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The following FAQ entries may contain spoilers. Only the biggest ones (if any) will be covered with spoiler tags. Spoiler tags are used sparingly in order to make the page more readable.
For detailed information about the amounts and types of (a) sex and nudity, (b) violence and gore, (c) profanity, (d) alcohol, drugs, and smoking, and (e) frightening and intense scenes in this movie, consult the IMDb Parents Guide for this movie. The Parents Guide for The Langoliers can be found here.
The Langoliers is one of four novellas published in Four Past Midnight (1990) by American horror novelist Stephen King.
The Langoliers are fictional boogeymen of sorts from Craig Toomey (Bronson Pinchot)'s imagination. Toomey's father described them as having big teeth and eating kids who are lazy and don't get with the program. Toomey's description of the Langoliers so closely resemble the Timekeepers of Eternity, as passenger Bob Jenkins (Dean Stockwell) calls them, that the passengers take to calling them that.
Remember that this is fiction a la Stephen King. In King's story, the Langoliers eat the Past in order to keep time balanced and stable and to make room for the Future. Here's an example. Say that you have a computer with a 20 gigabyte harddrive on which the Past, the Present, and the Future each take up 10 gigabytes (which makes 30 gigabytes). You've opened a tremendous MP3 file that takes up the whole 10 gigabytes allotted for the Present. After listening to this song, it is transferred to the Past because it's been used and provides no more use to you. Now you go on to the next song, and you also have another song you want to download, but your harddrive is now full. The old song takes up the Past 10 gigs and the song currently in play takes up the Present 10 gigs, so you can't download the new song until you make space. The song you're listening to is in use in the Present, so you don't want to delete it to make space for the new song. However, the song you just listened to is over. It has served its purpose. It's in the Past. It's time to make room for the new and, thus, it is deleted so that you can download your next song. This is the function of the timekeepers aka the Langoliers. They constantly clean up an empty and useless physical spectrum of a world that can no longer be of use to anyone. They keep the time spectrum clean and continuous and make room for the Future.
...Nick to die?After seeing the movie, some viewers have suggested that. to cross the rip and get back to the Present, all they had to do was to put the plane on an autopilot course through the rip, lower the oxygen levels so people could sleep, and set a timer so that Captain Engle [David Morse] could wake up. Then he could reset the oxygen levels and wake up Nick [Mark Lindsay Chapman] and the other passengers. Other than the pat answer that that's the way Stephen King wrote the story, this plan would probably not have worked because, with the oxygen levels as low as they were, an alarm would not have awakened the captain. He would not have been able to bring himself back to a conscious state in order to reset the oxygen levels.
That question is not answered, either in the movie or in the novella. Explanations offered by viewers include (1) experiencing the beauty of the rip was simply too much for the mind, (2) a person must be doing exactly what they were doing when they first crossed the rip, and (3) it keeps the Langoliers from entering the present because they never sleep. Stephen King also used this specific plot device before in "The Jaunt", a 1981 short story. In "The Jaunt", people could travel incredible distances through portals, but they had to be asleep (or knocked out) to survive the trip or they would suffer severely damage to themselves, physically as well as mentally. For more information, see The Jaunt.
Another question that is not answered in either the movie or the novella. There are two possible explanations: (1) they died, or (2) their bodies passed into the new Present. Unfortunately, explanation (2) brings up another question: What happened to those passengers who passed through the rip while the airplane was left in the Past? Were they simply left hanging in the sky? For that reason, most viewers adhere to explanation (1). They ceased to exist.
Dentures, watches, rings, surgical pins, and wigs of the awake passengers were left behind. The common denominator seems to be that objects containing metal cannot pass through the rip. As for the wigs, there may have been bobby pins, clips, or something metal in the weave.
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