'1899' Ending Explained: What Is Reality?

Does anything exist beyond our minds?

Editor’s note: The below contains major spoilers for 1899.

1899 is finally available on Netflix, delivering one more mind-bending story from Dark creators. However, while the previous TV show from Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar bent time, 1899 plays with the notion of reality itself, pushing viewers to doubt anything they have seen. So, when the credits roll, you might still have questions about what happened aboard the Kerberos, a ship departing from Europe with a destination to New York, hosting thousands of people from very different cultural backgrounds.

Many questions remain unanswered after the end of 1899, as the series was clearly planned to span multiple seasons. Nevertheless, we have enough clues to solve some of the 1899’s biggest mysteries, such as the nature of the Kerberos Project and why the ship’s passengers are constantly forced to confront their traumatic memories.

What Is the Kerberos Project?

During the first season of 1899, we study there’s some thing wrong with the Keberos. The ship turned into offered by using an English businessman, Henry Singleton (Anton Lesser), who made a few bizarre changes. While the Kerberos experience takes place in 1899, a few wondrous tech is hidden inside the ship, and its passengers are taken again to relieve their maximum annoying memory. The handiest those who appear to be aware of what’s occurring are Daniel (Aneurin Barnard) and Elliot (Fflyn Edwards), the 2 closing survivors from the experience of the Prometheus, the preceding enterprise’s ship, which were given lost in the sea.

After receiving a mysterious message, the Kerberos’ group finds the Prometheus adrift within the ocean and rescues the boy from inner. Daniel makes his way to the Kerberos by himself and manipulates Maura Franklin (Emily Beecham) into thinking her reality. As the very last episodes of 1899 display, the ship is a part of a pc simulation built to preserve human beings’s minds trapped inner a machine. The shafts positioned all around the ship function loading factors, allowing human beings to go from one a part of the simulation to the alternative. Each shaft represents the pathway to a unique reminiscence simulation, and every memory simulation is inspired by one of the Kerberos’ passengers’ beyond. However, it looks as if a lot of these reminiscences are fake, introduced within the passengers’ minds to lead them to forget who they’re.

For instance, Maura is Henry’s daughter and is attached to the simulation. She doesn’t understand why, but it quickly will become clean that the Kerberos is simply the contemporary simulation in a neverending cycle. After human beings die on the Kerberos, their attention gets rebooted and reused inside the next simulation, with each preceding ship representing the log facts of a failed test. Henry observes the human beings of the Kerberos from his office all of the time, judging their alternatives and blaming them for making the identical mistakes over and over again. While we don’t get a clean answer approximately why these experiments are being repeated, it looks like the intention is to recognize the human mind and unencumber its full potential by means of coaching human beings to place reason above their feelings. While Henry seems to be the mastermind in the back of Project Kerberos and the previous simulations, the truth is greater elusive. And as we learn inside the finale, Henry is as tons a puppet as every person else aboard the ship.

Who Built the ‘1899’ Simulation?

In the real international, Maura and Daniel are married, and Elliot is their son. At a few factor, Elliot’s frame starts offevolved to fail because of a mysterious ailment, pushing his mom to create a way to shop his moral sense internal a laptop. Maura refuses to permit go of her son, so she builds the first simulation to hold him alive for all time. Maura and Daniel are the simulation creators, as he is a master programmer, and he or she’s a genius in neuroscience. So, because the writer of the simulation, Maura designed this system’s architecture, permitting a couple of human beings to be plugged right into a system concurrently, so they might spend time with cherished ones who’re dead inside the actual world.

While 1899’s by no means explicitly confirms it, it appears Elliot died in some unspecified time in the future. Incapable of bearing that pain, Maura determined to erase her memories and remain forever plugged into the simulation, wherein she wouldn’t recollect her failure anymore. During the complete collection, Daniel and Elliot are aware about their digital situation and try and make Maura wake up. As it turns out, Maura programmed an exit key in the simulation. Still, on account that she hid it earlier than she erased her own recollections, no one knows where the secret’s. Henry took over manipulate of the simulation with the same goal of locating the key, so he should eventually be freed from his digital jail.

What Happens in the ‘1899’ Finale?

In the series finale, the key and the lock that must be connected end up in Henry’s hands. Blaming his daughter for all the pain inflicted on the people locked into the simulation, Henry decides to reset her memory, send her back to the start of a new boat trip, and use the key to get himself and the people close to him out of the simulation. The key doesn’t work, though, because, in a desperate move to wake up Maura, Daniel changes the Kerberos code, altering the program’s structure and destroying the latest iteration of the simulation.

Inside the simulation, every object represents a different piece of code. For instance, the black syringe Henry uses to stick Maura in the neck works as a memory reboot, forcing her to repeatedly relive the same hellish boat trip. The key and the pyramid Elliot is always carrying around are the two pieces of code that, when put together, wake up someone and bring them to the real world.

When Daniel changes the simulation code, he changes the black syringe so that it would transport Maura to the first iteration of the simulation, a simple room the family used to extend their lives together. Daniel also changed the key code to become Maura’s wedding ring and the pyramid code to become a toy found in the first iteration’s room. As Daniel explains, it is imperative that Maura wakes up and works in the real world to free everyone else. That’s because, while she was in deep slumber, her brother Cirian took control of the simulation, trapping everyone inside it. Maura follows Daniel’s instructions and gets out of the simulation, but there’s still much we don’t understand about what happened in the virtual world.

For starters, we don’t know why Cirian decided to trap everyone inside a computer program, nor why he made everyone’s fake memories so filled with traumatic events. We do know, however, that all the people onboard the Kerberos chose to be there at some point, and a future season might reveal why. There’s also the matter of the computer virus spreading through the simulation, which might corrupt the passenger’s consciousness. We don’t know where the virus came from, but it might have been introduced by Daniel in a way to break Maura out of Cirian’s mind prison. Finally, Daniel’s drastic changes to the simulation’s architecture managed to free Maura but might have put everyone else at risk. If Netflix greenlights Season 2 of 1899, the series needs to deal with the consequences of Daniel’s desperate escape plan. Finally, we need to know what is happening in the real world as Maura wakes up to an unexpected reality.

What Is Real in ‘1899’?

As Maura gets unplugged from the machine that trapped her consciousness inside the simulation, she realizes she’s inside a chamber where some of the passengers she met inside the Kerberos are equally plugged in. The room is inside a spaceship belonging to “Project Prometheus,” which also houses multiple equal chambers, meaning all the people from the Kerberos are there too. While the simulation of the Kerberos trapped people’s minds in 1899, the real year is 2099, and almost two thousand people are being transported through space towards a destination unknown.

That explains why the people inside the simulation were somehow volunteers, but it doesn’t help us understand why Ciaran took over everything and kept people locked inside. However, Ciaran is aware of his sister’s escape and sends a message to welcome her to reality. Season 2 should partially take place in the futuristic reality while we still get back to the simulation to figure out what happened to all the people trapped inside it and how Daniel inadvertently might have doomed them all. Fingers crossed, we will get our answers sooner than later.