger, and Kevin kept losing. You're not looking at the Kevin Flynn who fought Sark and ENCOM. You're looking at a Kevin Flynn who spent years and years and years fighting against an unbeatable enemy who was corrupting and twisting his greatest creation, fully aware that ultimately it was hopeless as he'd never leave the Grid again. The Kevin in Legacy is the product of a massive betrayal, the death/rectification of one of his best friends, the conquest of his life's ambition, the genocide of an entire species, and has come out the other ends of a thouands-of-years-long Hopeless War. He's crossed the Despair Event Horizon. He's not a young, optimistic, energetic, relentless hero anymore, but a tired old man who's spent too long fighting for a lost cause. To be honest, I'm surprised he's even sane, much less a hermit. Anyone else in Kevin's shoes, having faced horrors like treachery, genocide, and endless, futile struggle with no hope of ever getting home, would have been killed or driven mad.
  • Your Mileage May Vary; this troper has a hard time believing that Clu would be able to counter every stratagem Flynn could think of, given the Creative Sterility shown by Programs in both movies. The idea that Kevin -- who is still a Physical God on the Grid, and effortlessly evades capture for (subjective) millenia -- couldn't outwit one program that he created comes across as either Badass Decay or Plot Induced Stupidity.
    • Why would Kevin having created Clu mean anything? Just because he created Clu doesn't mean he's smarter than Clu, an entity who has lived for hundreds to thousands of subjective years in his own world before he even started his rebellion. Clu is just as sapient and intelligent as he is and has almost complete access to the Grid (Betrayal even has Kevin giving Clu near-complete control of the Grid when he asks so they can better automate the Grid). And again, Kevin is a person who has experienced betrayal, murder of his best friend, widespread corruption, and genocide. Before even beginning to struggle against Clu, Kevin was already in a bad position that would only get worse; remember that anything Kevin creates, Clu can likely defeat (due to the powers Kevin granted him) and corrupt and repurpose to his own ends. And, on top of all of that, Kevin knows he will never be able to leave the Grid again. So it makes perfect sense to me that Kevin would gradually be worn down over thousands of years of conflict. Hell, most real life commanders would be worn down by less than a decade of war.
  • I'm also iffy on just how "badass" Kevin Flynn really was in the first movie. He never struck me as a badass, he just struck me as an Action Survivor. Also, the movie makes it clear that this supposed Badass Decay is only temporary. After Sam shows up, Kevin becomes much more active, doing things comparable to, if not greater, than what he did in the first movie, i.e. winning a fight by empowering the programs, stealing a plane, etc.
  • It's arguable that Kevin is even more badass in Legacy than he is in the original. In the original movie he had to hide and sneak around, and his powers were large-scale and overt. In the sequel, he seems even more powerful, but his abilities are far more subtle. He's not overt or flashy; he heals dying/disabled programs, he converts a program's functions without it knowing immediately, he actually breaks Clu's programming on Tron by meeting his eyes, and he wins a battle by showing up. He never raises a hand against anyone (except to bop that one program on the head) and the most overt attack he launches is to pull Clu into himself to destroy him. It reminds me of a scene from the novel Turn Coat where a Native American medicine man deflects the magical attacks with a rain dance that causes all of his foe's energy assaults to simply flow around him, like it was part of the natural order that he couldn't be harmed. Kevin Flynn's power is like that; subtle but impressively potent.

