So, did Captain Cold and Heat Wave know that Oliver Queen is Green Arrow before everyone else started blurting it out?
Spoilers DC's Legends of Tomorrow - Season 1
- Thread starter Commander Richard
- Start date
This one was okay, though packing the whole alternate dystopian future into one episode alongside a frivolous subplot about romantic aspirations among the crew means that it was all rather cursory. The reveal of Connor Hawke's real identity was a nice surprise, though. And I'm glad Sara confronted Rip about how his rhetoric about "It's just a possible future, don't worry about it" clashed with his mission to fix his own future. (And if the future has so many possible branches to begin with, why are the Time Masters so concerned with preserving a single version of history?)
The main thing I wondered is how the shooting schedule worked out between this and Arrow. They had to redress the Arrowcave set pretty heavily for this, it seems. I guess the LoT crew was shooting on that set on the days that the Arrow crew was shooting elsewhere.
I checked, and Grant Wilson is a pre-existing comics character, aka Ravager. In fact, it seems he debuted one issue before Slade Wilson, as part of the same storyline in New Teen Titans #1-2 in 1980.
The main thing I wondered is how the shooting schedule worked out between this and Arrow. They had to redress the Arrowcave set pretty heavily for this, it seems. I guess the LoT crew was shooting on that set on the days that the Arrow crew was shooting elsewhere.
I checked, and Grant Wilson is a pre-existing comics character, aka Ravager. In fact, it seems he debuted one issue before Slade Wilson, as part of the same storyline in New Teen Titans #1-2 in 1980.
I think that it's pretty odd for somebody who specializes in time travel to consider alternate timelines as "not real". Though maybe that's how they condition themselves to manipulating timelines in the first place.
Well, there's a difference between an alternate timeline and a potential future. "Alternate timeline" implies a degree of permanence. This is just the future that might happen if the "Legends" don't return home, an accident that resulted from them being flung into the future.
Any timeline is real while it exists. It's one thing to view a hypothetical potential future on the Waverider...but they were interacting with people who had lived 30 years of actual history since 2016. Those people didn't just pop into existence when the "Legends" showed up, not from their own perspective.
It's not about "real," it's about mutability vs. permanence. This was like those simulations that Rip has Gideon display to show how horrible the present will be thanks to the team's mistakes in the past. It doesn't become "locked in" as the definitive timeline until the causal factors reach a point of no return. (Which probably answers my question earlier about the Time Masters' priorities.)
It doesn't become "locked in" from the perspective of the travelers who are hopping around between past and future causing alterations in the timeline. It's perfectly real to the people who lived those 30 years.
^But your comment was about why Rip would perceive this future the way he did, not about how its residents would perceive it. So I was addressing the question of how Rip would see it.
And I was drawing attention to how you'd think that a "Time Master" would be sensitive to these alternate histories and the people living in them, but in fact Rip is highly insensitive to them. This timeline and the people in it were no more real to him than they are to you.
Am I supposed to not like Rip? Because they've done nothing to make him likable. Captain Cold and Heat Wave are more likable than Rip.
Am I supposed to not like Rip? Because they've done nothing to make him likable. Captain Cold and Heat Wave are more likable than Rip.
Another good episode. I really dug the dystopian future. I know these have become a cliche, but I like that there are still heroes fighting against such insurmountable odds. I also liked how they wove in Grant Wilson. Hopefully his dad makes another appearance in the future of the Arrowverse.
Because he travels in time routinely enough that he's seen countless of these potential time branches and is keenly aware that each one is just one option out of numerous potential paths that stretch forward from a decision point. So he has good reason to see it as less definitive as it would appear to a less experienced time traveler who only sees that one branch. If nothing else, the human mind and heart can only withstand so much caring. There are people suffering and dying around us every day, but as nice as it would be in principle to care about all of them, we'd go crazy with grief if we tried to get emotionally invested in every single tragedy. So we have to focus on those that are most relevant to us or that we have the most ability to intervene in. Someone who constantly perceives countless alternative possible time paths can't care about every one of them equally -- since, after all, they're in competition with each other and the survival of one means the cessation of all the others. On the whole, it makes more sense to focus his concern on the resolved timeline rather than the multitude of competing potential futures.
