The Adam Project Ending and Time Travel Explained

Realising he’s misjudged the time jump by four years, Adam has little patience for the tricky situation he’s now in, and the awful way Young Adam treats his mother Ellie (Jennifer Garner) after his father’s sudden death. In the future, Adam has shifted his anger and grief from his mother’s shoulders onto his dead dad’s legacy: it turns out daddy Louis (Mark Ruffalo) was the one who accidentally invented time travel in the first place, causing a chain reaction that led to a very bleak future for everyone, including Adam.

The Time Jet

Gritting his teeth and buckling down, Future Adam realizes he needs Young Adam to fix his damaged ship, as the time jet’s controls work by recognizing the user’s DNA. Because Adam is injured, the jet won’t let him fix the damage or fly it. However, Young Adam’s uninjured DNA will apparently work just fine in a pinch so that Adam can heal and hopefully take over control of the ship after repairs are complete. Unfortunately, Adam doesn’t heal before he jumps back to 2018, and so Young Adam has to stick around.

Meanwhile, the villainous Sorian and her clean up crew track the time jet back to the past, where Adam has temporarily escaped her clutches.

Time Travel Logic

Young Adam is excited to meet his buff older self, but is naturally very confused and inquisitive about how time travel works. He wants to know if Adam remembers everything that’s happening, since they’re the same person and all. Or maybe this is a multiverse situation where these events are kickstarting a completely different timeline now that Adam has interfered with the past?

Adam rebuffs as many questions from his younger self as possible and dismisses the notion of a multiverse, mocking him for watching too many movies (the MCU is shaking), telling him that when he goes back to the future his memories of these events will be restored so that he knows what happened, but right now he doesn’t know how all this is going to end or how much of a mess he’s made of the timeline, which is fixed on “a quantum level.”

Yes, unlike those pesky Avengers: Endgame time travel rules, Adam can absolutely change the future here by traveling back to the past, and his quest to find out what exactly happened to his wife Laura may do just that.

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