the imitation game assignment

Script Analysis: “The Imitation Game”: Scene By Scene Breakdown

Scott Myers

Go Into The Story

Here is my take on this exercise from a previous series of posts — How To Read A Screenplay :

After a first pass, it’s time to crack open the script for a deeper analysis and you can do that by creating a scene-by-scene breakdown. It is precisely what it sounds like: A list of all the scenes in the script accompanied by a brief description of the events that transpire. For purposes of this exercise, I have a slightly different take on scene. Here I am looking not just for individual scenes per se, but a scene or set of scenes that comprise one event or a continuous piece of action. Admittedly this is subjective and there is no right or wrong, the point is simply to break down the script into a series of parts which you then can use dig into the script’s structure and themes.

The value of this exercise:

* We pare down the story to its most constituent parts: Scenes.

* By doing this, we consciously explore the structure of the narrative.

* A scene-by-scene breakdown creates a foundation for even deeper analysis of the story.

Today: The Imitation Game (2014). You may download the script here .

Screenplay by Graham Moore, book by Andrew Hodges.

IMDb plot summary: During World War II, mathematician Alan Turing tries to crack the enigma code with help from fellow mathematicians.

THE IMITATION GAME Scene-By-Scene Breakdown Written by Sean Sauber GoIntoTheStory.com 1–2: It is 1951 and Alan Turing is being interviewed by a constable of the Manchester police. Turing’s home has been broken into and trashed. The debris contains everything from paper with complex math equations to the actual Turing machine. Turing is taking charge of his own interview and demanding the constable take down the entire story without judgment. The constables radio the crime into headquarters and the signal is intercepted by MI-6, British Secret Intelligence Services. It reaches the head of MI-6 = Stewart Menzies. 3–7: Detective Nock finds his way the crime scene and has his first encounter with Turing — who is sweeping up a white powder — cyanide. Turing continues his “smarter than everybody the world” routine as he informs Nock he had “hoped for a bit more.” But Turing follows it up when he busts the detective. Nock was awake with a colicky child but was celebrating a win by the local football team. Turing further berates the constables by letting them know they could not catch who broke into his house if the culprit came up and spat in their face. We learn that Turing did not report the burglary — his neighbor did. And with that Turing asks the police to leave. Detective Nock is suspicious about being sent off and concludes that Turing must be hiding something. 7- 8: 1939 — Turing appears emotionally detached as he makes his way through the platform filled with families saying goodbye to their children. They are being sent to safety as war is breaking out. We get a glimmer of empathy as Turing spots one of the children completely engrossed in a puzzle, seeming detached from the chaos around him. Turing takes his train to Bletchley Village and the Bletchley Radio Manufacturing company — the cover for the top secret project he is about to join. 8–13: Turing meets is soon-to-be boss Royal Navy Commander Denniston. Denniston is Royal Navy all the way and not used to verbally sparring with “the best mathematician in the world.” When Turing admits he does not speak German and likes puzzles — Denniston is ready to throw him out, Just as he has done with some of the other great minds of the nation who applied for this work. But as soon as Turing says “Enigma” Denniston is stopped cold and the conversation takes on new meaning. Turing convinces Denniston that Enigma is indeed a puzzle and a problem that Turing can solve. 13–17: Denniston introduces his new team to the Enigma machine and each other — Hugh Alexander, John Cairncross, Peter Hilton, Keith Furman, and Charles Richards. Watching all of this his Stewart Menzies — head of MI-6. As they come to grips with the scope of the problem — the Enigma machine has 159 with 18 zeros after it possibilities, and is refreshed every 24 hours — Turing comes to grips with the possibility he may not be the smartest man in the room. Hugh Alexander is two time British chess champion — and the appointed head of the team. Team is not a part of Turing’s vocabulary and declares he needs his own space as the others “will only slow me down.” With this comment Turing and the others meet Menzies for the first time. Menzies makes it clear they must work as a team because as they are now speaking three additional men have died. They are losing the war and time is not on their side. They get to work. 17–20: 1927 and Turing is 15 while attending the Sherborne School for Boys. Turing is a loner and obsessive about “peas and carrots cannot touch,” green and orange. This makes him a prime target for bullies. Not only does he get the mixed vegetables dumped on him but he ends up buried under the floorboards of a half finished classroom. He tries to save himself with his superior intellect, explaining to the that he will steal the satisfaction of his captors by not screaming or showing fear. 16 year old Christopher Morcom comes to his rescue by removing the boards and pulling him out. As they walk away Turing displays in lack of comprehension of his situation, and arrogance, but saying they do this because he is smarter than the others. Christopher is clearly not only a friend but a mentor to Turing, as he explains it is because Turing is different that they bully him. Morcom encourages Turing to embrace being different telling him “Sometime it is the very people who no one imagines anything of who do things no one can imagine.” 20–23: Back in 1951 with Detective Nock and Sgt Staehl who we investigating the break in at Turing’s home. Nock has made a call to get Turing’s military records and is told they are classified. Nock and Staehl leave HQ and as they are walking, Nock punched Staehl, takes off running. He makes a turn and runs down an “innocent bystander.” Sgt. Staehl catches up, punches returns the favor of punching Nock. Then Nock shows him the wallet he lifted from the man he ran into. It is full of information on Nock. They learn from a letter in the wallet that Nock is being followed on orders of the Foreign Office. Nock uses the letter to forge an order for Turing’s military records. 24–29: A rapid fire sequence with VO from Turing as he narrates the flow of secret message from German spy-plane to German submarine. The message results in the sinking of a British merchant ship. In parallel with this sequence is what occurs at Bletchley Park when they intercept the same secret message. It is an exercise in futility as the team of 4 cryptographers attempt to decode thousands of messages where each letter has 159 million million million possible codes due to the Enigma machine. As the message is brought to Hut 8, the workplace of the Hugh Alexander’s team it is lunch time. John Caircross attempts to invite Turing but Turing is obtuse and obstinate as before. Hugh tries to bring Turing down a notch by claiming the attitude should be accompanied by genius but everyone but Turing is doing the work. Turing discloses that he is building a machine to do the work of decoding — since it would take a human 20 million years to go through all the possible combinations. Turing watches them all to lunch as a group, a team — while he stays behind alone. 29–32: Turing thinks while he runs. And he completes the design of his machine and needs the funds to build it. Hugh Alexander denies him those funds so Turing goes to Commander Denniston to complain. Turing instead gets a lecture on disciple and order. Turing wants to move the complaint up the chain of command — Denniston informs him he must take it to Chruchill. Later Turing hands his complaint to Menzies for hand delivery to Churchill. 32–34: Turing’s letter is effective. Commander Denniston gathers the team together, with Menzies watching again from the corner. Churchill has put Turing in charge much to the disbelief to he Denniston and the team. Turing’s first orders are to fire two of the team — the linguists. As they are now short staffed Turing exposes his plan to increase staff to the others on the team. It will be a contest — publish a crossword puzzle in the Daily Telegraph and whoever can solve it in under 10 minutes will be considered “for an exciting career opportunity.” 34–39: There are a lot of people that want to solve that puzzle. We see men, women, students all trying to solve it — even in the middle of an air raid while huddling in shelters. Some time after the raid Turing is bicycling on the street passing the rubble before he enters MI-6. There is a collection of puzzle solvers who are given a new puzzle to solve in less than 6 minutes. As Turing and Menzies are about to administer the test a woman walks in — Joan Clark. Though security tries to steer her to the secretarial positions she shows the letter of invitation for solving the previous puzzle. She is allowed to take her seat. Joan and Turning do a little sparring as she was late, wants to know what the position is — but Turing is usual obstinate, opaque self. As the test actually gets started Menzies ask Turing if six minutes is even possible — and he say No that it took him 8 minutes to solve it. At that moment Joan Clarke steps up — it has been 5 minutes and 34 seconds. Turing — maybe no longer the smarted person in the room — gets his comeuppance from Menzies — “Seems like some people approach it by simply doing the impossible.” Joan and one other person also completed the task in the allotted time and are invited to join the effort to break Enigma. 39–41: Return to 1927 and Sherborne School for Boys where Turing and Christopher Morcom are sitting affectionately close under a tree each reading their own book. Morcom introduces Turing to the world of “cryptography the science of codes.” As Turing seeks to understand the concept of “message people can see but not know what they mean” he equates it to speaking to another person. He reveals how little he understands of interacting with another person — “your supposed to know what they mean. Only, I never do.” Later as they say good night while parting for their separate dormitories the is a moment when Christopher touches Turing’s shoulder and Turing realizes he is in love. 41–43: 1951 at the Manchester police station where Detective Nock presents Superintendant Smitj with an empty envelope that was to contain Turing’s military record. Nock makes a case for Turing being a Soviet spy but Smith sends him back chasing some lads making a ruckus in the park. Nock goes outside to meet Sgt Staehl and lies telling him that Smith gave the go ahead to follow Turing. 43–46: 1941 Bletchley Park and we see the Turing Machine for the first time. A mass of wires and spinning dials. There are already technicians working on it when Hugh Alexander brings Turing’s next helper — but it is not Joan Clarke. Turing goes to Joan’s home and tries to convince her parents she needs to return to the “radio factory.” Joan takes over having tea with Turing as he tries to convince her to return against her parent’s wishes. They feel it is inappropriate for her to be alone amongst all those men far from home. Turing and Clarke carry on a conversation, with her parents eavesdropping, that she could work amongst the female clerks, live in town with them, and even attend church events. As Turning leaves her house there is a moment when the theme is restated. Clarke asks Turing why he is helping her and he responds “Sometime it is the very people who no one imagines anything of who do things no one can imagine” — just as he was told by Christopher Morcom (scene 17–20). Joan returns to Bletchley. 46–53: Hugh Alexander has had it with wasting each day trying to decode messages only to have all the work be useless by midnight. He decides to take out his frustration on Turing and his machine since he also has to work on Turing’s machine during the day. Even though the rest of the team holds Alexander back they make it clear to Turing they feel they are wasting their time, wasting lives, spending time on the machine — named Christopher. As the rest of the team goes off to the pub Turing decides it is time to take a risk. He gathers sheets of coded messages, hides them in his pants, shoes… and goes past the guards to see Joan Clarke at her flat in town. He gets her attention from her room, climbs a fence and sneaks inside. While he gives her piles of messages she comments how most men would come like this at night with flowers or chocolates. He reads her some of the decrypted messages as she tells him she knows he is trying to build his “universal machine.” His look of amazement is not missed by Joan as she tells him she read his university paper. He imagines a “digital computer” with her. He makes a bit a mess and noise and must climb out the window to escape the landlady. 53–59: There is evidence of a Soviet double agent in Bletchley. Commander Denniston goes straight for Turing as he fits the profile. But the military police can find no evidence so Denniston will have to wait to hang Turing. Joan Clarke hears about he incident and invites Turing out for a beer. While surround by napkins covered with mathematical equations the rest of Turing’s team enters the beer hut. Alexander discloses that he knows Turing is not the spy because Alexander broke the cypher, the evidence, too easily. But Alexander does want to have a go at Joan Clarke. Joan amazes the team, Hugh Alexander in particular, with he explanation of why the bubbles in Guinness go down instead of up. Turing has a moment of social awareness when he asks Joan Clarke why she made the team like her. She finally gets through to him when she tells him that he needs all the help he can get to break Enigma. The next day he makes an effort by bringing apples to the team and telling a lame joke. It goes over with a thud and he retreats to his machine, Christopher, in the machine hut. 59–61: 1927 Sherborne School for Boys where Turing and Morcom pass encrypted notes to each other in class. While one of confiscated by the teacher, Turing retrieves it from the trash. Morcom tells his “dearest friend” that he will see him in two weeks after the break. 61–61: While Turing and Clarke have lunch outside together Hugh Alexander comes over the Turing and hands him schematic showing how changing the wiring can make the rotors 500 times faster. Not only is Joan Clarke editing Turing’s equations during this lunch but now Alexander has a “not entirely terrible idea” for improving Christopher. Turing and Clarke’s relationship is deepening as she now “speaks Turing” in translating a thank you for Hugh Alexander’s suggestion. 61–66: Christopher is finally completed. It is turned on for the first time and the hundreds of rotors begin to spin. Above the din Turing tells the team that the machine will tell the day’s Enigma settings. As the days pass the spinning continues until Denniston is improved of the lack of a solution. Denniston finally thinks he has his chance to rid himself of Turing. When Denniston shows up with the MP’s Turing tries to block their way but is unable to. They turn off Christopher and Denniston tells Turing he his fired and to be escorted off the premises. The team has come to the machine hut and comes to Turing’s rescue telling Denniston the machine is their best hope — fire Turning and he must fire them all. Hugh Alexander is able to get a month reprieve from Denniston. 66–68: 1951 Manchester Police Station. Sgt Staehl was following Turing under orders from Nock. Staehl followed Turing to a pub where he witnessed an envelope exchange. Later when Staehl caught the other gentleman and interrogated him he discovered that he was a male prostitute. Staehl learns that Turing is gay and was paying for sex. the man he was paying was the man that robbed his house — and that is why he wanted the police to drop the matter. When Staehl reports this to Nock, in the presence of the Superintendent who told Nock to drop it; Nock is disappointed that Turing is not a spy. The Superintendent tells Staehl to pick Turing up anyway since homosexuality is illegal. Nock gets permission to interrogate Turing — not willing to give up that Turing is spying. 68–73: 1941 — Turing is in Joan Clarke’s flat with hundreds of papers with equations scattered on the floor. Joan drops a bombshell that she is leaving to return home to her parents. Turing is still Turing and in asking her to stay basically insults her reasons for leaving and says she can make something of her life by staying. She retorts that he is lonely, no one likes him — so she doesn’t want to stay for the reasons he thinks is important. Turing admits he doesn’t want her to leave because he likes her — but he also continues to think logically. If her parents don’t want their 25 year old daughter to live alone far from home — then why not get married? He pulls a piece of electrical wire he just happens to have in his pocket — creates an engagement ring — and proposes. Later at an engagement party, while Joan dances with Hugh Alexander, Turing confides in John Caircross that he may not be able to be with Joan “in that way. ” Prior to Joan coming up and asking for a dance all the men had been discussing sexual exploits. John tells Turing he already had suspicions that Turing was gay and that he had better keep it to himself since it is illegal. Turing wants a family and children — but is not sure he can fake it — should he tell Joan? 73–75: 1927, In Turing’s room at the Sherborne School for Boys where he is encrypting a love letter to Christopher Morcom. Outside his dorm the boys are retiring from break. Morcom doesn’t come back, and Turing gets confronted by the boys that burins him under floor. 75–77: 1951 Manchester Police Station for Nock is interrogating Turing. Nock tries appealing to Turing by asking if machines can think. Turing goes off on Nock regarding how we perceive differences — one’s mans manner of thinking may not be the same as another. Or more relevant subtext — one man’s preferences may not be the same as another. “The Imitation Game” was Turing’s title for his paper where he discussed the thinking of man versus the thinking of a machine. Turing tells Nock it is really a test to determine if the entity answering a question is man, or a machine imitating man. Nock plays the game by asking “What did you do during the war?” When Turing answers “I worked in a radio factory” and Nock asks “What did you really do during the war?’ Turing smiles knowing that Nock may not be as dim as he appears. 77–87: 1942 Bletchley Park — Another frustrating day/night as the chime strikes midnight while Christopher clacks along with no solution. The team walks dejectedly back to the work hut grumbling if they only knew what the message already was — they could decrypt it. In the beer hut the men are over at their table eyeing the women over at their table. Hugh and Helen, friend of Joan, make eyes at each other and finally Hugh asks Turing for an introduction. As Hugh tries to have a go at Helen she tells the story of her daily activity of intercepting radio messages from the same German tower every day — saying how intimate it seems as they get to know each other through the way he types. Hugh and Helen walk away to the bar while Turing’s mind is spinning on something. Finally he screams to Helen and asks “Why do you think your German counterpart has a girlfriend?” Helen says its because he starts all his messages the same way — C-I-L-L-Y. Turing states the Germans just lost he way because they are supposed to start every message with random letters — but this man doesn’t. Turing runs back the work hut with Hugh and Joan and the rest of Turing’s team following. Turing explains to the team that if Christopher only had to search for the decryption on words he knows — he could come up with the cypher. Joan finds the morning weather report and it’s obligatory signature — Heil Hitler. They run to the machine hut as a group and program Christopher with the message and the code as it came in that morning. They turn on the machine. The machine stops in minutes. They write down the cypher and head back to the work hut. They enter the cypher into their captured Enigma machine — and proceed to decode their first message! In characteristic fashion everyone is jumping and hugging — except for Turing. 87–93: The team has gathered around a map showing the location of every Allied and Axis ship in the Atlantic. The can see an attack is coming from the German U-boats on an Allied passenger convoy — hundreds of lives at risk. In order to save them Hugh begins to dial and report the pending attack. Turing stops him having to take the phone from Hugh’s hand. Everyone is incredulous when Turing says “let the U-boats sink the convoy.” Hugh punches Turning and Turning goes down bleeding. Hugh is about to go at Turing again when Joan steps in — taking the blow instead. Joan pushes Hugh to the floor next to Turing. Joan tells Hugh “If you hurt him you will just barely live to regret it.” In another example of subtext Turing tells Hugh people like violence because it makes them feel good — and it would feel good to “blow those U-boats out of the Atlantic.” But the team comes to Turing’s conclusion — save the convoy, sink the U-boats — and the Germans know that Enigma is broken. While the team is dealing with this Peter Hilton reveals his brother is on one of the ships in the convoy. When Turing tells Peter it is not his fault that they can’t stop the attack Peter goes after Turing — but this time the others in the team come to Turing’s defense. When Peter tells Turing he is not God and can’t determine who lives or dies Turing tells him that that is exactly what they have to do. 94–95: Turing and Clarke go to London to meet with Menzies. They inform him of the plan to keep the breaking of Enigma secret. They will use statistics to determine which attacks to stop and which to let happen. They tell Menzies he must come up with the cover stories — and keep Turing from being fired by Denniston. Menzies reply — “Maintain a conspiracy of lies through the highest levels of our government? Yes that sound right up my alley.” He follows with one more statement “Alan, I so rarely have a chance to say this. But you are exactly the man I always hoped you would be.” On the train back to Bletchley Pak Clarke places her hand on Turing’s and we see that they are “in this together.” 95–102: A sequence introduces to the new project “Ultra” — the largest store of military intelligence in the world. Each day the code is broken and messages decrypted. In the work hut Turing asks Peter Hilton for the decrypts and Peter walks past Turing without answering but does knock the papers from Turing’s hands. As Turing is picking them up from the floor he sees a bible hidden underneath papers on John Cairncross’ s desk. At this moment Turing realizes John is the Soviet spy — since the cypher for the coded messages given to the Soviets was a bible passage. John sees that Turing has figured it out. John reminds Turing that he knows he is homosexual and if Turing tells John’s secret he will tell Turing’s. Turing goes to Joan Clarke’s flat to tell her what he found out. The flat has been ransacked and Menzies is there. He tells Turing Joan is in prison because of all the Enigma messages in the flat — messages that Turing brought her a year ago. When Menzies causes Joan of being the spy Turing tells him its not Joan — its Cairncross. Menzies tells Turing he knew that all along and in fact it is the reason Cairncross was assigned to Bletchley. Menzies tells Turing that it is the only way to get the Soviets information they need to win the way since Chruchill won’t tell the Soviets anything. Now Turing is part of the scheme as he has to work for Menzies to get the right information exposed to Carincross and the to the Soviets. And by the way — Joan was never in prison — just at the market. 102–104: Alan now fears for Joan’s safety and wants her to leave Bletchely. As tries to convince her to do so she tells him she is safe there versus anywhere else. He tries a different tact — telling her he is a homosexual and they cannot be engaged anymore. Joan tells him she already suspected but it is ok because they are both different than then other people — they can still love each other and challenge each others’ minds. He will not give up and finally tells her he was just using her to break Enigma and he never cared for her. She slap him, calls him a monster — but makes it clear she is not leaving as this work is too important to her. 105–106: 1927 Sherborne School for Boys and Turing is in the headmaster’s office. Alan tries to deny that he an Christopher Morcom were friends but the headmaster provides fact after fact that Morcom was his only friend. The headmaster is leading up to the news that Morcom is dead from Bovine Tuberculosis. Morocm never told Turing. Turing still denies being close to him and asks to leave. 107–108: 1943–5 sequence at Bletchley Park with Turing’s voice over of what occurred for the next two years as the team continued to decrypt messages — shoulder to shoulder with Joan Clarke (broke her heart) and John Cairncross (revealed is secret) and Peter Hilton (killed his brother). Turing speaks to all the major victories that would not have been possible with out the breaking of Enigma — and the cold calculus that decided what to reveal and what to keep secret. The sequence follows the team making a decision of what ship to save, how the decision makes its way to MI-6, the Chruchill and finally into action on the sea. And how doe Turin deal with this — as before he runs until he cannot run anymore. The sequence continues as we see the team taking care of each other — Hugh makes a pillow for Peter, John makes tea for Joan. In the VO Turing states “The was was really just a half-dozen crossword enthusiasts in a tiny village in the south of England.” Its VE day and the VO continues with Turin saying “Was I God? No. Because God didn’t win the war. I did.” 109–110: Back at Bletchley Park Menzies is disbanding the team. They are instructed to burn everything and forget they ever met. “Have a safe trip home…. with a bit of luck you will never see me again.” 110–110: 1951 Manchester Police Station where Turing has finished telling this story to Nock. This is the Imitation Game — do you believe what you are being told? Do you believe it is man or machine doing the telling? Nock says he doesn’t know what to do. Turing tells Nock he must determine if Turing is “.. a person? Am I am machine? Am I a war hero? Am I a criminal?” We are not less than what we can convince other people that we are. When Nock tells Turing “I can’t judge you” Turing is finished with Nock. He is of no use to Turing. 110–115: 6 months later at the police station Nock is congratulated for Turing sentence of indecency. It leaves Nock empty. Turing is now back home but broken. He has gained weight, is pale and haggard, the place is a mess, but continues his work on a new machine. Infuriated with the ringing of his doorbell he finally gets up to answer it and none other than Joan Clarke is at the door. She read about it in the papers, not from Turing, but came to see him. She tells him she would have come for him, testified for him. As he turns to move away he drops the glass he was drinking from. Joan notices his hands are twitching. It is the medication he tells her. The drugs are for chemical castration so he can avoid prison and continue his work. Joan pleads with Turing to let her help him and that he does not have to do this alone. Turing tells her he has never been alone — as long as he has his machine — Christopher. He refers to the machine as if he were a person — “.. Christopher has got so smart.” Turing is freaking out and as Joan calms him down Turing sees her wedding ring. “Its much nicer than the one I got you.” To break the tension Joan asks if he wants to do a crossword puzzle. It is now obvious is brain is so wracked he cannot even look at the puzzle. Turing tells her that she got what she wanted — a normal life. She reminds him no one normal could have done what he did. All the normal things in life that people do everyday in England of 1951 are because of what Turing did. She tells him “I think that sometimes it is the very people what no one imagines anything of who do the things that no on can imagine.” 115–115: 1927 Sherborne School for Boys where Turing is no alone under the tree where Christopher Morcom first gave him the book on cryptography. He starts to cry — and starts his life long journey of being alone. 115–116: 1954 in Turing’s house as the police are swarming all over it again. This Nock goes to Turing’s bedroom to see an apple with a bite out of it- with white powder all over it. Nock realizes two things — one is that it is cyanide and Turing committed suicide. The second is Turing made the world a better place and Nock killed him for it. 116–117: 1945, the team is at Bletchley in front of a raging bonfire. Hugh puts his arms around Turing and Clarke. Carincross tosses Enigma messages on the fire. They are enjoying this last time together. Title cards declare “Turing committed suicide in 1954,” the path from the Turing machine to modern computers, Carirncross’s 1990 confession to spying but never prosecuted, and the 2013 pardoning of 49,000 gay men punished between 1885 and 1967. The final title card is “The log of Apple Computer — an apple with a bite taken out of it — has long been rumored to be a silent tribute to Turing. These rumors have never been confirmed.”

