Headscratchers / Palm Springs

• Why didn't Nyles arm himself against Roy?
  • He doesn't always see him coming, and also he's been going through this for years and probably no longer cares enough to defend himself.
  • Based on Nyles strongly disapproving of Sarah hitting Roy with the police car, Nyles doesn't want to hurt or terrorize people, even the people who arguably deserve it by literally hunting him. He says the pain he causes people is the only thing that matters. So he'd rather try and escape Roy than strike back. Maybe he had a different idea earlier on.
  • There are very few hints given to us about Nyles' "normal" personality before the loop started but there are hints that he always was an Extreme Doormat (hence being in a relationship with Misty, who doesn't respect him and is cheating on him). That plus the lingering guilt over the knowledge that Roy does to some extent have a legitimate grievance against him is enough to explain why he prefers running and hiding to fighting back.
• How did Sarah get Roy's phone number?
  • Sarah already had some information to go on as Nyles identified Roy as an invited guest to the wedding and even said he was "Abe's dad's cousin of the Schlieffin clan". He also said Roy lives in Irvine. Someone at the wedding would have been in charge of the invitations so it wouldn't be too difficult for Sarah to ask around until she found out Roy's full name and contact information.
• Why was Sarah surprised when the earthquake happened?
  • The earthquake would've already happened before she even started talking to Nyles because it happened in the middle of the day.
  • She was probably taken off-guard by the fact that Nyles had memorized the exact time of the earthquake and pranked her into thinking he caused it by snapping his fingers ("I am the Antichrist!")
• How did Nyles, in decades of looping, not figure out Sarah’s secret sooner?
  • A simple case of not giving a shit.
  • Maybe. But based on how quickly he put the pieces together, it seems more likely that he just never smelled the pillow in any previous loops.
• So the rules say when you go to sleep you reset in the morning. Why didn't they ever test what would happen if one of them took a nap early in the day (just take some simple sleep meds that would wear off) and then the other tried to later wake them up a few hours later? This would show if it was multiple realities branching off if the other person remembered taking the nap and being awakened being awakened when they next reset.
  • Why would it create multiple realities? From what we see the loop only resets after everyone stuck in the loop dies or is sleeping. So if one person stays awake and everyone else is sleeping, time would just proceeds normally people can wake up and continue the day and it's only once everyone in the loop, including the goat (I assume) is sleeping or dead that the loop will reset. It could also have a time limit that has to be reached before everyone sleeping will reset the loop. Maybe everyone could sleep from 2pm to 10pm, then wake up and it wouldn't reset because it will only trigger resets after 11:59pm on the day of the wedding.
  • Maybe the person who falls asleep first becomes brain dead and cannot regain consciousness. In this scenario, let's hope Roy was not yet in the loop when Nyles "made it all the way to Equatorial Guinea", because Roy's family would have found him brain dead on the morning of November 10th.
• Couldn't Nyles have just let Sarah leave the loop in the end and then brought the non-looped version of her back into it later to start over with her?
  • She'd told him the goat she tried it on stopped existing in the loops, so as far as he knew, no he couldn't.
    • To that end, why did the goat disappear, but Nyles reset?
    • When she said it disappeared she probably meant she couldn't find the remains of the goat after the explosion.
    • It could be that she somehow trained the goat to respond to her voice, so from her perspective, "her" goat had gone??
    • Let's consider how the time loop works. When, say, Nyles falls asleep, his body does not travel back in time, only his consciousness. So it is fair to assume that, when Sarah and Nyles exploded, their consciousness travelled to the morning of November 10th. But where was Nyles supposed to be on the morning of November 10th? If the rule is that he wakes up where he fell asleep on the night of his first November 9th, then there is a problem, because he never fell asleep that night, and instead went into the cave. Therefore, it's possible that reality needs to "reset" Nyles in order to "know" where he will be on the morning of November 10th. That would explain why Nyles was reset while the goat "was not there anymore". Of course, if Nyles repeats the same actions than on his first November 9th, then he will go back into the cave again. So we have to assume that his encounter with Roy changed that.
    • Nyles asks Sarah if she was lying about the goat, which she only answers with a “too late, you’ve already committed”, which implys the goat wasn’t “gone” but Sarah may have been able to tell it reset another way, like it’s behavior.
  • Without getting into the question of the disappearing goat and whether Sarah would have disappeared from his next loop or not, it would have been horrible for him to trap a new version of Sarah in the loop deliberately. She was miserable, willing to risk killing herself or obliterating herself from existence to stop it. If he was the kind of person who would do that to her deliberately he'd be a selfish, amoral, twisted individual.
• What did Sarah whisper to her sister that she believed to be 'truly selfless'?
  • That she had sex with her sister's fiance the day before the wedding.
• Why would Sarah (a very sharp person) believe the lie that the two had never had sex. The two were already well en route to finishing the deed before Roy intruded?
  • Because he actually delivered it very convincingly by not trying hard to sell it. He said 'no', but then amended it to 'I don't think so' as if it was something he didn't particularly care about. Since he didn't make a big deal out of it she could accept it without thinking too hard about it, since even remembering that she was going going to sleep with him she may accept that this was just the first time he got around to try to seduce her after trying a lot of other people before her.
• Is Nyles not being able to climax with this girlfriend in the first scene supposed to be because he was bored shagging her after umpteen loops? Their dialogue at the start seems to suggest it was an ongoing problem in their relationship?
  • Exactly. The fact that he knew she was cheating on him plus the countless times they've had sex in the loop gave him a severe sense of ennui with her.