A portion of this video was sponsored by Walgreens.
Exposure has
far exceeded dangerous levels. If they keep this up, there's going to be nothing holding him back.
Oh, no, it's too late. Run. Run! Goodbye, Internet.
Ahem, sorry about AntiPat over there he just escaped from his containment cell. Pay him
no mind. He's kind of a minor glitch in the system. Pretty darn harmless, honestly. The
scariest thing about him is just how cringe he is. Anyway, let's ah. Let's try that again, shall we?
Hello, Internet. Welcome to Film Theory, the show that just wants to ask, have
you ever experienced a terrible occurrence that has impacted you significantly? Now,
if you're a fan of our sister location gAmE tHeOrY or spent any time in the gaming zone of YouTube,
you're probably familiar with Sean McLoughlin, aka JackSepticeye.
Top of the mornin’ to ya laddies
Across ten years on YouTube. He's proven himself time and time again as a gamer, as
an entrepreneur, as a philanthropist. But recently he's also been proving himself as a storyteller.
Don't get me wrong, Sean has never been shy about hopping into character for one of his videos.
But now it appears as though Sean has something greater planned for those characters. A wider
connected universe that brings them all together to tell a story of love,
loss and chaos. And it all begins with one.
The powerful and terrifying AntiSepticEye Recently, Sean released what has got to be
one of his most ambitious projects to date The I.R.I.S. PROJECT,
an interactive livestream where the chat used text commands to cooperatively play a legitimate
video game, solving puzzles and ultimately unlocking all sorts of new channel LORE.
The video itself follows one specific Sean character: Chase Brody. Now to catch you
up in case you don't watch every single one of JackSeptEye’s let's plays Chase is your
typical bro. So much so that a spinoff YouTube series is called Bro Average.
But while onscreen Chase is living large with teabagging trick shots.
Offscreen he appears to be having difficulty with his family life.
This escalates, and ultimately it comes to a climax at the very end of a 2018
video titled What Do You Want from Me? In which Chase hears his family screaming.
He goes to explore his house, only to be confronted by another of Sean's characters,
the unpredictable and violent AntiSepticEye.
It appears that whatever happened here ended in tragedy because a year later
we get the video simply titled Chase. In it we watch as Chase approaches a
makeshift grave and then places a photo of his family on it. They're dead. But
who's responsible? AntiSepticEye? Chase himself? or something else? He begins to
drink his troubles away until he’s suddenly teleported to the top of a parking garage.
And it's here in an upload coming three years later that The I.R.I.S. PROJECT begins in earnest,
continuing the story of Chase, AntiSepticEye and presumably the rest of Sean's personas. Right now,
that narrative is still in its early stages, but it's clear that Sean has big plans for
it moving forward. I would assume the next installment is going to be coming sometime
either next summer or Halloween, based on how he's been treating these sorts
of uploads in the past. But here's the thing you don't need to wait that long,
my friends. I think that we've cracked open what the wider story is. In their pursuit
of discovery and technological growth. The I.R.I.S. Corporation has gotten too ambitious.
It's attempted to tap into forces that are far beyond their control. And by doing this,
they've unleashed a force that threatens not just I.R.I.S. not
just Chase and the other personas, but all of humanity. So grab your
clipboards and start scribbling away loyal theorists, It's time to dive in.
Because the main part of this was a live event that's now unlisted. Let me just start with
a quick recap of what actually happened in The I.R.I.S. Project that we're all on the same page.
The videos from the live stream that the chat unlocked are framed
as archival footage of a series of interviews between Chase Brody and
an unnamed I.R.I.S. scientist. I'm just going to call this random scientist a name
that comes to the top of my head. Let's just say Arin. No real reason for that.
Anyway at first, the interview is more of an interrogation. Arin seems distant and cold.
Shots framed so we don't even see his face. He refers to Chase as a subject rather than a person.
Arin's questions also seem borderline nonsensical at first. Does Chase recall
how he was teleported? Has he seen or heard things that weren't actually there?
seen objects appearing or disappearing? lost track of time? That sort of thing.
However, as the days of the interrogation go on and Arin attempts to warm up to chase,
we begin to see his face. And his questions start getting more personal.
Also, it becomes clear that Chase isn't alone in the facility. There's something else here,
too. Something that wants to talk. Something named Echo.
Multiple times throughout the week, other unseen entities enter Chase's cell. These
beings are what Iris classifies as alters. And they speak to Chase using what the camera picks.
Up as some sort of strange whisper or whale noise.
We can tell that at least one of them is tormenting Chase.
And the other is telling Chase that he's special.
Eventually, after the chat unlocked all but one of the clips in The I.R.I.S. Project livestream.
The facility changed. The power started flickering on and off. Chairs were strewn about. Red warning
lights blared throughout the building. The facility is in lockdown. Security guards enter
Chase's room and escort him out as Chase warns them of the impending danger that they all face.
