Oblivion ending explained: Jack tricked the artificial intelligence Tet with his human intelligence

Before Tom Cruise confronted the evil artificial intelligence, the Entity, in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, he confronted Tet in Joseph Kosinski's Oblivion. The world is literally a nuclear waste in space now. Almost all of humanity is lost following a war.

Cruise plays Jack, a technician who is repairing these drones controlled by Tet, which is scheming to rob resources from what's left of the Earth. This female-like machine would be a perfect match to the planet-devouring Unicron we finally met on screen in 2023's Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.

However, the revelation that Tet is the main antagonist in Oblivion comes at a later point, after which Jack needs to destroy this artificial intelligence before it destroys whatever is remaining on Earth. However, at the very last moment in the film, Jack tricked Tet in a way it didn't see coming, and this vast triangular entity is destroyed in a nuclear blast, which also consumes Jack. But fear not, Jack is alive.

Who was in the stasis pod?

The film was a commercial success. (Image via YouTube/Universal Pictures)

Jack knows that he and his partner, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), are the sole survivors on Earth until one day, when Julia (Olga Kurylenko) enters their lives after Jack saves her from an ambush when she was in a stasis pod. And then jealousy enters Victoria's life as she doesn't want Julia at their place. However, Jack wants her to stay regardless.

Victoria reports all of this to her and Jack's commanding officer, Sally, Tet's mission controller, who then asks Jack to bring Julia to the tetrahedral station floating in space. Which is also where Tet is found at the core, but we will get there in a minute.

Jack and Julia then travel to a crash site where they find these scavengers, whom they thought were an evil alien species. They are not. They are the remaining survivors on Earth. Just like the Fremen from Dune's Arrakis.

This is where the big revelation of Oblivion surfaces. The scavengers tell them that Tet is scheming to get rid of any humans alive. Jack still doesn't believe it, but some events following this meeting make it clear that they are telling the truth. Now they are all allies and take a stasis pod with Julia in it, with a nuclear bomb to Tet.

But then, Surprise! The Scavenger's leader, Malcolm Beech (Morgan Freeman), is in it, not Julia. And then, BOOM! The bomb goes off, and everybody dies on that large floating station.

The reason Jack didn't take Julia with him is that it is revealed mid-movie that she is his real wife. He cannot simply let his wife die.

How did Jack survive in Oblivion?

Oblivion is based on a graphic novel of the same name. (Image via YouTube/Universal Pictures)

There is another thing that is common between Dune and Oblivion: clones. The only difference is that they are called Gholas in Dune. So there are several Jacks, which is why they are labeled with numbers.

The one who dies in space was number 49, and the survivor is number 52; both of them had a brief confrontation in the film. And like Dune's Gholas, these clones, too, can retrieve memories. And the way Jack 52 looked at Julia while visiting her with scavengers after three years of Jack and Malcolm's deaths, it seems like he recognized her, his expression explains it all.