How did the crew die in Project Hail Mary? Andy Weir knows — and he's saving the answer

Because in Project Hail Mary, Ryland Grace wakes from his coma to find his crewmates — mission commander Yáo (Ken Leung) and the endlessly charming Ilyukhina (Milana Vayntrub) — long dead in their bunks. And then the movie just... moves on. Rude! I have questions!

What the story gives us (crumbs, it gives us crumbs)

To be fair to Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the book is equally cagey. Here's the entire evidence file:

• All three astronauts carried a rare genetic quirk letting them survive a years-long induced coma — the whole reason this crew got picked;
• The ship's medical robot kept them alive on the way to Tau Ceti;
• Judging by the state of the bodies, the deaths happened long before Grace woke up;
• Grace himself can only speculate that some medical problem arose that the robot couldn't solve.

Miller admitted in Wired's video where the filmmakers and Ryan Gosling answered the internet's most-searched questions that the directors had nothing more to work with:

"Each of them got sick and the robot was not able to fix it."

Then Weir dropped the grenade

In that same video, Miller turned to the author and asked if he had a secret answer. And Weir, cheerfully, confirmed the worst possible thing — that this isn't a plot hole, it's a locked door:

"I know the answer to this, but I'm saving it for potential sequel materials."

Potential sequel materials. Four words engineered in a lab to torment book people. Weir has said he isn't actively writing a Hail Mary follow-up — he's got "bits and pieces" banked for someday. Which means the cause of death for Yáo and Ilyukhina currently exists in exactly one place: one sci-fi author's head, where it will sit, smugly, until the market conditions are right.

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Honestly? Respect

Here's my take, as someone who normally demands answers like a toddler demands juice: the withholding works. Grace's isolation hits harder because the deaths are senseless and unexplained — he doesn't get closure, so neither do we. And a mystery with a confirmed answer is a different animal than a plot hole. One is negligence. The other is a hostage situation.

Anyway. Yáo and Ilyukhina deserved better, the amnesia-coma pipeline remains the worst commute in fiction, and Andy Weir owes me a sequel or an apology. Preferably both.

Previously we wrote: El Niño may bury states that rarely see snow