Of Clu and ledges

• When CLU is hanging of the ledge after making that massive leap after Sam and Quora, why didn't anyone think to knock him off? That way there would be no need for a silly sacrifice and they all get to go home.
  • Sam and Quorra were already in the beam. It is not a good idea to disconnect in the middle of an upload, especially when you're the upload.
    • What about Flynn? He still has Quora's disc so why doesn't he think to use it to knock CLU of the platform whilst he's barely holding on.
    • Hitting Clu with a disc is at best going to mildly annoy him.
  • Because that's not who Flynn is anymore. You're talking about a guy who's ultimate goal was 'listening to the sky'. That, and it would've messed up his Zen thing, man.
    • He wasn't adverse to trying to stop or destory CLU, seems illogical that he never attacked CLU despite his vulnerablity. Against, CLU was BARELY holding onto the platform. Even a disc hit can cause to be moved so it could have worked. It makes far more sense than just self-destructing.
      • It was a do-or-die moment, and in seconds Flynn had to think of something to do before CLU regained his footing and went after Sam and Quora again. He could either: pull off a move that would kill himself, but was also pretty much guaranteed to defeat CLU, or risk it all by performing a very precise throw that was just as likely to not do anything as it was to work.
        • It's no excuse for not even tryig that move before CLU managed to get back up. CLU was barely hanging on and no one thought to took advantage of him at that point is incredibly stupid.
    • From what I recall, Kevin was still prone, thanks to Clu having kicked him in the sternum hard enough to throw him twenty feet away. When a blow with that much power impacts you in the center of your torso across an area the size of a human foot, it will, generally speaking, ruin your ability to fight anyone, especially when you're a fairly old man like Kevin. IIRC, by the time Kevin managed to regain his feet enough to consider attacking, Clu was most of the way back onto the platform. Even if Kevin was on his feet, getting hammered like that from Clu was probably painful and debilitating enough to make it hard to even move, let alone attack. Coupled with the fact that he's distracted by Sam's departure, and I can see why he wouldn't attack Clu.
    • Plus, and let's be honest here, you're projecting your omniscient viewer knowledge onto characters in the story. What may of taken you a few minutes to think of in the comfort of your seat, Flynn's got to think up after getting a crippling kick to the chest that sent him reeling backwards a good 20 feet within a few seconds. At the time he was probably barely thinking coherently, let alone to the level where he'd be able to figure out how to make such a risky and difficult throw that'd send CLU falling to his death.
      • It doesn't take a few minutes to think to throw something at a hostile entity, it's pretty much instinct. Are we forgetting that users were more durable then programmes in the last movie? Even though Kevin was kicked down, he didn't seem to be overly injured or gasping for breath so much. He spent like a few good seconds bellowing to Sam "it is time!" and listening to Sam yell back ,when all the while he could have knocked off CLU.
        • When, exactly, did Flynn become a master disc-flinging warrior? Has he EVER thrown a disc, for that matter?
          • I think spending almost 20 years in a game world might be ample enough time and opportunity.
            • That's a subjective interpretation unsupported by the movies. All we know, objectively, about Flynn, is that he's good at games --like the Light Cycles or the jai-alai ball game-- and that he takes advantage of his User powers for subterfuge and environmental manipulation. He's not an actual warrior like Tron, Sark, Quorra, or even Clu, and we've never seen him fight, let alone fight with discs. Even Sam got a little bit of on-screen disc-fighting experience at Clu's games. There's as much evidence in the actual movies to infer that Flynn never learned disc-fighting as there is to infer that he did, but since he didn't fling discs once in Legacy, Occam's Razor points to the former.
              • Okay after rewatching that scene its clear that CLU is barely hanging on the ledge BEFORE Sam and Quorra even step under the portal. So Sam and Quorra could have finally finished of CLU withouth the need of Keven's self-destruct.
            • Still not clear HOW.
    • The only way they could have attacked Clu would have been to throw Kevin's disc at him (risky proposition) or run over there and attack him up close, in which case thay're at close range with the superhumanly powerful killer program who can grab them and yank them off the ledge. Not to mention that Sam can just step into the portal and exit the Grid, then eliminate Clu with a keystroke. Not to mention that they didn't know that Kevin was going to self-destruct at the time. Sam has no reason at all to attack Clu at that point, especially when there's a portal right there that they can use to just leave and eliminate Clu from the fleshy world.
      • Time moves faser in the GRID so before Sam could get in those key strokes, Kevin would be finished. Sam didn't want to leave his dad behind anyways. CLU was the one programme who caused Kevin all that grief, otherwise the other programmes aren't much of a threat and who knows how they would act without CLU. Sam and Quorra could have finished CLU while he was barely hanging on with some disc throws and then that's the major antagonist. Kevin could use his administrative powers to get across or Quorra could use her baton to make a light jet and fly over and get Kevin then head for the portal.
      • Suppose CLU manages to not only pull himself up, but also grab's Kevin's disc before it gets back to Sam. Then what? CLU regains his footing, and Sam's basically fucked everything up. We're never shown how far Kevin's admin powers go in regards to constructing things out of scratch, so I don't know if he'd have enough time to think of something.
        • Again he's BARELY hanging on and it takes quite a few seconds for him to get back up. Sam wants to save his dad and that should mean getting rid of the greatest threat to him, CLU.
        • IIRC, didn't they need Kevin's Disc to, you know, get them home? As a previous troper noted, it probably wouldn't be wise to remove the thing needed to kick-start the teleporation process halfway through. It could've potentially disrupted the process and send them back inside out for all they knew.
          • No, you don't need Kevin's disc because on CLU's battleship, Sam is arguing with Kevin whether to rescue Quorra and the Disc amd Kevin triesd to convince him to head to the portal WITHOUT Kevin's disc. Check this vid for the proof. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qwrGZYThJ0&feature=rec-LGOUT-real_rn-1r-17-HM
          • Mentioned prevously but CLU is barely hanging on the ledge BEFORE Sam and Quorra enter the beam.
          • In that video he's only trying to convince SAM to go home alone and shut down Clu from outside, which wouldn't require Kevin's disc. Taking Quorra DOES require Kevin's disc.
  • Rewatching the sequence of events, it's quite clear that Kevin and Sam are too emotionally bound up in the situation to think rationally. Quorra has to hold Sam back during this entire scene. They might have been able to hit Clu - Kevin has a decent angle, but Sam and Quorra don't really have a clear shot - but none of them are even thinking about Clu. Kevin and Sam are focused on each other. They're not sitting in a chair, thinking rationally and coldly while watching a movie. They're a father and son who are saying their last, painful goodbyes, with the son being so emotionally torn up he needs to be physically restrained and pushed back toward the portal.
    • Also, don't forget that Clu still has Rinzler's backup lightjet in his pocket. If pushed off, he could quickly activate it and fly back.
    • Another issue is that the disc that Flynn supposedly has is embedded in the floor behind him. Pulling it out of the grid-stone/brick/metal/whatever would take time; by the time Clu pulls himself up and Flynn realizes he's still there and able to present a threat, he doesn't have time to turn around and yank the thing free, and it's utility by that point would be questionable. The only option he has is to grab Clu and reintegrate.
  • Why didn't someone just push Clu off the ledge? For the same reason no one grabbed Clu's disk or tried to redirect the portal beam in an attempt to kill him (see huge wall of text argument above): Because the writers wanted the more dramatic Heroic Sacrifice, that's why! So please, let's get out of another argument like the one above. Please.