Major kudos to Sean Sauber for doing this week’s breakdown.

If you’d like a PDF of The Imitation Game script scene-by-scene breakdown, go here .

To see 100+ screenplay scene-by-scene breakdowns, go here .

To read an in-depth analysis of The Imitation Game , go here .

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Reading scripts is hugely important. Analyzing them even more so. If you want to work in Hollywood as a writer, you need to develop your critical analytical skills. This is one way to do that.

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• The True Story of <i>The Imitation Game</i>

The True Story of The Imitation Game

T hough The Imitation Game was largely based on the biography Alan Turing: The Enigma , much of Alan Turing’s life is shrouded in mystery. Turing, played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the film, is credited as the father of computer science. He cracked codes produced by the German military’s seemingly unbreakable Enigma machine during World War II using math, engineering and still-to-be-invented computer science. But most of the documents tracing his work for the British government have been destroyed and little is known about Turing’s personal life.

Here’s what is likely truth and what is embellishment in The Imitation Game based on Alan Turing: The Enigma and the Turing Exhibition at London’s Science Museum.

Alan Turing’s first love, Christopher, died at a young age

Ruling: Fact

Christopher, an older student at Sherborne School in Dorset, was also interested in math. Turing harbored feelings toward Christopher, though Turing believed his love was not reciprocated. In the movie, Turing learns of Christopher’s death after-the-fact from his headmaster. In reality, Turing had been told his friend was sick and to prepare for the worst before Christopher passed.

Christopher’s death did spur Turing to pursue mathematics in the hope that he could understand whether part of Christopher could somehow live on without his body. In the year after his death, Turing wrote an essay in which he discussed how the soul might survive after death with a nod to the new field of quantum mechanics.

Alan Turing was a closeted gay man

Alan Turing was gay at a time when homesexual activity was outlawed in England. In 1952, he was convicted of “gross indecency.” (He admitted to being gay but pled not guilty because he thought the law was unjust.) He was sentenced to probation that involved chemical castration (see more below) and committed suicide within two years with cyanide.

The filmmakers decided not to include the suicide in the movie even though they filmed the scene. Benedict Cumberbatch explained to the press at New York City’s 92Y that in the film’s last scene, “Someone [is] telling [Turing] something he never had told to him in his life: That he did matter — the fact that he was regarded as different and not normal was hugely important to the world and to everybody around him. No one had told him that in his life. So to end it on that note, with someone explaining, was our way of thanking him in the structure of the film, our eulogy to him.”

Joan Clarke is invited to Bletchley Park, the home of the government’s code breaking operation, after completing a crossword puzzle

Ruling: Fiction

Clarke’s professor at Oxford helped her get into the program (which was dominated by men). The crossword puzzle test scene is fictionalized, though that was a method the government did use to recruit code-crackers at the time.

Joan’s parents didn’t want her at Bletchley

In the movie, the Clarkes do not want their daughter to crack codes for the government because she is a woman, but that aspect of the film was added for dramatic tension.

Turing named the code breaking machine “Christopher”

In the film, Turing tells Clarke that he named the machine “Christopher.” (The audience knows it’s named after Turing’s first love, though Clarke doesn’t know that part.) Turing is obsessed with the idea of using a computer to engineer a human brain or even a soul, and dubbing the computer “Christopher” makes it seem as if Turing may be trying to find a way to resurrect his old love. In reality, the machine was called the Bombe and nicknamed “Victory.”

John Cairncross threatens to expose Turing’s sexuality if Turing reveals he’s a spy

In the film, Cairncross says he will tell the government Turing’s secret sexuality if Turing reveals that Caincross is a spy. The blackmail works for a while and Turing covers up for Cairnscross. In fact, the two never met. Though Cairncross was at Bletchley Park, he did not work with Turing. There were strict separations between the units. As far as historians can tell, Turing never hid spies from the government.

Turing asked Clarke to marry him

Turing and Clarke were indeed engaged for a time. And, like in the movie, they never went through with the marriage. Turing revealed his true sexuality to his fiancée and, according to Turing , Clarke was “unfazed” by the revelation.

Some critics have said the friendship and pseudo-romance between Turing and Clarke is overblown in the film. Keira Knightley, who plays Clarke, told the Huffington Post , “I think what we’re trying to get to is the essence of what it was. And at that time with Alan, to my knowledge, he didn’t have another affair, or an affair actually, with a man. His big friendship was with a woman and he did ask her to marry him.”

MORE: The History Behind Benedict Cumberbatch’s The Imitation Game

The government thought Turing might be a Soviet spy

In the film, an officer interrogates Turing thinking he’s a spy and accidentally uncovers Turing’s sexuality. In reality, Turing was investigated for “gross indecency” after he reported a petty theft to the police. In his report, he concealed the fact that he was in a relationship with the possible thief. After the police pursued the charge, Turing finally submitted a five-page report admitting to his affair with a man.

Turing underwent chemical castration after his conviction

Consensual sex between two men remained illegal until 1967 in England. To avoid prison, Turing accepted treatment with estrogen, chemical castration meant to neutralize his libido. Gay men were considered a security risk to the government because they were open to blackmail, so Turing lost his security clearance. Turing died on June 7, 1954. He was found with a partly-eaten apple, and many biographers have posited it was laced with cyanide. But the autopsy found four ounces of cyanide in Turing’s stomach, suggesting he drank the poison and ate the apple to make the experience more palatable.

Some have suggested Apple’s symbol, the apple, is a tribute to Turing, though Steve Jobs denied this connection on multiple occasions.

MORE: Review: The Imitation Game : Dancing With Dr. Strange

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The Imitation Game review – an engrossing and poignant thriller

“A re you paying attention?” breathes Benedict Cumberbatch’s Alan Turing in the opening moments of this handsomely engrossing and poignantly melancholic thriller from Norwegian director Morten Tyldum. There’s little chance of doing anything else as Tyldum, who directed the tonally divergent Headhunters, serves up rollicking code-cracking wartime thrills laced with an astringent cyanide streak – a tale of plucky British ingenuity underpinned by an acknowledgement that Turing, as Gordon Brown put it, “deserved so much better”.

Granted a posthumous royal pardon for his “gross indecency” conviction only last year, the mathematician and AI pioneer changed the course of the war only to suffer the indignities of arrest and “chemical castration”, dying in 1954 having apparently taken a bite from a poisoned apple.

Yet The Imitation Game is not a tragedy – rather, it is a celebration of Turing’s extraordinary achievements, a populist yarn that makes an admirably firm fist of establishing its spiky subject as a heroic outsider. As the mantra from Graham Moore’s catchy script puts it: “Sometimes it is the people whom no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”

Reluctantly recruited by Commander Alastair Denniston (a witheringly supercilious Charles Dance) to join the country’s top minds at Bletchley Park in 1939, Cumberbatch’s appropriately indecipherable “odd duck” bumbles his way into Churchill’s confidence, securing funding to build a proto-computer (or “Bombe”) to crack the Germans’ daily changing Enigma code.

Meanwhile, plucky Cambridge maths grad Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) uses her crossword-solving skills to earn a place on Turing’s team and (unusually) in his affections. As the cogs of his Heath Robinsonesque creation whir, Turing struggles impotently to decode the signals of human interaction, the secret of his sexuality and the spectre of a lost childhood friend becoming talismanic ghosts in the machine.

Expanding upon the temporal shifts structure of Hugh Whitemore’s 1986 play Breaking the Code (adapted by the BBC in 1996, with Derek Jacobi reprising his starring role as Turing), Graham Moore’s dextrous screenplay skips between three distinct periods: Turing’s schooldays, wherein he tells close friend Christopher that people are like cryptographic puzzles; his time at Bletchley park, and the nail-biting adventures of the celebrated “Hut 8”; and the aftermath of the 1952 break-in at Turing’s Manchester home, which alerted the police to his homosexuality, with appalling consequences.

Historical liberties taken in the pursuit of drama range from the inevitable to the controversial (biographer Andrew Hodges, on whose book this is based, has complained that “they have built up the relationship with Joan”, suggesting a coyness about Turing’s true sexuality), with occasional false steps of all too convenient overstatement (placing the brother of a key code-breaker on board a doomed ship).

Yet for the most part, truth is sacrificed for the greater good of engaging cinema; Turing’s real-life “Bombe” may have been encased in a neat Bakelite box, but the audience needs to see its wires spreading out like entrails, mapping the complexities of its creator’s mind.

Crucially, Tyldum does not underplay the romance that blossoms between Alan and his machine, whose lovelorn nickname suggests that it has somehow become his bride of Frankenstein (“You are a monster!” Joan tells him when angry). The film’s very title refers to a game posited by Turing to deduce whether one was speaking to a man, woman or machine – a forerunner of the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner to which this owes a greater debt than such apparently comparable fare as 2001’s Enigma .

Just as Deckard fell for the android Rachael, so Turing is enraptured not by people but by an artificial intelligence. Both he and his machine are struggling to understand coded communications for which they have no instinctive key, strangers in a strange land, searching for a common language.

With such an alienated antihero it would be easy for The Imitation Game to fall into either arch chilliness or mechanical contrivance. Plaudits, then, to Cumberbatch for making his protagonist complex rather than just complicated. While the lines of the film are bold, clear and concise, Cumberbatch keeps Turing’s true motives and emotions so enigmatically concealed that at one point you wonder whether he really is a Soviet spy. Top marks, too, to rising star Alex Lawther, who is quite brilliant as the young Alan, perfectly paving the way for the tortured insularity of Cumberbatch’s performance.

While Turing remains enticingly unreadable, his coterie of friends and colleagues is rendered in immediately identifiable vignettes, precisely cast, efficiently played. The mercurial Mark Strong is terrific as Major General Stewart Menzies, the é minence grise who intertwines menace and magnanimity with mesmerising ease. Matthew Goode is on home ground as “bit of a cad” Hugh Alexander, with whom everyone is understandably infatuated.

As for Knightley, while her role may tend somewhat toward brainy posh-girl caricature (the exclamation “Oh!” becomes “Ay-o!”), she manages to breathe warmth and humanity into the character of Joan, a likable foil to the impenetrable Turing, her affectionate gaze mediating our response to his perpetually unbreakable enigma.

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Movie Review: THE IMITATION GAME

A mostly gripping look at wwii espionage and the birth of the modern computer.

Rating: PG-13 Stars: Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Mark Strong, Rory Kinnear, Charles Dance, Allen Leech, Matthew Beard, Alex Lawther Writer: Graham Moore, based on the book ALAN TURING: THE ENIGMA by Andrew Hodges Director: Morten Tyldum Distributor: The Weinstein Co. Release Date: November 26, 2014

By now, it is generally known that, during WWII, the British set up a secret code-breaking unit in Bletchley Park dedicated to deciphering the messages put out by Germany’s Enigma Machine. Information once hidden under the Official Secrets Act also includes the fact that mathematical genius Alan Turing (played in the film by Benedict Cumberbatch) led the team of cryptographers at Bletchley. Turing had already invented the Turing Machine, which was the forerunner of the modern computer.

THE IMITATION GAME makes all of this quite engrossing, with very smart dialogue, a sense of urgency and a persuasive arc. There’s nothing like a world war to set the stakes high, of course, but Moore and director Morten Tyldum fill this world with a sense of grinding frustration, enthralled discovery and wheels within wheels – the movie isn’t all about espionage by any stretch, but when MI-6 occasionally shows up, it’s full of credible surprises.

The real Turing was believed to have had Asperger’s Syndrome. Graham Moore’s screenplay takes this trait, combines it with Turing’s understandable if sometimes jaw-droppingly expressed self-regard, and comes up with a number of wonderful scenes. These are smashingly played by Cumberbatch – it’s not a stretch to see him playing someone with an exceptionally brilliant mind, but his Turing has an innocence that both sets him apart from Cumberbatch’s other brainy Englisman and makes him unpredictable. We’re so used to Turing being impervious to everything except the work at hand that when he relaxes into normal human contact, it’s startling.

The film moves back and forth in time, so that we see sections of Turing as a 15-year-old (Alex Lawther) at boarding school, who shares a deep bond with one of his classmates. We also see Turing in 1952, when a burglary at his home leads to him being arrested and charged with “gross indecency,” as it turns out that he’s gay – a punishable offense at that time.

Here’s where THE IMITATION GAME thematically veers off its rails a little. What happened to Turing is appalling, and the movie rightly ends with a note of protest about the legal persecution of gays and lesbians. If the action remained within Bletchley Park and the film ended with a postscript about the vile injustice committed against Turing, this would be understandable. However, since the film spends a fair amount of time dealing with what happened to Turing because of his sexuality, it seems odd that neither the script nor Cumberbatch allow him to display a flicker of interest in anyone at all. If we weren’t told he was gay, from the way the film plays out, we’d assume he had no desire for any kind of human touch. This is cognitive and dramatic dissonance.

This aside, THE IMITATION GAME is both gripping and entertaining. Mention should be made of the rest of the ace cast, which includes Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Charles Dance and especially Mark Strong as the MI-6 representative. They’re all impressive in the service of a tale that is intelligent and informative

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How odd that “The Imitation Game,” one of the more rousingly entertaining crowd-pleasers coming out this holiday season—as endorsed by its People’s Choice Award at the Toronto film festival—also happens to be one of the most devastatingly sad.

On one hand, this is a tense World War II thriller about a stellar team of Brits who cracked Nazi Germany’s Enigma code. The movie boasts its own inspirational rallying cry, repeated three times in case you miss it, which would be perfect for embossing on a holly-bedecked greeting card: “Sometimes, it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one imagines.”

On the other hand, it is an examination of the tragic circumstances that befell Alan Turing, the film’s central hero, who brings victory to the Allies by inventing a revolutionary machine that would give birth to the computer age. He would later be publicly vilified and savagely punished for engaging in homosexual  activity, which was criminalized in England at the time, before committing suicide in 1954.

Instead of being festooned with a chest full of medals, the closeted genius who saved countless lives by significantly shortening the war was cruelly subjected to chemically-induced castration in lieu of jail time. And, because much of the details were kept classified for 50 years, few knew of the extent of his wartime feats, even though he was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his services in 1945. He was officially pardoned of his offenses by Queen Elizabeth in 2013—a case of too little too late.

This atypical biopic about the brilliant, impossibly arrogant and socially awkward mathematician (played by Benedict Cumberbatch , impeccably perfect in every way) is a somewhat hard read at first. Most likely, it was the intent of screenwriter Graham Moore to make a puzzle out a film about puzzle solving. That is not necessarily a bad thing, however, once the pieces fall into in place. The fractured narrative starts off as a mystery in 1951 with a detective investigating a burglary at Turing’s home where, strangely, nothing was stolen. Eventually, the plot flashes back to 1928 and shifts into a heart-breaking love story as a teen Turing, a brutally bullied school-boy prodigy, chastely falls for a fellow classmate named Christopher.

But “The Imitation Game” is most on its game when it primarily sticks to being a John le Carre-lite espionage  version of “Revenge of the Nerds,” beginning in 1939 as it introduces a battleground of the mind that relies on superior intellect rather than bombs to beat the enemy. Norwegian director Morten Tyldum in his English-language debut provides just enough science to explain what is at stake while escalating the beat-the-clock tension involved in the mission conducted by Turing and a handful of other high-IQ cohorts. Alexandre Desplat ’s hauntingly propulsive score further enhances the suspense while capturing the gravity of the situation.

It might seem a no-brainer to hire Cumberbatch for the job of bringing Turing to life. After all, what other actor these days is as well-suited to emblemize an aloof smarty-pants? Sorry, Robert Downey Jr. The torch has been passed. Instead of constantly reminding “Sherlock” fans of his Emmy-winning role as the Arthur Conan Doyle’s master of deduction, Cumberbatch has broken his own code of how to distinguish this particular eccentric genius as a completely separate but yet no less compelling entity.

To portray Turing, Cumberbatch’s seductive purr is less mellifluous, his lips are slightly pursed, his gaze is often averted and, despite his unwavering confidence in his thinking skills, there is an air of vulnerability and melancholy about him.

But, like Sherlock, Turing is given to verbal dust-ups that often end amusingly, especially with such haughty superiors as the uncompromising Commander Denniston (a superb Charles Dance , whose patrician nose practically rears up in disgust whenever his by-the-book overlord encounters Cumberbatch’s defiant whiz). Turing also has his protector in Mark Strong ’s head of intelligence, who calmly, coolly and with a sly wink runs interference for his not-exactly-diplomatic secret weapon at every turn.

As for the rest of the code breakers, Matthew Goode stands out as a caddish chess champ Hugh Alexander, who initially butts heads with Turing until he realizes the depth of his abilities. On board as John Cairncross is Allen Leech , best known as Branson the Irish chauffeur-turned-terrorist-turned aristocrat on “Downton Abbey,” who is the most tolerant of Turing’s idiosyncrasies.

