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 always assumed time works in the Encom system the same way it does on the Grid. In Legacy, Flynn says “days in here were just minutes back home”, which implies that time moves faster in the computer world than in the real world. That would explain a lot about how quickly everything seems to change between Dillinger cutting everybody’s access and Flynn getting blasted into the system.
The funniest implication of that is that the MCP would have to talk *really* slowly to make sure Dillinger and Flynn understand him.
Haaaa…. ok that detail IS hilarious. Now imagining other programs in there overhearing his conversations but to them it just sounds like very slowly fluctuating ambient droning noises
Also Tron must’ve been standing in that light beam looking up at Alan much longer than the movie made it look, lol
(somewhere in the reblogs of this, there’s some discussion of how changes in the computer clock speed could affect the ratio of in-system time to real-world time and THAT’S another whole thing to explore)