Kamikazie Rinzler

• Ok how come Rinzler rammed his light jet into CLU's rather than Why Don't Ya Just Shoot Him? And please don't say it's because he has super durable light constucts because his light cycle was destroyed by the light runner's light streak all the same. It sees like the good guys in this movie are all bent on Heroic Sacrfices for no good reason.
  • Opening fire on Clu's light glider gives Clu the chance to evade and return fire; the shots from the gliders are very visible and not incredibly accurate. The entire air battle is actually similar to World War II aerial battles, and the aircraft and weapons behave like WWII planes, so its reasonable to assume it would take multiple hits to down Clu's glider. Ramming Clu's light glider with his own is much more likely to destroy Clu's glider before he would have a chance to begin evasive maneuvers, especially as up until Tron rams his glider, Clu has no idea that Tron has turned. It achieves both surprise and maximum force on target.
    Additionally, there are some indications that Tron was suicidal during that scene. When he was falling after the collision, Tron still had his vehicle baton, but didn't engage the glider again, and when he hit the water, he didn't try to swim. This makes sense, considering what he's been through up until that point.
    • Ok CLU was in Rinzler's direct line of sight anyways, he could have sped up AND shot at the same time. But as for him being suicidal, well he fought off CLU when he tried to nab his baton. Plus the impact and CLU's assault probably knocked Rinzler unconscious.
    • Again, firing on Clu would alert Clu that he's turned and give him time to evade. Clu had absolutely no idea of (and thus no way to escape) Tron's betrayal until he'd hit Clu's glider.
    • And, fighting off Clu's attempt to retake the baton is not necessarily survival instinct--if he can take Clu down with him into the Sea of Simulation (by ensuring that Clu never takes the baton), then he's saved Quorra, Flynn, and Sam.
    • RE: Tron being suicidal, it looked like he was hurt worse by the impact of the light jets than Clu, by the time he'd shaken off the impact and properly oriented himself in the air to slow his descent Clu was already headed for him. The way he was holding the vehicle baton in both hands looked like he was about to activate it but Clu hit him the moment before he could. He didn't try to swim when he hit the Sea because Clu had already knocked him unconcious again in the air when he took the baton and he was in the process of rebooting--when his lights went dark and then came back on blue. And even if he was suicidal, Flynn was still in danger. It seems more likely that Tron would want to make sure that Flynn escaped safely.
  • Rewatching that scene, Clu's jet was right on top of Sam, Kevin, and Quorra's jet. It is quite possible that he could have hit their jet as well if he opened fire. Clu had maybe a heartbeat to react to Tron's acceleration, which wasn't fast enough.
  • Tron seemed to have a problem with this. Notice in his fight with Clu he tackled him to the ground instead of hitting him with a disc, causing Clu to get the upper hand.
  • It is possible that whenever Clu rectified Tron into Rinzler, that Rinzler's coding included something preventing him from attacking Clu directly. (I know that if I were Clu, I would do this if possible) If that were the case, Rinzler may have been forced to ram Clu instead of shooting him.
  • RE: Tron being suicidal with Flynn in danger--it could be a legitimate Despair Event Horizon on Tron's part. Waking up from a nightmare where you were repurposed into an emotionless, amoral killer who was helpless in his own body to prevent the slaughter of innocents--and then realizing it really happened? For a principled Program like Tron, his time as Rinzler probably seemed like a thousand years in hell. YMMV on this interpretation of the character, however. (This troper also thinks that his obvious confusion when recovering from the Light Jet crash is a sign he reverted briefly to Rinzler, had no idea what the hell was going on, and then was immediately attacked by someone who should be his superior and ally. Cue fighting back as Rinzler, then dying as himself only AFTER he hit the Sea.)