If anyone comes close to matching Cumberbatch’s efforts, however, it is Keira Knightley . She brings a much-needed warmth, humor and Anglicized spunk to the proceedings as Joan Clarke, immediately winning over the audience’s affections when she is mistakenly pegged as a secretarial candidate while trying out for a code-breaking position. Clarke is as much of an odd duck as Turing—and perhaps even brighter—as the lone female involved in deciphering Enigma. Since it is considered “indecorous” for a single woman to work and share living quarters alongside men, she must sneak about to contribute to the effort.

Some of the best scenes involve Clarke and Turing, who confide in one another as equals—especially since both must hide their true identities. One of the more meaningful moments arrives when Turing jealously watches as Clarke immediately charms Alexander, a shameless pickup artist. When Turing asks her how she so easily made him like her, Clarke replies with Knightley’s posh accent, “I’m a woman in a man’s job. I don’t have the luxury of being an ass.” The "like you" at the end of that sentence is implied, of course.

Matters turn slightly hokey as the final solution to Enigma code relies on several “By Jove, I’ve got it” revelations. But, by then, you will likely be fully invested in the outcome, no matter how out of left field it might seem.  Some of Cumberbatch’s most affecting work is when the older and close-to-defeated Turing is at the end of his rope, unable to even focus on a crossword puzzle because of the drugs he has been given. But as I sit here typing away, I realize I have Turing to thank for being able to access a wealth of information with just a few key strokes and a click of a mouse.

Susan Wloszczyna

Susan Wloszczyna spent much of her nearly thirty years at USA TODAY as a senior entertainment reporter. Now unchained from the grind of daily journalism, she is ready to view the world of movies with fresh eyes.

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The Imitation Game (2014)

Rated PG-13 for some sexual references, mature thematic material and historical smoking

114 minutes

Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing

Keira Knightley as Joan Clarke

Mark Strong as Stewart Menzies

Matthew Goode as Hugh Alexander

Rory Kinnear as Nock

Charles Dance as Commander Denniston

Allen Leech as John Cairncross

Matthew Beard as Peter Hilton

• Morten Tyldum
• Graham Moore
• Alexandre Desplat
• William Goldenberg

Director of Photography

• Óscar Faura

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38 facts about the movie the imitation game.

Written by Ericka Mcgann

Modified & Updated: 04 Mar 2024

Reviewed by Sherman Smith

Are you a fan of thrilling historical dramas? If so, then chances are you’ve heard of the critically acclaimed film, “The Imitation Game.” Released in 2014, this gripping movie tells the captivating true story of British mathematician and logician Alan Turing, who played a crucial role in cracking the Enigma code during World War II. Directed by Morten Tyldum and starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing, “The Imitation Game” has received widespread recognition for its powerful performances, stellar screenplay, and thought-provoking themes. In this article, we’ll delve into the world of “The Imitation Game ” and uncover 38 fascinating facts about the film that will deepen your appreciation for its historical significance and creative brilliance. So, grab your popcorn and get ready to embark on an enlightening journey through the making of this remarkable cinematic masterpiece.

Key Takeaways:

• “The Imitation Game” is a captivating movie based on the true story of Alan Turing, a brilliant mathematician who played a crucial role in cracking the Enigma code during World War II. It highlights the power of determination and the importance of embracing diversity and tolerance.
• “The Imitation Game” offers a deep dive into an influential moment in World War II history, showcasing the significance of teamwork, innovation, and perseverance. It serves as a powerful tribute to Alan Turing’s legacy and sparks conversations about his remarkable contributions.

The Imitation Game was released in 2014

The movie “The Imitation Game” was released in 2014 and directed by Morten Tyldum. It stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, and Matthew Goode.

The film is based on a true story

The Imitation Game is based on the true story of British mathematician and cryptanalyst Alan Turing, who played a crucial role in cracking the Enigma code during World War II.

Benedict Cumberbatch delivers an outstanding performance

Benedict Cumberbatch portrays Alan Turing in a brilliant and award-worthy performance. His portrayal captures the complexity and brilliance of Turing’s character.

The movie received critical acclaim

The Imitation Game received widespread critical acclaim and was praised for its acting, screenplay, and historical accuracy. It won several awards, including an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

The Enigma machine plays a central role in the film

The Enigma machine, a device used by the Germans to encrypt their messages during the war, plays a central role in the film. Alan Turing and his team work tirelessly to crack the code and gain an advantage in the war.

The Imitation Game explores themes of identity and secrecy

The movie delves deep into the themes of identity and secrecy, as Alan Turing struggles with his own identity and battles to keep his work and personal life secret.

The casting for the film was exceptional

The casting for The Imitation Game was exceptional, with each actor bringing their characters to life. Keira Knightley , Matthew Goode, and the supporting cast deliver captivating performances.

The movie showcases Turing’s groundbreaking work

The Imitation Game showcases Alan Turing’s groundbreaking work in the field of computer science and his pivotal role in the development of early computers.

The film sheds light on the injustices endured by Turing

The Imitation Game sheds light on the injustices and discrimination Alan Turing faced due to his homosexuality. It highlights the tragic consequences he suffered as a result.

The movie highlights the importance of teamwork

The Imitation Game emphasizes the significance of teamwork and collaboration in achieving monumental tasks. Turing’s team works together to solve the seemingly unsolvable Enigma code.

The film balances suspense and emotional depth

The Imitation Game strikes a perfect balance between suspenseful moments as Turing’s team races against time to crack the code and emotional depth as the characters face personal struggles.

The Imitation Game has an impressive soundtrack

The movie features a stunning soundtrack composed by Alexandre Desplat, which enhances the dramatic and poignant moments throughout the film.

The Imitation Game was shot in various locations

The movie was filmed in several locations, including England and Scotland, adding to the authentic portrayal of wartime Britain.

The film chronicles an important chapter in history

The Imitation Game chronicles an essential chapter in history by highlighting the significant contributions of Alan Turing and his team to the outcome of World War II.

The Imitation Game captures the essence of wartime Britain

The movie expertly captures the atmosphere and spirit of wartime Britain, depicting the challenges and sacrifices made during that period.

The movie pays homage to unsung heroes

The Imitation Game pays tribute to the countless unsung heroes who played a crucial role behind the scenes in winning the war.

Benedict Cumberbatch worked closely with Turing’s family

Before filming, Benedict Cumberbatch spent time with Turing’s family to gain insight into his character’s life, making his portrayal even more authentic.

The Imitation Game has an iconic line

The movie features the iconic line, “Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”

The film raises ethical questions

The Imitation Game raises thought-provoking ethical questions about privacy, the use of technology, and the price of victory during wartime.

The Imitation Game portrays Turing’s brilliance

The film showcases Alan Turing’s genius and the revolutionary ideas he brought to the field of mathematics and code-breaking.

The movie received numerous award nominations

The Imitation Game received multiple nominations at esteemed award ceremonies, including the Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and Critics’ Choice Movie Awards.

The Imitation Game showcases the power of perseverance

The film highlights the unwavering determination and resilience of Alan Turing as he faces numerous setbacks in his quest to crack the Enigma code.

The Imitation Game has a strong supporting cast

In addition to Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, the film boasts a talented supporting cast, including Matthew Goode, Mark Strong, and Charles Dance .

The movie explores the consequences of secrets

The Imitation Game delves into the consequences of keeping secrets, both on a personal and national level.

The Imitation Game is a powerful tribute to Turing’s legacy

The film serves as a poignant and powerful tribute to Alan Turing’s legacy, shedding light on his extraordinary achievements and the injustice he faced.

The Imitation Game showcases the importance of innovation

The movie emphasizes the importance of innovation and thinking outside the box, as Turing’s unconventional methods prove instrumental in cracking the Enigma code.

The Imitation Game brings lesser-known history to the forefront

The film brings lesser-known aspects of history to the forefront, educating audiences about the vital role that code-breaking played in the outcome of the war.

The movie balances historical accuracy with storytelling

The Imitation Game successfully intertwines historical accuracy with compelling storytelling, captivating audiences from start to finish.

The Imitation Game highlights the importance of intellectual diversity

The film highlights the significance of incorporating diverse perspectives and approaches to problem-solving, as Turing’s team consists of individuals from various backgrounds.

The Imitation Game explores Turing’s personal struggles

The movie delves into Alan Turing’s personal struggles, including his isolation, social awkwardness, and the constant battle to hide his true identity.

The Imitation Game features stunning cinematography

The film boasts visually stunning cinematography, capturing the essence of the time period and enhancing the overall viewing experience.

The Imitation Game raises awareness about Turing’s legacy

The movie serves as a catalyst for raising awareness about Alan Turing’s remarkable contributions and the need to acknowledge and honor his legacy.

The Imitation Game showcases the power of determination

The film underscores the incredible power of determination and the impact that perseverance can have on overcoming seemingly insurmountable challenges.

The movie accurately portrays the complexity of code-breaking

The Imitation Game accurately depicts the intricate and complex process of code-breaking, showcasing the intellectual prowess required to decipher the Enigma machine.

The Imitation Game inspires and educates

The film acts as an inspiration for aspiring mathematicians, scientists, and innovators, while also educating viewers about an essential part of history.

The Imitation Game serves as a reminder of the importance of tolerance

The movie serves as a poignant reminder of the importance of embracing diversity, acceptance, and tolerance, highlighting the consequences of discrimination and prejudice.

The Imitation Game is a must-watch for history enthusiasts

History enthusiasts will find The Imitation Game particularly captivating, as it offers a deep dive into an influential moment in World War II history.

The Imitation Game has a lasting impact

The Imitation Game is a film that leaves a lasting impact on its audience, provoking thought and sparking conversations about the significance of Alan Turing’s contributions.

In conclusion, The Imitation Game is an incredibly captivating and thought-provoking film that sheds light on the untold story of Alan Turing and his contributions to world history. The movie not only showcases Turing’s extraordinary intellect and his pivotal role in breaking the Enigma code during World War II but also touches upon themes of discrimination, secrecy, and the true cost of war.

With a brilliant performance by Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing and a stellar supporting cast, The Imitation Game is a must-watch for any movie enthusiast. Its compelling narrative, powerful storytelling, and historical accuracy make it a deeply engaging and emotionally resonant cinematic experience.

Whether you’re a fan of historical dramas, interested in cryptography, or simply looking for a captivating story that will keep you on the edge of your seat, The Imitation Game is a film that will not disappoint.

So, grab some popcorn, sit back, and immerse yourself in this extraordinary tale of brilliance, heroism, and the ideals that drove one man to change the course of history.

1. What is the movie The Imitation Game about?

The Imitation Game is a biographical drama film based on the true story of mathematician and cryptanalyst Alan Turing. The film chronicles Turing’s efforts to crack the Enigma code, a vital task that helped the Allies win World War II.

2. Who stars in The Imitation Game?

Benedict Cumberbatch portrays the lead role of Alan Turing in The Imitation Game. The film also features Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, and Mark Strong in supporting roles.

3. Is The Imitation Game historically accurate?

While the film takes creative liberties for dramatic purposes, it is generally considered to be historically accurate. The Imitation Game represents a well-researched portrayal of Alan Turing’s life and his contributions to breaking the Enigma code during World War II.

4. Did Alan Turing really win the war?

Alan Turing’s code-breaking work played a crucial role in shortening the war and saving countless lives. However, it is important to note that winning the war was a collective effort by many individuals and factors. Turing’s contributions were significant but not sole in determining the outcome of the war.

5. Why is The Imitation Game an important movie?

The Imitation Game highlights the remarkable achievements of Alan Turing and brings attention to the discrimination and mistreatment he faced due to his homosexuality. The movie emphasizes the importance of recognizing and celebrating contributions from individuals who have been marginalized or overlooked throughout history.

6. Can I watch The Imitation Game with my family?

The Imitation Game is rated PG-13 and contains some intense and mature themes. It is advisable to review the content and suitability for your family members before watching it together.

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What Was Alan Turing’s Imitation Game?

What was alan turing’s imitation game , assessing the theory behind the movie, by professor drew mcdermott (yale university), december 31, 2014                                                                 picture: david perry/ flickr ..

This article is part of the Critique’s exclusive series on the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game

I. The Basics of The Imitation Game

C onsidering the importance Turing’s Imitation Game has assumed in the philosophy-of-mind literature of the last fifty years, it is a pity he was not clearer about what the game was exactly. The principal source for the game’s rules is the paper “ Computing Machinery and Intelligence ” published in Mind in 1950. Turing proposes the game as an alternative to answering the question, “Can a machine think?”

The “imitation game” … is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either “X is A and Y is B” or “X is B and Y is A.” The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus: C: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair? Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A’s object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. …The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers…. We now ask the question, “What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?” Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, “Can machines think?”

Right away there is confusion about what Turing meant by “a machine tak[ing] the part of A.” It sounds as if the machine is to convince the interrogator that it is the woman while B continues to try to convince the interrogator that she is the woman. But it is clear from other sources (especially Braithwaite et al. 1952) that Turing meant for the machine to convince the interrogator it was a person, and for the person to convince the interrogator that he or she is the real human being.

The interrogator’s questions are submitted via “teleprinter,” or “texting” as we would perhaps say today. So is it essential that A and B be able to overhear the questions and each other’s answers? Apparently not, as all subsequent commentators seem to have assumed that each of the two interlocutors received their own stream of questions and sent back their answers over a private channel. Sometimes the element is retained of having the interrogator (or judge, as I’ll sometimes refer to them) be able to direct questions to either interlocutor; although in many interpretations there are several interlocutors and each is interrogated separately. In actual runnings of the Game, such as the Loebner Prize competitions (see below), with multiple interrogators and overlapping interrogations, it is done with one-interlocutor channels to avoid tying up two interlocutors at the same time. Hence the Game has evolved so as to rule out the possibility of one interlocutor interrupting the other, a possibility I suppose Turing was too well bred to have pictured.

In the snippets of Qs-and-As that Turing himself gives as examples, there never seems to be more than one interlocutor. A typical example is,

Q: Do you play chess? A: Yes. Q: I have K at my K1, and no other pieces. You have only K at K6 and R at R1. It is your move. What do you play? A: (After a pause of 15 seconds) R-R8 mate.

To be consistent with the original rules, the Qs should be prefaced by “X, …” or “Y, …..” But it is much easier to focus on the interchange with just one entity, machine or human. In the original free-for-all, A and B can ask each other questions, even if the rules don’t allow it, as in a political debate.

If we simplify the Game so that the interrogator has a one-on-one conversation with each competitor, their goal is to distinguish the human competitor from the machine. The machine (or its designer) wins if the judge gets it wrong; and, of course, by “machine” we mean “program,” using the equivalence Turing himself had proved in the 1930s before the first practical computer had ever been built. It is this version of the Game that is usually called the Turing Test, and I’ll use this terminology interchangeably with “imitation Game.”

II. Eugene Goostman and The Nature of The Game

Important questions about the Game, or Test, still remain:

1. How long does the Test last?

2. What are the qualifications of the interrogators?

3. What topics may the questions touch on?

In “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” the only mention of the duration of the Game is Turing’s statement that

“I believe that in about fifty years’ time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 10 9 [bits], to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning”. (p. 442)

In June, 2014, a program called “ Eugene Goostman ,” written by Vladimir Veselov and Eugene Demchenko, supposedly passed the Turing Test, at an event organized by the University of Reading. U.K. It used the criterion of fooling 30% of a set of interrogators, each given five minutes to conduct an interview. The Eugene program fooled 33% of the judges. The organizers of the contest conveniently overlooked the restriction to a 10 9 -bit memory (about 100 Mbyte), although chatbots such as Eugene could probably be made to fit into it if necessary.

The judges included an actor who had played a robot, and a member of the House of Lords who had sponsored a bill pardoning Turing for his “crime” of being gay (BBC 2014).  Which brings me to the question of whether the judges should know anything about the current state of AI research. A couple of the papers in the collection (Epstein et al. 2008) of papers on the Turing Test include lessons learned by recent winners of the Loebner Prize, awarded annually to the best-performing program in a Turing Test with naïve interrogators (lasting 25 minutes). The papers contributed by winners contain a disappointing list of recommended tricks, including “Be zany,” “Try to ask questions, not answer them,” “Keep changing the topic,” and “Give lengthy answers, to run out the clock.” Goostman uses all of them. These tricks work because normal humans sound drab compared to zany, flighty chatbots, and naïve judges tend to equate “drab” with “mechanical,” “zany” with “creative.”

Transcripts with judges and journalists show that they are likely to succumb to the programmers’ wiles, and start answering questions the program asks them, as if the program understands, or cares about, their answers. For a time, you could try talking to the program yourself, at http://www.princetonai.com/bat — and unmask it with two or three hard questions. Unfortunately, the chatbot is no longer taking calls, but you can get the flavor of a serious interrogation by checking out Scott Aaronson ’s dialogue with it ( http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1858 ). Aaronson is if anything too easy with the machine, although Eugene does badly with almost every question anyway.

Depressingly, in the main other source of Turing’s thinking about the Test, the 1952 radio discussion moderated by the philosopher R.B. Braithwaite , he suggested having a jury of judges, “who should not be experts about machines,” and that “the machine would be permitted all sorts of tricks so as to appear more man-like, such as waiting a bit before giving the answer, or making spelling mistakes” (Braithwaite et al. 1952, p. 495).

But in his Mind paper, Turing seems to have as his standard of intelligence a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge. The other snippet of dialogue he gives is this one, in answer to an objection (number 4; see below) that machines could only echo things typed in by people, “parrot-fashion.”

The game (with the player B omitted) is frequently used in practice under the name of viva voce to discover whether some one really understands something or has “learnt it parrot fashion.” Let us listen in to a part of such a viva voce: Interrogator: In the first line of your sonnet which reads “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” would not “a spring day” do as well or better? Witness: It wouldn’t scan. Interrogator: How about “a winter’s day,” That would scan all right. Witness: Yes, but nobody wants to be compared to a winter’s day. Interrogator: Would you say Mr. Pickwick reminded you of Christmas? Witness: In a way. Interrogator: Yet Christmas is a winter’s day, and I do not think Mr. Pickwick would mind the comparison. Witness: I don’t think you’re serious. By a winter’s day one means a typical winter’s day, rather than a special one like Christmas. (p. 446)

Note how Turing discards player B once again. It’s clear that the Imitation Game changes when he needs to make a new point. The purpose of the “game” in this situation is not to decide whether player A is a machine, but to decide what grade it should get in a course. In its original form the game seems to presuppose no such expertise on the part of the computer, but it seems as if the contestant population Turing is drawing on is college-educated people for whom the question “Do you play chess?” has a non-negligible probability of being answered “Yes.”

This brings us to another problem Turing never clarifies. Although he isn’t clear about what the computer is expected to know, he’s even less clear about what it’s expected not to know. Consider questions like these: Where were you born? What’s the earliest war you remember? How did your mother and father meet? Do you live far from here? What made you decide to take part in a running of the Imitation Game? Did you have to travel far to take part? Where are you sitting? Did you vote in the last election for national office?

The weird thing about these questions is that they require us to equip the computer with a fake backstory, as if it’s an undercover agent. Yet Turing never mentions having to deal with this now-obvious possibility. Many contestants, like Veselov and Demchenko, have indeed equipped their programs with backstories, such as Goostman’s claim to be a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine. Regrettably, the judges rarely probe very deeply into Goostman’s backstory; it’s just as flimsy as the rest of the illusion created by the program’s seemingly weird personality.

Sometimes people running Turing Tests try to rule out “personal” questions, but it’s difficult to see how this can be done. Suppose the judge says, “I’m a computer. How many computers are taking part in this conversation?” The machine should either answer “One,” or express doubt that the interrogator is a computer. Perhaps all questions should pass through a “censor” who would detect a question requiring the computer to cough up information about “itself,” the fictional human being. Training the censors could be difficult. It’s apparently legitimate to ask questions such as, “Are you interested in football?” or “When you talk of football, which kind do you mean?” But we would like to rule out, “Did you ever play football for your school?” or “We’re in Kentucky. How can you not mean `American football’?” Conversations about general events often get into personal questions, and if the programs are allowed to ask questions about personal backgrounds, which they do all the time, they should have to answer them.

