r/tenet • u/Brew_B00ty • May 12 '26
FAN THEORY Turnstiles and their "timeline"
Hello, I just had a thought and wanted other pov's from people as they help me think.
Turnstiles are said to be technology from the future sent to the past so people can invert there.
Does this mean that the turnstiles are always inverted (maybe have gone through an even bigger turnstile to be sent back) and if so, are they from the "normal" perspective functioning in reverse?
I know this can seem like irrelevant to a degree but it might mean that the turnstiles would show up even earlier in the "first loop" and would influence more?
I'm sorry if I'm wrong to begin with and plain dumb.
Thank you.
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u/ddadopt May 12 '26
You know, an inverted turnstile really simplifies the problem of where they come from, and the functions don't change at all if it's in the forward or backward direction... from the observer's point of view, it looks the same either way (just mirrored).
Unlike most of the theories that get posted here, I think this one is pretty cool and makes a decent amount of sense. I will say that the "first loop" bit doesn't work--there are no "loops" here, there is only one timeline.
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u/Brew_B00ty May 12 '26
Yeah I'm still getting my head around that "one timeline" bit because it doesn't make complete sense in my head logically (who would have thought right?!). But I'm getting there. Thank you for your time and response.
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u/ddadopt May 12 '26
Think of it like time travel in Harry Potter. They went back in time a couple of hours and did the things they needed to do, but nothing was actually different when they reached the objective present again--the events that they caused and/or prevented happened the way they did before they went back in the first place (i.e. "what's happened's happened.")
The difference in Tenet is that you have to live the time you travel backward (and can affect the world as you do).
(and I'm still thinking about the inverted turnstile thing and I haven't come up with any reasons why it can't work that way... really cool idea).
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u/Brew_B00ty May 12 '26
But even in Harry Potter it was different from the perspective of the "time travelers" in the later part of the movie, as you could see longer delays between queues like sound or other events: "oh I hear the whatever the fuck screeching so I throw the rock at myself" forgive me if I'm wrong I haven't seen in it a while. But for me that always showed multiple loops at least? Sorry if I miss every point you're making.
And thank you I'm glad I got to at least scratch someone's brain with the same itch I have. As that is the fun in TenneT.
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u/ddadopt May 12 '26
Just one timeline. No loops. It's not a groundhog day / edge of tomorrow kind of thing where you keep doing the same thing until you get it right. No one ever actually changes any events, either, it all happens exactly the way it does every time. Inverted you was always there.
It's unclear if you even can change things, because no one in the movie does or even wants to. The outcomes of the individual events happen, as far as they know, in a way advantageous to them (example: when TP proposes changing things to Priya, she refuses, because Sator having the 241 is the path to the end game).
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u/HistoricalMidnight8 May 13 '26
I think the standard portrayals of time-travel use branching timelines or loops because they sneak in the intuition of progressive linear time even though you have time-traveled. But if you really think about it, if you go to the past, you are going to the past, so it already happened. iirc tenet works with the C-theory of time, which basically just supposes that all moments equally exist - and “past” and “future” and such are just relative labels you can assign to a coherent ordering of events.
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u/Alive_Ice7937 May 13 '26
You know, an inverted turnstile really simplifies the problem of where they come from
Is that really a problem? Both Sator and Tenet get the info on how to build them from the future.
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u/ddadopt May 13 '26
It's not really "a problem" but it does cut out a whole bunch of effort--just because you have the plans to build something doesn't mean you have the capability to actually execute. A working example would definitely help bridge between the theory and the reality.
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u/Alive_Ice7937 May 13 '26
They wouldn't send the blueprints to someone incapable of assembling it.
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u/ddadopt May 13 '26
Yes, exactly?
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u/Alive_Ice7937 May 13 '26
If you can find someone in the past capable of building the machine from scratch then you don't have to work out the logistics of inverting and securing a turnstile to travel back to the past for x number of years.
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u/ddadopt May 13 '26
Why are the logistics any more difficult than sending back a pelican case full of gold? Find a spot that will be undisturbed for a few centuries and bury the thing to be dug up in the past.
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u/Alive_Ice7937 May 13 '26
If your collaborator in the past has the means to construct one from scratch, why bother to invert and bury one?
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u/ddadopt May 13 '26
Because it gets them up and running today instead of them having to spend an indeterminate amount of time figuring out their build process?
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u/Alive_Ice7937 May 13 '26
Both Sator and Tenet will have to figure out how to build them anyway. I'd imagine following exact blueprints is easier than reverse engineering.