Quorra letting herself be captured

• Back onto the sacrfices but remind me why Quorra allows herself to get caputured? It's a tip off to CLU that Sam and Kevin are nearby, wo nice going.
  • It was either that or Rinzler would find all three of them, and Rinzler's already shown that he can easily beat Sam by himself; the only reason Sam lasted as long as he did was because Rinzler was playing with him. And when Quorra fights Rinzler, he takes her down in a couple of seconds. The only time they're able to get the better of Rinzler is when Sam catches him by surprise in the warship's upper level, and manages to take him off-guard, using terrain and a surprise attack from Quorra. They're not going to have that advantage in the solar sailor terminal. Their only option is for someone to draw off Rinzler long enough for the others to escape, and Sam and Kevin are users, which in Quorra's eyes automatically puts them above her in terms of importance. Furthermore, if only Quorra is taken, Clu and Rinzler are still not sure if Kevin and Sam are there or if they've been killed. After all, Rinzler's entire purpose in pursuing them is to confirm that Kevin and Sam were killed. Note that once Quorra is captured, Rinzler ceases his pursuit and hauls her off to Clu; Clu isn't really tipped off that Kevin and Sam are nearby, because if he was there would be a lot more security and patrols looking for them.

Rinzler "purring"

• More of a fanon just-bugs-me than a canon just-bugs-me, but describing the continuous low-frequency rumble that Rinzler makes as a "purr". Actual cat/genet/mammal purring varies in frequency because the animal's breathing; whatever Rinzler is doing sounds like an engine idling. It's really mechanical. It's true people allude to the "purr of a well-tuned engine" and even this troper sometimes refers to their cats as "having their purr motors going" when they're really spun-up, but this is a terrifying killing machine we're talking about. "AWW HE'S PURRING" is not really the first thought that comes to mind...
  • I thought of it as growling.
    • Sounds like a hard drive seeking data.
      • This. In fact, the best description I read was in a AU fanfiction one-shot in which Alan was on the grid also (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6797979/1/Double_Portrait)

"The continuous grinding noise coming out of that helmet reminded Alan of the noises the hard drive in his old desktop computer made. The poor thing sounded as if it was on its last legs, but worked without a hitch."

• • • A coffee machine is the best description I've heard!
      • That would have been for Tron's real-world function as an espresso dispenser....
  • I like the idea of the hard drive seeking data. I wish there had been an occasional whir-click sound, like the drive head hitting a bad sector and re-setting.
  • I've always thought it sounded like a few different things. Like, sometimes it does sound like a cat, but it's rare. Most of the time it sounds very mechanical, and in a few scenes it sounds kinda like a velociraptor growling.
  • Original troper here. I like all these explanations much better than the default to "purr" a lot of the fandom uses!

What happened to Yori?

• What happened to Yori? Was she killed defying Clu or protecting the Isos? She was shown in the first film to have a rebellious streak, and would be the type to help the Isos. If that were the case, Clu WOULD be the type of bastard to send "Rinzler" to kill her. For that matter, what happened to Lora?
  • Yori stayed in the ENCOM servers. Tron was the only program to be copied and transferred from the ENCOM server to the Grid by Flynn. Lora, IIRC, married Alan.
    • And had a son named Jet Bradley, if you go by Tron 2.0.

Where did all the other programs come from?

