Okay so I’ve been obsessing over this one specific technical point in Inception’s ending and I feel like I’m 80% of the way there but there’s this one wall I keep hitting. The main question everyone argues about is whether the top falls but here’s the thing — I actually think that question is a red herring, or at least not the most interesting one. My specific wall is about the wedding ring. Cobb wears his wedding ring in every dream layer but not in reality when he wakes up on the plane and not in the final scene with his kids. So the ring is supposed to be his totem, not the top, right? That’s the theory I’m stuck on because it’s the only object that consistently satisfies the totem rule — only he knows the weight or feel, and he’s the only one who touches it. But here’s where I hit the wall: in the limbo scene with Saito, Cobb is wearing the ring. Yet when he and Saito emerge into the plane reality, Saito immediately reaches for the phone and calls someone, and then Cobb walks through customs and gets home. If Cobb was still in a dream at the end, why would the ring disappear when he’s with the kids? The top wobbles but we don’t see it fall, and Mal’s totem never wobbles because it’s her thing not his. I’ve read the Nolan interviews where he says the point is that Cobb doesn’t care anymore about the top but that doesn’t explain the ring inconsistency unless the entire ending is a dream and the ring being gone is just a continuity mistake. But Nolan doesn’t do mistakes like that. So is the ring actually the totem and the top is just a decoy, and if so does the ring being absent in the final scene mean he’s finally in reality or does it mean he’s so deep in a dream that he doesn’t even need totems anymore? That’s the specific technical wall I can’t get past.
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Final episode ending explanations for popular shows still unclear
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