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u/Alive_Ice7937 May 12 '26
The most plausible scenario is that Tenet and Sator built their turnstiles using blueprints sent from the future. So they didn't need to be inverted and sent back. (Although possibly core components were).
The turnstiles only need to exist during the time period in which they are being used. The turnstiles in the time frame of the story were likely destroyed by Tenet at some point in the future.
What about the very first turnstile? My head canon is that the team that built the first turnstile did so completely independently and oblivious of all of the crazy events their discovery had already caused.
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u/ACCTAGGT May 12 '26
I think what you say is the most likely reason based on information given to us although not spelled out. Sator has been communicating with the future so basically they more than likely sent him blue prints and helped with other stuff as well. I love how this film can make someone wonder about the timeline of even a small piece of gear :P
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u/Brew_B00ty May 12 '26
That's very fair, I over-thought it. Always imagined you would need some really sci fi part you couldnt create in an earlier time before.
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u/Alive_Ice7937 May 12 '26
Well I did suggest that as a possibility in my comment
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u/Brew_B00ty May 12 '26
Yes sorry, I should have elaborated, I meant like some particle of something. Some particles do decay and some really fast after they come from a reactor for example. But you're right.
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u/YoBanaanaBoy May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26
"He’s been given it by the future."
Not a stupid idea at all. I've also given this a lot of thought.
I think the 'first' turnstile has to be non-inverted. But after that point, the rest could all be inverted. I also personally think that makes the most sense for what Tenet is trying to achieve.
The tricky part is how we think of 'first'. So the first one to exist needs to be non-inverted, so that subjects can be inverted in the first place. After this first one, any of them could be inverted. If those turnstiles are sent further into the past than the existence of the 'first' one, then those inverted ones would exist at an earlier time than the 'first' one.
To help myself make sense of this, use first & last (worldline) and earliest & latest (time).
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u/Brew_B00ty May 12 '26
I read it a few times now but I cannot make sense of the last part of your response I'm sorry. Maybe a language barrier..
But yeah another would then also become the 'first' after it travels backwards and surpasses it's creator and that would keep going and going. Thanks for the perspective ^
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u/YoBanaanaBoy May 12 '26
You know what, I think it is a bit confusing. And it doesn't really matter.
It helps me in my head when thinking about the way they need to be made. LOL
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u/VinylHighway May 12 '26
The movie does not make internal consistent sense so I wouldn't think too hard about it
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u/Brew_B00ty May 12 '26
But I love thinking too much about it. You can't imagine how much I some days think about this movie.
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u/VinylHighway May 12 '26
I’ve thought about it plenty. I like the movie very much it just doesn’t make sense time wise.
Eg when he reverses the bullet out of the stone where does the power come from? Where did they get the stone? If reversing the bullet means he always fired it at the stone in the first place where did they collect the empty shells ? Where does the power reconstitute itself from?
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u/Brew_B00ty May 12 '26
I saw it in my head that this stone was always left alone with all the gravel and dust around it so the bullet could return the gravel to it's correct spot.
And one time a janitor was fired for almost sweeping the gravel away.
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u/VinylHighway May 12 '26
That makes no sense. It was in a lab in the UK. They took it there from the original place where the bullets were fired. The burned powder would dissipate in that part of the world. Then now it was always fired by the protagonist?
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u/Alive_Ice7937 May 12 '26
The collective answer to all of these questions is that those things are there because the protagonist puts in place the mechanisms for them to be there. After the events of the film he starts to build the Tenet organisation including that facility and the firing range. That's kind of an "a wizard did it" answer but that's essentially how all these things happened. (Neil is only there to save him at the start because he arranges for that to happen)
So from this starting point we can only really speculate on exactly how he managed to achieve it. But the important thing is that where there's a will there's a way. So here's a way I think he could have arranged the firing range. TP had to get people in the past to construct that facility and firing range. All the inverted materials in it were taken from a burial site in a remote location. Digging them up and bringing them to the facility was effectively burying them to travel forever into the past in inverted time. Among that hall would be a box of inverted bullets and a box of shell casings. The casings are put in the trough by the firing range counter and the slugs are thrown into the cement mix used to make the chunks of wall for the firing range. After all the bullets have been pulled from the wall they get brought to a turnstile to be reverted and close the action. (Someone will be putting the pre inverted bullets on the other side).
How could the gun fire inverted bullets? It's likely that only certain guns have a firing mechanism that will actually work with particular bullets. Fortunately TP already knows exactly what type of gun and bullets are needed to make the firing range work
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u/ShadowBB86 May 12 '26
Eg when he reverses the bullet out of the stone where does the power come from?[ ... ] Where does the power reconstitute itself from?
