Themes: redemption, corruption, free will:
- Dillinger Jr.: a nerd who everyone hates and thinks is bad but who could actually be good. He is young, and has associated with bad people but hasn't actually been directly implicated yet
- Castor's girl Gem: Like Dilliger, she is young and could have been misled. She could be redeemed.
- Part of the plot could be about how everyone always suspects and distrusts Dillinger and Gem, and about their choice to do something good anyway (or possibly, they could have a similar opportunity, and one could choose good and one could choose bad).
- Zuse: In order to escape his enemies, long ago Zuse 'forked' into two processes, Castor and Pollux, the idea being that Castor and Pollux would each have different checksums from Zuse and neither would not be detected as Zuse by Clu's forces. Each of Castor and Pollux contain all of Zuse's code, and each has identical checksum with the other (because they are exact opposites and the checksum function used by the Grid is indifferent to parity). Castor is evil but Zuse and Pollux are good (but Pollux still loves his brother..). Pollux is overly outgoing and Castor is overly shy. As in the myth, their process tree has a fixed amount of CPU time allocated to it, so they cannot both be awake at the same time. If they were to recombine, they would reconstitute Zuse (possibly only one of them could also reconstitue Zuse (because since they are opposites each one contains all of the information in the other), but only if the other were terminated, making available the other half of the CPU time). In Tron 3, Castor turns up a number of times trying to help to protagonists, but of course they think he's Pollux and run away.
- Quorra: Quorra can go bad or at least a less good: The whole standard plot line about small-town people who have had little exposure to cosmopolitan life becoming intoxicated by fame and fortune. She could refuse to go back to the Grid, thinking it small and unimportant.
- Similarly, about CLU: in Tron I, CLU was portrayed as kind of dorky and uptight. This was lost in Tron II, and that's too bad, because Clu's uptightness is the reason why he did all the bad things he did.
- Something from Tron I could have profound philosophical consequences; both users and programs consider the other to "always have a plan". This could mean that each side regards the other as deterministic and lacking free will. In reality, both sides could be deterministic (both typical computer programs and Newtonian physics are deterministic, after all), and free will could be something that depends on your point of view, a la Kant.
- This could fit in with the quantum teleportation comment in Tron Legacy to provide a fuzzy explanation for why the heck people and programs can appear as humanoids (whose appearance and behavioral mannerisms contains much more information than their program code) and be transferred between the realms; the "soul" of people and programs alike is something like a platonic ideal, a concept that can be expressed in code or in Earth physics (both deterministic state machines running on an underlying platform with access to non-determinism); the expression of the computer world as a detailed world (lots of information) rather than a few lines of code (less information) could be redundant in that there is some sort of spiritual "god" or "reality" function which provides a mapping from the low-information (lines of code) representation to the high-information (programs as seen by a person in the computer world) representation. If this were the case, then one religious dispute could be the uniqueness of God; that is, is there only one way to perceive the programs in the computer world as people on Earth, or are there many, and the transformation that we see is just an accident of fate? And if there are many, will ANY homomorphism do (and the homomorphism could go in either direction), or are there a restricted subset of "meaningful" interpretation functions? See also Permutation City. It would fit if Flynn had been thinking along these lines because of the term isomorphic algorithms.
Other fun stuff to work in:
- Zero knowledge proofs
- randomearths (parallel earths, and parallel Grids; the name 'randomearth' is from Moebius)
- About Flynn: not saying they should come back, but just some comments. He was presented as the good guy but really the whole CLU problem arose from his ego. Flynn always was a bit egotistical. It was egotistical of him to make a partial copy of himself (CLU), assuming that what the world needed was more of him.
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