I.R.I.S. ignores Chase's warnings,
only to discover AntiSepticEye here to once again wreak havoc on Chase's life.
So now that you're all caught up,
the way I see it, there are three main mysteries presented to us here.
What's I.R.I.S. up to? How to Chase and Anti play into all of it? And finally,
who or what is Echo? Well, I believe we have answers to all three of those
questions today. But before we start decoding what it all means,
let's take a moment to talk about our sponsor for this portion of the video.
Walgreens. That's right. The drugstore store that's literally everywhere noticed
little old us online and sponsored this episode. We are legit guys.
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Steph and I both take vaccinations seriously. We have a child who needs us to stay healthy. We do a
lot of travel to see you guys and speak at events. We do our best to spend time with family at the
holidays and all of those things mean that we need to stay as responsible as we can in order to
keep ourselves safe. Case in point, just a few weeks ago, our entire team came out to
North Carolina to work together in the same room for the first time since COVID. There
was a lot of hugging, a lot of jumping up and down and then a lot more hugging.
Honestly, for a bunch of introverts, Team Theorist is shockingly close.
But you know what made all of those close hugs possible scientifically
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That way, by the time you hit the relatives house, gift swaps, or uncomfortable corporate
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Or you know, you can just click the link in the description if you don't want to
type all of that stuff out. be smart and safe this holiday season loyal theorists.
Once again, thank you to Walgreens for sponsoring that portion of the video.
Let's just jump back into the mystery of I.R.I.S. to decode what all of it means. Starting with the
last question first, who is Echo? Out of all the entities that interact with Chase,
this character seems to be the most benevolent.
It wants to help.
When Echo first appears, the I.R.I.S. camera encounters some interference,
and you can even see the silhouette of some sort of figure in there. Easy money would
say that that is Echo. But something else you might not notice here is that all throughout
the rest of the interaction, the camera feed is glitchy with Chase jumping around a fair bit.
Now, this could certainly be a way to hide cuts to different takes, but it could also be a hint
as to the identity of Echo. In the live stream, one of the rooms that we see appears to be some
sort of I.R.I.S. employee break room, and one of the posters on the wall reads, quote:
“Did you know… altar 5914 is a time thief! Don't be like altar 5914!”
So since we're seeing some jumps and Chases conversation here with Echo,
maybe Echo is alter 5914 an entity who is somehow able to manipulate time. And the glitches we're
seeing aren't actually glitches, but rather time that's literally being stolen by Echo.
Additionally, if we look at the I.R.I.S. Twitter feed, we can see that some form of time
manipulation does exist inside this universe. According to this post about the Retrowave:
a microwave that rewinds old meals back in time to when they were fresh,
I.R.I.S. started experimenting with time manipulation technology in the 40’s.
So we know that it is possible within this universe. That alone would be an
interesting factoid. But that's not all we hear about time travel in the series. One
other post from the I.R.I.S.Twitter got my theorist senses working, quote again:
“If you were able to travel back in time and talk to yourself, what would you tell them?”
What if Echo is Chase from the future somehow traveling back in time to communicate and
tell Chase that he's special, that he has a big role to play in this story,
and that it can help because again, it's him from the future.
It would be quite literally an echo of events yet to come. Now, admittedly,
that sounds like a big shot in the dark, but it would help a lot of things in the
series make more sense. For example, despite I.R.I.S. assuring Chase that
he's never been in the facility before, he insists that he somehow remembers it.
Sean also explained in his post stream breakdown that deja vu is
a scientific thing within this universe. It means something.
What if the deja vu is Chase picking up bits of his own memories? Memories that
he hasn't made yet, because they're Echo's memories. That would explain
why I.R.I.S. seems so interested in his feelings on the subject.
And time travel may not be the only dimensional technology that I.R.I.S. is messing with here.
I believe that a multiverse of some sort also exists in this world. In another Twitter post,
I.R.I.S. asks, quote: “People always say reach for the stars because they think
it's impossible to do so. What if we reached even further?” The only thing I can think
of that's further than the stars in outer space are places outside of our universe,
in other universes that might seem outlandish, but teleporting is established
as a fairly regular occurrence among these characters. We've already talked about how
Chase teleported to the top of a parking garage at the end of
one of his videos. But he's far from the only person to experience this.
First of all, Doctor Scneeplestein, Sean's wacky doctor character, witnesses an interdimensional
portal through one of his computer monitors at the end of a 2019 video. That same portal
is seen alongside the magician character Marvin The Magnificent. In a vision from a 2020 upload.
It's worth noting that both AntiSepticEye and Chase are also seen in that vision,
showing that all of these characters are indeed connected in some way. In fact,
AntiSepticEye himself has already directly interacted with both Dr. Scneeplestein,
as well as another character in the roster, the silent film performer Jamison Jackson.
What if all of these characters are literally the same character? just from different universes,
different timelines? And what's more, I.R.I.S. clearly has an interest in these alter egos,
with several of them likely already in containment within the facility.
