By 
This article contains spoilers for The End of Oak Street
David Robert Mitchell’s late-summer sci-fi movie The End of Oak Street has landed in theaters, and its final scenes feature some truly unexpected narrative twists and turns worth thinking twice about after the credits roll.
In the film, we follow the Platt family, an all-American clan of four who are transported back in time from 1982, along with the rest of their neighborhood, to an era when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Yet for a film that has time travel built into its core concept, it spends surprisingly little time dwelling on the mechanics. After all, the Platts are in imminent danger. They understand the situation they’re in, and a brief discussion about why they might be in it leads nowhere because there isn’t a screen or convenient scientist nearby to drop helpful facts and exposition.
However, the time-travel element of the film becomes super important during its conclusion, and the longer you think about the ramifications of the choices made in those final key scenes, the more complex and dark they become. Let’s take a deeper look at those events and then discuss why they’re so much more messed up than you first realize.
The Basics of the Ending
Midway through the movie, after the family discover what looks to be a flashing spherical portal in a neighbor’s home, they begin piecing together a possible escape from the dinosaurs, hoping that jumping through the portal will send them back home to 1982. Unfortunately, the portal seems to only last for brief intermittent periods… and it appears to be getting smaller every time it pops up in a new random location.
So by the time of the climax, Denise (Anne Hathaway) and her two children Aubrey and Brian (Maisy Stella and Christian Convery), plus the neighborhood kid they picked up along the way, Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis), are desperate to get into the last portal they’ve discovered floating above their librarian’s house. At this point, they’ve already seen the core family’s father, Greg (Ewan McGregor), eaten by a T-Rex (plus the librarian too!). And the last proverbial road out of town via this portal is flickering badly. And yet, the escape still goes pretty smoothly. Whilst Brian misses his first jump into the portal, everyone, including the dog, is able to get through on the second try.
… What is twisty is the aftermath. Faster than you can say Back to the Future, Denise and the kids quickly realize they have not only traveled back to 1982 but a little less than an hour before they were originally transported to the prehistoric past. Furthermore, while they’re safe high up on a hill above Oak Street and the rest of their neighborhood, they realize everyone beneath them is doomed to a grim dino-fate. Denise understands some hard decisions need to be made because there’s not enough time to save everybody, and who would even believe them if they explained what was about to happen? Meanwhile, Jeannette decides to risk going down into the neighborhood to save her parents, who originally died in the past, before they disappear again for good.
Denise won’t risk her kids’ lives by going back down there, but she does decide to make some collect calls at a nearby phone booth—including when she orders a pizza from her husband Greg (he has a delivery job in 1982 on the side after being laid off). Clueless as to what’s happening, the very much now alive Greg shows up with a pie, and the family are overjoyed to see him. Along with his family, he looks down at the Oak Street neighborhood as the flashing lights begin and a huge portal swallows it up, replacing it with a patch of land from long ago. “Is that a fucking dinosaur?” he asks incredulously. The Platts laugh.
Afterward a montage reveals what else happened in and outside of Denise’s phonebooth. Following the traumatic events of their time-travel adventure, the family definitely has a renewed sense of togetherness. Audrey seems to have made it to her dream college, and Brian has a girlfriend. As the Platts barbecue in their garden, Jeannette also appears with her parents… plus a copy of herself. We also learn in the montage that a few of the Platts’ other neighbors received life-saving phone calls, including the argumentative Mel Jacobs (P.J. Byrne) and the kind librarian Mrs. Valcourt (Emily Kuroda), during Denise’s precious 20 minutes in the phone booth.
The Dark Choices and Their Consequences
We admit it’s a pretty hilarious, blink-and-you-miss-it realization that there are two Jeannettes at the end of the movie. Like two Doc Browns on the same street, our two Jeannettes and her parents will have to explain forever after why there’s a spare, and it means it’s two times the Jeannettes who aren’t into Brian at all, and instead much prefer his sister. But the realization that there can be two Jeannettes really casts a shadow over Denise’s decision to only rescue Greg and leave versions of the rest of her family, including herself, to the distant past.
The Platts only lasted as long as they did in the past because they worked together as a family and looked out for each other whenever dinosaurs moved in for the kill. Indeed, Greg died horribly saving Denise from meeting the same fate during a grisly Tyrannosaurus attack. With Greg no longer there in that moment, Denise would have surely perished, and the kids would have been left to fend for themselves. So when Denise chose to save Greg but not the old versions of herself, Audrey, and Brian, the mother likely doomed all three of them to horrible fates.
In fact, if time travel works the same way as in Back to the Future here rather than Avengers: Endgame (let’s face it, no one wants to go down that baffling rabbit hole), it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that Denise doomed the old versions of herself and the kids. After all, if those versions made it to a portal, much like the current versions did, they would have also appeared in the future. It’s possible that Denise at least called the house and tried to warn them, but she certainly didn’t ask Greg to pick them up on the way with his pizza delivery, and since we don’t see them pop up at the end or during the film’s final montage like Jeannette 2, we can indeed assume they died in the past. Probably in really unpleasant ways. There are no paradoxes here!
With Denise essentially leaving the old versions of herself, Audrey, and Brian to die, it becomes a much more messed-up ending than the cheery scenes of family togetherness and emotional progress show us. Denise will have to live with that fateful decision. She might be comforted by the knowledge that she, the kids, and select neighbors live to barbecue another day thanks to her phone calls in that key 20-minute window of opportunity, but personally, we’d be having some pretty bad nightmares about what happened to those other versions of our kids in the past.
The End of Oak Street’s moral quagmire is playing in theaters now.
The post The End of Oak Street Ending Is So Much More Screwed Up Than You Realize appeared first on Den of Geek.
