Reconstructing Tenet scenes with hand-drawn diagrams

Introduction

After spending a year with Tenet and related material, including the documentary Looking at the World in a New Way: The Making of Tenet, Welby’s videos, the r/Tenet subreddit, and my own “real-life experiments”, I managed to grasp Tenet’s physics and reconstruct some of the core scenes. Of course, there is more that can be reconstructed. It’s hard to say which scene was the most difficult because understanding any of them took a lot of time. I would like to thank the Tenet community on Reddit, especially Alive_Ice7937, for his priceless comments. I’ve reconstructed the following: the Opera siege, Sator’s communication with the future, the Tallinn chase and its temporal pincer movement, the Stalsk-12 battle, and the entire timeline.

The Opera Siege

This scene involves several parties from different organizations, including the CIA, Tenet, Ukraine’s SWAT team (KORD), and the antagonists (Sator and his affiliates). But who is who? Let’s look at this in more detail.

The terrorists occupying the ground floor and taking hostages are believed to be Sator’s men, acting as a diversion to mask the mission of stealing the plutonium. When the terrorists take the hall, the Ukrainian response unit (KORD) arrives exactly on time, suggesting they were notified in advance (likely by the CIA).

We also see the “Well-Dressed Man” (WDM) and a Russian general sitting in the VIP area. They are there to carry out an exchange; the WDM is an undercover CIA agent selling the “lost” plutonium (which the Russians lost in 2008) back to the general. Perhaps the CIA learned that the WDM’s team was compromised and sent TP’s team to extract them.

The Ukrainian SWAT team also includes “moles” - mercenaries affiliated with Sator. Their task is to mine the building with explosives to disguise the event as a terrorist attack where the audience is merely “collateral damage”. Meanwhile, the “private Russians” in the van are the backup. Their job is to kidnap and interrogate TP and the WDM to find the plutonium’s location if plan A fails. Finally, there is Neil, who saves TP’s life by catching an inverted bullet. It is believed that TP and the other survivor were rescued from the Russians by Tenet.

Communication with the Future

Communication with the future is crucial for Sator. However, the type of communication differs depending on the direction of time. Because Sator lives in the relative past, he may use an electronic device to send coordinates to the future, but the future can only respond with inverted objects or material placed in a time capsule. Since the material exchange via a time capsule works effectively in both time directions, Sator uses it for communication as well. The capsule must be buried in a place that remains safe and inaccessible to anyone for hundreds of years.

There are few scenarios in which Sator needs to communicate with the future. One of the main reasons is receiving payments from the antagonists, who pay him in gold bars. In a nutshell, Sator can notify the future that he needs another payout and digs up a capsule full of inverted gold bars. But this process is more complex. Because the gold is inverted, its timeline is upside down. Thus, Sator can’t simply bury an empty capsule, dig it up full of gold, and take it to the turnstile to revert.

When working with inverted material, cause and effect switch places. From the inverted gold’s perspective, it should be dug up and brought to the turnstile, but from Sator’s perspective, it appears in the turnstile, then he puts it in the capsule and buries it. Why does the gold appear in the turnstile from nowhere? Because Sator intended for this action to happen. In the turnstile, Sator sees two stacks of gold - inverted and forward. He brings the inverted one to the dead drop, puts it in the capsule, buries it, and transmits the coordinates to the future.

The Tallinn Highway Chase

In Tallinn, Sator launches a temporal pincer movement to obtain the plutonium, which the Protagonist (TP) is supposed to steal from a firetruck. Sator sends Volkov in a Mercedes to follow the BMW carrying TP and Neil. Volkov is in touch with Sator and gives him all the details of what is happening on the highway. Sator waits in the freeport until Volkov and his inverted self arrive at the building.

Then, Sator inverts in the freeport and exits the turnstile. He goes to find the plutonium using the information obtained from TP. Now Sator sees all the events in reverse and gets into the Mercedes to find the case tossed on the highway, while Kat - in the inverted Audi - starts moving, most likely using a cruise control feature that starts the car moving without a human.

Sator doesn’t find the plutonium in the case and swaps cars with the inverted driver; he moves to the inverted SUV. Then the cars converge, and Sator hands the case back to TP and sees how TP throws the plutonium into the inverted Saab. Now Sator knows where it is. Then, the SUV driven by the inverted driver outruns the BMW and turns around, and Sator instructs Volkov to take the plutonium from the Saab (“The Algorithm is at the freeport”).

The Stalsk-12 Battle

On the 14th, Tenet moves to Stalsk-12 to thwart Sator from burying the Algorithm. They launch a temporal pincer movement. The Red team, with TP and Ives, moves forward in time from the briefing location to the hypocenter. The Blue team is reversed and departs from the icebreaker while inverted in the choppers. The choppers are forward-moving, so the icebreaker is their destination, while the Blue Team boards them to fly to the hypocenter.

The Blue team lands on the ridge above the hypocenter minutes before the explosion. When the soldiers exit the containers, they see the Red team disembarking from the choppers. TP and Ives are a splinter unit tasked with the mission of lifting the assembled Algorithm before the countdown goes off. Neil, in turn, reverts on the battlefield when he sees Volkov setting a tripwire at the entrance to the hypocenter.

Eventually, TP and Neil lift the assembled Algorithm to the surface with the help of two Neils. While the normal, forward-moving Neil helps them get to the surface, his future inverted self sacrifices himself and saves TP’s life from Volkov’s bullet.

Reconstructing the Timeline

Now we can summarize movements of the main characters through space and time.

Reconstructing Sator’s Contract with the Future

The document we see in the capsule is actually called «Свидетельство о внесении записи в Единый государственный реестр юридических лиц», which translates to English as “Certificate of Entry in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities.” This is the main document issued by the Federal Taxation Service (Федеральная Налоговая Служба) and is used to officially register a business in the Russian Federation. In the United States, its closest equivalent would be an Employer Identification Number (EIN), which is assigned by the IRS to business entities operating in the U.S.

The document shown in the capsule isn’t a full copy of the original - some fields were omitted, and some were added, meaning the structure was modified. I took an original Russian certificate, reconstructed it to match the version seen in the capsule, incorporated details from Sator’s contract, and also translated the whole thing into English.