Spoilers DC's Legends of Tomorrow - Season 2

[Christopher]

It is? My memory of the Atom's origin is he finds a metor and make a lens from it that enables him to shrink things.

My point is, the only way the meteorite wouldn't sink to the center of the Earth like a cannonball through quicksand was if it was already an alloy/admixture with only a small percentage of degenerate matter in its makeup. And even that's highly unlikely. Basically, as with most things in DC or Marvel, this is a fantasy treatment of a scientific concept.

Although I remember now that they didn't call it "dwarf star alloy" in the comics -- I got that from Doctor Who. I always get that mixed up with the Atom's dwarf star matter or whatever they called it.

 

[Jax]

Something came to my mind during the bar fight...

The Legends have killed quite a few people along their way who probably were meant to live a lot longer thus wiping out any future family members in the process from ever existing. Be nice if the show ever brought up the fact of maybe we should do out best to hurt but not kill people while doing our little time travel adventures.

 

[Christopher]

The Legends have killed quite a few people along their way who probably were meant to live a lot longer thus wiping out any future family members in the process from ever existing. Be nice if the show ever brought up the fact of maybe we should do out best to hurt but not kill people while doing our little time travel adventures.

I'm of the school of thought that superheroes shouldn't kill as a general rule, but movies and TV rarely go along with that -- except in a few cases like Daredevil mostly, Ant-Man more or less (there may have been some unconscious goons left in the building when it was destroyed, but it's hard to tell), Luke Cage, and Supergirl until this week. You're right that the Legends should have an additional incentive to avoid it, but this show has never bothered to make sense in any other way.

Maybe it's the "City on the Edge of Forever" idea -- Edith Keeler being saved changes the whole future, but some random bum disintegrating himself has no impact. (An idea that was made more overt in the original script.) Maybe the premise is that there are only some people that have large-scale, lasting effects on history, and in other cases the changes are damped out by other historical factors and thus have no long-term impact. Poul Anderson used that premise in his Time Patrol prose series starting in the '50s (and extending into the '90s) -- and, as I've been trying to explain in the Timeless thread, there's actually some recent scientific/mathematical analysis supporting that idea. There's also the related idea in modern Doctor Who of "fixed points in time" -- which is different in that it refers to key events that can't be changed no matter what, but similar in that it implies that most other historical events can be altered without having a critical impact on later history. It's a handy conceit for a lot of time travel stories to use, because it frees the writers from having to be too careful about small-scale changes.

 

[sojourner]

Putting a log, or a cow on the tracks would have stopped the train.

You know what that pointy triangle part is on the front of old steam locomotives? A cow catcher. So, no.

 

[Nerys Myk]

A guy throwing out his hands and bracing his legs to stop a train is classic superheroics 101.

 

[Christopher]

A guy throwing out his hands and bracing his legs to stop a train is classic superheroics 101.

I was wondering, why not just climb on board and force the engineer to stop the train?

 

[dahj]

It was a self-driving google train.

 

[Guy Gardener]

You know what that pointy triangle part is on the front of old steam locomotives? A cow catcher. So, no.

I called it a scoop, but yes I did mentioned that.

 

[sojourner]

Nope, you didn't.

Did they explain why he did it like that, as if it looked like he was actually wrestling a locomotive, which shouldn't have worked?

It's not his strength that stopped the train, it's the engineer that lost a game of chicken who put on the breaks, and turned the engine off as soon as that lunatic stood in front of the train.

Boarding the train, and threatening the engineer would have worked better, and they could have mentioned Back to the Future again.

If they were not worried about the Dwarfstar allow blowing up, punching the tracks ahead of the train would have caused a serious derailment, and history is saved, except for all the people that would have died on that train crash.

Putting a log, or a cow on the tracks would have stopped the train.

Steel should have been ripped in half.

It would have been funny.

Too pretty to live.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Must have been edited out in an earlier draft for being extraneous.

 

[dahj]

^^
Got scooped out?

 

[Guy Gardener]

I was thinking of a dead cow any way.

Walk it up to the tracks, shoot it through the face, so that it's a lot harder to push off the tracks than a live cow because of the lower centre of gravity, and the head on strike would drive the cow under the wheels, which still wouldn't hurt the train, but no one wants to clean up a mess like that if they can avoid it.

 

[Beagleman]

You don't know if that cow is important for history.

 

[sojourner]

It could be a sacred cow.

 

[Greg Cox]

"Ohmigod, that was Mrs. O'Leary's cow! The one that started the Great Chicago Fire!"

 

[Nerys Myk]

I was wondering, why not just climb on board and force the engineer to stop the train?

This is why you failed Superheroics 101.

 

[Christopher]

This is why you failed Superheroics 101.

If it helps, they could subsequently disembark from the train using a parachute arrow...

 

[E-DUB]

If you could trace the ancestry of all existing sheep back to a single "eve sheep" and went back in time and killed it before it could reproduce, would that mean that you would come back to a world with NO sheep. Of course not, because sheep serve a purpose to humans. Meat, wool, and, in certain rural areas, a few other purposes we won't talk about. Another sheep would have stood-in for "eve sheep".

People are different. Go back to WW2 and arrange the death of an navy pilot named George H. W. Bush and you take two presidencies off the table. Who knows who would have served in their stead and what policies would have been implement and with what results.

 

[Beagleman]

If you go back in time and pet a sheep you will come back to a 2016 vastly different from your own, as with any time travel, a molecule shoved left other than right would change everyhing. But since this is fun and BS... let's have fun.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

parachute arrow...

That would be a paraglider arrow.

Contrast of silly and real still goes strong. And I'm still liking it.