There is only one future.
(According to these rules.)
If they eat food from a future timeline that collapses and all physical evidence of that timeline disappears, including the food you ate from it... The food in your belly that you just ate vanishes, and the new flesh, blood, bone and stuff you built from that food, will also disappear, ripping your torso into the texture of Swiss cheese.
(According to these rules.)
If they eat food from a future timeline that collapses and all physical evidence of that timeline disappears, including the food you ate from it... The food in your belly that you just ate vanishes, and the new flesh, blood, bone and stuff you built from that food, will also disappear, ripping your torso into the texture of Swiss cheese.
Wouldn't Rip Hunter be from a "potential future" from the perspective of all the characters from 2016? What if in preventing Savage to take over the world the specific lineage that lead to Rip Hunter never happens?
'Facts' that were never referenced in any way on the show aren't facts. And the claim that the characters must've had a reason for doing what they did because they did it would basically render all discussion and criticism moot automatically.
Is it possible to imagine some undisclosed reason why they might do what they did and have that reason make sense? Sure it is. It doesn't make the writing any less weak, though.
That could be an interesting route to go down, except for the fact that an expert like Rip really should've thought of that before trying to kill Savage in the 70s...
My main question in regards to this conundrum is - what does it even mean to have 'fluid futures' and a 'solid past'? We already know for a fact that the past can be changed, just as well as the future, which logically means it's all one and the same thing and all equally fluid. The 2016 timeline that our heroes came from is no different from any other timeline, except that it's the one our heroes came from.
As to the latest episode - it was decent on the whole. Some good character stuff. I'm glad to see Rip called out on his repeated timeline hypocrisy. Hopefully that thread will actually go somewhere over the season and give us a better reason why all this time travel stuff is being done in such seemingly illogical ways.
I also liked that Mick decided he'd found his perfect home. I'm not sure exactly where they're coming from making Snart so insistent on being a hero - I mean, the arrogance of wanting to be a legend makes sense, but it feels like they're going for more than that. I'm curious to see where that goes from here.
I only really had one problem with the episode: that Sarah wants to blame herself for not being there to save people makes sense. Emotions are unreasonable and she's rather morose to begin with. But for Rip and Oliver to agree with her? That makes no sense. We're talking about a city defended by an entire team of heroes, who also have connections to Argus and the Flash. If this army was big enough to win anyway, why would one assassin and a tech happy goofball with a terrible fighting record possibly have turned the tide?
Also, Stein really is an arrogant manipulator. Although, in this particular instance it was actually pretty funny.
While we are on that. What happens to the sparepart from the potential future the instant they change it?
Will they vanish, too, or will they transmute somehow into versions that match an alternate version of this episode where they just stroll into a Smoak Technologies office greeted by an elderly Felicity who just habded over the stuff to Ray instead?
Will they vanish, too, or will they transmute somehow into versions that match an alternate version of this episode where they just stroll into a Smoak Technologies office greeted by an elderly Felicity who just habded over the stuff to Ray instead?
1. Rip's dad was born in the 25th century.
2. The Time Masters base of operations is hovering over the last nanosecond of the universe. It's called Vanishing Point, which is like how everything you eat winds up in the toilet, every potential and actual timeline ends up as heat death and nothing. Therefore by the rules we have, that superficially similar is good enough. It doesn't matter what happens to time, or which potential time line becomes dominant if 80 billion years later they all lead to the same vanishing point and therefore the Time Masters, so long as each Time Master perceives Vanishing Point to be their homeville because they've been fiddled with by psychic surgeons for that to be a truth, even if their original histories where they were born are steam rolled through, they should be good to go.
