The Electric State Book Summary, Ending & Spoilers Explained Ahead of Netflix Movie

The Netflix adaptation of The Electric State looks dramatically different from the original illustrated book.

Based on the illustrated sci-fi novel of the same name by Simon Stålenhag, released in 2018, the movie will be directed by Joe and Anthony Russo of Avengers: Endgame fame with a script written by frequent collaborators Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.

The film will star Millie Bobby Brown of Stranger Things (now going by a new name) as Michelle, alongside Chris Pratt as Keats, who helps her and her friendly robot companion, Skip, traverse a desolated United States ravaged by robots.

The Electric State Plot Explained

Fans of the original The Electric State book already noticed several distinct changes from the source material, such as an assortment of new characters, including Chris Pratt's Keats.

Other key plot points from the book are seemingly missing, too, such as the Hive Mind and neurocasters, the latter of which only make a brief appearance in the trailer. The film's tone also seems devoid of the melancholy and isolation of Simon Stålenhag's The Electric State.

The Neurocaster

The neurocaster is a vital piece of technology in the world of The Electric State that sets into motion the slow decay of the United States. Manufactured by Sentre for the federal army in the early '90s, the technology was developed to remotely control drones, giant hulking machines of war that now litter the landscape and are slowly rusting.

However, there were adverse side effects on the drone pilots who operated them, namely, stillbirths and becoming hopelessly addicted to the drugs used in conjunction with the technology. Despite these adverse side effects, several years later, the neurocaster became available to the public for commercial and recreational use, replacing nearly every other form of entertainment. 

Mode Six

The beginning of the end for the world of The Electric State started in 1996 with a software update for the neruocasters called Mode Six. The update caused the devices to become even more addictive, as the users' consciousnesses would be blissfully cultivated into glorified servers scattered across the country.

Eventually, these consciousnesses merged, forming a new higher intelligence—a Hive Mind—an amalgamation of neurocasters that developed into its own digital consciousness. Before anyone could do anything, it was already too late to stop it as it spread across the country.

The Hive Mind

As more and more people became victims of the neurocasters, neglecting to remove them due to their addictive nature, their minds would become one with the Hive Mind. Their bodies turned into undying husks for it to puppet across a crumbling countryside.

The original illustrated novel left the Hive Mind's greater goals rather vague. It appeared to either seek an organic body or give birth to a new life form. This life form is heavily suggested to be one of the two lead characters of The Electric State.

Michelle & Skip

Michelle is a teenage girl who is made an orphan by the military-industrial complex. Her father, whom she never knew, was killed in the war. Her mother became addicted to military drugs while enlisted as a drone pilot, eventually overdosing. Her grandfather died from exposure to hazardous materials while helping manufacture military equipment.

All Michelle had left was her brother, Skip, who arrived at her foster parent's home in the form of a small, yellow robot. Skip's mind was seemingly trapped in the mechanical construct, forcing him and Michelle to journey across the United States to find his physical body with a kayak and stolen car, bypassing what remained of law enforcement and the ever-growing Hive Mind.

Unlike the upcoming Netflix adaptation, Skip's plot point of inhabiting the yellow robot was revealed as a twist to the reader in the final pages of The Electric State. Michelle and Skip find a boy, that was him, in an abandoned house in the northern cape of San Francisco wearing a neurocaster barely clinging to life.

Michelle recalled only seeing a neurocaster removed once, and it immediately killed the host. Fearing the same fate for her brother, she would delay removing it as long as possible.

Otherwise, much of The Electric State's narrative is Michelle's bittersweet recollections of her past as she and Skip trek across a crumbling United States. These include seminal moments with her foster parents, Ted and Brigitte, and her blossoming romance with a girl named Amanda, which sadly wilted due to the girl's abusive and religious father.

Agent Walter

Another minor subplot sprinkled throughout The Electric State showed that a government agent named Walter had been pursuing the siblings across the country, believing their journey was playing right into the hands of the Hive Mind.

Walter stopped an early manifestation of the Hive Mind before, describing a previous mission in which he destroyed something grotesque in a laboratory linked to the digital entity. He then learned about Skip, the child of a drone pilot who should have been sterile.

Walter determined that Skip was another anomaly created by the Hive Mind and quickly decided that the best course of action for the sake of humanity was to kill the child to stop whatever the artificial construct had planned for him.

Unfortunately, just as Walter had caught up with Michelle and Skip, the Hive Mind finally retaliated, summoning a monstrous machine to attack him. It's unknown whether the Hive Mind succeeded in killing Walter or simply drove him away, but it allowed Michelle to escape with her comatose brother.

Siblings Sail to Safety

Like much of The Electric State, the ending is left ambiguous. The final illustrations showed their car abandoned on the rocky coast near the ocean, with the kayak missing from the car roof. On the ground, the reader is only shown Skip's limp robotic body and a discarded neurocaster.

So, did Skip's body not survive having his neurocaster removed, as Michelle feared? It's uncertain, but considering that only the yellow robot was left behind, it appeared that Skip lived, with Michelle taking him away on the kayak to hopefully safer shores.

Netflix's The Electric State will be released on March 14, 2025.