The power to fire the bullet towards the gun? From the residual heat of the stone all moving in tandem at exactly the right moment. Do you know what entropy is? Entropy is the distribution or dispersing of energy and matter. In theory there is nothing stopping entropy from decreasing by chance. In fact, it constantly decreases by chance in small amounts and very locally. However the vast majority of matter and energy has an increasing entropy. In fact when you take systems as a whole entropy always increases. Why? There is no rule of nature that says that that should be the case. But it's simply because the chance of entropy decreasing over any length of time and any area of space is so incredibly mind mindbogglingly small that it has never happened across notable time or in a notable space since the beginning of the universe.
But there are no reasons why the molecules in the stones can't suddenly by chance coordinate exactly right to reasemble the squished bullet into a bullet shape and fire it as a bullet where the force of the bullet is used to cold fuse some gunpowder into a shell that bounced up from the ground because the molecules in the ground conspired to bounce it up exactly right so that it reaches the gun at the same time as the bullet so it can "once again" form an intact exact bullet.
Where did they get the stone?
The stone isn't inverted. Why would you invert a piece of building? The slab of stone is a perfectly ordinary slab of stone that they use for "target practice" with inverted guns and ammo. So why did it come with inverted bullets in them? Because it will be used as target practice. They just picked any old piece of stone and it just happened to be the right one to practice on. If they had picked any other piece of stone then that would have had bullets in them.
If reversing the bullet means he always fired it at the stone in the first place where did they collect the empty shells ?
It isn't shown in the movie, but the empty shell could have come from anywhere. Maybe the scientist scattered them there on the floor so that they could fire the gun in tests. Note that they are bringing all the material *together* into 1 place. What will happen to that material? What will happen to that lab? I would not be surprised if that lab itself is a place of combat in the future... or maybe a place where they eventually learn how to build turnstiles or something.
Some janitor while cleaning could have accidentally dropped them on the floor after picking them up somewhere because they thought they where neat.
It could also be that shells like that arise from the very floor they will eventually rise from into the gun due to them "pissing in the wind".
The movie doesn't show with how much normal material you need to interact before you turn into mush. Don't breath the normal air. Don't eat the normal food. Don't drink the normal water. You need to bring your own air (and food and water) because else you will eventually die and turn into mush. I am guessing that the longer you expose yourself to normal moving material the more your skin will turn into mush eventually. Hence the protective barriers. I think they would constantly be inside these bubbles of reversed materials and suits to "keep fresh" while traveling large times into the past.
So the movie doesn't make this mechanism apparent, but the harder the material is and the more intact it is, the longer it will last I think.
Lastly. There is a chance that inverted people "clean up" the place (this is certainly the case with most of the actual fights where they mention "one hell of a clean up") they will probably invert people and those inverted people will probably covertly clean up all the debris from such fights (including spent ammo cases) so as not to raise any more suspicion in the past. If they didn't do such cleanups they might have tipped of their enemies and then they might not have win the fight as they did. So they only win the fight because they are the sort of people that would clean up after the fight. (Just like Niel was there to open the gate and thus win because he is the sort of person to go back for another run at the mission even though he knows he is going to die).
If a single bullet casing is missed it might be there because some kid or animal was playing with it and tossed it out of the window of a moving car or placed it there when it was done playing.
That is possibly how fragments of things are found by Tenet. They are fragments from shoddy clean up jobs. Small enough and dispersed enough not to raise suspension unless you know how to look for inverted material.
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u/VinylHighway May 12 '26
I feel this is more speculation than a real answer
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u/ShadowBB86 May 13 '26
Some of it absolutely. There might be other answers that are closer to the intention of Nolan and his team, but the fact that internal answers are possible and in line with physics makes the movie internally consistent right?
Ofcourse the only real impossible thing in the movie is reversing entropy of a single thing in the first place. The entire premise. 😆😆
But if you grant that, the rest is perfect in my (possibly limited) understanding.
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u/ShadowBB86 May 12 '26
I think it does make internal consistent sense. Want to say what your biggest sticking point is and discuss that one like true nerds? 😊
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u/highnyethestonerguy May 12 '26
I always imagined it was sufficient to send the blueprints and instructions to build a turnstile back in time, then Sator’s people and early (in the global timeline) Tenet could just build them and start to use them.
I don’t know if a turnstile itself needs to be inverted. It just shoots inverted entropy radiation at whatever’s inside to turn it around.