Again, Turing’s oracular pronouncements on such questions are often hard to make sense of. In the same radio discussion cited earlier, when asked whether machines could or would throw tantrums, he said:

“I don’t envisage teaching the machine to throw temperamental scenes. I think some such effects are likely to occur as a sort of by-product of genuine teaching, and that one will be more interested in curbing such displays that in encouraging them. Such effects would probably be distinctly different from the corresponding human ones, but recognisable as variations on them. This means that if the machine was being put through one of my imitation tests, it would have to do quite a bit of acting, but if one was comparing it with a man in a less strict sort of way the resemblance might be quite impressive”. (Braithwaite et al. 1952, p. 503)

Everyone involved in this radio discussion was confused, understandably, about the potential of digital computers. Turing seems clearly to have overestimated the difficulty of getting a computer to do the trivial tricks he alludes to, and at the same time underestimated the difficulty of getting a machine to really sound like a person. If “temperamental scenes” were a natural and expected result of teaching, but “distinctly different from … human ones,” then why have a test requiring a machine to seem human? And what could he possibly have meant by “acting” here? Acting is a difficult skill that few humans can master; did Turing really believe that a practical test for intelligence could require a machine to master it? And why would an intelligent machine want to master it? Given the textual medium he had in mind, I don’t think he meant “acting” in the normal sense, nor did he really intend to credit the machine with that ability. I think all he meant was that the programmer would have to engage in a lot of vicarious prevarication. And the last bit about how the results would be “quite impressive” if “one was comparing [the computer] with a man in a less strict sort of way” is impossible to interpret.

Turing was a brilliant thinker, but an average writer. His papers read like lists of thoughts that were put down in the order they occurred to him, and never revised. In “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” he presents the Game and answers a couple of critiques of it as a test of intelligence, then (section 3 to 5) digresses to explain digital computers, universality, and programming. This digression was necessary at a time when most people, including readers of Mind, had little concept of what computers were. At the end of section 5 he proposes that the question “Can machines think?” should be replaced by “Can a big, fast general-purpose computer be programmed to play the Imitation Game?”

Let us fix our attention on one particular digital computer C. Is it true that by modifying this computer to have an adequate storage, suitably increasing its speed of action, and providing it with an appropriate programme, C can be made to play satisfactorily the part of A in the imitation game, the part of B being taken by a man? (p. 442)

Of course, nowadays we take for granted that if the machine isn’t big enough and fast enough, wait 18 months and there will a be bigger, faster, lighter one on the market.

III. Objections

Section 6, the most entertaining, consists of various objections to the idea of machine intelligence, and Turing’s reply. But of course the objections, identified with various real and hypothetical opponents, are rarely concerned with the refined version of Turing’s proposal as quoted just now, because none of these opponents had heard it before. However, some had heard precursors of Turing’s idea. For example, Geoffrey Jefferson, who is quoted at the beginning of the Objection from Consciousness (number 4) titled his Lister Oration of 1949 “The Mind of Mechanical Man” (Jefferson 1949). It is obviously the work of an acquaintance of the men who built the Manchester computer that Turing was an early user of. (Jefferson was an insightful participant in the radio discussion described above (Braithwaite 1952), as was Max Newman, the man who hired Turing.) Jefferson disparaged machines that engaged in “artificially signalling” with messages as “an easy contrivance.” Turing counters with the hypothetical viva voce involving sonnets quoted above. His argument to the objection, after some insightful observations, descends into regrettable flippancy about whether to grant other beings consciousness as a courtesy; but here our question is what all this has to do with the Imitation Game, and the answer is, not much.

Objections 1 and 2 are the argument from religion and the argument from fear of the unknown. The response to neither involves the Imitation Game.

One of the most resilient objections is number 3, the mathematical objection, based on Turing’s own work (and others’) on uncompatibility. For every computer program that answers Yes/No questions (drawn from a class complex enough to include Peano arithmetic), there is a class of questions it can’t answer, and among this class is one equivalent to, “If I asked you this question, would you answer No?” It can’t answer, and hence the correct answer is No. This proves a limitation of computer programs that apparently we don’t share, since we can draw the correct conclusion and the program can’t. Turing has several replies to this objection (here and his earlier papers on AI, Turing 1947, 1948), but all he says about the Imitation Game is: “Those who hold to the mathematical argument would, I think, mostly be willing to accept the imitation game as a basis for discussion” (p. 445). In fact, objectors such as Roger Penrose , who has defended the mathematical objection in two books (1989, 1994), have not accepted the imitation game or any other way of thinking about AI.

Objection 5 is a list of things machines will never do, such as fall in love or enjoy strawberries and cream, or make mistakes. Many of these tie into the argument from consciousness, as Turing points out. But his reply is vague and desultory, focused on issues like whether computers can make mistakes. In some senses, no, and in some yes, as every programmer knows.

Objection 6 (“Lady Lovelace’s) is that “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.” It is now a commonplace that one thing we know how to order a computer to perform is learn enough for its behavior to change dramatically, under certain conditions. Unfortunately, Turing seemed to have hoped that it was possible to bootstrap from a few basic rote-learning strategies into learning to learn faster. Most of the results in the theory of machine learning tend to be refutations of this kind of idea. But in Turing’s defense, almost everyone overestimated the power of learning in those days.

By now Turing has drifted far from the Imitation Game. But he does return to it in connection with the next objection, number 7, the argument from continuity in the nervous system. “It is true that a discrete-state machine must be different from a continuous machine. But if we adhere to the conditions of the imitation game, the interrogator will not be able to take any advantage of this difference” (p. 451). Why not? He offers an analogy: Suppose we wanted to make a digital computer “pretend” to be a differential analyzer (a kind of analogue computer). It could use random or pseudo-random numbers to introduce wobble into the answers it prints out, and no one would be the wiser.

One sees the analogy, but it’s a weak one. Those who find “electronic brains” to be totally unbrainlike presumably do so because they believe that inside the brain, among all those trillions of synapses, and billions of glial cells, and axons, phenomena occur that would be very hard to simulate digitally on the scale required to achieve, say, creativity. I don’t find this objection any more convincing than Turing did, but I have to admit I have no argument. In spite of impressive advances in neuroscience, we are as far from answering many basic questions about how the brain works as we were in 1950.

Besides, what does the differential-analyzer imitation game have to do with the original Game, exactly? Turing may have thought that randomness was necessary to avoid falling into repeated behavior patterns, but it now seems obvious that the reason most people avoid repeating themselves is memory. For instance, one remembers having been directed to help desk A from help desk B, so after being sent to desk A again one does not just start all over from square one, at least not without protest. (Perhaps one way for the interrogator to unmask the machine is to make demands that will infuriate a real person, hoping the program will be unnaturally patient.)

The objection (if you’re counting, number 8) from informality of behavior is that people don’t follow rules to decide what to do. This objection is based on a simple equivocation: the sense in which computers follow rules is not the same as the sense in which people do (when they do), as Turing points out.

The last objection, number 9, is that people may be capable of extrasensory perception. Turing takes this objection surprisingly seriously, and ends up recommending figuring out how to build a “telepathy-proof room” to house the contenders in the Imitation Game. We pause in wonder, and move on.

That concludes section 6 of the paper. After this comes one more section, a longish discussion of machine learning, but the Imitation Game, or the Turing Test as it is now usually called, is not mentioned again.

IV. Conclusion

Given the general fuzziness of Turing’s description of the Imitation Game, its lack of importance in the history of the field, and uncertainty about how much importance he attached to it, one wonders why it has circulated so virally for so long. I think there are a couple of reasons. One is that there is no obvious sufficient condition for us to label a machine as intelligent, or as capable of thought. Stevan Harnad ’s (2000) “Total Turing Test,” satisfied only by a mechanical person that fools people into thinking it’s human (a Terminator II, in other words, but non-homicidal), is hard to set rules for. For Turing’s Test, we have to decide how savvy the judges are and how long they get to talk to the machine, and we’re done. Plus Harnad’s test is almost by definition sufficient, whereas you can spend an enjoyable evening over a couple of beers debating whether Turing’s version is sufficient, or there’s a way to cheat (McDermott 2014).

But my guess is that the most important reason for the hold the Turing Test has on the imagination of so many is that Turing died young, under mysterious and infuriating circumstances, having been persecuted (and prosecuted) for what was then considered deviant sexual behavior. Only after his death was the magnitude of his achievements realized. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” is not one of his strongest works, but it is one of the most accessible, and readers groping for its significance fastened onto the Imitation Game as its one solid contribution. On the basis of this paper, he was anointed the patron saint of AI and the Turing Test was enshrined as one of its central ideas. The sad truth is that Turing, only 42 when he died, could have been one of the founding fathers of AI, but missed the founding by a few years. His influence on the field when it took off was small, whereas his influence on computer science in general is incalculable. The Imitation Game is basically a fun thought experiment and not much more. But it will be around until AI is seen as having definitely succeeded or failed, so we might as well enjoy whatever conversations it gets us into.

Footnotes & References

[1] BBC 2014 “Computer AI passes Turing test in ‘world first’.” http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27762088

[2] R.B. Braithwaite, G. Jefferson, Max Newman, and Alan Turing 1952 Can Automatic Machines Be Said To Think? (BBC Radio broadcast.) Also in (Copeland 2004), pp.~494–506

[3] B. Jack Copeland (ed.) 2004 The Essential Turing: Seminal Writings in Computing, Logic, Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, and Artificial Life, plus The Secrets of Enigma. Oxford: Clarendon Press

[4] Robert Epstein, Gary Roberts, and Grace Beber 2008 Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer. Springer

[5] Stevan Harnad 2000 Minds, machines, and Turing. J. of Logic, Language and Information 9 (4), pp. 425–45

[6] Geoffrey Jefferson 1949 The mind of mechanical man. Brit. Med. J. 1 (4616), pp. 1105–1110

[7] Drew McDermott 2014 On the claim that a table-lookup program could pass the Turing test. Minds and Machines 24 (2), pp. 143–188

[8] Roger Penrose 1989 The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. New York: Oxford University Press

[9] Roger Penrose 1994 Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press

[10] Alan Turing 1947 Lecture to the London Mathematical Society. Typescript in the King’s College Archives titled “Lecture to L.M.S., Feb. 20, 1947.” In (Copeland 2004), pp. 378–394

[11] Alan Turing 1948 “Intelligent machinery.” Typescript in King’s College Archives. (Digital facsimile at URL www.turingarchive).

Harnad, S. (2014) Turing Testing and the Game of Life: Cognitive science is about designing lifelong performance capacity not short-term fooling. LSE Impact Blog 6/10 June 10 2014 http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/06/10/turing-testing-and-the-game-of-life/

Drew, really interesting. I hadn’t really even heard of Turing before the trailer for The Imitation Game but his story and work are fascinating. Thanks for enlightening me!

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Home > The Imitation Game Ending Explained

• The Imitation Game Ending Explained
• UPDATED: September 19, 2023

Table of Contents

“The Imitation Game” is a gripping historical drama that tells the story of Alan Turing, a brilliant mathematician and cryptanalyst who played a pivotal role in breaking the Enigma code during World War II. The film not only sheds light on Turing’s extraordinary achievements but also explores the personal struggles he faced as a gay man living in a time when homosexuality was illegal.

As the movie reaches its climax, viewers are left with mixed emotions as they witness Turing’s triumphs and tragedies. The ending of “The Imitation Game” is both poignant and thought-provoking, leaving audiences contemplating the significance of Turing’s legacy.

*Spoiler Alert*

The film concludes with Turing being convicted of “gross indecency” due to his homosexual relationship with another man. Instead of serving jail time, he is given the option to undergo chemical castration as an alternative punishment. This procedure involves taking hormone injections that would suppress his sexual desires.

Turing reluctantly agrees to this in order to avoid imprisonment, but the side effects take a toll on his physical and mental well-being. The once vibrant and brilliant mind gradually deteriorates, leaving Turing isolated and broken.

The final scene takes place years later when Detective Robert Nock visits Turing’s home after his death. Nock discovers an envelope containing a letter from Turing addressed to him. In this heartfelt letter, Turing reveals his true identity as a codebreaker and expresses gratitude for Nock’s efforts in solving the mystery behind his death.

This revelation adds another layer of complexity to the ending, as it highlights the secrecy surrounding Turing’s work during the war. It also serves as a reminder of how society failed to recognize and appreciate his contributions while he was alive.

The ending of “The Imitation Game” raises important questions about justice, discrimination, and recognition. It forces us to confront the injustice faced by Turing simply because of his sexual orientation. Turing’s story serves as a powerful reminder of the progress that still needs to be made in terms of LGBTQ+ rights and acceptance.

Furthermore, the ending prompts us to reflect on the impact of Turing’s work. Breaking the Enigma code is widely regarded as a turning point in World War II, saving countless lives and shortening the war by several years. Yet, Turing’s contributions were not fully acknowledged until decades later.

“The Imitation Game” leaves us with a bittersweet feeling, celebrating Turing’s achievements while mourning the injustice he endured. It serves as a reminder that even in the face of adversity, individuals can make significant contributions to society.

In conclusion, the ending of “The Imitation Game” is a powerful and emotional conclusion to Alan Turing’s story. It sheds light on both his incredible achievements and the discrimination he faced due to his sexual orientation. The film challenges us to reflect on societal norms and prejudices while honoring Turing’s legacy as a brilliant codebreaker and advocate for LGBTQ+ rights.

