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Jul 23, 2023

Unbreakable Trilogy: A Complete Timeline Of Events

With interconnected flashbacks and twist reveals from Unbreakable, Split, and

With interconnected flashbacks and twist reveals from Unbreakable, Split, and Glass, the Eastrail 177 Trilogy timeline is pretty complicated.

The Unbreakable trilogy timeline is complicated by all the interconnected flashbacks and twist reveals in the stealth sequel Split and the crossover follow-up Glass. M. Night Shyamalan kickstarted his own shared superhero universe with Unbreakable, a grounded take on comic book lore in which a seemingly average man learns that he has superpowers after he survives a deadly train crash. Sixteen years later, Shyamalan expanded the Unbreakable universe with Split, a psychological thriller about a man with dissociative identity disorder, and then he brought the series — also known as the Eastrail 177 Trilogy — full circle with Glass, the big finale incorporating characters from the two prior movies.

With flashbacks to all the major characters’ backstories and a twist reveal about a secret society that's been around for thousands of years, the timeline of the Unbreakable movies gets a little convoluted. Unbreakable and its spinoffs plant superhero tropes into the real world, imagining what would really happen if someone with superpowers used those abilities for good – or evil. The Split timeline and the Glass timeline have gotten jumbled up in Unbreakable's own story timeline. Therefore, a guide is helpful to navigate the timeline of the whole Eastrail 177 Trilogy, comprising the events of Unbreakable, Split, and Glass, in chronological order.

RELATED: How To Watch The Unbreakable Trilogy In Order

The formation of the Clover Organization is the earliest event in the Unbreakable trilogy timeline by several thousand years. The Clover Organization is a secret society that managed to hide the existence of superhumans for millennia. With unlimited resources at their disposal, the Clover Organization indoctrinated human society into believing that superhumans exist only in myths and comic books. Although the Clover Organization remained unseen throughout Unbreakable and Split, they played a major role in Glass. The Clover Organization subverts the secret society comic book trope as they target heroes and villains alike.

Related: Every Clue In Glass To The Clover Twist

Elijah Price, the main antagonist of the Unbreakable trilogy, was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, colloquially referred to as "brittle bone disease." Elijah's mother always took care of him and assured him that his bone disorder made him special. Elijah's brittle bones earned him the childhood nickname "Mr. Glass" from the schoolyard bullies, which he would later self-apply as his supervillain moniker. At the beginning of Unbreakable, Elijah's birth year is dated as 1961. Samuel L. Jackson was born in 1948, meaning his Unbreakable trilogy character is significantly younger than the actor. Casting an older actor may have been an intentional move by Shyamalan to highlight the character's brittleness.

Unbreakable hero David Dunn nearly drowned in a pool as a child when other kids pushed him underwater. The original script mentions at the time David was slightly younger than his son, who is 10 on the page and around 12 or 13 in the movie. Bruce Willis, who plays David, turned 10 in 1965. While David thought this experience was proof that he was not superhuman, Elijah points out that every superhero has a weakness. Superman has Kryptonite, and David has water. David's near-death experience ominously foreshadowed his real demise in Glass: being drowned in a flooded pothole.

Elijah was 13 years old when he received his first comic book, sparking a lifelong obsession with the tropes and conventions of superhero stories — and a psychotic bid to bring those tropes and conventions into real life. Elijah's mother gifted him comics to encourage the boy to go outside. Since he was born in 1961, this would take place in 1974, a year that marked the first appearances of such iconic Marvel heroes as Wolverine, the Punisher, and Iron Fist. But Elijah wasn't drawn to the heroes; he felt a personal connection to the villains, who took out their problems on the world with diabolical schemes and deadly attacks.

When David was a promising up-and-coming football star, he and his then-girlfriend Audrey got into a near-fatal car crash. While Audrey sustained wounds from the accident, David was unharmed. He even managed to rip the door off with his bare hands to save Audrey. He chalked this up to an act of adrenaline-fueled heroism, not evidence of superpowers. Although David was not hurt in the crash, he faked an injury to get out of football because Audrey wanted him to give up the violent sport. This is a subversion of the usual superhero movie origin stories because the superhero didn't realize he was a superhero at the time.

When Elijah became obsessed with comic book mythology and identified himself as a supervillain, he started orchestrating deadly disasters in an attempt to draw out his superhero arch-nemesis. While there are plenty of other high-profile disasters that are glimpsed in newspaper clippings — and it's unclear which ones were caused by Elijah and which ones were just accidents — the two incidents seen in flashbacks that Elijah is definitely responsible for are a plane crash and a hotel fire. The fact that Elijah was willing to let hundreds of people die horrifically in the hope of discovering somebody with superpowers makes him one of Shyamalan's most sinister and cold-hearted villains.

One of the incidents orchestrated by Mr. Glass was the deadly Eastrail 177 train crash. While every other passenger was either killed or horribly injured, David emerged unscathed, proving Elijah's suspicions about real-life superpowers. The first major plot twist in Glass revealed that Kevin Wendell Crumb's father was among the casualties. This meant that no one was around to protect a young Kevin from his abusive mother, and his other personalities – including "The Beast" – took over his psyche. This twist seems to confirm that Crumb is much younger than actor James McAvoy, who was 21 years old, rather than a young child, at the time Unbreakable was released.

