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Hang the DJ
posted by easyjoeySTAFFMOD on January 19, 2018 at 9:56 AM
I want to ask everyone's opinion of the ending of Hang the DJ. Were the two main characters really people or just a simulation? I ask for a couple reasons.
Near the end when the female is provided time to say goodbye to one person, she chooses the male lead and they decide to leave together and buck the system. While leaving, a security guard attempts to taze them but instead, the security guard freezes and they are able to escape to the wall.
While climbing the wall, everything turns to binary code which proves this is clearly not reality.
After the wall climb, the characters find themselves in a room of strangers with numbers above their heads. Anyone notice the first person with a number was 998, was that a coincidence or was it because the repeated success rate of 99.8? Anyway, why are those people there? They then turn to particles and float away.
Finally, the two lead characters end up on the opposite ends of a bar, in a different time frame and with different personal styles. When they look at each other, was that attraction or did they recognize each other?
Because of the above points, I am a bit confused. Maybe that is the point?
What are your thoughts?
Reply by izzybee3
on January 19, 2018 at 10:09 AM
I came here to ask the same question . . . what did the ending mean?! I tried to let it go, but it just kept nagging at me. I think the 998 certainly had something to do with the percentage, but I don't know exactly how. She said to him one time that she felt like this had happened over and over with him (paraphrasing), so I think them seeing each other at the end in another time is that happening. But, why. If they are meant to be together, why not let them be together instead of going through this over and over.
Reply by krashd
on January 23, 2018 at 1:18 PM
In the version I saw it stated after the breakout "1000 simulations complete" and then "998 rebellions logged" which I took to mean that in 998 instances out of 1000 the two of them found one way or another to beat the system and escape together, meaning they are pretty much meant to be. So there's a 99.8% chance that they are either soulmates or just extremely compatible with one another.
The entire thing prior to the last scene was a simulation inside a dating app on a phone. A typical dating app today matches your likes and interests against those of others and comes up with a match based on that, but just because two people enjoy a lot of similar things doesn't mean they are compatible, as we all know. I think in the future when we have phones so powerful that you can have an artificial intelligence inside one there will be dating apps that take all of your info and that of another person and it will generate both personalities in a situation and run simulations to see whether those two people upon meeting make love or make war. Then it will show you the results.
There's already (sort of) technology that does this, but it's not an app and would never fit on a phone, instead it is the complex databases and simulation software belonging to dating websites like eHarmony and Match.com, the more information you give them and the more access you give them to your social media accounts, family history and personality traits the more accurately they can simulate your encounters with other members of the site. But they still cannot create a full digital representation of someone and it still takes a small supercomputer to do the work so don't expect anything like the people-inside-a-phone-app we saw in the episode until closer to 2030 or 2035.
Reply by Midi-chlorian_Count
on June 6, 2019 at 6:12 PM
I wish they'd come up with another concept for the end of this episode rather than sentinent digital beings again!
Great episode otherwise with a rather sad but true satire on dating / relationships...