Some specific thoughts about the bizarre relationship between time inside the Encom system and time outside it…
- In the outside world, Alan talks about Tron as a project he’s “working on,” as if it’s not even finished yet
-(though at another point he described it as “almost ready”)
- shortly after that, in User-world time, we see Lora’s laser, which Yori is definitely involved in:
-but then, the same day when Kevin Flynn enters the computer world, it seems (in this context) as if a lot of time passes very suddenly:
- Tron has been locked up for “200 microcycles”
- long enough for his fellow warriors to view him as a sort of legend (“he fights for the Users!”)
- though in the novel, it’s said that he was developing this reputation even before he was captured!
- Yori, when she appears, has clearly changed role; she no longer seems actively involved in the laser… she’s now got what seems to be a mindless soul-sucking job on the Solar Sailer dock
- novel also clarified that yes, this is a change from her previous status, and was caused by the MCP’s rule.
- also: Tron and Yori clearly had history together, by the time they met up in the movie. They’d been apart a long time, but before that they’d clearly been a couple even longer. (“Knew you’d escape! They haven’t built a circuit that could hold you!” Like she’s seen them try and fail to keep him captive several times before!)
- and there’s more, if you count the Deleted Scene (which has her saying “not like home, is it?”) and the novelization (which actually describes the “home” that the two of them used to have together!)
So–l am somewhat at a loss to even try and imagine a timeline for how this all fits together.
Questions that come up for me:
- if Tron wasn’t even a finished project when Dillinger and MCP shut access down, when did all this history happen?
- Was Alan hiding something from Dillinger when he talked about “working on” the Tron program? Had he actually let Tron run around as a not-totally-authorized security program before all this?
- Or does time happen in some non-linear way in the Encom system, like… events out of order? Or memories appearing all at once, instead of being the result of experience over time (the way I suspect it sometimes happens in dreams)?
I personally lean toward the first explanation… Tron may not have been “ready” yet but he was sort of in beta…. Alan had been testing out what Tron could do, for long enough that other programs had started to notice (including MCP, who captured Tron about the same time he and Dillinger shut down access)
I also think it’s very likely that there’s NOT a static relationship between time inside the system and time outside it. I bet it depends heavily on things like how fast the computers are currently running.
And… wow, I wonder how long Kevin Flynn really was in the computer, from Lora and Alan’s perspective.
Thinking about @fights4users observation that Lora must have heard the laser go off. Wonder if the timing was such that she heard it… stopped… heard it again… turned back to see what happened… and ran right into Kevin zooming down the hall all triumphant with his printout and everything
(just went back through the scenes to see if I could find any clues, and this timing seems… unlikely, since the printout has the time 06:00 on it, which is probably quite a few hours after they broke in. Ah well.)
I definitely subscribe to the idea that Tron was in a beta stage when he was captured, very close to being finished, and Alan had tested him out in the system for a while, so he would have met Yori and had a relationship, caught the attention of the MCP, etc. When he gets to the I/O Tower in the film and makes contact with Alan-1, that’s when he goes to 1.0 status, so to speak. I’m also knocking around a headcanon that Tron originally started out as a contribution to the MCP by Alan, before he realized that instead of merely being a subroutine of the MCP, it would work better as an independet program. So Tron would have been a servant of the villain, maybe working with Sark, before gaining the will and ability to work against them. Could possibly give some extra layers to his later Rinzler incarnation as well.
I’m also fascinated by the idea that time in the digital world runs at different speeds relative to our world depending on the processor speed of the computers. So maybe the MCP clogging up the system slowed time down, and when he was defeated, time started running faster?
