I saw Wanted last night, and there really, seriously, needs to be a discussion about the wisdom of taking your orders from a Loom of Fate. I mean our hero (don’t worry, no spoilers here really) waffles over the decision to do what’s he told for a second, but eventually he decides the Loom knows more than he.

This is simply further proof of why I wouldn’t make a good assassin of fate. You show me the Loom of Fate and I say, “Really? Where do you get the thread? How do you make sure it’s weaving the cloth of fate, or does the cloth not really matter? How do you know you’re interpreting it correctly? What if the first interpreters got it wrong? Is there a Rosetta Loom somewhere you want to tell me about? How do I know this is a good Loom of Fate and not a bad one? Can fate be evil and good?”

I feel like these are all perfectly valid questions and it isn’t too much to expect that one might ask them before following the Loom’s orders. Obviously, the movie progresses, things are more complicated than they seem, but I couldn’t help remarking as the proverbial feces hit the proverbial fan that this is what happens when you take orders from a loom.

And then we have the problems of fate—I like fate, we get along pretty well, but once you start preemptively killing people because fate deems it so we’re into some pretty murky area. For example, let’s say that the person I take orders from goes evil—now fate is going to think that I’m evil because so long as everything stays as it is I will be. But what if I figure it out? Can I not change my destiny? People can be tricked, can they not? So how do we know how savvy fate is? Is it my lack of awareness that has caused me to slip into evil and a danger to mankind, or is it my association with that specific person at that specific time? If it’s the second…well, that’s very malleable and I’ll thank fate not to judge me because of what I might do.

But if names of people only come up after they have committed their first atrocious act (or thirteenth) then I could accept that easier. I see you killed a baby, now I kill you. This is a very simply one-to-one relationship. But I kill you because you might kill the baby—the Loom and I disagree there. Though it does raise that excellent question of would you kill [insert evil dictator’s name here] as a child if you could? And if (very big if) said Loom of Fate really were a Loom of Fate and I could accept its Fateyness, I might be able to. But in order for that to happen we’re back to the earlier situation of proving the merits of taking orders from a Loom of Fate.

The Loom weaves in circles.

(ah! I’m funny)