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The Imitation Game

• During World War II, the English mathematical genius Alan Turing tries to crack the German Enigma code with help from fellow mathematicians while attempting to come to terms with his troubled private life.
• It is based on the real life story of legendary cryptanalyst Alan Turing. The film portrays the nail-biting race against time by Turing and his brilliant team of code-breakers at Britain's top-secret Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, during the darkest days of World War II. — Studio Canal
• Out in the world, one who is compelled to create is considered abnormal. Society is hard on the non-conformist. A creator may solve impossible puzzles with his brain or write symphony; he turns nothing into something. Success in his endeavor may result in the masses of society clustering at the median to call him "genius." But, beware: this means they can neither understand the achievement nor hope to equal the mind who made it. The same masses who eagerly accept his gifts with the one hand will turn around and push him into a snake pit with the other. Such is the cautionary tale of Alan Mathison Turing, master of the puzzle and father of the modern computer. — LA-Lawyer
• In 1939, newly created British intelligence agency MI6 recruits Cambridge mathematics alumnus Alan Turing to crack Nazi codes, including Enigma -- which cryptanalysts had thought unbreakable. Turing's team, including Joan Clarke, analyze Enigma messages while he builds a machine to decipher them. Turing and team finally succeed and become unsung heroes, but in 1952, their quiet genius leader encounters disgrace — Jwelch5742
• With Europe succumbing to Adolf Hitler 's suffocating grasp, the British government recruits the country's best scientists to stop the Nazis. However, the Allies are running out of time. Now, only a radical, out-of-the-box approach could save millions of lives. As a result, Alan Turing joins a hand-picked team of accomplished code breakers at Bletchley Park, determined to crack the code behind the infamous Enigma Machine, the Germans' top-secret, military-grade encipherment device. But to turn the tide of the war, Alan and his fellow cryptanalysts have their work cut out for them: they must first figure out a reliable technique for cracking the Enigma's millions of combinations. — Nick Riganas
• BASED ON A TRUE STORY. We hear Alan Turing say, "Are you paying attention? Good. If you're not listening carefully, you will miss things. Important things. I will not pause, I will not repeat myself, and you will not interrupt me. You think that because you're sitting where you are, and I am sitting where I am, that you are in control of what is about to happen. You are mistaken. I am in control, because I know things that you do not know. What I need from you now is a commitment. You will listen closely and you will not judge me until I am finished. If you cannot commit to this, then please leave the room, but if you choose to stay, remember that you chose to be here. What happens from this moment forward is not my responsibility. It's yours. Pay attention." It is 1951, Manchester, England. Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) Headquarters intercepts a message that Alan Turing has been robbed at his place. Alan, now known as a professor at Cambridge, is visited by the police inquiring about his burglary. They find him in his home, but he is dismissive towards them. They find him an insufferable person, raising suspicions that he is hiding something. In a flashback to September 1939 in London, war has been declared with 800,000 children evacuated from their homes. On the train, 27-year-old Alan Turing admires a kid doing crossword puzzles. He arrives at Bletchley Park, guarded by Royal Naval officers. He waits in the office of Commander Denniston. When the Commander arrives, Alan is cold and seems to lack humour. The Commander asks why Alan wants to work for the government; he replies he doesn't. He mentions that he's not very political, and the Commander says it may be the shortest job interview ever. Alan mentions he doesn't speak German but tells the Commander that he's one of the best mathematicians in the world. He considers German codes to be like puzzles, which he enjoys solving. The Commander calls for Alan to be removed by his secretary, so Alan mentions "Enigma," revealing he knows about the top secret program he's being considered for. Alan explains that Enigma is the greatest encryption device in history and, if the Allies can crack the code, it will end the war. The Commander says everyone thinks Enigma is unbreakable; Alan says to let him try and they'll know for sure. Alan is welcomed to Enigma alongside five others including Peter Hilton, John Cairncross, Hugh Alexander, Keith Furman and Charles Richards. They've got their hands on an actual Enigma machine smuggled out of Berlin but they don't know the machine's settings to decode messages. Every night at midnight, the Germans refresh the settings. Intercepting the first message every morning at 6 A.M., the code-breakers only have eighteen hours each day to crack their code before it changes and they must start from scratch. Hugh, a chess champion, is able to calculate that this means there are 159 million million million possibilities every day. Alan is reluctant to work as a team; Stewart Menzies, the Chief of MI6, tells them four men have died in the last few minutes because the code remains uncracked and orders them to begin. Alan says all the messages are floating in the air for anyone to grab; the problem is that they are encrypted and there are 159,000,000,000,000,000,000 possibilities. It will take twenty million years to try everything. The team wants to take a lunch break but when they invite Alan, his social awkwardness is cold and off-putting, so they go on without him. Alan continues his work alone, building blueprints for a machine. In 1951, Robert Nock, the detective from before, finds out that Alan's records are classified. He doesn't know why a math professor would have classified records and becomes suspicious. He uses a typewriter to falsify a document, allowing him to secure Alan's service records. Returning to 1939, Alan complains to Commander Denniston that Hugh Alexander has denied funding for the parts he needs to build a machine. The commander tells him the other code-breakers do not get along with him and he should take up the complaint with someone else. Alan suggests firing them all and using the funds for his machine. He says he only needs 100,000 pounds and that only a machine can defeat another machine. Alan asks who the Commander's commanding officer is; he is told Winston Churchill. Alan sends a letter to the Prime Minister via Stewart Menzies. Churchill puts Alan in charge, overriding Hugh's authority. Alan immediately fires two of his teammates, Keith and Charles, calling them mediocre linguists and poor code-breakers. He is asked sarcastically if he was popular at school. Flashback to young Alan: as a schoolboy he was picked on for having a form of OCD, keeping the carrots and peas separate during lunch. His classmates pour food on him and bury him under the floorboards. He tells us: "Do you know why people like violence? It is because it feels good. Humans find violence deeply satisfying, but remove the satisfaction and the act becomes hollow." When Alan is able to remain calm under the floorboards, the other kids leave him alone. He is rescued by fellow student Christopher Morcom. Christopher says they beat Alan up because he's different. Alan says he's an odd duck. Christopher tells him, "Sometimes it's the very people who no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine." Return to 1939. Now short on staff, the team decides to find new members by placing a difficult crossword puzzle in newspapers to be mailed in upon completion; anyone who can solve it is a good candidate. The war rages on, with many hiding out in bomb shelters. The handful that managed to solve the puzzle are gathered together to take a test. One young woman, Joan Clarke, shows up late because her bus had a flat tire. They think she is in the wrong room and remain skeptical as she tells them that she has solved the crossword puzzle. Alan tells her to take a seat. He tasks the room to solve a very difficult puzzle in six minutes that took Alan himself eight minutes. Surprising them all, Joan solves it in five and a half. Joan and one other man are kept afterwards and told that they are not allowed to share what they are about to be told or they'll be executed for high treason. They are ordered to lie to everyone they know about what they are going to be doing. Joan asks what he is referring to. She is told she will be helping to break an unbreakable Nazi code and win the war. Back in school days: young Alan bonds with Christopher, who shares with him a book on codes and ciphers. The awkward Alan compares cryptic messages with how people talk, saying one thing while hiding true intentions beneath their words (which he doesn't know how to decipher). It is now several months later in 1940, Bletchley Park. The supercomputer is being hooked up in a secret hut. Alan is concerned when Joan does not show up. He goes to her home and tries to convince her parents that she's very necessary at the radio factory (official cover for their true purpose) that wants to employ her. Joan comes home and talks to Alan in private, although her parents are listening in. Joan explains that it is indecorous for her to be working and living among men (according to her parents); Alan loudly suggests she work in the clerical department with women (although she won't really be doing this). Apparently, this is convincing enough, because Joan packs up and leaves with Alan. She wonders why he is so fixated on helping her; he responds that "Sometimes it's the very people who no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine." In 1951, Detective Nock shares with Superintendent Smith that Alan's classified military file is empty. His war records aren't classified. Someone has burned and erased them. They suspect he is a Soviet spy. In 1940, Joan arrives at Bletchley Park under the guise of a clerical worker. In narration, Alan tells us that the British were literally starving to death. Every week, Americans would send 100,000 tons of food, and every week, the Germans would send it to the bottom of the ocean. Every night at midnight, a bell sounds, telling them their day's work has been wasted (since the code is reset at midnight). Frustrated, Hugh visits Alan, tinkering with his machine (referred to as Christopher throughout the film, named after Alan's childhood friend). A frustrated Hugh grabs a wrench to destroy the machine, but the others hold him back. Hugh tells him that the machine is useless and there are legitimate ways to help in the war. One of the others, Peter, explains that his brother and cousins are actually fighting in the war while they have nothing to show for all of their work because of the machine. Alan is adamant that the machine will work. Later, Alan is in the hut alone. He removes a stack of Enigma messages and stashes them in his socks. They manage to go undetected by the guards at checkpoint. He sneaks over to Joan's home and climbs through her window. He reveals the decrypted Enigma messages, delivered from Nazi high command they read one with the weather report, ending in "Heil Hitler". Joan and Alan talk about Christopher and the concept of a digital computer. The next day, Alan enters the hut to find military police rifling through his desk while the other code-breakers watch. Commander Denniston explains that there is a spy in Bletchley Park and they suspect it's one of them. The Commander shows Alan a telegram that was intercepted on its way to Moscow, which is encrypted with a key phrase. They suspect Alan because he's arrogant, has no friends or romantic attachments, and is a loner. Commander Denniston says he will no longer have to fire him - he can hang him for treason if he's caught. Joan greets Alan, working on Christopher, and tries to cheer him up by taking him to a beer hut. Hugh, John, and Peter enter the hut and Joan is friendly towards them. She tells Alan in private that she's a woman in a man's job and doesn't have the luxury of being an ass. She says it doesn't matter how smart he is; Enigma is smarter and Alan needs all the help he can get - but his team won't help him if they don't like him. The next time he sees them at their workshop, he brings apples under Joan's suggestion to give them something. He then tries to tell a joke. In a flashback to his schooling, Christopher is caught passing a note to Alan. The teacher mocks them for the note being in gibberish (not knowing it's encrypted). Alan retrieves it from the garbage and breaks the code later "See you in two long weeks, dearest friend." The school is going on holiday. In 1941, at Bletchley Park, Joan and Alan bond over the codes. Hugh Alexander approaches, telling Alan that if they run the wires on Christopher diagonally, they'll eliminate rotor positions 500 times faster. Alan is able to utilize this idea. The machine is turned on; it is the very first digital computer, and it works. They wait to see if it can reveal the day's Enigma settings. We see footage of the war. In Denniston's office, he is told that the machine is not producing any results. He surprises Alan at the hut, who barricades the door, trying to keep him out. They force the door open and turn it off. Commander Denniston tells him his machine doesn't work because it hasn't broken Enigma. Denniston's associate from the home office is upset about spending a hundred thousand pounds with nothing to show for it. Alan tries to defend his machine but it has not decrypted a single German message. The Commander fires him but is stopped short by Hugh, John and Peter, who say that if he fires Alan, they will have to be fired, too, because they believe his machine can work. Hugh reminds the Commander that they're the best cryptographic minds in Britain and asks to be granted six more months. Commander Denniston grants one more month or they're all gone. At the beer hut, Hugh tells Alan that he cracked the encrypted message "Ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find. Matthew 7:7." He knows that Alan is not the spy because he would not have used a simple Bible quote for his code. In 1951, Detective Nock and Superintendent Smith are told by a sergeant that he has found out that Alan is a "poofter" (British slang for homosexual). He has been caught with a male hustler, who later robbed his house. That was the piece of information that he was hiding from the police, not that he's a spy. The detective is sure Alan is hiding something else, so he asks for him to be arrested so he can interrogate him. In 1941, Joan comes home to find Alan there, using her flat to try to solve mathematical equations so Christopher can run through more settings per 18-hour block. She interrupts Alan to tell him that she has to return home; her parents are unhappy with her being twenty-five years old and unmarried. He suggests she get married. She suspects he is suggesting Hugh or Peter, but of course he means himself. He proposes with a piece of electrical wire, rolled into a ring. An engagement party is thrown at the beer hut. While Joan dances with Hugh, John Cairncross talks to a sullen Alan who admits he is a homosexual. John is sympathetic and tells Alan that he already suspected that for some time. John suggests that Alan keep it a secret because homosexuality is illegal and, on top of that, Denniston is looking for any excuse to put Alan away. Back at school, everyone returns from holiday. A young Alan encrypts the message I LOVE YOU and prepares to give it to Christopher but he never shows up. In 1951, Alan is interrogated by Detective Nock. The detective asks if machines can think. Alan notes that he must have read his published work since he was called in on charges of hiring a man to touch his penis, not on computers. Alan says "machines can never think as humans do, but just because something thinks differently from you, does it mean it's not thinking?" He tells the detective, "We allow for humans to have such divergences from one another. You like strawberries. I hate ice-skating. You cry at sad films. I am allergic to pollen. What is the point of different tastes, different preferences, if not to say that our brains work differently, that we think differently? And if we can say that about one another, then why can't we say the same things for brains made of copper and wire and steel?" The detective asks him about the paper he wrote, The Imitation Game. Alan tells him it is a test to determine whether something is a machine or a human being. The detective asks him what he did during the war and Alan tells him he worked at a radio factory. Detective Nock knows this isn't true. In 1942, Alan and his team wait for Christopher to crack the code but then the midnight buzzer sounds. The machine will never be able to process so many possibilities in an 18-hour time frame. At the beer hut, Joan's friend, Helen, is admiring Hugh. Hugh finally approaches her, with Alan by his side. To charm Helen, Hugh tells her that Alan believes men and women should not work together because it will lead to romance (a ruse as Hugh personally believes that women are smart and should be considered equals). Helen says she agrees with Alan because she has a male co-worker that she has garnered a crush on; upon further inquiry, Helen reveals she intercepts messages from a German radio tower and has been assigned one counterpart. She says she has grown fond of him but, unfortunately, he has a girlfriend. Hugh steals Helen and they go off to the bar. Alan is lost in thought and then calls out to Helen. He asks her why she thinks he has a girlfriend. Helen says because every message begins with C-I-L-L-Y, which she assumes is the name of his love. Alan tells her the Germans are instructed to choose five letters at random to start each message but, because he is in love, he uses the same five letters every time. Alan remarks that love just lost the Germans the whole bloody war. Everyone chases Alan as he rushes across Bletchley Park, past guards and security checkpoints. They get into their hut and Alan pours out previously decrypted messages. He points out that Christopher does not have to search through every possible setting; the computer can search for ones that produce words he knows will be in the message. They realize the entire 6 A.M. weather reports end in "Heil Hitler". They can have Christopher search for the words "weather," "heil" and "Hitler" to crack the code. They test it on a 6 A.M. message. Christopher comes to a stop. They take the letters it produces and run back to the Enigma machine, typing in the same letters. They are able to decode a message. They've cracked the code! The team works throughout the night. They have decoded messages and translated decrypts, now able to produce a map that represents all of their ships versus the Axis ships. John tells them there are five people in the world who know the position of every ship in the Atlantic, and they are all in this room. Joan realizes that they're going to attack a British passenger convoy as they are positioned twenty minutes away. Hugh tries to call Denniston to warn him but Alan stops him, ripping the phone out of the wall. Everyone argues. Alan points out they have to let the U-boats sink the convoy or else it will give the Germans a heads up that they have cracked Enigma. The Germans will stop radio communication and change the design of Enigma immediately. In order to keep their success secret and win the war, they have to allow the lives of hundreds of innocent people to be lost. Peter breaks down, realizing that his brother is on one of the convoys. He demands that they alert Denniston of just that one ship, but Alan simply apologizes. Peter tells him they don't decide who lives or who dies; Alan says they do, because no one else can. Alan and Joan ride the train into London. They meet with Stewart Menzies in a tea shop. They reveal that they have broken Enigma but ask for Stewart's help in determining how much intelligence to act on, which attacks to stop. He can come up with believable sources of information so the Germans don't suspect Enigma has been cracked. Peter harbours animosity towards Alan for letting his brother be killed despite knowing it in advance. He knocks his books over. While retrieving them on the ground, Alan spots John Cairncross' Bible. He opens it and realizes that it is earmarked to Matthew 7:7. John notices Alan making this discovery, now aware that John is the Soviet spy. In private, John tells Alan that the Soviets and Britain are on the same side; he then threatens Alan that, if he tells his secret, he'll reveal that Alan is a homosexual and his work will be destroyed. Alan tries to call Menzies but knows his calls are being intercepted. He returns to Joan's flat and Stewart Menzies is there; Alan is told that Joan is in military prison after discovering that she was the Soviet spy -- they have found Enigma messages in her things. Alan tells him that he gave her the intercepts when they were trying to crack the code. Stewart says Denniston is looking for a spy in their hut and Alan tells him the spy is actually John Cairncross. Stewart admits to knowing this before Cairncross even got to Bletchley; this is exactly why he placed them there so they could leak whatever they wanted to Stalin since Churchill was too paranoid to share information with the Soviets. Cairncross is unaware that he is being used by them. Stewart says he needs Alan's help to know what to leak to John and feed to the Soviets. Alan says he's just a mathematician, not a spy, but demands that Joan be released. Stewart reveals he lied about her being in a military prison but threatens to use the Enigma messages against her if Alan doesn't cooperate. Alan encourages Joan to leave Bletchley, knowing she is in danger, but it is too risky to tell her this explicitly. To get her to go, he reveals that he's a homosexual. Joan responds with indifference. She says she's had suspicions about him for some time, but doesn't think they can't love each other in their own way. Joan tells Alan that, despite the fact that he only loves her as a friend, they'll be in a marriage built on companionship and intellectual stimulation rather then love, since most married couples that love each other end up divorcing anyway. Alan then lies and tells her he doesn't love or care for her and was only using her to break Enigma. She slaps him and tells him she's not going anywhere, despite all the low expectations placed on her by men and her parents. She calls him a monster. We see more stock footage from World War II. In voice-over, Alan says that, every day, they decoded messages and the war wasn't determined by the bombings and fighting but by a team of six crossword enthusiasts in a tiny village in England. We see everyone celebrating on V-E Day, May 8, 1945. Menzies tells the group that before they can return to their lives at university, they have to burn all evidence that they cracked Enigma because it may be used again in future wars. They also have to pretend they have never met one another. In 1951, the interrogation of Alan by Detective Nock continues. Alan tells him he has told him his story, and now the detective has to play the Imitation Game and answer if he's a machine or a person. "Am I a war hero?" he asks. "Am I a criminal?" Detective Nock tells Alan he can't judge him. Alan tells him he's no help to him at all (because he doesn't know how to judge himself). In another flashback, Alan is called to the principal's office and asked about his friendship with Christopher Morcom. He vehemently denies being friends with him, afraid they are aware that it is romantic. The teacher tells him he asked because he heard they were close and wanted to inform him that Christopher has died over the holiday break; he had bovine tuberculosis and never told Alan. Six months after his interrogation, the detective is congratulated: Alan has been sentenced for indecency (homosexuality). Joan goes to visit the older Alan at his home. She says she would have testified on his behalf to keep him out of jail. Alan is shaky and reveals to her that the judge gave him a choice: two years in prison or two years of weekly hormonal therapy designed to dampen his homosexual predilections. He wouldn't be able to continue his work from prison and, if he's taken away, they'll destroy Christopher, despite all the work he's done on him over the last ten years. He has a panic attack and she calms him down. He notices her wedding ring and she tells him about her husband. She asks him to do a crossword puzzle for old times' sake, but he is not able to do it, the hormonal treatment having ravaged his brain. He tells her she got what she wanted: work, husband, a normal life. Joan tells him no one normal could have done what they did. That morning, she was on a train that went through a city that would not have existed if it wasn't for Alan. She bought a ticket from a man who would most likely not be alive if it wasn't for Alan. She's read up on a whole field of scientific study that wouldn't exist if not for Alan. She is glad he wasn't born normal. She tells him, "The world is an infinitely better place precisely because you weren't [normal]". He asks if she really thinks that and she tells him, "I think that sometimes it's the very people who no one imagines anything of, who do the things that no one can imagine." In 1953, Alan is in his home, alone. He looks longingly at Christopher, at his supercomputer, at the love of his life. He turns off the lights. Cut to a flashback of the six cryptologists burning all the evidence toward cracking Enigma. In a series of final on-screen texts, it is said that Alan killed himself in 1954, after a year of government-mandated hormonal therapy. Between 1885 and 1967, approximately 49,000 homosexual men in the UK were convicted of and imprisoned for gross indecency under British law. In 2013, Queen Elizabeth II granted a posthumous royal pardon, honouring Alan Turing for his achievements during the war. Historians estimate that breaking Enigma shortened the war by more than two years, saving over fourteen million lives. It remained a government-held secret for more than fifty years. Turing's work inspired generations of research into what scientists called "Turing machines", now known as computers.

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How Accurate Is The Imitation Game ?

Photo courtesy StudioCanal

The Oscar-buzzed new movie The Imitation Game is an old-fashioned biopic, crafting a tidy, entertaining narrative from disparate strands of its subject’s life—in this case, British mathematician, codebreaker, and computer pioneer Alan Turing. Slate movie critic Dana Stevens has taken issue with the film’s emotional straightforwardness , writing, “ The Imitation Game doesn’t do right by the complex and often unlovable man it purports to be about.” Meanwhile, on Outward , my colleagues J. Bryan Lowder and June Thomas praise the film’s message in spite of its historical inaccuracies.

Just how inaccurate are those inaccuracies? I read the masterful biography that the screenplay is based on, Andrew Hodges’ Alan Turing: The Enigma , to find out. I discovered that The Imitation Game takes major liberties with its source material, injecting conflict where none existed, inventing entirely fictional characters, rearranging the chronology of events, and misrepresenting the very nature of Turing’s work at Bletchley Park. At the same time, the film might paint Turing as being more unlovable than he actually was. For details on the film’s flights of fancy, read on. (There will, naturally, be spoilers.)

Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch)

Wikimedia Commons / © 2014 - The Weinstein Company

The Alan Turing played by Benedict Cumberbatch is brusque, humorless, and brilliant. In an early scene where he is interviewed by Commander Denniston (Charles Dance), we learn that he made exceptional achievements in mathematics at a young age. This is a reflection of reality: Turing was elected as a fellow at Cambridge at the age of 22, and he published his most influential paper, “ On Computable Numbers ,” at 24.

Other aspects of Cumberbatch’s characterization are true to life, as well: Turing was fairly indifferent to politics, both in the interpersonal sense and in the civic sense. He ran marathons. He was also gay, and even more openly than the film implies. Hodges’ biography is filled with instances in which Turing boldly made advances toward other men—mostly without success. Turing also told his friends and colleagues about his homosexuality.

However, the central conceit of The Imitation Game —that Turing singlehandedly invented and physically built the machine that broke the Germans’ Enigma code—is simply untrue. A predecessor of the “Bombe”—the name given to the large, ticking machine that used rotors to test different letter combinations—was invented by Polish cryptanalysts before Turing even began working as a cryptologist for the British government.* Turing’s great innovation was to design a new machine that broke the Enigma code faster by looking for likely letter combinations and ruling out combinations that were unlikely to yield results. Turing didn’t develop the new, improved machine by dint of his own singular genius—the mathematician Gordon Welchman, who is not even mentioned in the film, collaborated with Turing on the design.

Leaving aside Turing’s codebreaking achievements, The Imitation Game also somewhat alters Turing’s personality. The film strongly implies that Alan is somewhere on the autism spectrum: Cumberbatch’s character doesn’t understand jokes, takes common expressions literally, and seems indifferent to the suffering and annoyance he causes in others. This characterization is rooted in Hodge’s biography but is also largely exaggerated: Hodges never suggests that Turing was autistic, and though he refers to Turing’s tendency to take contracts and other bureaucratic red tape literally, he also describes Turing as a man with a keen sense of humor and close friends. To be sure, Hodges paints Turing as shy, eccentric, and impatient with irrationality, but Cumberbatch’s narcissistic, detached Alan has more in common with the actor’s title character in Sherlock than with the Turing of Hodges’ biography. One of Turing’s colleagues at Bletchley Park later recalled him as “a very easily approachable man” and said “we were very very fond of him”; none of this is reflected in the film.

In addition to the more significant creative liberties that the movie takes, there are small fictions surrounding his character in the movie. Although, in the movie, Alan tells Denniston that he doesn’t know German, Turing did in fact study German and travel to Germany before and after the war. Turing did not, as far as we know, have a compulsion to separate his peas and carrots. (In fact, given his generally unkempt appearance, it’s highly unlikely he gave attention to such details.) And whether or not Turing liked sandwiches—a key plot point in The Imitation Game —goes unmentioned in Hodges’ biography.

Christopher Morcom (Jack Bannon)

In flashbacks to 1928 in The Imitation Game , we learn that Alan’s first love was a classmate at boarding school named Christopher. Christopher rescues Alan after he’s nailed under the floorboards by bullies, teaches Alan to communicate via codes and ciphers, flirts with Alan, and then suddenly dies of bovine tuberculosis.

Although many of the details are invented for the movie, the gist of this storyline is true: Turing really did befriend and develop romantic feelings for a boy named Christopher Morcom at Sherborne School, the boys’ school in Dorset that he attended as a teenager. (He also did get trapped under the floorboards by other boys, according to Alan Turing: The Enigma , but this occurred before he met Morcom.) Morcom died from bovine tuberculosis in 1930, shortly after he’d been accepted to Cambridge and three years after Turing had first met him.

In the movie, it’s implied that Christopher shares Alan’s attraction, but it seems likely that Turing’s affection for Morcom was unrequited—Turing later wrote, “Chris knew I think so well how I liked him, but hated me shewing it.” Several other details of their relationship are different in the movie than in Alan Turing: The Enigma . Although in the movie Christopher is taller than young Alan (Alex Lawther), in reality Turing had a growth spurt at 15, while Morcom was “surprisingly small for his form.” (Morcom was one year ahead of Turing in school.) Turing and Morcom bonded over math and chemistry, not ciphers; Turing began exploring ciphers with another friend at Sherborne after Morcom had died. The biggest departure from reality in the film is the scene where the headmaster informs Alan of Christopher’s death, and Alan denies having known Christopher very well. In real life, Turing was openly devastated by Morcom’s death, and he subsequently developed a relationship with Morcom’s family, going on vacations with them and maintaining a correspondence with Morcom’s mother for years after he’d left Sherborne.

Additionally, Turing did not call any of the early computers he worked on “Christopher”—that is a dramatic flourish invented by screenwriter Graham Moore.

Commander Denniston (Charles Dance)

Screenshot © 2014 - The Weinstein Company

In The Imitation Game , Commander Denniston is a rigid naval officer who resents Alan’s indifference to the military hierarchy and attempts to fire him when his decryption machine fails to deliver fast results. This characterization is mostly fictional, and Denniston’s family has taken issue with the film’s negative portrayal of him . The real-life Alastair Denniston, who spent most of his career as the director of the Government Code and Cypher School, was eager to expand his staff to help break the Germans’ Enigma code in the late 1930s. He recruited Turing, on the basis of his work at Cambridge and his writing on hypothetical computation machines, in 1938, and he hired Turing to work full time at Bletchley Park when Britain entered World War II in September 1939. There’s no record of a contentious interview between Turing and Denniston, and Denniston never tried to fire Turing from the Government Code and Cypher School—rather, given his innovations, Turing was a star of Bletchley Park.

Even if most of the details of the conflict between Commander Denniston and Alan are made up, they do stand in for a real-life power struggle between the military brass and the cryptologists. Turing’s colleagues there recalled that Turing “was always impatient of pompousness or officialdom of any kind,” which made him ill-suited for work in a military context, and Hodges writes that he “had little time for Denniston.” One of the most memorable clashes between Commander Denniston and Alan in the movie occurs when Alan goes over Denniston’s head to write a letter to Winston Churchill, who immediately puts Alan in charge of the Enigma-breaking operation and grants him the 100,000 pounds he needs to build his machine. This never happened, but Alan and three colleagues at Bletchley Park—including Hugh Alexander—did write a letter to Churchill requesting more staff and resources in 1941, and Churchill quickly granted them their requests.

Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode)

In The Imitation Game , Hugh Alexander is a suave ladykiller who spends much of the film battling with Alan for control of the codebreaking operations; Hugh eventually recognizes Alan’s genius and falls in line behind him. Hugh Alexander—who went professionally by Conel Hugh O’Donel Alexander or C.H.O’D. Alexander—was a real person, but the film’s Hugh character seems intended to serve as a contrast to Alan’s antisocial personality.

The film is faithful to the basic facts: Alexander was a chess champion, and he was much better at managing people than Turing was. However, Alexander was not initially assigned to be Turing’s superior at Bletchley Park. Alexander began working there several months after Turing arrived, and the two didn’t begin working together for another year or so, when Alexander was transferred to Turing’s team to work on breaking Germany’s naval Enigma code. Hodges writes, “Hugh Alexander soon proved the all-round organiser and diplomat that Alan could never be.” Alexander eventually took over naval Enigma decryption after Turing began pursuing a speech decryption project, but by all accounts, their relationship was friendly and mutually respectful. In fact, when Turing was tried for indecency in 1952, Alexander served as a character witness for the defense.

Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley)

© 2014 - The Weinstein Company

Keira Knightley’s character in The Imitation Game is a brilliant, spunky young mathematician whom Alan agrees to marry to get her conservative parents off her back. As with other storylines, the skeleton of this narrative is true, even if the details are not. Clarke was recruited to Bletchley Park by her former academic supervisor (and Turing’s partner in improving the Bombe) Gordon Welchman; she didn’t win the role by excelling in a crossword competition. (Bletchley recruiters did use crosswords to find talented codebreakers, but neither Turing nor Clarke was involved in this effort.) And Turing proposed to Clarke not to help her escape from overbearing parents, but because they liked each other. He “told her that he was glad he could talk to her ‘as to a man,’ ” writes Hodges, and they shared an interest in chess and botany. She even accepted Turing’s homosexuality; their engagement continued after he confessed his attraction to men. But after some months, Turing ended the engagement. “It was neither a happy nor an easy decision,” writes Hodges, but it wasn’t the ultimately violent confrontation depicted in The Imitation Game , either. “There had been several times when he had come out with ‘I do love you.’ Lack of love was not Alan’s problem.”

Turing and Clarke kept in touch after their engagement ended, and Turing even tried to rekindle their relationship after a couple of years, but Clarke rebuffed him. Turing also wrote a letter to Clarke in 1952 to inform her of his impending trial for indecency, but the final scene of The Imitation Game , in which Joan visits Alan during his probation, is invented.

Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong) and John Cairncross (Allen Leech)

Stewart Menzies, the chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, and John Cairncross, a Soviet spy, are two historical figures who appear in The Imitation Game despite the fact that neither worked closely with Turing. Menzies was, as the film suggests, responsible for passing decrypted Nazi strategies to Winston Churchill, but it’s highly unlikely he interacted individually with Turing (or most of the thousands of other codebreakers who worked at Bletchley Park over the years). Cairncross did pass intelligence from Bletchley Park to the Soviet Union, but he worked in a different unit from Turing’s, and there’s no evidence the two knew each other. Similarly, the filmmakers’ conceit that Menzies knew about and tolerated Cairncross’ duplicity isn’t supported by the historical record.

Peter Hilton (Matthew Beard) and Jack Good (James Northcote)

In the film, Peter and Jack are more or less interchangeable background characters, distinguished primarily by the fact that Peter has a brother who is serving in the armed forces on a ship that the code-breaking team discover is targeted by the Germans. The ensuing dramatic scene, in which Alan reminds Peter and the rest of the team that they have to keep the Germans from learning that they’ve broken Enigma, is entirely invented; Hilton had no such brother, and in fact he began working at Bletchley Park long after Turing’s Bombe had been built. And while it was crucial for the British to use their intelligence wisely, Hodges writes that their success had less to do with their tactical shrewdness and more to do with the Germans’ a priori conviction that Enigma was unbreakable, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

Detective Nock

The Imitation Game ’s framing device depicts one Detective Nock’s investigation into Alan’s life, following a mysterious burglary at Alan’s home. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this framing device isn’t quite true to life: There was no Detective Nock, and the detectives who did book Turing for indecency (who were named Mr. Wills and Mr. Rimmer) were under no illusions about his mysterious circumstances. Turing was burglarized by an acquaintance of 19-year-old Arnold Murray, who had slept with Turing a few times. The burglar had heard Murray talk about his trysts with Turing, and when the police interrogated the burglar, he revealed the illicit nature of Murray and Turing’s relationship. When the police interviewed Turing, he made no attempt to hide his homosexuality from them. Turing eventually pled guilty to indecency, and he was placed on probation and agreed to submit to estrogen treatment—intended to destroy his sex drive—for more than a year.

The Imitation Game implies that the estrogen treatment sent Alan into an emotional tailspin, but Turing seems to have continued his work and social relationships normally during his year of probation. The film also implies that the estrogen treatment triggered Alan’s suicide, but in fact the treatment ended in April 1953, fourteen months before Turing killed himself. Although some modern scholars believe that his death from cyanide poisoning was an accident , Hodges believes that Turing made his suicide deliberately ambiguous so as to spare his mother the pain of believing that her son had killed himself on purpose.

Correction, Jan. 28, 2015: This post originally misstated that Polish cryptanalysts built “the first version of the ‘Bombe.’ ” Though it did crack the Germans’ code and influence Turing and his colleagues, the Polish Bomba was mechanically different from the British “Bombe.” 

Previously How Accurate Is The Theory of Everything ? How Accurate Is Foxcatcher ? How Accurate Is Jersey Boys ? How Accurate Is Get on Up ?

The Imitation Game Trivia Quiz

"the imitation game" tells the story of how alan turing and a team of code-breakers in bletchley park broke the german enigma code, thereby shaping the outcome of wwii. see how much you remember about this remarkable film. contains some spoilers..

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Essay: The Imitation Game

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The Imitation Game is a text based on an entertaining, old-fashioned film acted to create a biopic about Alan Turing. Other than being a code-breaker, Turing was a computer pioneer and a British mathematician who helped Allies to win the Second World War. Some critics take issues with the emotional straightforwardness of The Imitation Game, especially due to its base on the unlovable and complex man. Other critics praise its message irrespective of its historical in accuracies. The paper recommends The Imitation Game to various audiences through expression of its quality and importance which are evidence in its social, aesthetic and cultural values. The Imitation Game does not represent precisely the real Turing or his life. Also, it does not represent history accurately and therefore cannot be evaluated based on known historical records (Piccinini 1). Turing was portrayed as gay but The Imitation Game does not show any homosexual or gay related acts. This means that Turing personal life, historical accuracy and homosexuality cannot be used to make standards of evaluating The Imitation Game since they are not among the main themes in its plot (Piccinini 2). In order to appreciate the movie, other criteria need to be set in order to judge the text based on its plot. The historical thriller contains digestible, emotional gripping representation of how Alan Turing’s technological and intellectual achievements helped allied powers in winning the Second World War. It also shows that tragedy of Turing’s unfair conviction for his homosexuality (Piccinini 2). To some extent, these two aspects can provide the basis of evaluating the movie for correct results to be obtained. Originally, Alan Turing was a shy, solitary and awkward boy who was often bullied by his peers. Christopher Morcom came for his rescue during his early days in traditional boarding school (Piccinini 2). Morcom advised him to blend in to avoid being picked on each time. Months later, Christopher Morcom died and Turing was left lonely again. Just like any other young man, he kept his friend’s memories alive and this is evident when Turing names his machine after Christopher. His machine was an imitation and representation of modern day computing machines (Anderson 1). Turing often lived in solitude and was hardly concerned with what other people did or thought. In his life, he experienced many problems for example, when his house was burgled and he ended up being mistakenly arrested (The Weinstein Company 3). After his arrest, he was charged with gross indecency which led to his conviction for homosexuality. Lastly, he died under mysterious circumstances. His life cannot be admired by many and in addition, those close to him disliked his company making his life more awkward and lonely. These account of events mentioned in The Imitation Game demonstrate how resilient people should be irrespective of what is happening around them. Turing was bullied, lost the most adorable friend, got arrested and later convicted dishonestly. This did not however stop him from being courageous and visionary. His computing machine made him to be the pioneer of modern day computing machines (Piccinini 1). People disliked him but this did not make him achieve the impossible. He was a great leader who led diverse linguistics, scholars, intelligence officers and chess champions to decipher the codes of Germany’s Second World War Enigma machine that were believed to be unbreakable (The Weinstein Company 2). As a result, the protagonist is intensively and hauntingly portrayed as a brilliant but complicated man. His genius thinking under intensive pressure helped shorten the Second World War and saved many lives which could otherwise have been lost had the war continued. The movie proves that personal attributes, other people’s opinions and occurrences in life should not bar anyone from realizing their potential. Had Turing been concerned about how people looked down upon him, he could have been discouraged. Had he been worried about lack of friends, he would have been unable to think critically about different problem solving mechanisms. Turing appreciated his environment and was more than willing to try what others believed was impossible. His willingness to think differently made him realize that only a machine could crack; the Enigma machine codes (Piccinini 2). The urgency with which the codes needed to be cracked did not bar him from adopting new ideas. This movie shows us that it is only concrete thinking based on open mind that can solve problems. For this to be achieved, surroundings, expectations and urgency of the subject under question should not affect the thinkers. The limit of what people can do is not limited by the outward picture but by the internal nature that classifies situations based on their importance. Tuning’s daily life was not influenced by what people expected from him but what needed to be done for any particular problem to be solved. As people thought about his awkwardness, he thought how to control certain things deemed to be beyond control. This means that sexual orientation and affiliations cannot bar people from performing their duties extraordinarily. People around Turing and the policemen who arrested him had no idea about his extraordinary capabilities but the world knew how important he was (Piccinini 3). The movie teaches us that no matter who we are, we will still have friends who appreciate us the way we are. Turing had secured true friendship in Christopher. It also teaches us that we should be focused to achieve our goals but not try to change our nature in order to fit in the society. Turing cared less about what people thought about him and consequently went ahead to lay a foundation for modern day computing machines. The Imitation Game makes us understand that we can’t change our nature, but we can change the world. Through these, The Imitation Game is a very interesting movie to read and motivates people to achieve even the most difficult goals of their life. Michael S. Berry presents an evaluative text on The Imitation Game that echoes mine in many facets. In his view, Berry reasons that The Imitation Game is primarily concerned with computer science which makes an important facet of our present-day lives. This is because Turing is represented as the father of computer science (Berry 319). It is a source of motivation for computer scientists because Turing Awards are labeled as the highest distinction for all computer scientists. Berry acknowledges the importance of movie design applied in The Imitation Game (Berry 319). Its plot makes it unusual and very interesting. I concur with Berry in his review that Turing was a young man who was in the process of self searching. Despite his poor relationship with people, especially in his childhood years, he never gave up. Afterwards, his persistence is shown when he helps to end the deadliest war in the world’s history. His arrest, conviction and mysterious death reveal lack of recognition for his theoretical accomplishments. Berry believes that The Imitation Game traverses several points concerning Turing’s thoughts and thought processes that suggest that he indeed possessed sophisticated knowledge (Berry 319). Turing’s work was not covered widely due to security concerns but never failed to be appreciated by colleagues. Turing was awarded the ‘Most Excellent Order of the British Empire’ (OBE) yet he was arrested, convicted and chemically castrated for crimes based on assumptions (Berry 319). This is a challenge to people not to expect recognition from any person or authority for their accomplishments. They should instead seek motivation from their success and focus on more achievements. People who are not well celebrated irrespective of their mouth-watering accomplishments should draw motivation from this movie and soldier on. Barry Cooper presents is review with the most touching recommendation of the Turing’s work of trying to solve the insoluble. Turing machines presented the idea of modern day computers to world (Cooper 1). He brought prescient insight and genius in reality and imitation, control and beyond control as well as wild interface. Cooper presents the ability to work from scratch and achieve unthinkable. His review guides choices in tough challenges. Aspiring thinkers and developers can rely on this review to achieve what others believe is impossible. Turing believed that a computer could be as intelligent as human which made modern computer scientists to keep researching in order to achieve his visions (Cooper 2). This review recommends The Imitation Game to a science-oriented audience as it serves as a mentor for computer scientists. In addition, the text sheds to light the belief that big accomplishments are drawn from visionary works. Overall, The Imitation Game is a very important movie to read and has the quality to motivate modern day thinkers in working towards their dreams. Further, the text encourages people to accept who they are and work on their dreams without expecting to be recognized. Visionary thinking as portrayed by Alan Turing is helpful in achieving goals of any magnitude. Works Cited Anderson, L. V. How Accurate Is The Imitation Game? We’ve Separated Fact from Fiction. Web.11.2.2014: http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/12/03/the_imitation_game_fact_vs_fiction_how_true_the_new_movie_is_to_alan_turing.html Berry, Michael S. Book review: The Imitation Game, by Jim Ottaviani & Leland Purvis. TUGboat, Volume 35, p 319, 2014. Dominguez Archaeological Research Group. Web.11.2.2014: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb35-3/tb111reviews-ottaviani.pdf Cooper, S. Barry. Inside the mind of Alan Turing, the genius behind ‘The Imitation Game,’ Elsevier, 2014. Web.11.2.2014: http://pdf.printfriendly.com/pdfs/1423640787_b8ff2e/download Piccinini, Gualtiero. The Imitation Game: A Philosophical Review, 2015. Web.11.2.2014:

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• The Evolution of Imitation: Building Your Style

Evolution of Imitation: Building Your Style

This chapter focuses on incorporating imitation practices into a student’s writing toolbox. By encouraging students to look more rhetorically at writing through imitation, they learn to recognize that language is more dynamic, and they can approach writing tasks with more contemplative thought instead of as a dreaded task. Through the use of structural and contextual imitation, students gain more insight into how sentences create meaning, how they can be changed, and how the decision-making processes relate to putting certain writing elements in certain locations for specific effects. While this article briefly touches on plagiarism as being distinct from imitation, students should recognize that imitation is not mindlessly copying, but mindfully understanding the rationale and effect of sentence structure, variety, and placement. They also learn how words form meaning within a sentence and, by extension, paragraphs and the overall paper. Imitation helps student writers realize that the more models, authors, and examples they can imitate, the more diverse and expressive their writing will become. Each time they understand how and why another author’s sentence does what it does, they can use that insight in their own writing, which also increases their confidence.  

Think for a moment on how you have learned most of the things you know. Sometimes you learned by reading—perhaps from a textbook in history class. Sometimes you learned by doing something, like riding a bike. Sometimes you watched someone else and copied their movements, such as when you learned to write the alphabet. Oftentimes, we learn by mimicking or imitating others. Consider how you might catch yourself acting like a parent or close loved one—in essence, you are imitating that behavior. Your first reaction might be negative: “I don’t want to imitate anybody!” And I think most people can understand that feeling. We want to be original. However, if we can acknowledge how much we can learn from other people’s writing, then we can incorporate their experience and talent into our writing. In other words, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Here, we will learn how to imitate another’s writing and adapt it to our style, thus enhancing our own style to be more flexible and durable across writing tasks.

Learning by imitation gets a bad reputation even though we do it a lot in our lives. Imitation has mistakenly been linked to plagiarism. As you know, plagiarism is the copying of another person’s work and not crediting them with it or taking credit for a piece of writing you did not write. For example, if you purchase a paper online and turn it in for a grade in a class—that’s plagiarism. Likewise, if you copy a paragraph from a website and don’t cite it, that, too, is plagiarism. Imitation is more complex than mindlessly copying down someone’s words. Think of imitation as having a teacher that encourages you to figure out the hows and the whys something is the way it is—how to break it down, put it back together, and learn from that process to enhance your abilities. 

To help illustrate, consider musicians. They listen to a lot of different types of music and each piece they listen to impacts their overall musical knowledge and experience. This influences how they create their own music. For example, I recall an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Data, the android (one who supposedly cannot create, just imitate; in fact, an imitation himself!), plays the violin. Captain Picard is called away and misses the concert but gets a recording of it. Later, this scene takes place between Picard and Data; they discuss Data’s violin playing:

Picard : The good doctor was kind enough to provide me with a recording of your concert. Your performance shows feeling. Data : As I have recently reminded others, sir, I have no feeling. Picard : It’s hard to believe. Your playing is quite beautiful. Data : Strictly speaking, sir, it is not my playing. It is a precise imitation of the techniques of Jascha Heifetz and Trenka Bronken. Picard : Is there nothing of Data in what I’m hearing? You see, you chose the violinists. Heifetz and Bronken have radically different styles, different techniques, and, yet, you combined them successfully. (“Ensigns”)

Data believes that the imitation and combination of two others is still an imitation in the strictest sense; however, as the scene makes clear, Data, by combining two “radically different styles,” has created his own style. Without the imitation and interpretation of those two, he could not and would not have generated his own style; this is the power of imitation. That creation, then, becomes much more than mere imitation; it evolves. The evolution of prose is no longer an imitation of one, but of the combination of many to create your own. Although the scene depicted above refers to only two violinists, Data no doubt has heard dozens of violinists. Each one has left a mark on Data’s performance and thus made his performance unique. Therefore, by understanding how others put words together and the style or voice of ourselves, we uncover a new set of procedures, styles, and possibilities, which then cease to be imitation but creation.

Our goal is not to only use imitation, but to consider it one of the tools of learning—a powerful tool, but a tool nonetheless. Yet imitation, as one of those tools, is different because it focuses on the improvement and empowerment of the writer through mimicry of another’s style, voice, or pattern—not necessarily their actual words. Some time ago, I was reading On Writing Well by William Zinsser, and I hit a short section on imitation. Zinsser believes we must learn by imitation, and although Zinsser was a master writer, he continued to be influenced by other writers because all writers can continue to grow as writers. Each author a writer takes as an influence helps the writer grow and make stronger connections to words and phrases. Zinsser gives his take on imitation:

Never hesitate to imitate another writer. Imitation is part of the creative process for anyone learning an art or a craft. Bach and Picasso didn’t spring full-blown as Bach and Picasso; they needed models. This is especially true of writing. Find the best writers in the fields that interest you and read their work aloud. Get their voice and taste into your ear—their attitude toward language. Don’t worry that by imitating them you’ll lose your own voice and your own identity. Soon enough you will shed those skins and become who you are supposed to become. (235-36)

What he acknowledges is that as you gain more experience, you’ll develop more of your own strategies to deal with the numerous problems you’ll encounter when writing.

Here’s our plan: we are going to look at a few pieces of writing and see what is happening so we might adapt it in our writing. We won’t be copying or simply right-clicking to get a synonym, but learning from the style to improve our own. This doesn’t mean we won’t on occasion use some of the same phrases or words, because we will. But in doing so, we will be tacitly adjusting our understanding of how words make sentences, how sentences make paragraphs, and how paragraphs make papers. As our understanding of language interaction grows by looking at more examples, our style will become broader. Remember, writing is a continual process. We won’t ever be perfect and we will need to continue working on our style by reading others and seeing how they make words work for them, then adapt that experience into our style.

We are going to consider two types of imitation: structural and contextual. First, structural imitation is mimicking the actual sentence structure of an author. We carefully look at how they put the words together to generate meaning and how sentences can be shaped to provide certain meanings. This form of imitation allows us to increase the variety of sentences we can utilize. Second, contextual imitation relates more to the style of a selected piece. By considering what, where, and why an author chooses to do something, we can understand the effect on the reader and why that choice was made. Here, we discuss both because both will add to our writing toolbox. Remember, our goal is to learn from other authors as we continue to improve our own writing and build confidence in our ability to handle writing tasks.

Structural Imitation

Let’s take a look at structural imitation. A writer creates a sentence such as, The windowpane protects me from the brutal world and its dangers. Obviously, if you were not the writer, but copy that sentence exactly—it will never be your sentence. It will be the original author’s sentence. Its generation or its reality was brought forth by that person. However, by imitating the structure, the impression of the sentence, we learn to imitate a slice of its original usefulness; it is this use that carries over into structural imitation, such as, The explorer guided me away from the cliff’s edge and certain death. Even though I created both sentences, they are not identical. Yes, they have some of the same structures. Yet, the second sentence, even with my attempt to make them equal, is not the same. Imitation, then, in its purest form, is a new creation from an old model.

