The Electric State ending explained: Does Christopher survive?

Russo Brothers' The Electric State is full of robots, humans, and robots who are humans. Millie Bobby Brown takes the lead as Michelle Greene, who is finding her brother, Chris, in this dystopian world who she thought had died. However, Cosmo Bot (voiced by Alan Tudyk) enters her life, revealing that Chris is controlling him. Chris is alive—but not in the way she expected.

Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci) is using Chris in a comatose state for his corporation called Sentre. He has successfully integrated the boy's consciousness into the company's Neurocaster technology. So essentially, Chris is now at the heart of the drone robots the company uses.

Michelle eventually finds Chris with the help of her allies, which includes an impressive cast in The Electric State. However, she now has to make one tough decision: to kill Chris and put a stop to all the havoc that's been going around, or not. With a heavy heart, she chose to do the former.

Disclaimer: This article contains The Electric State spoilers.

How did Chris die in The Electric State?

When Michelle finally sees her brother, she learns that she can only interact with him using a virtual reality headset, something like we saw in Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One (2018), but these are too big for an average human head.

The next scene follows Giancarlo Esposito's Col. Marshall Bradbury removing his headgear somewhere as he realizes he could not be a part of this chaos, and Michelle donning one, leading her into Chris' consciousness. She reunites with him and they have an emotional chat together but she learns something.

While a mini-Infinity War of Robots is still on in the real world between Sentre's bots and the rest, the only thing that can stop is to disconnect Chris' consciousness that's integrated into Sentre's tech. There's a symbiotic relationship between Chris and Sentre's robots so if he dies, all the evil robots will too. In short, she needs to pull the plug of the machine keeping the boy alive.

In the beginning, she is reluctant to do that but she eventually agrees. After a Batman Begins-like dialogue exchange, she comes back to reality and stops pushing three buttons to cut the ties between his consciousness' and Sentre, killing him right there and then.

What does Cosmo Bot coming to life at the end mean?

In the final scene, just before the credits roll, we see a puppy slurping water somewhere in a junkyard where a lifeless Cosmo Bot is seen. But suddenly, in a reflective shot, we see him coming to life. Now it could imply that Chris somehow managed to transfer his consciousness into the Cosmo Bot.

Now the metallic war in The Electric State is over, and as we saw, Michelle broadcasted her message and asked people to join them in the new beginnings; it's sort of a happy ending. But that was an ambiguous one so who knows what lies ahead?

We don't have any update regarding a potential The Electric State sequel, but if that ever happens, Chris disguised as Cosmo is a sure shot to appear in it. However, given the film isn't performing well, we are less likely to get one.