No -- presumably Hunter's future is the one that happened normally, without temporal intervention -- which is why the Time Masters are forbidding his attempt to change it via time travel. This one, like the apocalyptic simulations of alternate 2016 that Gideon has shown, is a timeline that might happen as a result of a change caused by time travel -- specifically, as a result of Ray and Sara not being in Star City when the Uprising happens because they were jumped forward 30 years. (Much like the timeline from the '90 Flash series's "Fast Forward" episode, where Barry was flung a decade into the future and it was an apocalyptic hell because the Flash hadn't been there -- but when he went back to his own time, it undid that future.) And as the show has already established, those changed timelines resulting from time travel are only potential, possible futures as long as the time travelers still have an option to prevent the causal factors from becoming irreversible. For instance, Savage getting Ray's ATOM tech created a potential apocalyptic 2016, but stopping Savage from reverse-engineering the tech erased that potential path. Vostok capturing Stein created another potential apocalypse with an army of evil Firestorms, but the team rescuing Stein and destroying Vostok's research erased that potential path. And so on.
So according to the show's time-travel rules, there's a functional difference between a potential future and a "fixed" future. A fixed timeline is either the original, unaltered history or an altered history that's passed the point of no return. A potential future is just one possible outcome of a time-travel event that's still in flux and still has multiple possible outcomes. Like Rip said, "Time is like cement. It takes a while to set."
I'm referring to the fact we do have -- namely, that the team did not take a temporarily dead Savage back with them to the Waverider. That fact is not in dispute, because it's the whole thing we're arguing over. Given that they did not do that, it follows that there's probably a reason why they didn't do it. Saying "They faced no resistance and could've gotten him back easily but were just too stupid or lazy to do it" is just as much a conjecture beyond the facts as saying "They faced a fair amount of resistance and had no choice but to abandon him even though they would've brought him if they could." And I submit that the latter interpretation is more plausible because it does not require the characters to be incompetent.
And I don't agree. In both cases, it was clearly established that they were surrounded by hostile forces. In that situation, it logically follows that escape would be difficult. If their escape appeared easy to you, I'd call that a shorcoming of the direction or editing rather than the writing.
See above. The show has already repeatedly explained the difference between a time-travel-created change that is still reversible and one that has become irreversible -- wet cement vs. set cement. Fluids can become solid.
We've seen that Snart is loyal to his teammates and his friends. He said after Carter died that nobody kills a member of his crew and gets away with it. And now he's begun to bond with some of the others, particularly Sara.
I suspect that, in his own way, Snart is motivated by a sense of justice. It's a rather self-centered definition of justice, that the world wronged him and his sister and he's therefore entitled to do what it takes to redress that; but he doesn't share Mick's love of chaos for its own sake. He has a sense of doing what he thinks is right, even if his definitions of right have nothing to do with laws or conventional ethics.
You never know who'll make the critical difference. In Ray's case, it could've been his technology (which is far beyond anything in Team Arrow's repertoire) or his ability to inspire and rally the populace. In Sara's case, it could've been her ability to infiltrate Wilson's forces, or her past connections allowing her to bring new allies into the fight; or maybe she was able to prevent Chief Lance's murder, so that the power of the police force and the will of the people weren't broken. Anyone can turn the tide. (I've recently been reading the early Fantastic Four issues, before Sue Storm got her force-field power, and though she often seemed like the most helpless and passive member of the team, she often made the key difference by invisibly grabbing the villain's gun at a critical moment, say.)
Well, the facts that we were shown were that they made no attempt whatsoever to bring him, and, as far as we know, never even considered doing so. It's not just a case of we see Savage die and then the crew is back on the ship. We see Rip kill Savage and then automatically walk away. It's also not the first time they've shown the characters fail to consider or attempt what should be seemingly obvious solutions, so I'm going to stick with my original opinion that the writing is simply weak to start with. But I suspect we'll just have to agree to disagree on this point.
