Breaking Down the Ending of ‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’

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Not only does the latest Indiana Jones romp get freaky towards the end, there are twists and turns that can't be explained as logically as an archaeology professor might like. Are you still scratching your head as to what really happened at the end of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny? There are spoilers for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny ahead. You shouldn't need a whip and a fedora to know that.

The film takes place in 1969... well, mostly. Fresh out of retirement from his latest teaching gig at Hunter College in Manhattan, Dr. Henry "Indiana" Jones teams up with his goddaughter Helena Shaw (a charming and shady Phoebe Waller-Bridge in full trickster mode) to recover the "dial of destiny." Fitting, since Indy's day job was professor, the movie could come with a whole curriculum. The plot is imbued with geometry, geography, history, science, and even Latin. But let's focus on what happens at the end of the movie, after they finally find the dial, because it's weird AF.

So, Indiana Jones went back in time using math...

Previous Indiana Jones films have featured dalliances with religious curses, black magic, immortal medieval knights, and aliens. So time travel really isn't that weird considering.

The "dial of destiny" that Indiana and Helena are racing against the Nazis (of course it's Nazis) to find is actually Archemedes' Antikythera. This is a real historical object, like the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail in Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. And just like those objects in previous Indiana Jones films, it has additional supernatural properties in The Dial of Destiny. The real Antikythera is considered an early, and analog, computer. It could predict the locations of stars in the sky and other astronomical phenomena like eclipses.

In the movie, Indy's associate Basil Shaw (Helena's father, played by Toby Jones) and a Nazi scientist Dr. Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) believe that the dial can also help predict and locate fissures in time. I'm not going to explain how time fissures work, or even what a time fissure is, because I am not an astrophysicist–and also because they're fictional and don't really exist. But in the movie, they're basically like little portals, up in the sky for some reason, that you can travel through to get to another time period. Voller and Shaw think that they're predictable, like an astrological phenomenon, and that the dial can tell you when and where they occur. Their theory is that if you set the dial to the time you wish to return to, the dial will give you a location.

Indy assumes that Voller wants to go back in time and help Hitler win the war, but that's not exactly the plan. Mikkelsen's nefarious character actually wants to take a plane through the time fissure in Sicily, then skip over from Mussolini's Italy to Nazi Germany, kill Hitler, and rule Germany himself. He kidnaps Indy and takes him along out of spite. But don't be fooled: while assassinating Hitler is technically a noble cause, Voller appears to be just as much of a racist and a fascist as the former führer. He's still a villain.

The calculations were WRONG... maybe?

Indy realizes on the plane that, because Archimedes was unaware that the continents move over time, there's no way for a dial based on 2000-year-old knowledge to take them exactly where they want to go. That doubt is enough for Voller to want to turn back, but it's too late. Sure enough, instead of 1939 Italy, they end up in Ancient Greece. Not just any time in Ancient Greece, however: it's specifically the Roman Siege of Syracuse (213-212 BC) that Indy's lecture at the beginning of the movie explained.

However, continental drift actually isn't why Indy and the Nazis ended up when they ended up. It turns out that Archimedes, who was building the Antikythera during the Siege, engineered it so that whoever was able to get it working in the future would travel back to him and help him win the war against the Romans. Which doesn't work, by the way. Archimedes died soon after, they lost the war, and as you may have noticed Sicily is no longer a part of Greece. But still, the Roman soldiers were momentarily distracted by the "dragon" in the sky. Every little bit helps, right? They also managed to take out all of the Nazis.

Voller probably should have noticed that his own watch was in Archimedes' tomb when they opened it in 1969, and clearly helped to inspire the design of the dial. But he was too busy bragging about having bested the legendary Indiana Jones. Classic villain mistake!

Indy considers staying in the past

Dr. Jones is a historian and an archaeologist with not a lot going on at home. So when he finds himself in Ancient Greece, he thinks about staying there. He'd finally be able to observe an ancient culture firsthand. Helena begs him not to, floating the idea that he could muck up the history he's studied by staying behind. (He could, for example, tell Archimedes about that whole continental drift thing.) I don't think that would actually be the case, given that the time fissure creates a closed loop. It seems like that means they aren't in danger of messing with the space-time continuum. I think Helena was always meant to knock Indy out and take him back to 1969 with her before he spilled too many future secrets. That's what happens, anyway.

Helena also makes the point that Indy would likely be tortured and suffer a horrific death in those times, which I think is the better reason to GTFO. He wakes up back in his apartment, where Helena has called his wife Marion. The two reconcile. All is well!

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