During the original live stream, we were able to see Jamison's Bow Tie,
Mervyn's mask and several Jacky Boy Man comics hidden throughout the facility. Were these just
Easter eggs to Sean's other characters? Or could these characters actually be kept in the facility?
My hunch is that they're here for a reason. And if I.R.I.S.
has an interest in all of these other egos, then of course they'd want to
capture AntiSepticEye too. Gotta be a completionist of the dex and all that.
But why? Why would I.R.I.S. be so interested in collecting all
these random characters from across time and space? According to Arin,
I.R.I.S. is a benevolent organization that's just trying to protect people.
But this, frankly, does not align with everything else that we see
with I.R.I.S. in the series. First of all, their treatment of Chase is
borderline torture to the point that they even make it difficult for him to sleep.
And despite already knowing the answers to the questions that they're asking of chase,
they decided to push him to the edge in a way that triggers horrible, repressed memories.
Notice the flashing images that appear here? graves, bodies, a wedding rings, It’s Chase's
family, the ones that died most likely at the hands of AntiSepticEye. And the more they
question chase, the more they poke and prod at his tragic past, the closer AntiSepticEye becomes.
I.R.I.S. knows this and chooses to proceed anyway.
They want AntiSepticEye to show up. They want him here. But why? What
could they possibly have to gain from this super dangerous being?
It can't be for the good of the universe, can it? to contain him? No loyal theorists.
They're doing it to harness the power that AntiSepticEye holds.
Despite the series taking place basically in the present day days
I.R.I.S. has access to technology that's far beyond what we have in our universe. On
their social media page, they talk about true high definition TV in the 1970s,
implants that make it smarter, microwaves that can reverse time on specific objects
and quantum displaces that can change the mass of objects. However,
the piece of tech that we get the most elaborate explanation for is their watcher security system.
These security cameras have incredibly high 12 K resolution. They can detect both the physical,
health and emotional state of the people they record. And most importantly to our purposes
today, their wireless and battery-les thanks to an antimatter power source.
Yeah, I.R.I.S. apparently has antimatter technology in the year 2019. For proof,
look no further than that Marvin The Magnificent video that I mentioned earlier. In it,
we get a close up of a spell book. And what's that written inside? I.R.I.S. equals antimatter.
This is from a video that was uploaded back in 2020. So Sean's been laying the groundwork for
years now. To my knowledge, this is also the first time that I.R.I.S. was officially used
in the context of this ongoing character narrative. Though if I'm wrong on that,
feel free to call me out in the comments.
But now we fast forward ahead to the more recent I.R.I.S. Project upload,
in particular one shot of the Iris facility from the original livestream.
In it, we see what appears to be a pair of giant sci-fi power generators. I wouldn't be surprised
if these puppies were running on antimatter and suddenly with all of this information,
everything starts to make sense. During the livestream, we saw a room that seemed
to be designed to contain a powerful humanoid, someone like AntiSepticEye.
And while it's certainly a bit on the nose. The fact that the people clearly trying to summon
AntiSepticEye have themselves super futuristic technology that's powered by antimatter.
Coincidence? I think not. I.R.I.S. is trying to capture Anti and then use him as a power source.
And so they're triggering Chase, poking a sleeping dragon to get AntiSepticEye’s attention. And,
well, that didn't turn out well for him. It's interesting. This entire
project plays with the idea of how toxic social media can be. How people who have
no real stake in something, want to get involved with the personal lives
of people that they don't even know. Sean explained as much during his live stream.
In this way, the viewer is playing the game on the I.R.I.S. livestream,
and the I.R.I.S. Corporation within the story are representative of people
attempting to insert themselves into businesses that aren't really theirs.
They're pressing people's buttons. They're poking and prodding, all in
hopes of getting a reaction. And things don't end up going well for them. Again, as Sean says,
In universe, I.R.I.S. seems to be doing this for selfish reasons to capture AntiSepticEye,
to use him as a power source for their futuristic technology. And we as an
audience are also doing it selfishly to get to the next part of the story,
to learn more about the people we follow in line to the point where we probably shouldn't.
Regardless of whether I'm right or wrong about the story Sean's trying to tell here and the lore of
the World that he's building. I just want to take a step back and congratulate him on creating a
universe that's so ambitious and one that's so far outside of his normal content, including going so
far as to make one of the coolest interactive live events I've ever seen happen on YouTube.
For real, A clap and a half to Sean and all the developers at Hyper RPG
for putting that one together. You know that I'm a big fan of content creators
trying new things on their channels and pushing the limits of their creativity.
So you can bet I'm excited to see where this one is going to be headed next. So as always,
my friends, in the meantime, remember It’s a fact. A FILM FACT! Aaaand glue.
Did you really just say “and glue”? As in, you were just looking for the opposite of “and cut”?
Yeah. Now,
see this? This right here is why we can't have any good lore for the channels. All right? Sorry.