[innerSpaceman]

Yeah ...

Spoiler:

I suppose if there was an actual alternate reality spawned each time Capt. Colter Stevens (his porn name, I presume) was introduced via the Source Code procedure, it would not be reliant on the brain memory storage of the subject being replaced in that reality.

Sure, there's no explanation of why the programmers think they are tapping into a dead memory bank that's somehow subjectively malleable for its 8-minute duration. That seems a rather large error if indeed what's happening instead is the spawning of an actual alternate reality. But, yeah, that's the point of the film's McGuffin - they got it all wrong!

Personally, I think this film handled its lack of believable sci-fi explanation better than most, by rationally stating - in the midst of a real-world, time-of-the-essence emergency - that every second spent explaining the science is time detracted from completing the mission. To me, this is all the respect a film McGuffin deserves, and better than one usually gets.


Personally, I'd rather consider that Capt. Stevens ends up in an internally-generated fantasy world while still a lump of meat in the "real" world where he is not taken off life-support (that only having happened in his fantasy world). Admittedly, there are problems with that theory, not the least of which is how are we seeing him taken off life support if he's not "there" to witness it?

But, to me, that's less of a problem than him being able to send a text message from one particular alternate reality where the train explosion never happened and thus Source Code was never invoked ... to a completely different parallel universe where the Source Code was used, and thus Goodwin feels honor-bound to terminate his life-support. By the film's internal logic, he would only be able to text the Goodwin at the control center pre-Source Code, yet we see her receive the message in the post-Source Code control center.

Boggle on purpose, or by mistake? We'll never know.