Before I get to the exercises I mentioned at the end of Script Trace #2, I wanted to nail down the reimagined story I only hinted at last time. I hit on a lot of the major points I wanted to get at, but I never really put it all together into a solid and coherent story. So here’s my attempt at that.
Tron : Legacy Retold
Sam Flynn is obsessed with the mysterious disappearance of his father, Kevin Flynn, twenty years earlier. Cheated out of his inheritance and control of Encom, Sam spends his remaining fortune searching for clues to what happened to his father and for some way he might regain his rightful position over the company. Following a lead in archived logs, Sam breaks into the abandoned Flynn’s Arcade, now used as cold storage, where he discovers his father’s old office. Instead of finding answers, Sam finds himself transported into the digital world his father told stories about when he was a child, the Grid. But this world isn’t the orderly and fantastical world he imagined it would be. This world is broken and fractured, a nightmare of paranoia and madness.
Sam is quickly ensnared in violent power struggles and bizarre political machinations, all fragmented and strewn across the Grid, where he must navigate brutal games of gladiatorial combat and labyrinthine landscapes in the shadow of the distant but looming eye of the Master Control Program. Sam quickly discovers the Grid might be the way it is because of his father. At first he thinks it was something his father did to the world before he disappeared, but Sam slowly understands the various political forces are pieces of Kevin’s psyche siloed on cores of the CPU and gone mad from the isolation and the countless millennia trapped on the Grid, fighting against each other for reasons they no longer remember.
Act Two
After escaping on a light cycle into momentary respite, Sam finds finds a broken CLU, the former digital assistant to Kevin. The fragmented program is weakened and weary but Sam manages to reintegrate the program to its former functionality. As the two continue through the Grid, they eventually find Tron, the hero of the old system, now transformed and in hiding from the MCP. They try to convince her to help but Tron is reluctant, since she is the only program whose activity on the grid fully awakens the MCP and his fleet of Recognizers. But Tron reveals a crucial piece of information to Sam, that none of the shards of Kevin’s psyche ever directly confront any other, and this gives Sam the information he needs to go forward.
Two by two, Sam and CLU entrap the pieces of Kevin’s psyche into direct confrontation, and Sam taps his User powers to reintegrate them with each other. But this makes them more powerful and more cunning, and the world around them more chaotic and shattered. And each time, Sam and CLU barely escape.
When it is down to the last two shards of Kevin’s psyche, Sam and CLU bring them together, but they are both too obsessed with destroying Sam to reintegrate. They come close to doing it too but for CLU sacrificing himself and Tron coming to Sam’s rescue. As Sam and Tron escape, the two Kevins taunt them, telling them they won’t find any refuge. They promise to chase them into the real world if necessary.
Sam and Tron realize their only hope now is to lure these last pieces of Kevin into a confrontation with the MCP, who has now fully reawakened because of Tron’s activity. And now the entire Grid seems set against them, reformatting and coming apart at the same time. Armies of programs are conscripted and amassed and mobilized, the landscape is in upheaval, while the MCP deploys its army of Recognizers.
Act Three
Sam and Tron negotiate all of this and bring the three together at the I/O gate where the MCP resides. And in this ultimate confrontation, Sam finally recognizes the MCP is also his father, the most broken and most powerful of all of his shattered pieces, bitter and wanting revenge against the outside world that had abandoned him. And now confronted by Sam, the MCP — Kevin — wants to act on his feelings, return to the outside world and turn it into the same hellscape he has wrought upon the Grid. And though the other Kevins resist, it’s futile in the face of the MCP’s power. They are reintegrated and the full power of the MCP is realized.
Since Sam arrived at the arcade, the MCP discovered the internet hotspot of Sam’s phone and has been slowly figuring out how to access it and the vastness of the internet. And now awakened, he commands full access, and his plan to escape to the outside world begins to initialize.
With Kevin’s psyche fully reintegrated into the MCP, he is at his most powerful, but also his most vulnerable. Sam tries to appeal to that lost humanity, to the memories he might still have of their time together all those many cycles ago. This provides enough distraction for Tron to attempt to purge the MCP from system RAM and wrest control of the CPU. Kevin’s data had been distributed across both the system RAM and GPU RAM and his processes multithreaded over all the CPU cores and available GPUs, so Tron only manages to take control of one CPU core. But this still works to disrupt Kevin momentarily.
Sam is almost grateful Tron failed. He didn’t want his father to die. He still wanted to try to save him. And Kevin in a moment of weakness, admits to Sam that even if he could be saved, the digital remains of his body are too scrambled and unrecoverable. He could never return to the real world as Kevin Flynn ever again. He could only return as the MCP he has become.