Elijah wasn't revealed to be Unbreakable's villain until the very end. When the two men shook hands, David's powers of seeing people's crimes by touching them revealed that Mr. Glass caused the train crash and other accidents to find his superhero arch-nemesis. Elijah told David, "Now that we know who you are, I know who I am," and gave himself the supervillain alias "Mr. Glass." This ending subverted the usual superhero narrative with a more realistic outcome. The hero and villain didn't face off in a thrilling final battle; the hero simply reported the villain's crimes to the police and had him arrested.

The beginning of Glass revealed that David's son Joseph became his superhero sidekick. Joseph was one of the few people who knew about David's double life as a superhero and helped him track down bad guys to bring to justice. A flashback sequence in Glass, reused from a deleted scene in Unbreakable, showed David coming home from a night of fighting crime and Joseph admitting that he knew about his "secret identity." Their last act as a superhero duo is seen in the opening scene of Glass when David and Joseph tracked down "The Horde" to an abandoned warehouse and David freed the four cheerleaders The Horde had taken hostage.

Among the earliest events of the Split timeline within the Unbreakable trilogy are the harrowing flashbacks to Casey Cooke's childhood. These scenes revealed that Casey was abused by her uncle and legal guardian, John, both before and after her father's death. She eventually picked up her uncle's hunting rifle but couldn't bring herself to pull the trigger. The majority of Split takes place during Casey's teenage years, but these flashbacks provide key context. The horrific moments introduced childhood trauma as a major theme in the story. These scenes also established the commonality between the hero and the villain: they were both traumatized by abusive parental figures at a young age.

After his father died in the Eastrail 177 crash and his mother's abuse worsened, Kevin began suffering from dissociative identity disorder and developed 23 distinct personalities. As he grappled with DID, Kevin started attending regular sessions with his therapist, Dr. Karen Fletcher. In Split, Kevin is shown to be several years into his treatment with Dr. Fletcher, who was the only person who could get through to him and navigate his various personalities until he found a kindred spirit in Casey. Despite Kevin's instinctive trust of Dr. Fletcher, when "The Beast" took over his mind, he killed her, proving that this new persona was something else.

At the beginning of Split, Casey and her friends Claire and Marcia were waiting in Claire's dad's car to be driven home from a birthday party. However, before Claire's dad returned to the vehicle, one of Kevin's most unsettling personalities – Dennis – got in the car and kidnapped the girls. He intended to sacrifice them to the superpowered 24th personality he was developing, "The Beast." He trapped the girls in a secret underground lair beneath the Philadelphia Zoo, where all their escape attempts were unsuccessful. This ordeal forced Casey to confront her childhood trauma as she refused to be victimized a second time.

When Kevin finally transformed into "The Beast," Casey managed to escape his captivity and armed herself with a shotgun and a box of shells. This was the culmination of Casey's fight for survival. She managed to shoot The Beast twice before she ran out of ammo, but he was barely fazed by the gunshot wounds and moved in for the kill. Then, The Beast noticed the scars from her uncle's abuse and decided to spare her life because she was "pure." This scene introduced The Beast's limited but very real capacity for mercy, and the special connection he shared with Casey, which would come back in Glass.

In the twist ending of Split, patrons at Silk City Diner watched a TV news report about The Beast's crimes. One of them mentioned that it was similar to another story about a real-world supervillain from a few years earlier, but she couldn't remember the nickname that the media gave him. The man sitting next to her, revealed to be David Dunn, identified the real-life villain as "Mr. Glass." Split wasn't advertised as an Unbreakable sequel, so this final scene connecting the two movies took audiences by surprise. This was one of the most crucial scenes in the Unbreakable trilogy timeline because it established the interconnected universe.

In the opening sequence of Glass, David tracked down The Beast and saved his latest batch of hostages. During the showdown, both David and The Beast were captured by Dr. Ellie Staple and taken to Raven Hill Memorial, where she’d already detained Mr. Glass. Dr. Staple claimed to be a psychiatrist who specializes in convincing people who think they have superpowers that they simply have delusions of grandeur. However, as the movie went on, Dr. Staple turned out to have a much darker ulterior motive. This setup brought the characters of Unbreakable and Split together for the first time.

David, Mr. Glass, and The Beast all escaped from Raven Hill in Glass's final act. Joseph told The Beast that Mr. Glass caused the train crash that killed his father, so he killed Mr. Glass in retaliation. Before The Beast could kill anyone else, Casey brought Kevin's original personality back, and in a classic M. Night Shyamalan movie twist, he was instantly gunned down by a police sniper and died in Casey's arms while another officer drowned David in a flooded pothole. Dr. Staple and the cops revealed they were members of the Clover Organization, which was committed to suppressing superhumans. Killing off all three major characters was wildly unexpected.

The final event in the Unbreakable trilogy timeline brought its story of real-world superhumans to a definitive conclusion. At the end of Glass, after overhearing some comic book fans discussing the trope of ingenious supervillains always having a secret plan, Dr. Staple realized Mr. Glass must’ve had his own secret plan to take her down. The Raven Hill surveillance footage that Dr. Staple deleted was live-streamed by Mr. Glass and sent to Casey, Joseph, and Mrs. Price, who simultaneously leaked it online. This exposed the existence of superhumans to the public, undermining 10,000 years of efforts by the Clover Organization, and providing a conclusive ending to the Unbreakable trilogy.