this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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Zion is definitely portrayed as that kind of “cold calculating choice”
But the crew especially Morpheus and Neo seem very understanding. They violate orders for the greater good a few times.
I feel like they would’ve tried to help.
They let mouse have his women in red as a kink. They aren’t exactly rule tyrants
I agree that they'd try to help if they could but I think we'd have to assume that getting someone plugged back into the Matrix permanently would carry a much greater risk for the crew required to carry out this operation than is acceptable.
I think this assumption is reasonable because:
When Neo leaves the matrix, within a minute of "waking up" a machine quickly arrives to unscrew his neural connection and flush him down the waste disposal at the back of the pod he was "asleep" in. So we can assume that there's constant monitoring of the pods and lots of machines to quickly dispose of humans that wake up.
The humans want to stay as far away from the machines as possible, hence why they use a dish to broadcast a signal from a hidden portion of the world outside of Zion so they can jack into the Matrix remotely and disconnect when they need to move to avoid detection. Getting inside of one of these human pod farms likely would be a nigh-on impossible task as can be seen when A. Neo and Trinity fly into the heart of machine territory in the 3rd film and B. Morpheus and the crew wait until after Neo gets flushed out into what most of the time is a corpse sewer to fish him out.
During the whole explanation of the matrix from Morpheus we can see that as soon as a human is grown enough to be picked they're moved into one of these pods. So even if they somehow manage to sneak into one of these facilities without being detected by one of the innumerable monitoring machines they'd either need to A. Time it perfectly between a dead person being flushed out before the pod is repopulated with a new young person from the farms. Or B. Swap Cypher in when someone else wants to come out, when they state in the film that spending enough time in the Matrix to extract someone is already a risky operation.
They might not be rule tyrants but Zion clearly has a leadership hierarchy and risking a whole crew and a ship which has information on how to find and get into Zion in it's systems would likely be a completely unacceptable risk to Zion management who already don't like Morpheus' recklessness for chasing the prophecy by freeing Neo in his 20s when they normally only free people when they're younger.
I’m still reading your reply but I have to comment on #1.
I can’t make sense of that scenes logic either way. To the point I just kinda dismiss that whole scene.
If the computers know he woke up why did they release him instead of just killing him?
If they did know he woke up, and didn’t kill hom because he’s the one… wouldn’t the crew find it unusual how easy it was to get him?
It’s always got me ass odd the machines are like “dang another one woke up… we’ll release them to the rebels like normal I guess… this upcoming war we totally know about and planned for is going to be hard…
I just have to dismiss that scenario unless anyone else can explain it?
So I just went and watched that specific scene because you do raise some good points here.
It looks like the machine that releases him is a different one from the usual Sentinels we see elsewhere in the films so I assume it's just there to monitor the humans in the pods. It is probably programmed to just dispose of humans into the sewer that either wake up due to technical issues or that die in the pod by yanking their neck using the grabby arm and unscrewing the neural spike. Flushing the live/dead body down is just the last step in it's process because even if they wake up alive in the pod, once they're flushed down they aren't going to be fed nutrients to keep them alive and these vat grown humans barely use their muscles so they can't swim well and will most likely drown quickly. Why bother wasting energy making sure they're dead when they most likely will die anyway?
I don't think the machines knew he was The One at that stage because he was yet to perform any of the feats that the "prophecy" laid out. I don't think I could explain the whole prophecy thing they go over in the third film well enough but from the sounds of it, until Neo can see the Matrix for what it truly is the machines don't know if he's the one or not so until he gets shit by Agent Smith and comes back to life to the machines he's just another human that broke free and being a bit of a pest like the rest of them.
You knock my whole argument out with that sewer. Neos eyes couldn’t even adjust to the light when he first woke up. Thefomouters expect people to drown. That’s why the crew are in such a hurry to find him. No one can swim.