Originally posted by cgannon64
Two questions: Why wasn't the entire human race destroyed when Neo chose to save Trinity, and why could Neo use his powers outside the Matrix?
The way I see it is that the doom of the human race is not to instantly follow Neo's making the wrong choice. That instead it is an eventual failure. By making the choice to save Trinity he broke the cycle. He will not select the new founders of Zion nor will he allow his knowledge to be integrated into the matrix. The result of this is a cascading collapse that can no longer be averted because the control has failed. And eventually all the currently plugged in humans will reject the simulation and have to be killed by the machines.
Now this brings up the question of can't they just restart the matrix, like they did with all the previous failures. In which case the architect was just exagerating the problem so that Neo would make the right choice (though dooming a whole batch of humans even if not the entire race is not much better). The other possibility is that because of the success of the current matrix the backup procedures were eliminated, triming unnecessary elements. Though this seems unlikely.
The idea recently posted by another poster that the outside world is real, but that Neo just did not downlink after saving Trinity so this final time he is in a new matrix does have some merit. The "truth" in of itself should not really convince the one that the matrix needs to be maintained. Instead when the One visits the achitect he leaves into a special matrix designed to convince him of the futility of making the wrong choice so that he will come back hoping to somehow salvage the matrix. Additionally this second matrix which Neo just entered may be the actual process in which the architect interfaces with the One and updates the matrix.
In either case, this time Neo has suddenly realized that he did not leave the matrix the final time. The coma itself may actually be just a protection program that was written into his brain by the architect to prevent him from realizing this truth.
Of course this still leaves the issue of Agent Smith and his deceit if the real world until the end was the real world. However, it is possible the architect may know about Agent Smith's escape (may have happened the previous times as well), and as such he included this in the simulation for why the defense failed.
Well what ever the case, thinking about this can create too many circles in circles to handle at times. Maybe the animatrix shorts will shed some light onto the topic. In any case November is no that far off.