In a last ditch effort to stop the MCP, Tron tells Sam to merge her with it. Sam refuses but realizes this might hint at the only way to win. Instead, he tries to merge with the MCP himself just as the MCP initiates the transfer out into the internet. The Grid begins to tear itself apart and the flood of internet data and the hundreds of thousands of years of Kevin’s experience on the Grid start to drive Sam insane. Tron intervenes with control of the one CPU core. Because of this, she also begins to merge with Sam and Kevin, and this helps stabilize Sam to manage the flood of data that his human brain could not. This allows Kevin to finally come to his senses completely and he realizes the only option now is a killall reboot. But Sam doesn’t want to let go, he holds back the command line. Kevin tells him he loves him one last time and Sam realizes, as the MCP floods out onto the internet, he has no other choice. Sam is ejected back into the real world just as the killall command executes.
Resolution
Sam quickly grabs his phone and breaks it apart to be absolutely sure, then watches as the workstation reboots. He holds down a key combination to purge the PRAM and safe reboot just in case.
Weeks later, Sam is standing on the roof of Encom tower watching a helicopter approach. Alan and his wife get out and they all hug before moving inside. Sam congratulates Alan on his new position as CEO of Encom and Alan congratulates Sam on reestablishing a controlling interest and his new position on the Board. Alan asks Sam about his “side project” and Sam tells him he’s going to need his help to track down all the MCP code still out there. Alan reassures Sam that all the resources of Encom are at his disposal.
The end.
Self Reflection
I like it. Of course I like it. I wrote it. Now let me tell you why I like it.
Sure, there are still some missing details, glossing over some specifics with “quickly ensnared,” and “as they continue,” and “they lure,” and the like. And some of those easter eggs I mentioned last time would need to be integrated when these details are worked out. For as long as it is, it’s still more summary than treatment. But I think it works structurally and has some good plot points.
Sam actually drives the plot of the first act. He investigates. When he finds the office, I’d want the computer to give him a prompt: enter the Grid? And Sam would hit the Y key. And when he enters the arcade office, there could be some nice foreshadowing when he puts his phone down on the desk. Maybe some notification that the phone hotspot is activated, and Sam doesn’t notice.
Finding the broken pieces of CLU and using his User powers to put him back together sets up Sam’s idea for a solution to the larger conflict with the Kevin fragments. I like how Sam’s solution to defrag his father’s psyche continues to raise the stakes by making them more powerful. I like how Tron’s refusal to help has a reason that when she does help, it’s why the stakes are raised again moving into the third act.
Speaking of which, I like that the MCP is looming over the Grid but not involved until the third act for a good reason, breaking into the phone hotspot and working out how to use internet protocols. The various fragments of Kevin controlling CPU cores is a good use of the premise. I’m okay that it may not make real world sense, but it works within the suspension of disbelief.
The twists of the MCP being another part of Kevin, and using the phone hotspot to access the internet are sufficient. They’re not mind-blowing but at least they make sense.
And the final confrontation brings Sam’s arc to a nice conclusion. Sam holding on to Kevin is driving him crazy. This is what’s happening to him at the beginning of the story and it confronts him again at the end. Sam wants to find his father, but he needs to let go. I didn’t really mention how Alan would be a part of the beginning, but he could be there for Sam to advise him that he needs to get over his loss. That he needs to accept that his father is gone. And Tron in the end could serve that same purpose, to remind Sam of that earlier advice.
It also has some nice parallels to the original, Tron that is not Legacy, and I manage to setup a potential sequel without having to rely on a sequel happening to conclude this story. And this setup is not so telegraphed as to be embarrassing if one doesn’t happen.
Pre Review Review
Now for those exercises I mentioned. I work in some of the premise into the story mechanics — the fact that this takes place in a computer, that sort of thing. But what I really want to do is figure out how to incorporate the production design (light) and the thematic and philosophical implications of the premise into the narrative. What is it about light that informs character, plot, theme? What is it about being turned into disembodied data and translating human consciousness into binary perception that informs the thematic and philosophical underpinnings of the narrative?
I still haven’t put too much thought into it yet, but I think I need to to really feel like this Script Trace is complete. Yes, I’ve put an inordinate amount of effort into this already, for a pointless reimagining of a failed soft reboot to a failed original movie from the early 80s. But I still like the property, I like what I’ve come up with, useless fan fiction that it is, and I like what I’m learning from this so far.
But given all this, here’s what I’m thinking: I may not follow up with the exercises immediately. I might move on to Script Trace #3 next, then come back later with Script Trace #2.2. I have no problem working out of order. My brain clearly doesn’t work linearly, so I see no reason to do so here.