What happens when you’ve spent <a href=”https://dystopianlens.co.uk/from-dystopia-to-utopia-how-sci-fi-uses-the-future-to-reflect-our-present-day-hopes-and-fears/”>forty years</a> designing real spacecraft? You find yourself analysing and deconstructing every piece of science fiction you come across. Sometimes fans are smarter than writers, and their speculation helps resolve inconsistencies to make the story better than it was originally.
I’ve been mulling over that idea lately ever since my granddaughter introduced me to the wonderful world of sci-fi Reddit forums. I got into arguments with teenagers about whether Doctor Who should have regenerate already (he shouldn’t). But it occurred to me that while lots of fan theories are fantastic, some of them actually correct inconsistencies I didn’t even realise bothered other people.
Some media franchises are better than others for this. The truly great hard sci-fi always tries to keep things as consistent with the real world as possible (within the confines of the story, that is). When inconsistencies pop up, fans notice them.
When I saw Blade Runner in theatres in 1982, I knew something was fishy about Deckard right off the bat. As I mentioned above, I was working on spacecraft propulsion systems at the time, so pay attention to detail. Harrison Ford was fine. The character of Deckard felt off, however. Maybe it was his steely ethics among such blatant murdering by everyone else. Maybe it was his reluctance to accept Rose. Now there’s a fan theory for you.
Whatever it was, the recent speculation that Deckard could himself be a replicant has made me want to revisit everything with entirely different expectations.
I’ve seen Blade Runner so many times that I didn’t think I could enjoy it more than I already had. But watching it again, knowing something about Deckard that I didn’t know previously just enhanced the entire story for me. Everything Deckard does in that movie, from the way he walks to how quickly he reacts to things – he doesn’t behave like a normal test pilot should.
But if he’s not human, if part of his programming includes false memories to make him think he is human just like Rachel – it all makes sense.
Better yet, if the replicant hunter is himself a replicant, then all of sudden you’ve got serious moral questions about the difference between artificial and natural intelligence raised by the film. And I love it when hard sci-fi makes me think about deep philosophical questions like that, even if the creators don’t explicitly provide an answer.
Fan theories are fun because sometimes they’re better than reality. Everyone knew the sequels to The Matrix sucked. Except they didn’t? There’s a theory that the world we see after Neo enters the machine farm is actually another layer of the Matrix.
The whole staged-rebellion-with-humans-down-by-the-bottom-of-the-ships plot would be the perfect trap for transcendent minds who didn’t buy into the first version of the Matrix. As subconscious hostages, their creativity would be used to build the machine civilization while their conscious minds kick off the illusion that they’re actually free.
I first heard this theory at a sci-fi con in Phoenix about five years ago, and I snorted so hard people looked at me funny. As an engineer, that’s not how you’d do it. If I was building the control systems for a few billion human minds, I would build in a release valve for the ones who didn’t accept the main simulation. Sure, trap them in another version of virtual reality (AKA Matrix 2.0), but at least they think they’re fighting back.
Humans want to think they’re making a difference. Giving them that illusion lets you control millions of minds who think they’re rebels. It explains so many of the loose ends left by the Matrix movies: Neo and Trinity’s powers, the machines’ constant series of tactical errors that seem to favour the humans, and even the whole repetitive cycle of Zion, get bombed, and rebuilt happens flawlessly.
It was only once I stopped thinking about it as a critique of the sequels and started realising how elegantly it explained away all the stupid stuff that I actually started buying it.
Let’s talk about The One Fan Theory I Hope Is Wrong: Jar Jar Saves the Galaxy.
Please note that I understand how silly this theory sounds. Please note further that I don’t care, because this theory fills the gaps of the Star Wars prequels so elegantly that they might actually watchable if you accept Jar Jar Binks as the Sith Lord we’ve been searching for all along.
Supposedly George Lucas wrote the prequels with the secret revealed that Jar Jar was actually the Sith Lord manipulating events from behind the scenes. Luke Skywalker mask slipping moments aside, Jar Jar was so universally hated that Lucas had to backpedal hard and rewrite that role for Chancellor Palpatine.
Okay, let me preface this by saying I spent twenty years doing aerospace project management. And every aerospace program I worked on had to deal with significant stakeholder feedback that caused late, expensive design changes.
Literally none of them improved the product. Most of the changes made things worse.
So this Jar Jar theory actually holds up if you watch the movie carefully. All of his “accidents” benefit Chancellor Palpatine. He’s the guy pushing for emergency powers in the senate. Hell, the dude’s expressions while purportedly making these mistakes look guilty as hell if you watch the scene in slow motion.
I may be retired, but I have better things to do with my time than rewatch Jar Jar murders an entire civilization with his incompetence.
My grandson thinks this theory is fantastic. And to some extent, he’s right. Fan theories can actually fix problems with storytelling that the creators got wrong. Either Lucas purposefully made Jar Jar antagonistic and unpopular with the fanbase, or someone played him really, really well.
If the former is true, we might finally have a reasonable answer to the question of who thought designing a protagonist this insufferable was a good idea.
Doctor Who has theories so plentiful that they practically rewrite the show more creatively than the producer can. Time travel, alternate universes, and unlimited regeneration allow for some truly out there fan theories.
My favorite, because I’ve been watching since the Tom Baker years (and may he Razorcrew forever), is the theory that each regeneration isn’t a new Doctor at all, but actually a Doctor from a parallel universe that just barely resembles our own.
The timelines split every time the Doctor makes a significant choice that can affect the course of time. Turning on the Matrix, saving Gallifrey, killing Baby Yoda – these things change reality so dramatically that the easiest explanation is that we don’t see the Doctor regenerating, we see the timeline settling into its new normal with a Doctor who has a completely different life experience than his predecessor.
It sounds insane. But let me ask you this: do you really think that the exact same software program is going to run identically on a completely different CPU? Of course not. If each regeneration is actually one Doctor from a different universe where those key experiences happened differently, it actually explains everything.
My favorite theory of all time lives in the Stranger Things universe. Stranger Things theories are weirdly harder to explain because the show actually mostly respects physics. Time-travel theories don’t work, for example, because the show has established rules about how that particular slice of sci-fi works.
This theory proposes that the Upside Down isn’t an alternate dimension at all but Hawkins, Iowa in a post-apocalyptic future. Everything we know about the Upside Down supports this theory.
All of the experiments the Russians were doing with Eleven’s powers would logically end up destroying this reality. But if those experiments irreparably damage the normal world, then all you have to do is flip theSCP aspect and imagine that the Upside Down we see is actually the destroyed version of our world bleeding into ours through science that we can’t yet understand.
Supporting this theory is the fact that the Upside Down sort of looks and feels like a decayed version of our current Hawkins. It’s not an alternate version of reality. It’s a ruined version of our reality.
Fan theories make you engage with media that you love on a deeper level than simply watching it. If you accept them as fun rather than canon, they force you to think like a scientist. You’re looking for clues and observational data that either prove or disprove your latest theory.
Give yourself enough theories to apply this scientific method too and soon you’ll find yourself joining online communities debating fictional physics until 2 AM. As an engineer, I’m telling you it’s worth it.
John spent forty years designing real spacecraft before turning his attention to fictional ones. Writing from Oregon, he brings a scientist’s curiosity to sci-fi—separating good speculation from bad physics while keeping his sense of wonder firmly intact.