Warning: Major Spoilers For Lightyear Below!

The ending of Lightyear shows Buzz Lightyear learning new lessons about being a Space Ranger, and it explains some connective tissue with Toy Story. Telling the story of Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear as the movie character who inspired the action figure seen in Toy Story, Lightyear shows its stalwart hero, voiced by Chris Evans, on a mission with his fellow rangers on the planet Tikana Prime. Unfortunately, an unexpected attack by some indigenous lifeforms forces Buzz and his team to retreat, but things get more complicated from there.

Star Command's ship is damaged in the crew's escape attempt, leaving them stranded on Tikana Prime. As they adapt to their new home and establish a human colony on the planet, Buzz becomes increasingly determined to find a way to get his friends home. Along the way, Buzz meets new enemies and allies and learns some important lessons about how guilt and regret can hold one back in life.

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Lightyear's positive, if slightly mixed, reviews have praised the film for its inventive re-imaging of Buzz Lightyear's story and for Chris Evans's performance as the voice of the upstanding Space Ranger. As is common for Pixar's animated movies, Lightyear deals with some surprisingly strong themes, using the template of a family movie as a vehicle for a story that knows no age barriers. Here's how Lightyear's ending plays out, and what the true meaning behind it is.

Buzz's Mission & Time-Travel Explained

The real Buzz in Pixar movie Lightyear

As part of the mission to get the Star Command crew home from Tikana Prime, Buzz steps up to test out a newly designed fuel for hyperspace travel, created through "crystallic fusion" — a callback to the toy version of Buzz's inquiry about fuel for his ship in the original Toy Story. Buzz makes repeated failed efforts to make the hyperspace jump, with the time-warping from light-speed travel bringing him back to Tikana Prime four years after each trip began. This leaves the Star Command crew on Tikana Prime for decades, with Buzz's friend Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Abuda) eventually dying of old age during his travels.

After learning that the colony intends to stay put, Buzz makes one last-ditch effort at hyperspace travel, finally succeeding. However, this time he returns 22 years in the future of Tikana Prime, with the colony overtaken by the forces of Emperor Zurg (James Brolin). Buzz joins forces with new Star Command rangers Mo Morrison (Taika Waititi), Darby Steel (Dale Soules), and Hawthorne's grown granddaughter, Izzy (Keke Palmer), to stop Zurg.

Who Is Zurg & What Does He Want

Emperor Zurg

After Buzz is captured by the more menacingly designed Zurg, the Emperor reveals himself as a much older version of Buzz from a different timeline. Zurg explains that after making a successful hyperspace leap, he was nonetheless reprimanded by Star Command officer Burnside (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), which led him to return to space and travel far into the future, coming across an even more technologically advanced ship in his travels. Learning that limited time travel to the past is also possible, Zurg then traveled back to Buzz's time, with the goal of retrieving additional fuel for another hyperspace jump in order to prevent the Star Command unit from landing on Tikana Prime.

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Buzz opposes Zurg's plan, as changing the past would wipe out the lives of everyone born since then, including Izzy. After an extended battle in which Izzy, Mo, Darby, and the cybernetic cat assistant Sox (Peter Sohn) arrive to help, Chris Evans's continually determined Buzz and his allies destroy Zurg's ship and halt his plan. Though Zurg escapes the ship's destruction, he is seemingly killed in his final confrontation with Buzz and left floating in space, with Buzz and his friends returning to Tikana Prime.

The Future For Buzz & His Team

The characters of Lightyear in a rocket

Upon their return to Tikana Prime, Buzz and his friends, despite having violated Star Command protocol, are given clearance by Burnside to continue the Galactic Ranger program. Buzz is offered a new team by Burnside, but after their role in helping him defeat Zurg, Buzz says Izzy, Mo, Darby, and Sox are his team of Space Rangers. With his new team assembled, Buzz assembles them for a new mission to the stars, soaring off into space on his and Hawthorne's old catchphrase "To infinity, and beyond," this time shared with Izzy.

Lightyear also wraps up with three end-credits scenes to help set up Lightyear 2. The first two are more comedic in nature, showing Burnside sardonically quip about being happy with the Star Command base's shield acting like a giant bug zapper when it fries an insect. The second shows the robot ERIC (Angus McLane) showing the map through Zurg's ship, belatedly realizing the Space Rangers have already departed. The final end-credits scene, unusually placed after the final Disney and Pixar logos, shows Zurg floating in space and hinting that he's still alive, foreshadowing that he and Buzz will again in Lightyear 2.

The Meaning Of Lightyear's Ending

Chris Evans as Buzz Lightyear No Helmet

The main theme of Lightyear is learning to live with mistakes and accepting that which is beyond one's own control. Buzz's commendable effort to make the hyperspace leap to get his Star Command compatriots home leaves him to miss out on the bulk of Hawthorne's life on Tikana Prime. Just as determined as Tim Allen's Toy Story version of Buzz Lightyear, Evans's Buzz is motivated by the feeling that he is responsible for his friend's predicament. As he returns from each jump, he sees Hawthorne aging, getting married in a same-sex romance, and having a child, and finally, he sees her posthumous message commending Buzz for his stalwart dedication to his fellow Space Rangers. Buzz eventually comes to realize that his efforts to fix the situation only make his heartache greater.

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As the future Buzz from a parallel timeline, Zurg exemplifies the road Buzz could have headed down by obsessively trying to undo past mistakes at the cost of living life in the moment. Buzz ultimately decides it is best to look to improve the future, and that the best thing he can do for his friends is helping them to build the best lives they can on Tikana Prime. Of course, Buzz's dedication to intergalactic exploration remains, with the mega-budget animated adventure Lightyear ending with him, Izzy, and their crew heading into space once again, now looking forward to new possibilities rather than behind, to that which they cannot change.

Buzz's Connection To Toy Story

Woody and Buzz Lightyear posing for a photo in Toy Story.

In Lightyear, Buzz is effectively the same person as the toy version of himself in Toy Story, his unwavering commitment to the mission at hand being something inherited in the toys made in his image. Buzz even directly pulls several Buzz quotes from Toy Story, putting a clever spin on the idea of legacy quoting. The film opens with a caption revealing itself as the movie Andy Davis saw that made him a fan of Buzz Lightyear before getting his action figure for his birthday, retroactively making itself the origin of Buzz lines like "The terrain seems a bit unstable" and "You're mocking me, aren't you?"

The shared character trait of both versions of Buzz is their selflessness, a retained trait of Buzz after learning he is a toy in Toy Story. As a Space Ranger, Buzz never takes his eye off of completing his assigned mission and protecting his friends no matter the potential risk to himself. In Toy Story, Buzz was exactly the same before and after learning he was a toy, with his concern ultimately shifting towards realizing his important role in filling Andy's childhood with happiness as the hero he aspires to be. It seems a consistent trait that Buzz Lightyear action figures, after learning their true nature, simply take on a new mission of still being Buzz at their core, only with a very different kind of mission.

Lightyear adapts Buzz's core personality and heroic nature to a new story of the character upon whom the action figure in Toy Story was modeled. Lightyear establishes that these are elements intrinsic to Buzz whether he's an actual Space Ranger or a toy in the Toy Story movies. Regardless of what planet he's on or whether he's a man or a toy, Toy Story's thesis on who Buzz is is solidified in Lightyear: that Buzz Lightyear will never quit and will always fight to infinity and beyond for those who need his help.

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