The Perfect Icebreaker

If I Hadn't Met You, such a beautiful show with an intensely melancholic ending. The sense of despair is seated from the very first episode and prevails through to the very end. The highs, the lows, the bad and good are all reminiscent of how life isn't perfect, how it could go wrong at any turn. A very sobering thing to consider and calls the viewer to not take life nor loved ones for granted. It had me crying, smiling, hopeful and unsure of anything just as much as the protagonist of the show. It's been a long time since I've watched it If I'm going to be truthful, so most of the details are blurry, however, the emotions I felt are still imprinted in my mind.

It begins with the head male of the series, Eduard, whom has made a beautiful family with his college sweetheart and has settled down with the mesmerizing Elisa. They have two children together, one girl and one boy.

During a drive home, Eduard encounters an accident. He, momentarily, hits something and stops the car. Due to the fog and rain, he's unable to see out his front wind shield and happens to see a hang drag across his side window. An eerie unsettling feeling sets in, forcing him out of his car to see who the person was. However, he's unable to find them. Drenched and confused, he leaves. It's not clarified whether he was hallucinating or really seeing someone.

After leaving he makes his way home, to the smell of freshly baked fish. Unfortunately, the aroma isn't enough to calm him down as he's asking his wife Elisa that there is something he needs to discuss with her about transportation, in haste. We can tell they've had this sort of problem before because Elisa is pretty furious, warning him that they'll "talk about it later".

Meanwhile, before they discuss, Eduard decides to chat with his children and get them ready for dinner. It's in his interaction with his children we see how unaware, inconsiderate, and clumsy Eduard really is as a husband and father. His daughter even calls him "Scatter brain" because he's very forgetful and all over the place. Which we see when he forgets to lock their home's front door and only returns to lock it once his daughter reminds him before bed time. Earlier, while speaking with his son prior to dinner, whom he finds blaring noisy music, he says "Don't you have homework to do? How about studying for exams?" To which his son mentions, "You really don't know what's going on around you, do you? Exams finished a week ago." It gives a sense too that Eduard truly isn't involved in his children's affair, activities, and isn't even sensitive to time that passes.

Later when Elisa and her husband are alone, they speak of whom is taking the children to school the following morning. Elisa tries to convince Eduard to let her borrow his car, due to her own car having complications, mentioning "I don't want to use it until it's been fixed." She shows concern to which he fixates more on work rather than her worries and tells her he has an important promotion tomorrow, he can't miss. Unwilling to compromise and allow Elisa to borrow his vehicle and compensate by taking alternative travel, the next morning she and the kids take off.

He wakes up late, hops into his car distressed that no one woke him up and heads for work. Unfortunately, he receives a phone call that his family died in an auto accident. The guilt eats at him, recalling his refusal to allow Elisa his car and he can't manage the despair.

He later meets a woman, Dr. Everest. This is where things get interesting! Dr. Everest saves Eduard from an attempt on his own life, gives him a way to travel to an alternate universe, where he can meet Elisa again, and restart his life.

Tempted, Eduard takes the offer and sets off on a journey for the rest of the show where he can find an alternate reality to settle in.

There are many twist and turns from there on out, a small backstory about how Eduard and Elisa met before college. It reveals how Dr. Everest discovered alternate universe hopping, and what Elisa and Eduard's life would have been like in many different timelines.

The minor details in the show is really what makes it stand out the most. In specifics, when discussing reality hopping through wormholes, Dr. Everest mentions to Eduard that time flows differently within each world he visits, so while in some only three days may pass, back in his true universe it would have been six months.

This show really speaks to my inner nerd and romance geek.

One of the most memorable scenes is where Eduard and Elisa sing in a talent show. Eduard was an entirely different major, there was no possible way for their paths to cross, except through Eduard's friends encouraging him to go. There he finds Elisa, with his guitar he provides the background for her beautiful song, Risc De Ara. A song portraying the moment of love, in which every love tale about to end is frozen in for only a little time, the sweetness of love that is about to disappear, wishing to relive the emotions with the same person a million times more, before it turns to smoke.

It's here, that their paths intertwine entirely.

If I Hadn't Met You is nostalgic, heart breaking, and romantic with a hint of science, to spice things up a bit. It warns us to cherish those we have near. It keeps us holding onto hope, and elicits yearning for the past.

The next recommendation is Interstellar, not because of it's romantic aspects (since there is none) but because of it's focus on traveling through wormholes. It isn't about alternate realities, but if someone watching If I Hadn't Met You wanted to delve more into a similar science aspect of the show, Interstellar is the right choice.

The movie is about the inhabitants of earth quickly running out of resources, endangered by the threat of extinction and the race to finding an inhabitable planet in another galaxy via wormhole.

Former Nasa pilot, Cooper, takes on this mission despite the fact that another team was sent out ahead of him, however they've gone quiet . He has two plans set before him, transmit Quantum data to the scientists back on earth to enable them to create a propulsion theory, that would save the human race by moving them to another galaxy, or establishing a colony elsewhere.

The only way he could possibly do this, however, is by traveling through a black hole of some kind. Black holes are ways to travel to another place in the universe. Cooper is able to do this, survive the black hole and successfully sends the quantum data back to the scientist on mother earth.

I think, whether anyone is a science nerd, or not, we can all come up with fascinating ideas or conclusions about Interstellar on our own. That's one of the great qualities of the movie, it allows us to freely explore and guess what's going on. We can imagine as much as we please.

(SPOILER ALERT) At the end, Cooper manages to transmit the code by breaking through the fourth dimension, breaking through space time itself. While he's communicating the message to his daughter (Murphy), whom happens to be a scientist, within her childhood bedroom, she can hear the knocks in present time. However, at the beginning of the film, the knocks of the present (which is also the future) reached her even as a child within the same room in the past .

It really harkens, in my opinion to Einstein's perceptions of time. His famous "Time is not linear but an illusion, and we merely use it to measure time for human purposes."

It's as though our actions are never ending vibrations that echo into life and get lost in the minutes, the hours the days, the months, the years...in the seemingly linear life of ours. Only time isn't linear. So, our actions will always have a permanent mark that we can always revisit. It's almost like it's engrained.

Then there's the concept of wormholes, and how the universe needs negative energy to create blackholes, however, the universe is made of both positive as well as negative energy. Therefore, they cancel each other out and so there is no energy in our universe.

It makes me wonder how black holes could be possible in Interstellar, but maybe the movie is set in a different way than our earth. Maybe it's not confined by our laws. Then again it is a movie and I'm not a quantum physicist nor am I a science major of any kind. Just a big nerd that likes to dabble in the "what if's" from time to time, not going into the more complicated theories.

Interstellar is a bit vague, but does showcase the "What if's" about wormhole travel and black hole travel in a really interesting way. It's not overly complicated, so it's welcoming to everyone, nerd or not! And honestly...who doesn't love watching films on the unknown?

These two shows are the Ice breakers, and hopefully if you read up to this point you'll put them to good use. If not, no problem. I'm sure in another alternate reality, you already have.