So, did Captain Cold and Heat Wave know that Oliver Queen is Green Arrow before everyone else started blurting it out?
ha ha, I had the same thought.
So, did Captain Cold and Heat Wave know that Oliver Queen is Green Arrow before everyone else started blurting it out?
No. It is now just a potential future, and one that Rip Hunter is trying to make sure never comes about. In fact, I don't know why Rip is going on about there being differences between actual futures and potential futures; they're all potential futures as long as they keep fiddling with the past. In fact, everything since his attempt to kill Savage in Ancient Egypt is just a potential future.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.
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.
I'm not willfully ignoring it. I've already addressed it.
It ties into a rule that isn't a rule at all. Rip makes claims and the show immediately contradicts him. Stein interfered with his own past. So did Snart. Nothing prevented them from doing so, it was just kind of risky (and yet, still didn't actually result in any harm).
So there is absolutely no reason why they can't go back and try to kill Savage in exactly the same time and place a hundred times over, if they think it's worth the risk (which they apparently do, since they're already repeatedly screwing up the timeline to get to him).
See above. They're not being consistent at all.
That's a different matter altogether. We're talking about time travelers trying to undo their own actions as time travelers -- for instance, going back to prevent Ray from losing the piece of his Atom suit in the first place. Once a time traveler initiates a change, then they can't go back and stop themselves from initiating it; they have to move forward in time from there and find some other way to fix it.
And you're again ignoring the distinction between the original timeline and a timeline created by time-travel intervention. The former can be changed; the latter can only be made worse if the time travelers try to double back on themselves. Because, as the show has established, time travel creates problems that the normal flow of history does not have, so trying to fix a time-travel mishap with more time travel is probably just going to compound the damage. This is something the franchise has been consistently clear on ever since the Flash first went back in time: that time travel is disruptive and has dangerous consequences.
I think they're being entirely consistent. You just seem to be missing some details.
So that concludes "Diggle week".
They should definitely make this a yearly thing.
By the way, why didn't Dig Jr. mention his older sister who was named after the time traveling blonde chick who saved his life? Actually now that I think about it it would have been way cooler if Sara Diggle was the new Green Arrrow...
Yeah, definitely a great week for DiggleSo that concludes "Diggle week".
They should definitely make this a yearly thing.
By the way, why didn't Dig Jr. mention his older sister who was named after the time traveling blonde chick who saved his life? Actually now that I think about it it would have been way cooler if Sara Diggle was the new Green Arrrow...
I get that intellectually, but he could have explained it better and a bit more sensitively. I don't remember his exact phrasing...something along the lines of "it's not real" or "it doesn't matter"...but it sounded far too cavalier, and even amateurish for someone who's supposed to be an expert in the field of time travel. It ceased to be a hypothetical situation when the Waverider was stranded in that timeline. What's more, they'd already played a role in influencing events in that future, so they bore some responsibility for that, in the event that they might not be able to prevent it from happening.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.
This.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?
I get that intellectually, but he could have explained it better and a bit more sensitively. I don't remember his exact phrasing...something along the lines of "it's not real" or "it doesn't matter"...but it sounded far too cavalier, and even amateurish for someone who's supposed to be an expert in the field of time travel. It ceased to be a hypothetical situation when the Waverider was stranded in that timeline.
What's more, they'd already played a role in influencing events in that future, so they bore some responsibility for that, in the event that they might not be able to prevent it from happening.
My bottom line from this is that I realize that Rip isn't a very likable character...and not in a "love to hate" or "entertaining asshole" sort of way...he's just a bore. As with Savage, they could have used somebody with a little more gravitas in that role.
Whatever he's supposed to be, he doesn't have the charisma to make it interesting, for my money.
Good thought. You're probably right, since the show has established how dangerous it can be for the team to disrupt their own past. If Stein's wedding ring disappeared when he stopped his younger self from meeting his wife-to-be, then presumably Kendra preventing her own birth by killing Savage would create that "temporal vortex" catastrophe that Rip warned about, due to the irresolvable paradox.
The Waverider must protect flesh and memories, even if it won't protect wedding rings.
Succeed or fail, with a changed timeline, there will be doppelgangers of the team from 2016 who someone has to kill or permanently place in a detention facility so that our legends can take over someone elses lives in a delicately different time line from which they left.
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