The latest Hulu sci-fi comedy Palm Springs featuring two lost souls — sad-boy Nyles (Andy Samberg) and cynical Sarah (Cristin Milioti) — stuck in a time loop, seems to have left many in limbo with its ending.
From the moment Sarah follows Nyles into a mysterious cave and becomes stuck with him in an infinite time loop, forced to relive the same day, again and again, the film jumps the familiar rom-com rails and veers into a Russian Doll-style, genre-scrambling sci-fi-comedy.
At every turn, director Max Barbakow and screenwriter Andy Siara suspend the usual romantic-comedy conventions, climaxing in an ending that may leave audiences wondering what exactly they just saw.
What happens at the end?
Towards the end, Sarah tells Nyles she has learned a way to break out of the endless loop — by detonating an explosion at the very moment they cross the time horizon.
Nyles, who has fallen in love with Sarah, is initially reluctant fearing they could end up dead or eternally separated. But he agrees to take a leap after Sarah affirms her own love for Nyles. They are then enveloped in an explosion and the screen cuts black.
After the black, Sarah and Nyles wake up next to a swimming pool at a house whose owners have been out of town.
The owners suddenly show up and Nyles says to Sarah, “I guess they come back Nov. 10,” suggesting it is now the day after the wedding and the two have successfully escaped from the loop.
From there, the camera pans up to show a pair of dinosaurs ambling in the distance — the same brontosauri that Sarah and Nyles saw earlier in the film.
In one of those mid-credits sequences, Roy (J.K. Simmons), who has also been stuck in the time loop, approaches Nyles to tell him that he thinks that Sarah’s theory of how they could escape might work. But Nyles now has no idea who Roy is or what he’s referring to.
What does it all mean?
Have Sarah and Nyles broken free from the time loop? Or have they jumped into a different dimension where they will ultimately get stuck in the kind of dead-end marriage that they both fear?
Are they dead and eternally chilling in some kind of poolside afterlife? Or are there now two different Sarahs and Nyleses in two parallel timelines? And don’t even get me started on the dinosaurs.
The ending seems to be deliberately designed so that it could be viewed in different ways. The personal beliefs about not just string theory and the possibility of alternate universes but the existence of true love itself will define how you look at this weird world.
“The intention was always to create an ending that was open to interpretation, where you could arrive at different conclusions about what had happened depending on how you were looking at the world, whether that was in a more optimistic or a more cynical light,” Barbakow says.
“I think we all think different things happen after we pull away from that pool. That’s the fun of it.
Whatever you wanted to get out of an ending, you can get out of it.”
Apparently, after Samberg came on board, he and his Lonely Island producing partners, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, helped push the film’s conclusion in a much more ambiguous direction than was originally intended.
The result is that the show lands somewhere in the space between a traditional sort of pro-love-and-marriage rom-com happy ending and a slightly darker, more open-ended one that reflects the uncertainty of any romantic venture.
Samberg says, “We didn’t want the ending to feel saccharine, like, ‘Yay, everything works out!’ But at the same time you don’t want to end on a note that’s bitter and depressing. It was a delicate balance.”
Along the way, Siara, like Sarah in the film, delved into a more exotic corner of research the physics of space and time.
“I had a nice YouTube internet spiral of looking into black holes and string theory and found some science papers on the Cauchy horizon,” Siara says.
For his part, Samberg — who has been married to singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom since 2013 — says he is actually sunny side up.
“I am very happily married and there is a big part of this script that really resonated with me because of that idea of taking a big leap and that feeling that in the end it pays off,” Samberg says. “But obviously everyone is different.”
Milioti says, “I’m reticent to say what I think because one of my favorite parts about it is how ambiguous it is. They could be dead. They could be in a different realm. But it kind of doesn’t matter because they’re together.”
Siara, whose own Palm Springs wedding helped serve as the springboard for the script, agrees.
“The hope is it doesn’t really matter if they get out of the loop or if they’re not out of the loop or if they’re in another dimension or whatever,” he says.
“The real emotional arc of the movie ends right before they walk into the cave.”
What about the dinosaurs?
As for the dinosaurs, that’s for the viewer to break down.
Siara says the dinosaurs were there from the very earliest versions and came from a personal place.
“The whole reason I wanted to make movies, to begin with, is ‘Jurassic Park,’ ” says the screenwriter, who, along with Barbakow, is making his feature debut with the film.
“So therefore, if this was the only chance I ever had to make a movie, there’d better be dinosaurs in it.”
Now why would there be dinosaurs roaming the Palm Springs desert that only Sarah and Nyles seem to see?
“To me, whether they’re real or not, is a nice symbol that falling in love is like seeing dinosaurs in the desert,” Barbakow says.
In Siara’s mind, the dinosaurs are not really about literal truth but something more intangible.
“Thinking about my wedding day or when I held my daughter in my arms for the first time, those are moments in life that words cannot describe — and the only way they could get better is basically if you have dinosaurs on the horizon,” she says. “It’s that feeling that we were always after.”
That feeling was more than enough for Milioti.
“I remember that moment in the script really took my breath away,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh, that’s so beautiful. That’s love’.”
As Samberg sees it, the real message of that final shot of the dinosaurs is that each of us, with our own personal baggage of hopes and fears and foibles, ultimately creates their own reality.
“The thing that is so key about the dinosaurs is that Sarah and Nyles both see them,” he says.
“Having them there at the ending is a nod to them seeing them earlier [at the campfire].
But it’s also a wink to the audience as well, saying, ‘Whatever you want it to be, that’s what it is.’ ”
So there you go, guys. From what the show’s creators have to say about their creation, the ending is much more nuanced than you would expect.
Comment below and let us know if your interpretations and those intended by the writers were in sync or not.
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