Ran across a fun quotation in +Doyce Testerman's feed earlier today,
"Destiny is for people who are too lazy to create alternate timelines."
— Richard Stevens III, Diesel Sweeties, webcomic (5 Oct 2011)
[http://www.dieselsweeties.com/archive/2907]
Which called to mind some thoughts on goings-on in the Berlantiverse of DC heroes on the CW this season. (Some spoilers for S2 of Legends of Tomorrow, S3 of Flash below)
In both Flash and, especially, Legends of Tomorrow (but with a bit of splash-over onto _Green Arrow),- the question of changing the timeline has been a major plot point.
Legends has focused on it from Day One: the Time Masters were (ostensibly) trying to protect the true timeline, while Rip was gathering the gang to help change it just enough to save his family (and, incidentally, billions of others) from Vandal Savage.
With the destruction of the Time Masters, the Legends crew have suddenly changed course. They're out to eliminate time anomalies — the results of changes to the timeline. Most of what they are detecting and correcting are the results of actions by Bad Guys — time pirates, Damien Darkh, etc.
But some anomalies have been caused by the Good Guys. Some innocent advice to is younger self caused Professor Stein to discover that, hey presto, he now has an adult daughter.¹ And, after feeling horrified and repulsed, as realized that, wow, she's not an anomaly, she's a person.
Similarly in Flash, the eponymous hero wrapped up last season making the poor judgment decision to go back and save his mother from Reverse Flash. This set up the "Flashpoint" time paradox, changing the timeline so that when Barry arrived back in the present (a bit of handwaving as to how all that worked), he discovered things were Really Different — and, in some cases, far worse. That led him to going back and undoing what he'd just done, but the future (Butterfly Effect style) was still a bit different from the previous canon. This has led to recriminations and anger and drama (some of it overblown, some of it exacerbated by the Berlantiverse Mandate that Thou Shalt Lie To Thy Friends About Anything Important).
The question is, what is an "alternate timeline," or an "anomaly" actually is. Who gets to define the baseline reality that needs to be defended — especially when everyone else considers that "normal"? Screwing around with time can lead to some better outcomes, some worse — but given that knowledge of such things is always very local and immediate (Barry didn't count the number of people who might have lived, or died, as a consequence of his Flashpoint actions; Prof. Stein didn't consider the lives that his "new" daughter might have touched — benefited or hurt — once she started existing.
Some of this speculation probably also gelled from having watched a stage production of It's a Wonderful Life this weekend; the play stacks the deck by basically having everyone be more miserable because George Bailey never existed in the alternate timeline, but reality might be more nuanced. Maybe one of the people on that troop transport that was destroyed by a kamikaze because George's brother never survived to become a fighter ace would have grown up to be the forefather of some 21st Century Hitler. Maybe the misery of Potterville led to an amazing civil rights leader in the 60s, or the 70s, or the 80s, someone whose future of bringing equal rights to populations today is now wiped out because George decided he wanted to live after all.
Not only is making an objective determination of the benefit or drawback of a given alternate timeline difficult, but deciding if something is an alternate timeline is impossible. Is what we are living in the primary timeline? How would we (or the Legends, or the Flash) know? Who's to say that a 1930s speedster or a 29th Century time traveler didn't already screw things up ("Wait, Franz Ferdinand got killed here, instead of the failed assassination leading to a history of rapprochement between first the ethnic groups of the Balkins, then Europe, then the whole world?") or fix things ("Wait, John Glenn actually made it back to Earth, rather than his fiery crash leading to the Soviet domination of space and, then, the whole world?")?
I'm hoping that this will be the ultimate lesson of Legends of Tomorrow in this (and future) seasons — not some sort of hopeless mission to maintain a hypothetical baseline, regardless of the costs, but a recognition that it's all real — and, yeah, that trying to change time intentionally has lots of unintended consequences, good and bad, but that you can't let that paralyze you into thinking this is the best of all possible worlds and that we don't dare interfere with it on a micro or macro level.
Because, really, everyone screws around with the timeline, just by our impact on the world. We're all time travelers. Most of us don't have any choice about where we're going, but we all have an opportunity to change the future.
—-
¹ Stein is somehow convinced that this is due to his own meddling, not due to the Flashpoint shenanigans. How he is convinced of this never seems clear to me.
Have you watched a show called Timeless? It just wrapped the first half of its first season and its pretty good, and it plays with the alternate timeline idea. Without getting too spoilery, three people are enlisted to travel into the past to try and stop the bad guy from changing the past.
In the process of battling the bad guy, even when they manage to stop his plan of the week, a few changes are made that affect the present they return to. One of their missions even manages to erase one of the team member's sisters.
I like that the show is handling time travel in a somewhat realistic fashion. Recently, one of the team's bosses handed over a flashdrive filled with video and pictures of her family because she's freaked that some change might be made that wipes them from existence and she wants to know if that happens… which sort of seems like a special section of Hell to me but to each their own.
+Marty S. Watched the first ep. It's on deep DVRing, to be pulled out next summer.
Yes, I now recall that show also touched on this. theme.
It's interesting that this is bubbling up in so many shows/movies of late. Is it a matter of cascading from a common "Hey, that's a cool idea, let's play with that some more" (maybe Tom Cruise, Tomorrow Never Ends) or is it a sign of some societal angst over the flexibility of reality and anxiety about change?
There's definitely plenty to watch for lovers of time travel this season. Timeless, Time after Time, and Making History are the ones I can think of off the top of my head, and there's also Frequency.
While that last one is not an actual time travel show, the present-day cop is able to change her past by using an old HAM radio to talk to her father about 20 years in the past. This is another good show, IMO.
It's sort of odd because aside from Doctor Who and Legends of Tomorrow (along with Flash), I don't think there have been any other shows focusing on time travel recently. I guess someone somewhere decided it was the next big thing.
Marty S………Thank you for the info……..I have seen all of these…also there is Rewind and Time tunnel (pilot, never aired) and a couple others, also Time Machine where Jack the ripper is chased through time……I love these movies…..MERRY CHRISTMAS !!