Inception Movie Ending Explanation - Sequel Potential?

What does the ending to the movie Inception mean? In the ending of the movie Inception, you must decide if the main character, Cobb, has returned from a series of nested dream worlds to a true reality reunited with his children. You could just as easily accept the explanation that in the ending he remains unknowingly trapped in yet another dream world.

Inception is a movie of dreams within dreams, the ability to manipulate dreams, physics, and merged memories. People can architect other people's dreams and even impersonate other people in dreams. With all of these aspects, the hope of reaching a certain explanation about the ending is near impossible. But the range of explanations opens many interesting possibilities. Since Inception is not based on a book, we must explore the evidence and insights on our own to find an explanation for the ending.

Some evidence suggests that Cobb may now be in his true reality. He is finally united with his children and has emerged from 4 levels of dreams. The top he spins at the ending of Inception looks like it is about to fall. Even Mal - Cobb's wife who hunts him down in dreams - does not seem to interject into this world. The movie could certainly end happily right here.

However, other loose ends and curious scenes in the movie suggest another ending - Cobb may still be in another dream state and that constructing a sequel would be both easy and interesting. At the ending of Inception, the top continues to spin unusually longer than expected. The top wavers slightly, but does not show any sure sign of falling. Cobb walks away without actually seeing the top fall. This is the item he knows best and uses to determine if he is dreaming or not. However, the top was created by Mal - not Cobb. Cobb may not even know the characteristics of the top as well as he thinks he does - especially if his perceived reality is actually a dream world.

Let's continue by looking at some simple questions that remain unexplained from Inception's ending.

- What, if anything, did Cobb use before he started using Mal's spinning top?
- Why doesn't he use have or use his own unique item anymore?
- Without an object that pre-dream was made by him and not from Mal, how can he really be sure where he is?

Let's also explore other curious evidence and loose ends that suggest not just a movie sequel, but also support the explanation that Cobb is still in a dream layer.

1. History.
Only a highly select group of people have knowledge or skill enough to enter nested dream worlds. One of the first people we know of who experimented with this ability is Miles, who is Cobb's father in law (i.e. Mal's father). Miles is also a professor, Cobb's mentor and former teacher, and even seems to be a gatekeeper between Cobb and Cobb's children. From a historical perspective, one can reasonably believe that if Miles, whose very name choice suggests previous experience, is Cobb's former teacher and mentor, then at least one other person exists in this select group of dream manipulators whose interactions could predate and therefore effect even Cobb's own perceived reality.

2. Family.
Another peculiar point in the movie Inception is that the elite group of people with knowledge of dream worlds includes at least three people (Cobb, Mal, and Miles) from the same family.

3. Miles is not hunting for Cobb.
Miles explains that Cobb has manipulated what Miles taught him to do things that Miles does not personally agree with. Law enforcement is hunting for Cobb for the perceived murder of Miles' daughter Mal. Oddly, Miles himself does not act with any hostility towards Cobb about Mal's death. He even cooperates as a friend to enable Cobb with his mission.

4. Ariadne takes unusual risks to learn more about Cobb.
Ariadne is introduced to Cobb by Miles who tells Cobb that she is a dream architect even more skilled than Cobb. Ariadne, because of actions that she initiates herself, rapidly becomes a character much more intimately aware of Cobb's personal circumstances than anyone else in his team. Although she is the newest employed member of Cobb's team, Ariadne takes great risk deliberately inserting herself uninvited into Cobb's own personal dreams. She is even bold and motivated enough to quickly insert herself into the "basement" of Cobb's memories, even though he explained to her before that he did not want her to. She quickly becomes the only person who knows fully how Cobb's memories present risks that even his own team is not fully aware of.

5. Ariadne goes everywhere Cobb goes.
Ariadne is the only character in the movie who accompanies Cobb not only into his deepest memories, but also into every layer of their mission's nested dreams. She even is with him in the deepest state of limbo because she is also instrumental in persuading Cobb to attempt to enter limbo when their mission is about to fail. Whether by design Ariadne has full access to anywhere that Cobb will go, in spite of being the newest team member.

6. Ariadne is at both major confrontations with Mal in the movie.
In the basement scene, Mal tells Ariadne that she recognizes who Ariadne is, but does not attack her. Something is unexplained about that relationship. Again, at the most significant confrontations with Mal in Limbo, Ariadne is present and trying to convince Cobb to leave.

