Broadcast Signal Intrusion Ending Explained- The Signals, What’s Real, And What Happened To Alice?

Broadcast Signal Intrusion is a wild one to pin down. James(Harry Shum Jr.) is struggling. When his wife Hannah went missing, it broke him. We are led to believe she disappeared without a trace, leaving James behind to wonder and worry about what happened to her. As obsession and isolation turned to paranoia and madness, James slowly lost all touch with reality. The trippy Broadcast Signal Intrusion works because of its ambiguity. Like all good unreliable narrators, James can’t be trusted and what we see isn’t always what we get. Here’s everything you need to know about the ending, Alice, who made the signals, and who James killed.

James is a lonely man who works night archiving television footage for a local station. He has disturbing dreams and attends a group for those grieving the loss of a loved one. He initially presents as sane if depressed and capable. That may all be a facade, though. When James finds a strange signal interruption on one of the tapes he is transferring, it leads him down a rabbit hole of despair and delirium. He becomes convinced his wife’s disappearance and the Broadcast Signal Interruptions are connected. The harder he looks to BBS chat rooms for validation, the more he succumbs to his obsession. He makes connections that may not exist out of a desperate need to know what happened to his wife.

The more he reads in the BBS chats and watches the tape, the more he believes it is all tied to the disappearance of two women and potentially his wife. All three women went missing one day before the BSIs. Online speculation questions if the signals were apologies for killing the girls, while others think they could be snuff films. The only thing James knows for sure is there are two other tapes, and he has to watch them.

Many times James was warned to stop researching the signal intrusions. He was warned they would consume him, and he might find things better left alone. Dr. Lithgow tells him not to confuse conspiracy with coincidence, but James has been grasping for answers since his wife went missing. The tapes and the irrational BBC chatrooms offer solace and hope as much as feed his delusion.

Humans see patterns even when there aren’t any to see. We need order and closure. This genuine condition called pareidolia affects us all in different ways. For some of us, that is benign views of clouds shaped as lions; for others, that could be the insistence that there are faces on the moon. For James, it was finding a light in the dark of what his life became after he lost Hannah. He was warned, though, that this investigation would only breed pain. Clues were everywhere if he only listened.

He meets a media professor and an enigmatic antiquities broker who speaks in riddles. Both try to redirect him. He also watches a fellow conspiracy believer who commits suicide in front of him. None of these events stop James, though. The desire to solve his wife’s disappearance was too strong.

The ending of Broadcast Signal Intrusion explained.

After tracking down Stephen Meyer, who paid for the storage unit and kept the phone line operational, Alice and James are told that he was involved in the hacks. He did it for fun because, for once, he was cool and accepted in the popular kids’ group. He is menacing without being overtly threatening. They also hear thumps from upstairs, indicating someone is up there. Whether they were a victim, an innocent family member, or a willing participant, we don’t know. The pair leave with more questions than answers. Alice next disappears, and James finds his hotel room in disarray.

After watching the final tape marked Hannah’s ballet ’96, he finds a clue to the set’s location. He drives to a dilapidated house and attacks a man who appears to be mentally challenged. He locks him in a cage and later forces him to rebuild the set from the signals and read a confession admitting to the murders of Hannah and the two other women while wearing the latex mask. At certain times the man cries and begs for his dad, and at others, he coldly recites the lines. When he is done, we see James bury something and begin to drive off when he hears the phone ringing from the house. He does not go back to investigate, and it is plausible the ringing phone was all in his head. If everything up to that point was real, the ringing telephone could signify that someone was still searching.

James then drives back into the city and calls Dr. Lithgow. After the call, James accidentally hits someone who turns out to be a woman who morphs into a robot and bleeds black ooze from her face as the film ends. But, of course, whether any or all of that actually happened depends on your faith in James’ perspective. At the very least, James seems to have guilt about something, so he dreams of someone in a mask before anything happens in Broadcast Signal Intrusion.

James may have accidentally killed his wife.

The final scene could be meant more as a memory of what really happened to his wife. He can’t remember anything before her disappearance because he has blocked that out in self-preservation. The final scene where he hits a woman with his car who then turns into a robot could either represent his memory of killing his wife or a new accidental murder of a woman he then hallucinates is a robot because he can’t face the truth. He mentions to Alice that he has only snippets of visions of his time with Hannah, including a bridge. What if he accidentally killed Hannah and dumped her body over a bridge?

James had to have direct involvement with what happened to Hannah or was influenced by events we don’t see as in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. At the beginning of Broadcast Signal Intrusion, he has dreams about Hannah wearing the weird latex mask that all of the BSI later showcase. That could indicate everything we see is a product of a delusion, or he saw the tapes prior to the film’s events. We also see him watching himself from behind in the same red jacket he wears at the end of the movie. This might be his subconscious trying to get him to face the reality of what he did.

James is imaging almost all of the conspiracy.

James is desperate to find out what happened to Hannah. So much so that he invents patterns where there are none. So many times, the audience is clued in that he is mentally unstable. Shifting visual cues and conversation snippets on the BSI tapes foreshadow the realization that is to come. He has become obsessed with the mystery, and that obsession has destroyed him. He is unhinged and capable of almost anything at this point.

Everything we see from the storage unit to Stephen Meyer could all be hallucinations. He may not have gone to the storage unit at all and only imagined a conversation with Stephen. This theory would go a long way in explaining why almost everything Meyer said was pointless. There is no viable reason to keep the storage unit and answering machine going, and he has no reasonable explanation for it. James’ trashed home and hotel room could easily have been done by James while he was dreaming or in a fugue state.

He imagines the phone call with Dr. Lithgow at the very end entirely. This is why the call is so distorted at the beginning. He never picked up the phone, and the two men never spoke that night. He may also be imagining several characters, including Alice, who might be similar to John Shooter in Secret Window. Since everything we see is from James’ perspective, it is possible that he was the one who talked to the storage unit guy as, Alice. It would also explain why she was constantly leaving things inexplicably behind, like cigarettes and ball caps. If James did it as Alice, he would have no memory of it.

The original tapes could have been real crimes, but James became fixated on them and warped them into a larger conspiracy that included conversations with people who didn’t exist and places he never visited.

Is Alice real, and who is she in Broadcast Signal Intrusion?

The mysterious hoodie-wearing girl who first follows and then offers to help James is odd. Many have speculated that she was a federal agent. She appears directly following James’ inquiries about the second tape. He was told that all queries would be flagged and reported to the FBI when he asked for it. Additionally, she proved extremely helpful in getting the storage unit manager to let them into the storage unit the phone number found in Morse code was tied to and, after receiving a call, was all too willing to give Stephen Meyer’s name when he refused before.

Instead of believing she was an agent, I posit she was a member of the group of people that kept the BSI conspiracy going. This is why she could talk her way into the storage unit and why just one call later, she was given a name. Additionally, the call she makes in the motel to get the address for the unit could be a call to the group to determine how much, if any, information should be given to James. Her hat was at the house at the end, assuming this wasn’t a delusion of James’ because she participated in this entire thing. She would have been too young to do the initial BSI, but she could be a child of one of the hackers who perpetuated the legend.

Regarding why she is now missing, James is so far from rational; it is possible he killed her and buried that knowledge deep. On the other hand, it is also very likely she never existed, and James seeing a hat he thought belonged to a woman who never existed was yet another delusion.

Whether you believe some, all, or none of James’ story depends on your faith in the main character. There is just too much foreshadowing to be a coincidence for me, though. Then again, it could be me seeing patterns where there are none, and everything, with the exception of the robot at the end, happened just the way we saw it. Broad Signal Intrusion is on Showtime right now. Read our full review here.