The sci-fi comedy Palm Springs has many unsolved mysteries from the rules of the time loop to the possibility that others beyond Nyles and Sarah (Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti) trapped in it, and mainly if they did manage to get out of the time loop.
If you watched the movie, you must be going crazy too, trying to figure out what actually happened! Well, director Max Barbakow and writer Andy Siara have actually left clues both in the film and in interviews about what really happens.
But the secrets are not entirely revealed and it’s up to you to put two and two together.
As Siara told Vulture, “If you want to crack it, maybe the clues are there. But maybe not though, too.”
What’s a time loop?
Ever since Bill Murray kept waking up to February 2 in 1993’s Groundhog Day, TV and movie characters have found themselves trapped in time loops.
One usual way for characters to escape the glitchy timeline is by finally bettering themselves or helping others (remember Netflix’s Russian Doll?), but Palm Springs takes a less symbolic approach.
Nyles tells Sarah that he can barely remember his life before November 9, and explains that he has tried everything: selflessness, patience, countless escape routes, and suicide attempts. The classic tactics aren’t working.
So do they finally break the loop and how do we know for sure?
How to break the time loop?
There have been many speculations in the scientific world that time loops are impossible physically even though the great Albert Einstein seemed to think a fold in the time-space continuum could do the trick.
Nevertheless, the physics of films could be vague just like the case of Palm Springs where Sarah is the one to figure out how to break the loop.
After waking up next to her sister’s groom too many times, she heads to the diner and begins researching on quantum physics.
She comes to the conclusion that she and Nyles are “trapped in a box of energy,” and the way to escape is to leave the box “in the 3.2 seconds it takes to travel through the loop itself.”
During that narrow window of time, she and Nyles will blow up the cave that sent them into the cyclical timeline — along with themselves.
We don’t get a good look into Sarah’s math, logic, or thought process here, obviously.
The procedure involves a very specifically timed explosion at the cave that caused the whole mess to begin with, and there exists the possibility that they could just blow themselves up, but Sarah believes it is worth taking the risk following her experiments.
Do they break the loop?
In one word, yes. In so many words, yes, but maybe not completely or even at all.
Ok, sounds confusing. Let’s explain or at least try.
In Palm Springs, Sarah and Nyles manage to break the time loop. Sarah’s plan seems to work because the tests on the goat come positive. Soon after, she brings Nyles back to the cave and they blow themselves up thereby breaking out of the loop.
How do we know the loop breaks?
For one, the presence of the back-from-vacation family proves that Nyles and Sarah were successfully blown into tomorrow, as the movie goes out of its way in an earlier scene to explain via dialogue that Nyles doesn’t know when the owners of the pool will be getting back.
He just knows that it’s not November 9 a.k.a. the looped day. But there does still exist some open ended-ness in regards to how character’s lives might continue. Hence the uncertainty of the level of normalcy achieved by Sarah’s methods.
As they enter the cave, Nyles asks her if she was bluffing about testing on the goat, and her response of “too late, you’ve already committed” does not inspire full confidence.
Did Roy escape? What about the dinosaurs?
However, the creators are more into other questions. As also the show writer Andy told Vulture when asked how did they get out in that version: I will say, do they get out of this version?
It’s not that the science and physics of the climax don’t matter, only that there’s something else more important: Nyles and Sarah have broken a loop of their own destructive, self-loathing behaviours.
“It comes to the final question of did the cave work or not, but we always wanted to get to that point where it doesn’t matter,” Siara told Decider of the ending.
When asked about the people coming back from vacation sequence, Andy further explains the ambiguity.
“If you asked me and Max and Samberg and Milioti, we might all have different feelings about the end. The only thing [about the ending] that was there from that original draft, was the final shot of the movie, of the dinosaurs on the horizon. And me, I think those are real dinosaurs.”
As for Max, “The dinosaurs and going into the cave — or a version of that — are the two things that were always there. Then the getting out was something that we always wanted to play with.”
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