To help illustrate imitative sentence structure, let’s look at some sentences below. You can also pick sentences from your favorite authors and imitate them for more practice.

• Writing with real voice has the power to make you pay attention and understand—the words go deep. (Elbow 299)
• Movies with great actors have the influence to make us believe and take part—the drama becomes real.
• I stared at the speaker in mute astonishment. (Poe 154)
• I smiled at my girlfriend in silent acceptance.
• In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. (Carson 1)
• On stage, strings and woodwinds and drums created a harmony of sound that filled and floated through the auditorium into the recesses of my ears.

In looking at these sentences, we probably notice patterns. Patterns are particularly useful and have been used to help many students. In their writing textbook, They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein provide what they call “templates” that give us a number of these patterns. You can use these templates too, and, as you gain more experience, you can adjust them to fit your own style. Below are several examples from Graff and Birkenstein: 

• While I understand the impulse to ___________, my own view is _________. (309)
• Although X does not say so directly, she apparently assumes that _________. (311)
• X claims that __________. (312) • The essence of X’s argument is that __________. (314)
• By focusing on __________, X overlooks the deeper problem of __________. (314)
• X surely is right about __________ because, as she may not be aware, recent studies have shown that _________. (315)
• Although I agree with X up to a point, I cannot accept his overall conclusion that _________. (315)
• Yet some readers may challenge the view that _________. (317)
• My discussion of X is in fact addressing the larger matter of _________. (320)

These templates are more academic in nature than the earlier ones, and as you become more comfortable writing academic prose, you can adapt these to serve you better and more in your style and voice. For example, if I imitate the last template, but make it more in my voice, I might write, “This paper’s discussion of X’s argument focuses on the larger issue of ________.” It’s not a copy of the template, but you can see how it, more or less, leads us in the same direction. The point is other sentences give us a foundation on which to build. 

These types of exercises drive us to explore how words work together and form a sentence and how that sentence works to create meaning. Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee, in Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, write that “imitation exercises ask you to try new approaches and to innovate within those approaches” (29). Indeed, imitation becomes innovation. One does not build star-shaped houses; they typically build square-shaped ones, partly because there is an abundance of models to mimic and they seem to be the most functional, but that doesn’t mean they are all the same.

Contextual Imitation

Let’s move to the other type of imitation. Contextual imitation focuses on the meaning and the many interpretations of that meaning. What a sentence’s meaning is can be written several different ways. As we will see in the following example, every variation of a sentence can create new understandings and lead us into new directions. Take Desiderius Erasmus, who was a teacher in the 1500s. He provided his students with a simple sentence: Your letter pleased me greatly. Simple enough, right? How many different ways do you think you could rewrite that sentence?

Five? Ten? Thirty?

Erasmus generated 195! Some of his examples include:

• Your letter heaped joy upon me.
• After your note was handed to me, my spirit quite bubbled over with joy.
• I conceived a wonderful delight from your pages.
• All else is utterly repellent compared to your letter.
• At the sight of your letter the frown fled from my mind’s brow.
• How delighted I was to read your letter!
• The happiness occasioned by your communication is greater than I can describe.
• I never set eyes on anything more gladly than your letter.
• Like clover to the bee, willow leaves to goats, honey to the bear, even so are your letter to me.
• Your epistle exudes nothing but joy. (Collected Works 349-353)

Each one of these examples is a variation of that original sentence; the context is what we are imitating. Certainly, we can assume that some of these might be unclear or even painful to read, but we can also assume that the context of how each one can be read is also slightly different. Erasmus is taking the original sentence and working through nearly two hundred variations, and in doing so, another sentence presents itself that can be used as a slight variation from the original. As we consider these samples, we see that the length is different, the verbs are different, even the term for letter varies. These variations provide more nuance and insight into the meaning of each one—even though, basically, they mean the same thing. By practicing this type of exercise, we flex our sentence-making muscles. 

The other aspects of contextual imitation refer to the where and why authors make certain decisions in a piece of writing. To help explain some of this rationale, Donna Gorrell, who also champions the use of imitation, illustrates how those that use imitation are speeding up the process of learning. She explains that it demonstrates how other writers, when encountering a similar textual concern, find a way to solve the problem (Gorrell 55). In this way, instead of the tedious and time-consuming “[t]rial-and-error writing,” we see how others handle a writing problem (Gorrell 55).

In what follows, we have an excerpt from a short creative nonfiction piece. As we look at the piece, focus on where the author is deciding to do certain things—the comments along the side offer some guidance to help us along. He is describing a baseball game during, what we learn is, a critical moment: the last inning, the author’s team is up by one run, and he’s the catcher. We pick up the action with an intimidating and athletic player on first base—called by the author “big boy”—and a batter having let pass two pitches: 

The newest batter was about my size and build with a Louisville Slugger in his hands. Every player knows that Slugger is the bat of champions. He tapped his cleats with the mystical bat then readied his body to smack one beyond the fence. The first pitch he let go; it was a little outside and low. I could tell this was no ordinary moment, the crowd had hushed and I could feel tension in the air. I cautiously tossed it back to the pitcher. The second pitch was right on the money but he didn’t bite on that one either. As I was kneeling back down after throwing the ball back, he deepened the trench beneath his right foot with his cleats, kicking dirt on my plate. GAME ON. Nobody but nobody kicks dirt on my plate; I shot back up ready to confront the transgressor. The umpire yelped, “Time!” and showed his backside to my teammates as he swept off the plate. Order was restored [1].    Comment [1] : This short end summarizes the entire paragraph; it shows that within the paragraph, there was disorder, but with the past tense, we see now it was restored.   I knelt back down and got ready to receive fastballs and curveballs. As the next pitch came, I saw the Louisville Slugger drawn back and begin to swing. The bat hit the ball with a crushing blow that sent it to my old homeland of left field [2]. The runner on first took off like a rocket. The outfield was just getting a handhold on the ball as the runner whipped around second base. The third base coach was yelling “GO, GO, GO!” to big boy as he neared third. The outfielder heaved the baseball toward me with I am sure everything he had. The ball bounced once and I caught it—solid. With the ball in mitt, I threw off my helmet [3] and facemask.The runner had just rounded third and his coach in the dugout screamed “Bowl him over, bowl him over!” I clenched my teeth [4].   Comment [2] : Here the author ties his current position as catcher to his previous position in the outfield. Comment [3] : This active use of the verb increases tension and heightens the action. Comment [4]: The tension of the paragraph, as we see here, will carry over into the new paragraph with another short, powerful sentence.   I planted myself in front of my plate to defend it. As I tightened the grip of the ball, I could feel the stitches through the leather of my outfield glove [5]. I looked into his eyes and he into mine, we both had an uncertainty, who was going to win? His mouth was open sucking in air, the crowd was still crying out, but I did not listen to them anymore. I widened my stance to cover more ground and lowered my left shoulder ready to receive whatever he had to offer. I took a deep breath and held it. As I waited, I could hear every crunch of his feet on the dirt mixed with the tightened pounding of my heart deep in my chest. Below my armpit, sweat ran down tempting me to laugh by its tickling gesture. I would have none of it [6]. His arms rose as he began to dive headfirst into me like a linebacker in football. Big boy plowed into me like a tsunami hitting the beach [7]. I could only hope that I held firm. His blow sent me off to the side onto my right elbow; we went down side by side, lying face to face on the fine gravel surface [8] . Dust covered my tongue and clouded my vision. I felt dizzy.   Comment [5] : Here, as in the coming sentence, we see the pace dramatically slowed down to increase, once again, the tension set up by the end of the last paragraph. The author is slowing it down to increase our tension too.  Comment [6] : This reality of a distraction is quickly dismissed and heightens our focus on the incoming player, which enhances the readers need for something to happen. Comment [7] : This violent image of a massive force hitting a stationary object helps balance out this paragraph from the earlier anticipation. Comment [8] : After the collision, the pace returns to a slow, methodic one that is set up with details and the conclusion, again, summarizes the paragraph and sets up the next.    I did not know if I had stopped the run or not. My adversary jumped up and began to walk off to his dugout, as if nothing had happened. His face was expressionless, as if he got the run, but did not want to rub it in my face. A look of despair crossed my face [9] as I realized I may not have stopped him. After several confused seconds, I rolled over to look at the umpire and he yelled with all he had, “OUT!” The crowd celebrated [10].    Comment [9] : With the dizziness of the collision and now confusion of the score, our author is setting us up for a big win, or a big failure. Comment [10] : Although not the end of the piece, this selection ends with a short sentence the gives a needed conclusion to the action of the preceding paragraphs. Short and powerful.  Source: Craig A. Meyer, “Finding My Team.”

This author, as we see by the comments, decided to create almost a mini story at the end of each paragraph. This is a powerful technique (and one you can imitate). Think of it like this: imagine going to a movie that is two hours long. The first 110 minutes are horrible. You consider walking out but your friend insists that you stay, and she has the car keys. So you stay and suffer. But the last ten minutes feature the best piece of cinematography you’ve ever witnessed; it’s exciting—these ten minutes of the movie bring everything together and ends with an unforeseen twist that you find brilliant and unforgettable. 

As you’re walking out to the car, someone asks, “So, what did you think of it?” What might you say? Still charged by the ending, maybe you explain how great it was, even though most of the movie was rubbish—the ending leaves the impression. In this baseball piece, the author wants to give us an impression at the end of each paragraph, and while you may not remember the details of the paragraph, you probably remember those short, powerful sentences at the end. That’s the power of a strong ending. This technique of ending paragraphs with short, powerful sentences has just been added to your toolbox—you can imitate the technique to enhance your own writing.

In studying several authors or samples, we learn from each one’s strengths and weaknesses. Imitation is more than just copying down a selection of writing—it’s digging into the prose, pulling it apart, and understanding why it works the way that it does. More importantly, other scholars teach us how they write, how they combine words, phrases, paragraphs, and how they handle the writing problems they encounter. Then, we practice and transfer that understanding to our own prose. These exercises do not take over our writing; they become part of it and make it stronger. Just like Data, we can take radically different styles to develop our own style. The learning process derived from imitation takes time and dedication. Like many things, the process becomes easier with practice and persistence. Take the Erasmus example again; imagine writing a hundred different ways of telling someone you enjoyed their letter. Of course, that would take time and really focusing on the task at hand—it would not be easy. Yet, with each attempt to create a new version, something changes in us constructing it, and in that process, we stretch a little more outside the confines of the original sentence. It is this stretching where imitative learning takes place and it is how we grow as writers.

Works Cited

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring . Houghton, 1962.

Crowley, Sharon, and Debra Hawhee. Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students . 4th ed., Pearson, 2009.

Elbow, Peter. Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process . Oxford UP, 1981.

“The Ensigns of Command.” Star Trek: The Next Generation , written by Melinda Snodgrass, directed by Cliff Bole, season 3, episode 2, Paramount Television, 30 Sept. 1989. 

Erasmus, Desiderius, and Craig R. Thompson. Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings 2 . University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, 1978. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login. aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=468258&site=ehost-live.

Gorrell, Donna. “Freedom to Write—Through Imitation.” Journal of Basic Writing , vol. 6, no. 2, Fall 1987, pp. 53-59. 

Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing . 4th ed., W.W. Norton, 2018.

Meyer, Craig A. “Finding My Team.” Composing Ourselves: Writing from the Composition Program at Missouri State University , edited by Lanette Cadle and Lori Feyh, Moon City P, 2007, pp. 103-107.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Complete Tales & Poems of Edgar Allan Poe . Vintage, 1975. pp. 141-168.

Zinsser, William. On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction . 7th ed., HarperCollins, 2006.

Teacher Resources for The Evolution of Imitation: Building Your Style by Craig A. Meyer

Overview and teaching strategies.

Authors have used imitation for centuries as a tool to improve their writing. This chapter focuses on using imitation to encourage students to look more closely at readings and learn to better explain how specific words, sentence structures, and sentence placement affects reading, which transfers over to how students write. As students practice imitation, they are gaining vital experience in flexing their sentence-making muscles and trying out various placements of prose that will improve their own writing. Through doing these, they come to realize that writing is more dynamic and allows for their own voice and style to come out. 

While this chapter could be used at any time during a first-year composition (FYC) course, the earlier it is used, I think, the more practical use students will take away from it. To better engage students, ask them to bring in a favorite book or an academic article they thought was well written. These writings can easily be incorporated into the discussion of this chapter. Students can use them to practice imitation, which can then easily lead into a meaningful discussion about the differences between plagiarism and imitation. Near the end of the lesson, encourage students to discuss what they learned and how imitating an author’s style will aid them in their own writing, while not sacrificing their own voice and style. The chapter also provides imitation exercises for students to do either as a class, in small groups, or on their own. 

Discussion Questions

• In what ways can imitation help improve your writing?
• How is imitation different than plagiarism?
• Name a few authors you’ve read. Describe their style as best you can. Then, go look and see how accurate you were. Then, look carefully at their style. Write down some examples of how you may be able to imitate the writing through structural and contextual ways of imitation.
• Compare one assignment with other class members, pick out similar sentence structures or ways of explaining information. Discuss the patterns and why they are similar. What do you think led to this similarity? How are the sentence patterns operating to drive the paragraph? The essay?
• As a group, create a sentence (like Erasmus’s) and generate as many possible variations. How are the variations similar? Different? What are the advantages in being able to present a sentence or group of sentences in many different ways?
• As a group or a class, what other techniques could you learn from or imitate from the baseball selection?

This essay was written by Craig A. Meyer and published in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing , Volume 3 , a peer-reviewed open textbook series for the writing classroom; it appears here with minor changes. This material is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) . Please keep this information on this material if you use, adapt, and/or share it. 

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Lakers vs. Nuggets Game 2: The three biggest mistakes Darvin Ham made during stunning second-half collapse

It took a number of mistakes for the lakers to lose to the nuggets on tuesday.

The Los Angeles Lakers had a very real chance to not only steal a game against the Denver Nuggets on Monday, but swing the entire series. They led by 20 in the third quarter. They are 28-14 at home, and a win would have given them home-court advantage in the series. A year ago, the Lakers won two series as underdogs because they swiped one of the first two games on the road and never lost at home. Would you have bet against LeBron James in a best-of-five series with three home games?

Instead, well, you've seen the final score by now. The Lakers blew a 20-point lead . They lost to Jamal Murray at the buzzer. Now, they're down 2-0 in the series. They've lost 10 in a row to the Nuggets as a whole. The daunting prospect of still needing to win a game in Denver looms over the rest of the series. The Lakers will get only two more tries. In NBA history, 449 teams have gained a 2-0 series lead. Only 33 of them have come back to win the series.

And yet, in many ways, the game felt familiar. The recent history of the Lakers-Nuggets rivalry has revolved around three close quarters followed by a crunch time bloodbath. Entering Monday, the Lakers and Nuggets had played a total of 18 clutch minutes since the beginning of the 2023 Western Conference Finals. Denver won those minutes by a whopping 32 points. In Game 2, the Nuggets won the final five minutes and eight seconds by 10 points. Time and time again, once the Nuggets decide they are ready to take the Lakers seriously, they blow them out of the water. Head coach Darvin Ham never knows what levers to pull in response.

It takes dozens of things going wrong to blow a 20-point third-quarter lead. You need bad shooting variance. You need a bad whistle. You need sloppy, isolated missteps that are the natural outcome of tense, playoff basketball games. But more than anything, you need strategic mistakes, and the Lakers made several of them. Here are the three biggest ones they made down the stretch to allow the Nuggets the chance they needed to complete the comeback:

The rotation

Spencer Dinwiddie played 13 minutes in Game 1. The Lakers lost those minutes by 12 points. Though his size carries defensive upside, he's lost too much of a step to defend in a series like this properly. Teams frequently leave him open from deep and dare him to shoot. His 3-point numbers in Los Angeles have generally been good. For his career, he's a 33.3% shooter from deep. All of that is more or less how his second-half minutes played out on Monday. He entered the game with the Lakers up 10. Roughly four minutes later, he left with the Lakers up five. The Nuggets didn't guard him. They didn't notice him on defense either.

Ham isn't exactly in an easy position here. The Lakers signed Gabe Vincent for exactly this series. They watched him defend Murray well in the Finals. He's made his shots in high-pressure playoff moments before. But Vincent missed most of the season. As a result, he never quite earned Ham's trust in the way the front office likely hoped. So he played just 15 minutes in this one. He wasn't great, and didn't make a shot. But he's at least a threat from deep and his defense this postseason has largely been good. Disperse those Dinwiddie minutes to Vincent and Austin Reaves , who played only 33 in Game 2, and the outcome is potentially different.

And then there's the higher stakes matter of when to play LeBron. James took a seat with 3:44 remaining in the third quarter for his typical second half rest. But Ham allowed him only one minute of reprieve before re-inserting him into the game. This did two things that would eventually come back to bite the Lakers. The first is that it left James visibly exhausted for the most important minutes of the game: the beginning of the fourth quarter, when Nikola Jokic traditionally takes his rest. The Nuggets lost 25 games all season... but only 14 of those losses saw Denver outscored during Jokic's minutes. In the other 11, Denver won the Jokic minutes but lost the game because of how badly their bench lost its own minutes. The key to beating Denver is winning these minutes. The Lakers lost the no-Jokic minutes by a point because James was gassed and Anthony Davis was out.

To address James' exhaustion, Ham ultimately removed him again when Jokic returned. Again, his absence was for less than two minutes, and the Nuggets made up four more points while he was out. Yes, having James on the court at the end of the third quarter helped, but it deprived the Lakers of their best chance of knocking the Nuggets out for good. If a rested James takes the court early in the fourth-quarter, their lead might have grown enough to be safe.

Going away from their best play

Look at how easy this looks...

The TNT broadcast told us when the second half began that James and Davis stayed on the court during halftime to work on their pick-and-roll. When the third quarter started, the Lakers proceeded to run that play, their best play, every single time down the court. 

For five years, this has been their finishing move, their late-game checkmate to put a helpless opponent away. The Nuggets tried several coverages to slow it down. Jokic played a high-drop on the first video in that clip, so James snuck a pocket pass between the two defenders for the and-one. They blitzed the second, so James passed above them, giving Davis yet another easy layup over a too-small low-man (in this case, Murray). Jokic dropped lower on the third, and Murray shuffled over to help, so James nailed Reaves for an open 3.

Properly spaced, this is one of the best plays in basketball. There's no good answer to it unless you have two seven-footers that can switch (good luck with that). Go over the screen and James beats you to the rim. Go under, and now that he's evolved into a lethal shooter, he buries you from deep. Defend at the level of the screen and you're begging for a lob. Drop and you give James a head of steam to potentially draw a foul. Bring in a third defender and one of the best defenders in NBA history finds his shooter. It's an unguardable weapon that the Lakers are comfortable spamming when the need arises. Behind this play, the Lakers took their 15-point halftime lead up to 20.

And then? They... just... stopped... running it. Not fully, but they didn't run it anywhere close to often enough. James started using Rui Hachimura as his dance partner, often stashing Davis, the worst shooter in the starting lineup, in the strong side corner, where help could more easily arrive. D'Angelo Russell became a more frequent ball-handler as well, but his limited explosiveness gives him weaknesses that James doesn't have, especially against a Denver team that wins through discipline and intelligence rather than pure athletic skill.

Are there explanations for why the Lakers made this call? Sure. James and Davis were both exhausted by the end of the game. Maybe they lacked the stamina to abuse their best play as aggressively as they would have liked. The Nuggets also adjusted by switching that play more aggressively, so that when James got his screen, he ran into Aaron Gordon instead of Jokic. Ham had no response to this adjustment.

But in truth, it's a play the Lakers don't use often enough under any circumstances. For whatever reason, the Darvin Ham Lakers tend to get disorganized on offense and revert to isolation-ball far more often than the Frank Vogel versions did. The Lakers got sloppy down the stretch offensively when they'd found a play that consistently gave them easy points.

Not doubling Jokic

Before Game 2, Ham made an admission about defending Jokic that most coaches would secretly agree with. "It's like shit, I don't know what to do," he joked . To an extent, he's right. Jokic doesn't have a weakness. There's not a specific coverage that's going to stifle him. You're choosing between bad answers. It's just that Ham chose the worst answer down the stretch: he allowed Jokic to play one-on-one in the post. 

Jokic scored three times in the final five minutes. Davis attempted to guard him one-on-one each time. Jokic shot just below 53% when guarded by Davis in last year's Western Conference Finals. It's a matchup he's completely comfortable in. He even managed to get Davis airborne on the final shot he took of the night, picking up an and-one for his troubles.

