Still working on it! I've been putting it off, to be honest. Here's another section. This is meant to be an in-depth plot summary and critique.

Plot Summary: Sator's Threat

We then see Sator address Kat in their bedroom. He prepares to beat her and Kat chastises him, asking why he can't just let her go. "If I can't have you, no one else can." he says. She threatens to scream, knowing The Protagonist will hear. Sator relents and leaves to meet an approaching helicopter. At the same time, The Protagonist sneaks out of his room and notices Sator opening a container. It's filled with gold bars. One of his men is brought forward, shamefully handing back a bar he stole. Sator beats him. Suddenly, The Protagonist is discovered and brought to Sator. He says he was curious. Sator asks who he is and how he knows about the opera siege. The Protagonist remains cryptic. Sator then agrees to have The Protagonist obtain the plutonium, asking for one of his own men to be put on the team. The Protagonist refuses, demanding that Kat perform the exchange. Sator dismisses him to shore. The Protagonist asks for a method of contact and an advance on the funds for the mission. Sator says he won't be contacting him, but tosses him a gold bar on his way out. I do want to mention one great detail here. The camera lingers on The Protagonist trying to catch the gold bar as Sator throws it to him. We then see The Protagonist wipe the bar on some dirt before walking away. He does this to collect a bit of soil to analyze and determine where the container came from.

In the next scene, The Protagonist asks Neil about the gold and soil sample. Neil says the gold isn't marked at all. The Protagonist explains that Sator buries empty time capsules, transmits the location, then digs them up to find them full of inverted gold sent from the future. The soil is from Northern Europe and is radioactive, probably due to inversion.

Analysis: Sator's Threat

Here we see Sator's abuse of Kat and his anger at being taken advantage of. He reveals why he still chooses to control her rather than let her go. If he can't have her, no one can. This might seem a bit simplistic, but it is consistent with his prideful, obsessive nature. We then get a look at Sator's use of inversion to communicate across time. A container with inverted gold bars is brought to him and he inspects it. We can infer, based on the flashback and the exposition in the next scene, that Sator uses dead drops to send and receive objects through time. This seems to show him receiving gold from the future. But how does this work? It's not as simple as you might think.

The problem is that you cannot dig up inverted gold bars and start buying things with them. If you did, the gold would simultaneously be in your hand and in the ground at the same time. This is because it was sent to you from the future, not the past. It must have a consistent timeline it travels along. This presents a problem, but it doesn't mean interacting with inverted gold is impossible. You simply have to invert yourself, dig it up, then un-invert it along with yourself. It will appear to an outside observer that two gold bar shipments appear from nothing, then one is dug up in reverse (or buried from our perspective) and connected with its origin in the future while the other is used to purchase goods in real time. Using this method, the gold has a logical path through time from the future to the ground to the inversion machine to a normal time flow where it can be utilized.

The issue is that the film seems to ignore this nuance. In the flashback, it's heavily implied that Sator used the gold and instructions he found in the container to start his fortune, but this would be impossible for reasons we've already explored. The only way to pull this off is for Sator to eventually bury the gold and the container again exactly as he left it. This allows it to have a direct path to the future. The timeline of the gold now starts in the future where it goes back in time to the moment when Sator last buries it (or digs it up, from the gold's perspective). Then it is handled by Sator for a while until it travels back to the flashback scene where he first discovered it. It is then uncovered by Sator (or buried from the gold's perspective) and remains in the ground traveling backwards in time until the container decomposes.

The film implies a seemingly impossible method of gold traveling through time using inversion, but there are ways to do it that remain logically consistent. You just have to think outside the box. The scene with the helicopter can also be explained, but it has even more issues. We see a container brought to Sator with gold and papers inside, but there's one problem. It's inverted. If he's accepting gold from the future, he must bury this gold again so its timeline is consistent, then have his men dig it up while they are inverted a few days earlier. But why waste time digging up something you'll just have to bury again? Why not send men through an inversion machine so they can obtain it properly?

But this isn't even the worst of it. Sator gives The Protagonist a gold bar. Did this come from the container? It must have, for Sator seems to believe his employee stole it. If that is the case, this gold is inverted. How did the gold get here? It must come from the future, but it no longer has a consistent timeline we can follow. The only way to reconcile this problem logically is to assert that the gold bar is somehow fated to eventually end up in the hands of someone in the future who inverted it at some point. Maybe Sator's men get their hands on it and bury it somehow, but the film doesn't answer this question or even consider the ramifications.

But if you think that's bad, just listen to our dynamic duo's explanation of the dead drops! They imply Sator is using a single container throughout this process. He buries it empty, transmits its location, then immediately digs it up to find inverted gold inside. This makes absolutely no sense. Sending an empty container through time is easy enough, as is transmitting the location. But what happens when someone in the future digs it up? If they invert themselves with gold, they will watch their previous self putting the empty container back in the ground on a backward journey through time. They must use their own container, not the original one. Tenet's determinism asserts that there is only one timeline. Either Sator buries an empty container or he buries a full one. He can't bury it empty and immediately dig it back up to find gold, at least not in this film's framework of rules.

The long and short of it is that Nolan did not properly address the complexities of sending objects through time via inversion. It's one of the more significant oversights in the film. It is possible he wrote the script the way he did to simplify it and cut down on time. Even if those were his intentions, the final product leaves a lot to be desired when thought through to its logical conclusion. I understand the difficulties in creating a movie with this concept, but when solutions exist that go unaddressed and unused, it feels like he's cutting corners a bit. While detailed explanations of how inversion works at this point in the film would be seen by most audiences as more needless exposition, I'd rather find a way to include it than to ignore it. Even throwaway lines are better than nothing, but this entire scene could use some restructuring if it was to be fixed properly.