Headscratchers / Paycheck

• Michael Jennings did amazing job to avoid his own death. As it has already been quite correctly noted, he basically ran along a simple pattern: have an idea about how to evade the imminent danger - check on the future-machine if the idea will help him to stay alive - if yes, then encounter the next problem - have an idea about what to do about it etc. So in the end he must actually have seen Rethrick's death on the machine and that is indeed what happened in reality. Then why do both he and Rethrick see HIS death instead?
  • The machine wasn't exactly what we think it was. The principle of its work was not in a right-out "optical travel to the future" taken completely independently from the acting subjects (in our case that is Jennings himself), but rather in some kind of PROGNOSIS - a thorough and highly accurate evaluation of what SHOULD happen in the future GIVEN the situation in the present, an evaluation which takes into account actual people and their capabilities as well. (Remember the words addressed by Rethrick to his minion: if Jennings didn't die when he was expected to, "that means someone changed something. So it WAS possible to change the future.) OK, suppose I got right this one; the question persists - why did prognosis change so dramatically over the time? Because a major thing has changed in the meanwhile: Jennings lost his memory due to some drug injected by Rethrick's minion. So if a week before machine made its calculations based on the fact that Jennings had a viable project of getting himself out of the trouble, now it assumed that he didn't know what to do about it (which was in fact perfectly correct as Jennings-that-lost-his-memory didn't "know" anything). So it honestly showed what had to happen in the scenario where Jennings could do nothing to save his life. By the way, maybe that's why one needs to place a palm on the machine - to let it somehow "penetrate" your brain through it? Or is it just a fingerprints scanner inserted to make sure you are "authorized" to see your future (the underlying idea being that in most cases it should be disclosed to the person in question and to nobody else?
  • It could also help us in an attempt to answer the very top question on this page. It turns out that Jennings has actually offered a simplified explanation to the audience. At present it basically looks like this: we learn about the upcoming war - we react to it by starting a war - so we basically get the same war, only that it starts much earlier than "scheduled". Yes, we've actually brought it closer, but it was probably doomed to begin anyway even if we didn't have that devilish machine because the future had already been "programmed". However, if my theory is right, then without the machine war MIGHT NOT HAVE BEGUN AT ALL. Consider the following: if the machine makes a prediction rather than straightforwardly "sees" the future then it builds its predictions on the present situation. This might be enough if we deal with a limited amount of people and their wills: had Jennings decided not to act upon his knowledge of his future death (poor guy, I can only imagine what he must have felt the moment he knew...), machine's prediction would probably not have changed, because Rethrick's will to kill Jennings at any cost must have been present from the very beginning (and quite certainly to the very - tragic in that case - end). But it's a little bit more complicated in big politics, let alone international one: here we deal with a large amount of the most diverse forces, including those both under and not under control of any single individual (economics, social conflicts, personal ambitions etc). If, say, a trade war between the countries takes place, it's quite possible to predict that it will evolve into a full-scale military conflict; but a month after or even less the situation may take a sudden twist - and the prediction will be completely different. The forces of history are manifold, you know. Anyhow, I'll be more than glad to hear your feedback on this one.
  • That makes sense in at least one respect. If it actually sees the future, then because it exists and people use it, it would see the future that would result from people using it. When someone looks into the future and sees a war, the machine is showing that war because it sees that people will use the machine and then launch a preemptive strike and start a war.
    • This take on the situation (machine showing the future war which wouldn't have happened if it weren't for the machine itself not as a prognosis but as an established fact) alludes to You Already Changed The Future-world, but it is contradicted by the clear notion that the future CAN be changed, and the machine's verdict is in no way final.
• Why did Michael put a crosswords into the envelope? It is fully understandable why he blocked the system but why did he decide that he should allow himself to use the machine once more before its destruction? After all, Michael-in-the-past (that is, before the injection that caused him to forget everything) knew everything he needed to concoct a successful scheme to avoid death and kill Rethrick, and for Michael-in-the-future what he saw didn't bring any "relief" or "knowledge" whatsoever (quite on the contrary, I would say); and we remember that because of the time spent to activate the machine Mike and Rachel barely escaped death at the hands of Rethrick's forces.
  • Michael-in-the-past didn't give a damn about what Michael-in-the-future will see. The real target was... Rethrick; the whole "use-machine-for-one-last-time-thing" in reality was done to lure Rethrick to his death. Consider the following: Jennings knew that death awaited him on the upper level, but in the end it was Rethrick who got the bullet in the head! How so? Because Rethrick saw that Jennings had to die on the upper level and so decided to bring him there - with himself, which was just what Jennings needed. So while our arch-enemy thought of himself as the hunter who was bringing his helpless prey, nearly strangled by electric wire, to the place of the latter's ultimate demise, in reality he himself was falling prey to Jennings' truly ingenious and mastermind trap. And the magnificent "Wolfe vs. Machine" scene also became possible thanks to this witty deception. Though I must say Jimmy could have been a little more insightful and just think: hey, this guy had (and made use of!) a million possibilities to see almost everything in the future... why the hell would he NOW want to take an enormous risk of getting inside Allcom to look once more?
    • Of course, the possibility remains that Jennings just deliberately programmed the machine to play one of the death videos seen by him when he hadn't quite figured the way out of the trouble yet instead of the "final" version of his future.
  • It's possible that viewing the future "one last time" was critical to the plan. After all, without seeing the forecast of his death, it's entirely probable that Jennings would have no idea what the watch was signaling; it didn't say "duck," after all, it just said "go." Without context, the message was meaningless, so Jennings would've just been confused *and* shot. By viewing the future prediction, he knew what to do on the watch's signal.
    • Yes, but it had been none other than himself who programmed that watch. He could have easily made it say "duck" and spare himself the trouble. I guess there must be something else to that.
  • By the way, in the original story Jennings didn't unblock the system at all.
    • He actually did - Rethrick mentions at the end that they have been unable to use the time visor and scoop ever since Jennings left the company. If he hadn't, Rethrick would have been able to counter Jennings' plan.
      • Reread the statement you're responding to - it says that Jennings never unblocked the system.