Ham did have an adjustment here, but not a successful one. On Denver's final two possessions of the game, the Lakers put James on Murray and switched his pick-and-roll with Jokic. Once Murray realized this, he took advantage to set up a quick jumper before the switch set-in that tied the score at 99. And then, on the final possession of the game, the Nuggets took the switch to get Davis on Murray on the perimeter. They cleared the strong side so Murray would be able to work one-on-one. He created just enough space over the exhausted Davis to drill the game-winner.

Was there necessarily a good answer to any of this? No. But it's worth noting that Nuggets not named Porter or Jokic did not make a single 3-pointer in Game 2. They obviously could've heated up if given the chance, but given the circumstances, some help on Denver's two best players likely would have been warranted. It's just easier to stomach losing on role-player 3-pointers when those shots haven't been falling all night.

Every Lakers player and coach bears some responsibility for the loss, but strategic mistakes are the single fastest way to get knocked out of the postseason. Simply put, Michael Malone out-coached Ham on Monday, and that robbed the Lakers of their best chance to win this series.

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'You gotta be kidding me.' Nesmith has difficult assignment guarding Middleton, hits big shot

INDIANAPOLIS -- Aaron Nesmith had a good look at the shot.

Just a few seconds earlier, the Pacers ’ guard drilled a 3-pointer from the left corner to beat the shot clock and send the Gainbridge Fieldhouse crowd to full throttle. With 14.4 seconds left in overtime on Friday night in the Game 3 first-round playoff series with the Milwaukee Bucks, it looked like Nesmith’s shot – his only make in seven 3-point attempts – might be the dagger in the Pacers’ first home playoff game in five years.

“I haven’t been shooting the ball well, but I trust my work,” Nesmith said on a night when he finished with 13 points on 3-for-13 shooting.

Nesmith also knew, from experience, that a three-point lead was hardly safe the way Khris Middleton was shooting. Nesmith was switched off the Bucks’ star on the next possession, guarding Damian Lillard about 35 feet from the basket. Lillard bounced the ball at the top of the key to Middleton, who let it fly over the outstretched hand of 6-11 Myles Turner.

The shot was long. Way too long. But the ball caromed off the glass and through, good for Middleton’s 40 th , 41 st and 42 nd points. And a tie game again with 6.7 seconds remaining in overtime.

“You gotta be kidding me,” Nesmith said of his reaction after watching Middleton’s shot go through. “Typical. But it happens.”

Middleton’s shot was upstaged by Tyrese Haliburton’s three-point play on the next possession, giving the Pacers a 121-118 overtime win and a 2-1 series lead going into Sunday night’s Game 4 showdown, also at home.

Nesmith spent most of the night guarding Middleton, who hit an incredible array of shots to finish with 42 points on 16-for-29 shooting, including 4-for-9 from the 3-point line. Middleton sent the game to overtime with 1.4 seconds left in regulation when he dribbled around Turner and fired from 25 feet as Nesmith chased.

Pacers score: Tyrese Haliburton hits game-winner after Pacers blow 19-point lead

Tough shot. Really tough shot.

“He’s a good player,” said Nesmith, who is eight years younger than Middleton but from the same hometown of Charleston, S.C. “He makes some tough shots. It’s just my job to make it difficult. But it’s pretty cool to compete against him at the highest level – someone who I’ve know for such a long time.”

Nesmith had to sweat out one more attempt by Middleton to send the game to a second overtime. After Haliburton’s go-ahead shot with 1.6 seconds left in overtime, Middleton shot a contested 3 (Nesmith doing the contesting) from 24 feet that caught the front of the rim but fell harmlessly to the floor.

“He made two hellacious shots already,” Nesmith said of the final possession. “In my mind, I was (thinking), ‘Do not foul.’ Just make it as tough as possible and hope he misses.”

Pacers news: How Aaron Nesmith went from a Charleston swamp to Celtics bench to Pacers no-maintenance lynchpin

Most of Gainbridge Fieldhouse probably thought it was going in based on previous possessions. Nesmith did not.

“I knew when he shot it, I knew he missed it,” said Nesmith, who hit two clutch free throws with 7 seconds remaining in regulation to give the Pacers a three-point lead. “So, when I turned around and it was short, it was a sigh of relief.”

That sigh of relief turned into a crescendo from a sellout crowd that included Caitlin Clark, Anthony Richardson and Tony Dungy. The Pacers had to earn it, leading by as many as 19 points, falling behind by three in the fourth quarter and then grinding out an ugly overtime that included one Pacers’ possession of six missed shots.

But a win is a win. The Pacers took a punch and survived.

“Middleton was just, um, I don’t even know how to describe what he did out there,” Pacers’ coach Rick Carlisle said. “The shots he was making with guys draped all over him. Lillard, same thing.”

Why didn't the Pacers foul up 3?

The Pacers twice had a chance to foul the Bucks leading by three points before Middleton made game-tying 3-pointers. That was the plan, Carlisle said.

“We did have a scenario to foul,” Carlisle said. “We just didn’t do it. He was so far out on the first one that we laid off and didn’t lunge at him. The second one was a similar situation. I know that question will come up and when those things go wrong, it’s on me. I take responsibility for that.”

In the locker room, Pacers’ guard T.J. McConnell said it is sometimes easier said than done to foul in that situation.

“The situation when you look back at it probably just didn’t present itself,” McConnell said. “He was already in the shooting motion when we could have fouled him. But hindsight is 20/20. We’re happy that we got the win and we’ll go into (Sunday) and see what we can do better.”

Middleton, believe it or not, was a game-time decision after receiving treatment for a sprained ankle. The Bucks’ injury situation, with Giannis Antetokounmpo out and Lillard suffered an Achilles injury that sapped his explosiveness in overtime, will be something to watch going into Game 4.

“It’s big being able to defend your home court and give the fans what they want to see,” Nesmith said. “We couldn’t have done it without them and need them again on Sunday. It’s good to get this momentum and carry it forward.”

Call Star reporter Kyle Neddenriep at (317) 444-6649 .

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• 2024 NBA Playoffs

Can the Miami Heat Burn the Boston Celtics Again?

Miami’s hot 3-point shooting was the story of Game 2, but it wasn’t the anomaly that allowed the Heat to claw their way back into the series. It was something far more familiar, and potentially just as dangerous.

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Back in the early days of basketball, indoor games were played in cramped gymnasium halls. The game has always tested one’s spatial awareness and peripheral vision, but back then, before the standardization of courts, players had to factor in the environment about as much as they did their opponent. Backpedal on defense without looking and you might slam your head into a pillar. Get knocked off balance and you may be left with a permanent burn scar. In the winter, these halls would be warmed with a stove stationed in the immediate vicinity—perhaps the ultimate sign of basketball’s growth over the past 100-plus years is how far the game’s been removed from literal boiler rooms.

“It has been reported that visiting players had to play with one eye focused on the stove and one on the closest opponent, else they might find that they would be pushed into it,” John M. Cooper and Daryl Siedentop wrote in the 1969 book The Theory and Science of Basketball . “This situation helped make players and coaches conscious of the possibilities of using players as screens.”

Be aware of your surroundings, or you might get burned by the Heat. Some lessons in basketball are truly timeless.

The Miami Heat return home from Boston with their series against the Celtics tied at a game apiece in a matchup many pegged to be the most likely to end in a sweep. That isn’t coach Erik Spoelstra’s style. This is Spo’s 13th postseason appearance. He’s now 10-3 in Game 2s after losing Game 1. He’s one of the greatest in-series adjusters in the history of the sport. Sometimes the scheme changes are subtle. In Game 2, they rang loud. From the opening tip, franchise fulcrum Bam Adebayo picked up the assignment on Jayson Tatum. Gone were the aggressive doubles on Boston’s most formidable playmakers, gone was the cheap zone.

“They make us think. They do this on one possession, then they do another thing on another possession, then they switch, then they don’t,” Kristaps Porzingis told reporters on Thursday. “So that can freeze you a little bit, because you start to think a little bit, then you rush.”

Placing Adebayo on Tatum kept the Celtics from getting to their preferred areas of the court expediently, as one doesn’t just bump Bam into submission. The lack of doubles meant fewer clear release valves on the weak side to swing to. Adebayo was almost omnipresent—trained on Tatum, which allowed him to remain engaged both on ball and as an active helper on switches. Chasing stars around, digging at the nail, freelancing as the low man—Bam made the best possible case for a Defensive Player of the Year award that will likely once again elude him. He was the wellspring of a Heat defense that, by sheer force of will, junked up the Celtics’ best-laid plans. The clock ticked, and the onus was on Tatum and Jaylen Brown to work their magic. To their credit, they did: The dynamic duo combined for 61 points on 23-for-43 shooting from the field on Wednesday. But that efficiency was held in a silo; the Celtics, so dominant when they can swing the ball to their myriad shooters, managed only 32 attempts from deep. Miami successfully goaded Boston into a game that was not its own.

On the other side of the coin, the Heat successfully wrung out an uncharacteristically face-melting performance from behind the arc. That was the story coming out of Boston after Game 2, and the Celtics all noted the issue of having to close out better on the Heat shooters, who were wide open on a majority of their long-range attempts. The influx of 3-pointers seemed out of character for a Heat team that was in the bottom half of the league in attempts, but their sudden departure from expectation is all part of the adaptation game. The 3-pointer is an equalizing torch for teams in survival mode. The Cavaliers’ highest highs during the regular season occurred when Cleveland, on the fly, transformed itself into one of the most prolific 3-point shooting teams in the league with Evan Mobley and Darius Garland both sidelined. Upon the foundation of Miami’s top-five defense, the Heat have been emboldened to ramp up the variance against a team that knows intimately what a procession of 3s does to an opponent. The percentages won’t always be there for the Heat the way they were in Game 2, but something tells me that the attempts are only half the fun. It’s setting them up that really lights the HEAT CULTURE beacon.

It’s the psychology of—let’s call it a boiler room attack. Maybe the Celtics will actually bother to contest the likes of Haywood Highsmith from here on out, but Miami will relish in creating punishing obstacle courses all the same. Miami’s screen choreography in Game 2 was gorgeous: bumps and twirls and skipping between enemy lines. The hits accrue. Just ask Derrick White:

Ball movement and player movement key for Miami. Highsmith screens for Herro, Martin slips, quick advance to Bam to get a handoff. Celtics switch that but now Robinson comes from the corner and slips this screen for Herro. Pritchard holds, Robinson gets a 3. pic.twitter.com/zdZFlFi627 — Steve Jones Jr. (@stevejones20) April 25, 2024

White, one of the best on-ball defenders and screen navigators in the sport, gets dragged through hell on the play above. In the span of 10 seconds, he’s bumped and tagged at least three times. He starts off attached to Tyler Herro, and by the time the ball gets to Duncan Robinson’s itchy trigger fingers, he’s out of the play entirely. It’s not just the 3s, it’s the work that Miami will put Boston through in defending them. And we know the Heat are obsessed with the work. Moving forward, the Celtics will have to be prepared to run up against all those screens, night after night. (Celtics fans have bemoaned Bam’s illegal activity, to which, I’d say: After six years of witnessing Kevin Garnett, arguably the best to ever moving-screen, I would have expected more appreciation of the craft!)

The big question as the series shifts to Miami is whether Boston will adjust how it defends the arc. “I know we will be better coming into next game,” Al Horford told reporters on Thursday. “There will be more of an awareness to that.” Hard closeouts on Heat shooters would beget different problems; Boston’s best option may simply be staying the course and trusting the talent disparity. There have been five teams in NBA history, including Miami on Wednesday, who have made at least 23 3-pointers in a playoff game. The average score of the other four teams is 128; the Heat scored 111. It took a historic night for the Heat to approach a top-10 level of offensive efficiency, a rate that the Celtics have easily cleared all season long. The 3s were the story on Wednesday night, but it wasn’t the anomaly that allowed Miami to claw its way back into this series. It was something far more familiar.

“We’ve been doubted a lot throughout our playoff runs,” said Adebayo after Game 2. “There’s people saying we couldn’t do a lot of stuff that we did. So, for me and my team, it’s like: Why lose belief now? Backs against the wall, everybody already against us, use it as fuel. A lot of people seem to think we’re going to buy into what they say, that we can’t get it done, and let it seep into our locker room. It’s different. Our guys believe we can win. We get in between those lines, we make it about basketball. We don’t make it about schemes; we don’t make it about this guy and that guy. We make it about mano a mano, get in that cage fight, and let’s hoop.”

That’s the characteristic grit and hunger that have turned Heat Basketball into a strange postseason monolith divorced from rhyme or reason. Game 2 brought those moments of confounding brilliance that lead to “dark magic” accusations with a straight and sober face. Game 2 was the kind that reminds us of why it’s so easy to ridicule the notion of HEAT CULTURE: because it toes the line of myth and reality so deftly as to establish a hyperreality. The Celtics, who have stood as analytical darlings for years on end, stand as the perfect backdrop. Boston has all the tools to vanquish the ghost once and for all. And yet, it can’t. At least not so easily.

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Lakers blow big lead vs. Nuggets in Game 2: ‘We have stretches where we don’t know what we’re doing’

DENVER — As time ticked away, and the game got closer, there was only one way that Game 2 between the Los Angeles Lakers and Denver Nuggets could end.

For most of the game, the Lakers believed they were on the verge of snapping their nine-game losing streak to the Nuggets, overcoming their recent history and getting back into a series that only they truly think they have a chance in. After an Austin Reaves 3-pointer, they led 68-48 with 10 minutes left in the third quarter.

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But through a combination of fatigue, missed shots and stagnant offense, the Lakers only scored 31 points from that point. They didn’t bury the Nuggets. They couldn’t. And once the Nuggets had an opportunity to snatch the game, they seized it, as they have done so many times before.

The Nuggets had gut-punched the  Lakers in various ways nine times prior. But never like this.

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With the crowd in Ball Arena rising to its feet and buzzing with anticipation, Jamal Murray ripped the Lakers’ hearts out with a 15-foot buzzer-beating fadeaway over Anthony Davis to seal the Nuggets’ 101-99 comeback victory . Denver now holds a commanding 2-0 series lead — and has won 10 straight games over the Lakers. Game 3 is Thursday in Los Angeles — the Lakers’ final chance to make this a series.

“We have stretches where we don’t know what we’re doing on both ends of the floor,” Davis said after the game. “Just got to get it right on Thursday.”

The Lakers’ pain was palpable postgame. Head coach Darvin Ham sat at the podium seething before going off on the officials for what he and the Lakers felt were several incorrect calls and non-calls. LeBron James remained calm until the end of his presser when he also called out the league’s replay center — at least the third time he’s done so this season. Davis ended his press conference with an angry mic drop when asked about what he saw on the final possession against Murray.

D’Angelo Russell took to X to call out an overturned foul call late in the third quarter.

That’s a foul we all saw it on national television. — D'Angelo Russell (@Dloading) April 23, 2024

The Lakers were rattled. As they should be after 10 straight losses to Denver, with each one seemingly more painful and deflating than the previous one. At this point, it seems as if the Nuggets are merely torturing the Lakers, inventing new ways to embarrass them in high-stakes moments. And, given the context of this series and the past year-plus of Lakers-Nuggets matchups, it’s hard to find any silver lining or reason for optimism for the Lakers.

Game 1 was a missed opportunity. Game 2 felt like a death blow.

The Lakers needed to win one of these two games. Now, to win the series, they’ll have to pull off something they haven’t done in almost 500 days — beat Denver — and do so four times over the next five games, including at least once at Ball Arena.

That’s a tall task for any team to accomplish. The Lakers may get a game in Los Angeles, but it’s difficult to see them winning anything more than that. The Nuggets are just the better team. Their stars are better — at least when it matters most. The rest of their starters are better. Their bench is better. Their coaching and adjustments are better. They’re flat-out better than the Lakers.

To what degree they’re better is debatable. Six of these losses have gone into the clutch. The Lakers could’ve realistically won at least three or four of them. In an alternate universe, the Lakers are 3-7 or 4-6 against the Nuggets during this stretch, and it’s viewed less one-sided. But in this universe, the Nuggets have the Lakers’ number for the foreseeable future.

Game 2 began with such promise. Davis played one of the best halves of his career, scoring on the Nuggets at will and locking up Jokić, who he switched onto. A day after Davis was left off as a finalist for the NBA ’s 2023-24 Defensive Player of the Year award, he not only showed why he should’ve been among the award finalists, but also why he’s simply one of the best players in the world.

Russell slayed his playoff demons, at least for one game, scoring 18 points in the first half, including making six 3s. He picked up right where he left off, taking the second-most shots behind only Davis. As a team, the Lakers made eight 3-pointers, tying their Game 1 total.

They led by 15 at halftime. They scored on three of their first four offensive possessions in the second half, stretching their lead to 20.

Then, everything fell apart.

“A 20-point lead in this league, it’s not safe, especially against the defending champion,” James said. “We’ve got to do better. But we had our chances.”

The Lakers had had a ton of success targeting Jokić, who was defending Davis, in pick-and-rolls. James was able to get downhill against him and either score, dish inside to Davis or kick out to shooters. Denver eventually countered, switching Kentavious Caldwell-Pope from Russell onto James, Aaron Gordon from James onto Davis and Jokić from Davis onto Hachimura. The Lakers continued targeting Jokić with Hachimura as the screener, but it wasn’t as effective.

Over the final 22 minutes, the Lakers were outscored 53-31. They shot 36.4 percent and made only 12 shots. They had more turnovers (six) than assists (four). Their offense collapsed. Davis finished with 32 points, failing to score over the final 19 minutes, and had 11 rebounds. Russell scored just five points in the second half, totaling 23 overall. James scored 16 of his 26 points in the second half, including 12 in the fourth quarter. He added eight rebounds and 12 assists.

Meanwhile, the Nuggets shot 53.8 percent and made 21 shots. They dominated the glass (23 to 15), only turned the ball over twice and outshot LA at the free-throw line (9 of 11 versus 3 of 5).

After missing 13 of his first 16 shots, Murray scored 14 points in the fourth quarter to finish with 20. Jokić posted a triple-double with 27 points, 20 rebounds and 10 assists. The two combined for 15 points and 6-for-6 shooting over the final 4:25. Denver finished the game making all seven of its final field-goal attempts.

The Lakers tried switching the Jokić-Murray game with Davis and James in the final minute, but it didn’t work. Nothing really has for the Lakers against those two. They’re been unstoppable, especially in the biggest moments.

Now, facing a daunting deficit to an opponent brimming with confidence that no lead is safe against them, the Lakers are heading back to Los Angeles and trying to pick up the pieces. It’s unclear what adjustments they can make other than tightening their rotation — their bench has been invisible and outplayed by Denver’s — and continuing to tweak their coverages against Jokić. Davis and James should spend the entire game on him, however taxing that is. The Lakers will also need to come up with a counter to the Gordon-Jokić-Caldwell-Pope defensive adjustment.

The Nuggets took care of business at home, and now the pressure has shifted to the Lakers to win their home games to even the series. But series aren’t played without context, and the context is that the Lakers have lost 10 straight times to the Nuggets and just had their heart ripped out.

Davis, the truth-teller of the locker room, expressed optimism for Game 3 while simultaneously criticizing the team’s mental lapses at this stage of the season, an indictment of both Ham and his coaching staff and the players.

“We’ve shown that we’re more than capable,” Davis said. “We have stretches where we just don’t know what we’re doing on both ends of the floor. And those are the ones that cost us. So we have two days to get it right and come ready to win Game 3 on Thursday.”

James, who has played more games and minutes than any other player in NBA history, has seen it all through his 21 seasons. He’s unfazed by the 2-0 deficit, which is an important first step toward mounting a series comeback.

But even James, arguably the game’s greatest player and thinker ever, admitted he’s still trying to figure out the seemingly unsolvable puzzle that is the Nuggets.

“Protect home,” James said of the mentality needed for a comeback. “That’s where my mindset goes. And obviously, the only game that matters now is Game 3 and how we can get better. How we can figure this team out.”

The Lakers are getting closer, which, if the recent history of this matchup is any indication, means that more heartbreak is likely around the corner.

 (Photo: AAron Ontiveroz/Getty Images)

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Jovan Buha is a senior writer for The Athletic covering the Los Angeles Lakers. Before joining the company, Jovan was an NBA editor at ESPN.com. His prior stops also include ESPN Los Angeles, FOX Sports and Grantland. Jovan is a Los Angeles native and USC alum. Follow Jovan on Twitter @ jovanbuha