Twelve Minutes Ending Explained

When you start dabbling in time shenanigans, things have a tendency to get a bit… confusing. When you’re leaping through so many different timelines and permutations, it can be difficult to keep track of what’s actually supposed to be happening. For those of you who are feeling a bit chronologically confused, here’s an explanation of the ending of Twelve Minutes.

So, let’s start with an overview: the husband comes home to his wife, they have a little dinner, and hey, guess what? She’s pregnant! Yay! Unfortunately, the unhinged detective breaks in, accuses the wife of killing her father eight years ago, and demands both his old pocket watch and your wife’s death in recompense. 

Twelve Minutes Ending Explained

Point A: Did the wife kill her father? Answer: while she believes she did, she did not. She did shoot him after an altercation, but he did not die. 

Point B: Who did kill the father? Answer: turns out that the wife has a half-brother resulting from an affair between her father and her nanny. That half-brother killed her father a week after she thought she killed him, which is how she has a photo of herself elsewhere when the deed was done.

Point C: What does all of this have to do with the husband? Answer: literally everything. The wife’s nanny was named Dahlia, which also happens to be the name of the husband’s mother. Yep, the husband is the wife’s half-brother and her father’s killer. Welcome aboard the incest train, folks.

Point D: Where does this leave us? Answer: when the truth is revealed, the husband will experience a flashback to the night the father was killed, where the father pleads with him not to do the no-no with his half-sister. Through dialogue choices, the husband will either refuse and kill the father, agree and disappear from their lives, or use a red meditation book to wipe his memory of the entire affair.

It’s definitely confusing, but the presence of the book, as well as the wife’s possession of it, implies two possible reasonings: either this book was used to wipe their memories of the event, hence the major gaps in their recollections, or the entire twelve-minute loop was actually just a vivid hallucination the husband concocted, positing on a potential future where he marries his half-sister. It’s a rather squicky story either way, so just try not to think too hard about it.