7. Robert Fisher is more than meets the eye.
Fisher is the executive heir to his father's company and is the focus of the teams mission of inception. The team is trying to suggest to Robert Fisher's subconscious mind the idea to dissemble his Father's company. In spite of background checks and extremely deep research to reconstruct believable dream spaces, we learn that Robert Fisher's mind has been trained against dream intrusion and extraction. This is a major and unexpected turning point in the movie and we never get an explanation of how he obtained his training. Even the powerful and dream-aware executive Saito does not appear to be adequately trained in preventing dream intrusions. Fisher's preparations suggest that there is something that the movie ending has still not explained about his character.

8. Mal's projection is far more sentient and independent than any other.
Mal's name oddly coincides with a Latin root for "bad". Although memories from other members of Cobb's team never enter dream spaces, Cobb's memories of both Mal and interestingly their children seem able to invade every dream space including limbo. In limbo, Mal even demonstrates perception of all of Cobb's previous, ongoing, and current nested dream states. She even explains to him that he seems to want and even enjoy being chased the world over by corporations. She is suggesting that he wants to be in the dreams he is in.

9. Mal suggests another reality exists.
The epiphany of Inception occurs when Cobb finally decides to stop avoiding Mal. He confronts her and even overcomes his desires to imprison his memories of her. Repeatedly throughout Inception, Mal's memories suggest that Cobb knows how to break out and find her. Cobb believes that by means of inception he drove Mal to believe that reality was just a dream to break out of their multiple dream layers. His action led to her death (which Mal believed would, as is typical in dream worlds, return her to the true reality) but which Cobb regrettably believes unintentionally and regrettably led to her real death. Her perceived death resulted in his guilt as well as his efforts to guard his memories of her. Although it is explained that she and the other ambient characters are projections of Cobb or other character's minds, her repeated efforts to suggest that he knows the way out also suggests that a part of his subconscious fears that she might have been right.

A Potential Movie Sequel.

Inception raises many other questions that may also be worth exploring. Based on the points above, one interesting explanation (a.k.a. potential movie sequel) is the idea that Mal is correct and that Cobb will eventually have to face his fear of taking the literal leap of faith that Mal took.

If Cobb is still in a dream world, this world must be far more expertly crafted than any dream world he has knowingly ventured into. People with expertise and history before Cobb do exist and could be capable of crafting this world. Cobb could also be in a dream world because he has lost the desire or ability to perceive the dream world for what it is. His memories of Mal seem unable to penetrate into this world, but perhaps that is because of his own acceptance of it as reality.

One would expect that if Cobb is still in a dream, then someone might attempt to retrieve him. They would need to find the physical location in the real world where he is currently dreaming. This line of thought suggests that Mal must be unable to re-enter the dream world to meet him. She would have been either unwilling or prevented by someone else.

If anyone could enter Cobb's dream world, it would have to be someone other than Mal - someone unrecognizable and under cover. Ariadne, as a newcomer is a prime candidate. Her heightened motivation to seek out Cobb's secrets, her introduction and endorsement by Miles, her rare natural skill that exceeds even Cobb's, and her recognition of who she is by Mal all suggest that she may be involved for personal reasons.

Enough reason exists to believe that Ariadne could be Cobb's own daughter seeking answers about where he is, why he is missing, and what happened between him an Mal. Ariadne could also be trying to covertly get close enough to understand and guide Cobb out of his dream world.

Could we have possibly seen Cobb's son as well? Not likely. We can muse with the idea of Robert Fisher or others being Cobb's son, possibly shadowing their father's actions. While a covert recovery can explain Ariadne hiding her character, it is difficult to imagine that Fisher would not have recognized and possibly even resisted Cobb... unless Cobb's unexpected interest in Fisher raised enough curiosity for him enough to play along to create a difficult but not impossible mission. This idea could also explain Fisher's unexpected training against extraction. This explanation also could explain why Cobb was able to persuade Fisher to grant access and allow Cobb to protect him when Cobb told Fisher in his dram that his dream had been compromised. We were told that all previous attempts to alert a dreamer of a compromise had abruptly and disastrously failed. While this could be possible, there are many other explanations that could give a different and more interesting ending.

While the story of recovering Cobb could make a very moving sequel to Inception, certainly many other great explanations for endings and movie sequels exist as well. It is not very difficult to envision a whole series of follow on movie titles to Inception like Deception, Perception, Misconception, Interception, Preconception, or Exception. With all of the flexibility anyone could dream of, the one remarkable feature of the movie Inception is that imagination is the only limit.