Every screen on this page is a real frame from the film’s cockpit. This is what they were built to tell.
Marshall triages distress calls by salvage value, and skips them. Then one crackles through from Captain Alec Walker, his estranged brother, trapped at the edge of a black hole in something called the Recoil effect. The shock costs Marshall a finger to his own plasma saw.
“Everything I do, no matter where we go, keeps repeating… I’m not even sure what’s real anymore.”
Bodhi, the ship’s AI, runs the math: a 0.018% chance of recovery, no valued cargo. Against it, Marshall jumps.
He finds the Halberd 3 iced over and pulls Alec aboard barely alive. Minutes together. Alec presses a data card into his hand, the exact exit coordinates out of the loop. “Why haven’t you used it?” “My ship… she won’t fly. But yours…” Then hypothermic shock takes him, and Marshall finally says the thing he crossed a galaxy to say: “I’m sorry I wasn’t there when we lost dad.”
Flashbacks reveal it: their father’s deathbed, where the old man whispered something to Alec and only Alec, and Marshall walked out rather than stay for the end. What their father whispered, the film saves for the final dive.
Bodhi has the coordinates home. Marshall chooses the loop instead: fly back in, on purpose, and relive it until he reaches Alec early enough to save him. When Bodhi’s programming refuses, he takes the plasma saw to his own AI’s wires and grabs the manual throttle.
The film ends where it began. Cold bridge. Systems at rest. “Light jump 2154 complete, Marshall.” A blue light, pulsing. He’s in the loop. He chose it.
