(This article contains big spoilers for Hulu’s “Palm Springs”, including details about the ending. In case the title doesn’t make it clear.)
“Palm Springs” on Hulu is not a very serious movie. This thing is not “Dark” or “Primer” or any of those stories that get into the thick of the madness of time. It’s a romantic comedy, it’s fine. It has its “groundhog day” cycle, what’s going on, and yes, there are some winks to quantum physics and all that, but it doesn’t go into much detail.
It’s probably a good thing. Getting too entangled in the details of quantum theory and multiverses and all that would be a distraction. We are here to see Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti do some mischief and establish a deep emotional connection, not for long exposure scenes.
Therefore, director Max Barbakow and writer Andy Siara give us enough detail to help make sense of how various people might be caught in the loop at different times. There’s a bit of a mockery at the end as Sarah (Milioti) spends a lot of time learning about quantum physics so she can figure out how to get out of the loop, but that short montage doesn’t give us much concrete information. It’s just an abbreviation for “she found it out”, sort of.
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That said, “Palm Springs” is so light on the details that it can trip you up in the last scene. In that scene, which interrupts the first part of the end credits, Roy (JK Simmons) tries to talk to Nyles (Samberg) at the wedding that was at the center of this day and that is repeated forever. But Nyles does not recognize it.
The two have a long-standing rivalry on the circuit, with Roy doing all sorts of horrible things to Nyles as revenge that Nyles caught him in the cycle of time. So the two definitely know each other. So it’s a surprise to Roy that Nyles doesn’t know him.
The reason Nyles doesn’t recognize Roy here is, of course, because Nyles and Sarah escaped the circuit together. Roy quickly realizes this, because Sarah called Roy and told her about her plan. Then Roy puts two and two together and realizes that Sarah’s plan worked.
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So if you’re reading this, you’re probably wondering about the type of mechanics behind this scene. And, to be honest, this is the only place where the internal logic of “Palm Springs” could fall apart a bit.
So what happened here is that with Nyles out of the cycle time, Roy is interacting with Nyles “vanilla”, basically the person that Nyles was before entering the cycle. That seems simple enough.
But if they trip you up here, it’s probably because of something Sarah said when she was telling Nyles about her plan to get out. She had developed a theory based on quantum mechanics, and tested it on a goat that she sent to the cave of time with a bunch of explosives strapped on. She said she knew the plan must have worked, because that goat was simply gone.
“I don’t know where he went, but he’s not here anymore,” says Sarah. The implication is, as I see it, that the goat no longer exists in its time-loop universe, and that it was not reset to day like everything else in Palm Springs and beyond. It’s a vague enough line that it could mean something else, but I’m not sure why I would put it that way if they could go visit the goat at the time.
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So if the goat is no longer in any sense, then it wouldn’t follow that Roy could speak to this vanilla version of Nyles at the wedding after Sarah and Nyles came out. The Nyles should also be erased from the time loop universe.
Honestly though, this is not that important. “Palm Springs” doesn’t need to be airtight, because the focus really is on the characters and their relationships to each other. And this thing with the goat is less in the grand scheme of this story: it’s easy enough to let it go.
What’s more intriguing are the general implications of the last scene with Roy. “Palm Springs” winks at the multiverse earlier, but this scene really takes him home. Are Nyles, Sarah, and Roy creating new universes every day during the cycle? When they come out, from which version of the day do they continue? If Roy leaves later, would Nyles and Sarah still meet him or would he get versions of them that only happened that day once?
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I don’t have answers to any of those questions and, once again, I’m not too concerned about that. There are no answers, and that’s fine because it’s not the kind of movie I’m looking for those kinds of answers for anyway. Aside from the goats, “Palm Springs” is quite airtight.
Anyway, the point here is that this scene exists to show Roy that there it is an off-road trail, and Roy can follow Sarah and Nyles if he chooses to. It’s a happy ending! Despite all that 2020 has done to drag us down, at least we have “Palm Springs” to make short use of things.