Coherence treats its guests as rational actors paralyzed by perfect information—they know the rules, they understand the stakes, and they choose cooperation anyway.

This is not how quantum mechanics works, and the film conflates these entirely.

Schrödinger's cat is not trapped by logic—it is trapped by observation collapsing probability into singular fact. What matters is that this confusion maps exactly onto the early algorithmic anxiety: the belief that if you just understood the system well enough, modeled your own behavior accurately, you could escape it.

The dinner party doesn't collapse because the universe is fundamentally probabilistic, but because eight people have been given perfect knowledge of a deterministic branching tree and none of them can prove they're not the copies nobody wants to keep. Emily's insistence on taking the comet pill, Amir's refusal to leave, the recursive phone calls to verify which version is real—these aren't violations of logic. They're the exhaustion of logic. By the time they understand the mechanism completely, understanding has become useless.

By the time they understand the mechanism completely, understanding has become useless.

The film gets quantum mechanics wrong in a way that perfectly predicted how we'd misunderstand artificial systems: we thought knowing the rules meant you could game them, and we thought transparency would create agency. Within a decade, algorithmic systems had scaled past human comprehension entirely—the film's dinner party was optimistic, they could still talk to each other, they could still verify, but now we just accept the collapse without seeing the equation.