Did the jet engine come from the tangent world to the real world? It isn’t a metal “vehicle,” but it is still metal, so it could’ve sucked into the time portal and followed Donnie into the real world. But the timing is irrelevant: Donnie still had the time to come back home and be crushed by the engine. So that might mean that the engine came from another time period from the tangent world. Also, it doesn’t show that a jet was found after the accident.

Is Frank the manipulated dead? Is Gretchen the manipulated dead? The bunny Frank who already had his eye blown out probably came from the future after the human Frank got shot, because the manipulated dead can control the time traveling according to the book. Some of the sites I looked at indicated that Gretchen was also the manipulated dead, but it didn’t seem like she was able to come back in time.

The butterfly effect in this movie might be evident, but some of the things our class discussed didn’t make sense. If Donnie didn’t burn that guy’s house, the crazy lady would’ve gone to the competition and the plane crash could’ve still occurred. Just because Donnie died, doesn’t mean that the world wouldn’t end. He wasn’t the cause of it and he didn’t do anything to change the future. All he was able to do was to time travel at the end of the movie, come back to “real” world if it was real, and die in his room without remembering what happened at all. If he traveled several times in the Tangent world, he would’ve remembered who Frank was and he would’ve known what to do to change the future, destiny or fate, but he couldn’t because he didn’t remember any. The Tangent world was described as dreams which most people wouldn’t remember later, and Donnie was part of those people.