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Towards the end of the first episode on season four of Black Mirror, The USS Callister is damaged and Walton sacrifices himself by trying to fix the engine from inside. When the engine starts running again he is disintegrated by the flow of plasma or whatever. He doesn't join the crew later on when they move inside the real multiplayer version of the game so the question is if he has really died in the sense that his digital copy no longer exists.

Now if the answer to that first question is yes then why didn't everyone else just kill themselves the same way? They were aware that they are digital copies and they wanted to kill themselves anyway by flying through the wormhole, so why didn't they do it the easy guaranteed way?

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  • question title and body are asking little different questions
    – Ankit Sharma ♦
    Commented Jan 2, 2018 at 7:34

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Walton died in the sense that he didn't exist in the game anymore. However, there is no reason why the code storing his character wouldn't have been available, had Daly wanted to revive him.

The point of flying into the worm hole was to destroy the code that stored each character. It was thought that the firewall would delete this code and ensure permanent death (if the DNA samples are also taken).

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  • This is a more sensible explanation and probably the correct one (and also clearer than the other answer).
    – Paghillect
    Commented Jan 4, 2018 at 1:16
  • However, there is no reason why the code storing his character wouldn't have been available As much as I appreciate the general plot of the episode, this seems like a major oversight to their plans. If Daly had not been killed due to the network upgrade; he would've likely been able to rebuild the mod on an offline machine, using their stored data. It seems weird to assume that the DNA fridge was the only backup that Daly had, instead of also just a digital one.
    – Flater
    Commented Feb 20, 2018 at 17:24
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Walton knew he would get burned but not "die" because Daly has overall control and doesn't allow it. But when the Callister flies into the wormhole it opens the pocket universe to the update patch and all of Daly's special code is overwritten, which is why he suddenly loses admin access to escape the shuttle pod. So Walton, critically injured "in universe", would presumably then die as Daly's code wouldn't protect him (much like how the arachnoid change reverse, or the receptionist lost her blue skin tone). So his body is now floating in space (if he was ejected from the ship by the exhaust system) or lying in the engine room as a charred skeleton. He might have rebooted to wherever in universe characters go when they are killed in the game (to show up in any sequel) but this is never shown in the episode (game NPCs presumably are erased once they are killed in game since other characters suggest this before they learn of the DNA storage). He could be alive and whole somewhere else in the ship and just didn't make it back to the bridge before the episode ended, but this seems unlikely.

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