How do the movies all fit together? The new film kinda/sorta explains that.

The surprise Super Bowl commercial for Netflix’s The Cloverfield Paradox promised something pretty exciting for longtime Cloverfield fans: 10 years after the original found footage monster movie, which brought a giant alien monster into New York City, we were told that we were going to find out *why* the monster arrived here on Earth.

And indeed we do find that out in The Cloverfield Paradox, which takes us into the future to explain that a team of scientists up in outer space accidentally caused a rift in the space-time continuum while trying to solve Future Earth’s energy crisis, opening up a portal to another dimension that spills monsters into different places and times.

“Smashing together multiple dimensions, shattering reality, and not just on that station… everywhere. This experiment could unleash chaos the likes of which we have never seen. Monsters, demons, beasts from the sea… and not just here and now,” a conspiracy theorist (correctly) warns before precisely *that* happens. “In the past, in the future, in other dimensions.”

This dialogue is the key to understanding the increasingly-hard-to-follow “Cloverfield Universe,” as it explains how the events of all the films fit together. With The Cloverfield Paradox as the future-set linchpin of the whole thing, we now know that Cloverfield and 10 Cloverfield Lane took place in far different worlds, at different times; so if you ever wondered why the characters in 10 Cloverfield Lane had zero memory of a giant monster attacking America around 10 years prior, it’s because that didn’t happen in their world.

“All the movies are different timelines,” notes Reddit’s YamiNoMatsuei, who whipped up a simple and incredibly handy chart that makes this madness easy to understand.

“The events of The Cloverfield Paradox rips holes in space time and Clovers deposit themselves across different worlds at different points in time,” he explains.

A cop-out explanation crow-barred into the previously unrelated God Particle to sort of make sense of a disparate, ill-defined universe? Pretty much, yeah. Furthermore, the 10-years-deep Cloverfield ARG offered up FAR more compelling connections between the films than Cloverfield Paradox‘s simplified cop-out. So this gets a big ole sigh from me.

The next film is set in the 1940s, during World War II. You can see where this is going.