The Electric State has been a massive hit for Netflix as expected, reigning supreme at the top of the most-watched movies list worldwide since its release on March 14.
If you've already seen the sci-fi blockbuster, loosely adapted from Simon Stålenhag's graphic novel of the same name, we know you'll have a major question left about the movie's final shot.
The movie is set in an alternate version of 1994 as Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown) heads off on a quest with friendly robot Cosmo and low-rent smuggler Keats (Chris Pratt) to find her presumed-dead brother Christopher.
But what really happened to Christopher and what's that final shot of The Electric State all about? Let's dig into The Electric State's ending to explain any lingering questions you may have.
Major spoilers ahead if you haven't seen the movie yet.
The Electric State ending explained: What happened to Christopher?
Michelle's search for her brother leads her to Dr Amherst (Ke Huy Quan), who was the doctor that told her Christopher had died after her family was involved in a car accident during the war.
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He reveals that Sentre boss Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci) – an evil Steve Jobs, basically – saw in Christopher a chance to end the war. Christopher was comatose and Sentre used his mind to make the Neurocaster – Sentre's technology that allows a user to control a robot drone – work.
"We needed an impossible amount of computer power to run the network. Your brother's mind was the breakthrough Skate needed to link the Neurocasters and the drones," Dr Amherst tells Michelle. "We saved his life."
So Sentre got Dr Amherst to lie to Michelle and tell her that her brother was dead. What nobody saw coming was that 13 months after this breakthrough, Christopher woke up while he was running the Sentre network.
Dr Amherst wanted to disconnect him, but Skate threatened to kill him. Before he left the company though, the doctor established a small connection between Christopher and the outside world: "His mind could escape, even if his body couldn't."
It's why earlier in the movie, we see Skate get told that while Christopher's body is still at Sentre's base in Seattle, his consciousness had been allowed to "drip past our firewalls". Without Christopher, Sentre's network would fail and the company would collapse.
Skate sends Colonel Marshall Bradbury (Giancarlo Esposito) to capture the Cosmo bot, aka Christopher's consciousness, and bring the bot back to Sentre. He manages to capture Cosmo, while Skate controls a drone and kills Dr Amherst.
Luckily for Michelle, the doctor had his own drone called PC who knows everything that he does. They formulate a plan to break into Sentre which will see Michelle free Christopher, while Keats and the robots keep the drones busy outside with a massive battle.
It works and Michelle reunites with Christopher in the virtual world after putting on a Neurocaster. But he doesn't tell her what she wants to hear. "There's no out," he explains. "My physical connection to Sentre, it's symbiotic. Without me, they die."
Outside, the battle is not going well and the robots are being overpowered by an even bigger drone, operated by Skate. Bradbury turns good though ("I met someone less human than a robot") and helps Mr Peanut, the leader of the original robot revolution, by telling him where Skate is.
They're still running out of time though and in order to stop Sentre, Michelle has to disconnect her brother from the network, killing him.
It takes some convincing, but Christopher gets Michelle to agree to the tragic plan as otherwise, "Sentre can keep me alive like this for a hundred years". Michelle switches off Christopher's life support and outside, we see all the drones go offline.
"Once she realises her brother is out there, I think she has this really beautiful journey... 'I must find him. I must get him back to me'," Brown told Tudum.
"Toward the end, she realises that in order to get him back, she has to let go of him and remember him for who he was. I think that letting go was very therapeutic and cathartic for her. It's exactly what she needed to move forward in her life."
After this tragic event, Skate is cornered by Mr Peanut, but he doesn't kill him. A later news report reveals that Skate was arrested after footage of his experimentation on Christopher was leaked to the press.
But wait, is Christopher really dead after all that?
Is Christopher alive at the end of The Electric State?
The final sequence of The Electric State sees Michelle film a video, encouraging everybody to get out into the real world and connect with each other.
If they don't have anybody, she offers an open invitation to join her, Keats and the robots in their community which they're starting over: "We're going to do it right this time... together."
We have a feeling they'll soon be welcoming a familiar face back as the movie cuts to a junkyard where some scrap metal is being dumped. Among it is the now-lifeless Cosmo bot after Michelle turned off Christopher's life support.
But as a dog comes over and laps at a water puddle, we see the Cosmo bot come into view in the reflection, turning its head towards the dog as the movie ends.
It's definitely a sign that some part of Christopher has survived and will soon be reunited with Michelle, even if it is in robot mode. Perhaps he managed to transfer his consciousness again to the Cosmo bot before Michelle turned off the life support.
There's been no official explanation for the final shot, but Joe Russo told EW that Christopher was always going to die. "The films that we loved the most when we were kids were the movies that challenged us," he noted.
"And so if we were going to make a family film, we wanted to do it where there was something challenging in it because the movies that affected me emotionally as a child still resonate with me 30 or 40 years later.
"We were just trying to accurately reflect that some things require sacrifice in order to reach the proper balance or the healthiest place in your life."
Will that final flicker of life in Cosmo mean we'll get a sequel? Possibly. But for now, you can just make do with the happy(ish) ending.
The Electric State is now available to watch on Netflix.
Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.
