That's why the camera crew is there: A man killed himself, and the filmmakers wanted to document how his friends were dealing with it. The really sad part is that no one really seems to care. According to the writers, Ryan the temp was hired almost immediately after Tom's suicide, because death or no death, Dunder Mifflin is a business that cannot shut down, or even slow down, just because someone lost a battle with depression. Huh, you know, maybe The Office was more realistic than we gave it credit for.

NBCUniversal Television Distribution
Really, you couldn't give him one Dundie, asshole?

Now, unlike in the original, the Ape Planet does not turn out to be Earth. But after Wahlberg returns to the Solar System (while passing through an electromagnetic storm) he discovers that Earth has been taken over by intelligent apes, with the statue of the sadistic chimp general he met on Ape Planet sitting right where the Lincoln Memorial used to be.

Aperaham Lincoln, if you will.

How did Thade (the chimp general) get to Earth? Why are there apes everywhere? Is this even Earth? What the fuck is going on?!

The Explanation:

The ending was so notoriously confusing that the movie's DVD came with a graph explaining it.

20th Century Fox (Click Image For Larger Size)
Just a little supplemental quantum physics homework with your Walhberg flick.

All right, so after Wahlberg got into his pod and set course for Earth, it's implied that Thade and a few of his buddies got into the other pod (there were two of them on the Ape Planet) and followed him. They both then passed through the electromagnetic storm, which also acts as a time portal. However, because of the unstable nature of the temporal storm, they reached Earth at different times. It would seem that Thade and co. landed on Earth many decades/centuries in our relative past, and with nothing better to do, proceeded to take over the place. By the time Wahlberg finally landed back home, humanity had long been enslaved by a race of intelligent apes. Which were created by ... Thade and his time-traveling friends banging our regular apes and slowly creating more and more intelligent primates? That's the sexy answer. We always go with the sexy answer.

The Explanation:

Check out this scene:

On the surface, it looks like Cypher perving on some computer code. But what he's really doing is distracting Neo so that he doesn't ask what Cypher was doing before he came in. Say, what WAS he doing? Well, according to the Wachowskis themselves: "Cypher ... is setting up an automated system to allow him to go meet with Agent Smith." That ... makes a lot of sense. Cypher is one of the ship's IT guys, so if anybody could do it, it would be him. Plus, no one ever said you couldn't go into the Matrix alone; the audience just assumed that. Probably because we all know it's better when you don't do your own jackin'.

Warner Bros.
You might go blind.

Here are some of the questions the epilogue answers:

"What's with that giant bird from Seasons 1 and 2?" DHARMA experimented on animals! "Why do women have pregnancy problems on the Island?" It's the electromagnetism! "What was that weird thing in Room 23 that looked like a brainwashing video?" A brainwashing video! DHARMA used it to erase memories! "Where did the food drops come from?" A warehouse in Guam! "Why polar bears?" They were good candidates for testing!

ABC Studios
Also, one of the racist DHARMA scientists refused to work with black bears.

If you're feeling sort of insulted by the anticlimactic nature of these answers, then good. The writers made it clear that fans who demand logic instead of reveling in the show's "mysterious" insanity can go fuck themselves.

And that's a dirty damn lie. It turns out Dorothy could have returned home anytime she wanted, thanks to her magical shoes. When asked why she didn't say so from the start, Glinda explains that Dorothy wouldn't have believed her. So Dorothy was willing to go look for a wizard, but could not have been convinced to tap her heels three times? Is that what we're going with?

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
"You know I just saw flying monkeys and a talking cat, right?"

The Explanation:

In the original Oz books, there are TWO Good Witches. Glinda is the one from the South (born and raised, Quadling Country was where she spent most of her days), and she is the one who tells Dorothy how to go back home. The one Dorothy meets in Munchkin Country, though, is the Good Witch of the North, named Locasta Tattypoo (no, really). They are two totally different characters, with the latter obviously having no idea about the true power of the magical slippers.

However, the movie, most likely due to budgetary and time constraints, decided to merge these characters, thus creating this little inconsistency. Or -- and we're just spitballing here -- maybe witches are jerks. Lying-ass jerks. Even the "good" ones.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
The "good" character has a town full of slaves. Go figure.