• Flynn copied (or ported) Tron from ENCOM's system. We saw him create Clu. The Grid itself created the IS Os, of which there were a limited number. But the Grid is full of thousands (if not millions) of programs, far more than Kevin could have programmed himself. (Check out Clu's conscript army on the carrier, plus the audience of the games, etc.) It's explicitly stated that Clu can't create programs. Presumably no other programs can either (Clu would only need to rectify a few, then set them to work creating others). Where did they all come from? The Grid is not connected to any other system.
  • All programs are created by the system when it was being set up. Note that Clu is simply the first program that Flynn created personally. He may have created others, or they may have been formed as the systemw as set up. Each installation into the Grid probably created hundreds or thousands of new programs within the Grid.
  • Programs look like the person that they were created by due to the fact that a part of the user's "spirit" is in them. Besides Clu, all of the programs we see look like folks other than Kevin. This would seem to imply that they were all created by other people . . . which does make sense. Like Tron, they are all probably programs or at least portions of programs that Kevin ported in from other systems or coded up using the work that other people have done. Though each and every one of them might have Kevin's personal touch added to them, the main bulk of their code would probably still have the imprint of their original creators and thus cause them to look like those people within the Grid. Most of Kevin's coding seemed to go into the Grid itself anyway, meaning that his primary imprints on the system would be on Clu and the environment itself rather than the other programs. Still, there may indeed be a few other programs running around that look like him; we just don't get a chance to see any of them in the movie.

Criminal charges

• At the beginning of the movie we see Sam commit any number of criminal acts. By my count we have speeding, reckless driving, evading the police, breaking and entering, intellectual property theft, criminal trespass, vandalism (from landing on the cab), BASE jupming and resisting arrest. Yet after being busted he walks out of jail on the same night? Now, yes, the argument can be made that he "owns" the company by virtue of being majority shareholder, but while I'm not entirely up on SEC regulations, I'm pretty sure that doesn't give him the right to bypass the board and do something that might cost the company billions in profits, right?
  • Nope. It's essentially his company. The movie makes it clear that if Sam wanted to, he could walk right in and take control of the company. It's not like they can precisely press charges, considering that it is his building, and his intellectual property that he extracted from the server. You can't really charge someone for breaking into their own building and for distributing their own property. The first three charges don't really apply, as the police didn't catch him for those and there's no real connection between them and the crimes later on. He also never resisted police (he ran, briefly, but quickly surrendered) and didn't do any damage at all to the cab. So there's nothing that can really stick, or at least nothing that Sam can't just post some bail and pay fines on.
    Also, even if ENCOM could press charges, they'd likely avoid doing so, as pressing criminal charges against the owner of the company would likely not work and would just result in an even bigger media shitstorm than they've already got. They likely just shrugged and accepted the hit to their profits, which is suggested by what Dillinger Jr. says about the "gift from ENCOM." I mean, you can't go out and say that you're giving the program away for free and then turn around and charge the owner of the company for supposedly "illegally" distributing said program. That tends to result in frowny-skeptical faces from just about everyone, and the PR hit would be tremendous. Stocks would take an immense nosedive from the triple hit of losing the OS, charging (and likely failing to stick the charges to) the majority shareholder, and the fact that security got breached. Far better to simply pretend they released the OS for free for the big PR gain and reduced stock hit than to take massive stock and PR hits from openly talking about the embarrassing facts of what really happened. It's also implied during Alan's dialogue later about the "annual prank on the company" and that "the board is happy with you where you are" that the ENCOM board has tolerated similar such incidents in the past for the same reasons.
    In summary, he can't be charged with criminal trespass because one can't trespass on one's own building, and ENCOM will never release the fact that he released ENCOM OS12 online because of the damage it would inflict on the company. No connection to the initial incident on the motorcycle, no resisting arrest, no damage to the cab. So, the only thing likely to stick is just Sam BASE jumping off the rooftop of his own building. That's a fine and some jail time, at worst, easily mitigated by pleading guilty, community service and/or fines, and some good lawyers.

Millicycles?