Not quite. The show has repeatedly claimed that there is a difference, but has never actually described what it supposedly is. The fact that the past can be changed at all means that there is no 'resolved' or 'solid' timeline. Everything is fluid. The wet cement argument really only seems to apply (from a practical perspective) to the effects that changes to the past have on time travelers - it's a narrative excuse for giving the characters time to fix their mistakes, rather than instantly disappearing when they accidentally interfere with their own conception. But for the timeline itself, it doesn't matter whether changes take hold all throughout time instantly or follow some sort of wave effect - either way the entire timeline gets changed.
The entire concept of a timeline having passed the 'point of no return' is completely meaningless. If Valentina's research led to an army of Soviet Firestorms, then someone could simply go back in time and kill Valentina. Or kill Marx and Lenin, for that matter. Which is not to say that all possibilities would be smart things to do, but simply that there is quite clearly no such thing as a fixed timeline.
Maybe, and that's all well and good for a grand inspiring speech when someone's confidence is shaky, but the fact of the matter is that nobody can know for sure that them being there would've made any difference at all (since the only way to actually know that is for them to actually be there). And yet, two different people are standing there basically telling her this whole future really is her fault (even though Rip is also simultaneously trying to claim that it isn't her fault, because it doesn't exist yet - which is quite possibly the most bizarre argument he could've picked. Considering his entire purpose is to try to get her to forget this future and stay on mission, he should've been trying to convince her that her presence wouldn't have changed anything anyway).
At the end of the day, the fact is that two people are not the be all and end all of the universe. Maybe they could've made the difference, but there's just as high a probability that they couldn't have. Team Arrow seems to have plenty of other connections which should've been just as powerful, or really, moreso than these two characters, and yet that apparently didn't save the day, either.
Which makes sense if you consider that they were surrounded by hostile forces and knew they would be slowed down if they tried dragging Savage's dead weight with them. You seem be going out of your way to willfully ignore that integral part of the scenario just so you have an excuse to claim the situation makes less sense than it actually does. It sounds like you just want an excuse to be negative. I'm trying to be constructive and find an actual solution.
I think the difference has been made extremely clear. Time travelers whose actions create potential changes to the timeline have a limited window to reverse those changes -- to correct their mistakes before they become irreversible. Savage getting his hands on Atom or Firestorm tech creates a potential catastrophic future, but it takes time for him to perfect actual weapons based on that tech, so if you can stop him from creating those weapons before he actually succeeds, then you avert the potential timeline. It ties into the other established rule that the time travelers can't just go back into their own past actions and undo them without creating worse consequences. They only get one shot at any given temporal intervention in any given place and time. So if they fail to prevent the negative consequences of their actions, then they will never get another chance to restore the original timeline.
Well, this is a narrative. It has to have a consistent set of rules to play by regardless of whether they make real-world sense or not. As long as it defines its rules and sticks with them consistently, that's okay. And so far, that's what it's been doing (although there are still issues with regard to reconciling its ban on altering your own past with the way The Flash has treated time travel).
That's assuming a time-travel-created timeline is no different from the naturally occurring one. The point that's been made both here and in The Flash is that time travel has unintended consequences, that it tends to mess things up in unpredictable ways. I would imagine that the goal of the Time Masters is much the same as that of the Department of Temporal Investigations and the other temporal agencies in my Star Trek: DTI novels: to try to minimize timeline alterations as much as possible, to preserve something as close as feasible to the "default" history. That's why Hunter's mission to deliberately change history is so transgressive. Changing history is dangerous and disruptive in ways that just allowing history to play out its natural course is not. So, yes, the timeline is mutable, but there's still a functional difference between a "natural" timeline and an artificially altered one. Attempts at artificial alteration can create ripples that propagate in unpredictable and potentially dangerous ways.
Again, this is a narrative. In fiction, it's quite routine for one or two people's actions and decisions to determine the fate of the world. And it's quite routine for improbable outcomes to occur. It makes little sense to apply probabilistic arguments to narrative choices, since fiction thrives on scenarios where the heroes prevail against impossible odds.