• So what in the world do the "cycles" actually refer to in canon? The most obvious interpretation is that they (being units of time measurement) refer CPU or motherboard clock cycles. In that case, what the hell is a millicycle? 1/1000th of a cycle?
  • Cycle is roughly equivalent to a year from the perspective of the programs. Zuse notes that Clu has been searching for Flynn's disc for a thousand cycles, which means that there's fifty cycles to a real-world year if Clu's been searching for it since the coup. It does not appear to be connected to clock cycles.
• Also, let's just say that one millicycle is 1 clock cycle, and that a normal cycle is 1000 clock cycles. In that case, in order for one cpu cycle to take 8 hours (I'm assuming that refers to real world time, it wouldn't make sense for it to refer to system time), it would require the system to be running at 0.0000347222222 Hz. What...
  • You're assuming that they mean clock cycles instead of some other unit of time measurement specific to programs within the computer, which is a flawed assumption not supported by anything in canon.
• Many computers have some kind of periodic, timer-driven hardware interrupt (my old TRS-80's programmer's manual referred to it as the "heartbeat interrupt") that ensures certain BIOS or system tasks are performed on schedule, so it's entirely possible that to the Programs, a "cycle" means the period of time between each interrupt. The rate at which these interrupts fire doesn't have to have any relation to the clock speed of the CPU.

Programs act too independently of each other?

This Headscratcher could be me missing or not understanding the details of the Tron universe, but why to the programs seem to act so independently to one another?

To clarify: Take a Web Browser, for example. Using that is actually using several programs at once. You have the browser itself, Java, Flash, ect., probably some kind of virus software, and whatever plugins you choose. Other programs may also use the browser--like if you double-click the icon for an image file.

Using that model, I would expect sentient programs to be self-aware and intelligent, but not independent of each other. Maybe one program wouldn't be able to move around without another one being their with them, if they were designed to work together. Or one program two (or more) would share a kind of 'telepathy.' The programs in TRON, though seem to be able to do whatever they want, so long as they keep the disks on and follow the other rules of society.

Of course--and this adds a Paranoia Fuel quotient!--maybe the way we saw the programs interacting, what seemed like every day activities--is actually them working together, like real-life programs.

• That's pretty much exactly it. The way the programs interact is exactly how they're supposed to be working together. Different programs operate together, and what happens is what we see in the Grid/ENCOM servers.

Why did Clu throw away victory at the beginning?

• Sam went into the grid to find his dad and found Clu first. Sam assumed Clu was his dad and asked if they could "get the hell out" immediately. So why the hell did Clu say "not in the cards"?? It's obvious that Clu knew how and where the exit point to the real world was. It's also obvious that Clu is capable of lying, because he pretended to be Kevin for the brief minute before confessing the truth to Sam. If Clu had instead said "sure, buddy! Let's get outta here right now! Remember that amazing miracle I told you about? See, all these programs can exist in the outside world and they can bring knowledge and technology that will change everything! Let's hop on my flying carrier and head for the exit right now!". And Sam would have believed him because he was desperate to have his dad back. So why the hell did Clu pass on immediate victory? Was he so heavily consumed with a burning desire to beat Kevin first?
  • Going straight to the portal after Sam arrives would be pointless, because he needs Kevin's disc to escape. The only use Sam has to Clu is to draw out Kevin, and the only way to draw him out is to put him in a public venue where Kevin would learn of his presence and be drawn out of hiding. He literally cannot leave without that disc, which is something that the movie makes explicitly clear over and over. I'm not sure how you missed that, considering Kevin's disc was a focal point of the entire last half of the movie.
  • There is a valid question to be raised of why Clu didn't use Sam more subtly as a cat's paw (i.e., carrying out the "Father" deception to its logical end, where he sics Sam on his own father with the explanation that Flynn is a derelict Clu), but that can be chalked up to Clu's egotism. Whether it's due to a need to face Flynn directly or an inability (or aversion) to carrying out the deception is left up to the viewer. And then that viewer can write Fanfic about the AU where that really did happen (or Flynn really was the monomaniacal dictator watching the Games from the start).
    • I'm pretty sure that Clu is smart enough to know that he couldn't maintain the Flynn charade, and Sam is already putting together all the inconsistencies within minutes of meeting him. Look at the way Sam glances around the room and the hint of suspicion in his voice. Clu doesn't know enough about Flynn's life outside the Grid to keep up the charade either. He's Dangerously Genre Savvy enough that he doesn't try a plan that's likely to run into failure. Besides, realistically, what can Sam really do for Clu that Rinzler and his thousands of rectified troops can't? Clu's ultimate goal is to draw Flynn out, so the quickest and simplest way to do that is to throw Sam onto the public gaming grid and keep trying to kill him until Flynn intervenes.

1. ↑ he had probably already figured out that it was THE way to get back to the real world, so it's less Heroic Sacrifice and more "I'm going to count on Tron to send me back up"