One thing about this show I'm getting tired of is how it insists on repeatedly devoting time to lectures on its rules of time travel as if they were something novel and profound, when they're the exact same time-travel cliches about changing history that everyone already knows. (They're entirely wrong from a physical and logical standpoint, but they're the standard conceits of time-travel fiction.) So not only is it tedious to have to sit through the explanations as though there's something novel about them, but it's implausible that the characters would need those explanations. I mean, I can buy that if Ramse and Cole grew up in a world without Shakespeare and Beethoven, they probably never saw Back to the Future either, but Cassandra certainly shouldn't have needed Cole's lectures in the pilot episode, or at least shouldn't have reacted as though she'd never encountered the concept before.
Then again, maybe the events of "The Night Room" justify those lectures, since it's suggesting that maybe the characters were wrong about how time travel works. From the end, it looked like Cole did change things up in 2043, but he wasn't simply erased like they thought he'd be. So maybe it needed to be established what the characters believed about time travel physics in order to set up the surprise when it plays out differently.
Which would be a relief, really, since there's a basic contradiction in the "rules" they've spelled out so far. We've seen Jones tell Cole that he couldn't risk meeting Railly in the past and changing their history so that she wouldn't be there at the hotel to save him, and other instances of "You must preserve event A so it leads to event B." But at the same time, they're working toward the goal of preventing the plague so that Cole never goes back in time in the first place. Do you see the contradiction? If he never goes back, what's to prevent the plague?
Fortunately, the final scene here suggests something that's also part of the routine, cliched rules of fictional time travel, but that makes sense in context: that the time traveler's own actions and existence are conserved. That a time traveler is "outside" of time and is thus insulated from the changes that affect everyone else, and so whatever actions a time traveler takes to create a new timeline are preserved rather than creating an irresolvable paradox.
It's still confusing, though, since for the most part, this show has followed a self-consistent loop model. They keep claiming that time can be rewritten, but up until the final scene of this episode, the only actual change in time that we've seen was the scratch appearing on Cassie's watch crystal. And what do you want to bet that the remains containing the source virus are the remains of one of Jones's prototype time travelers? After all, they showed that mummy under a voiceover of Jones saying that some of her test subjects were lost in time. Which suggests it's another self-fulfilling loop: She caused the plague by trying to prevent it. I was starting to wonder if it would turn out that nothing major could really be changed after all, but the final scene suggests otherwise. (Unless he's just jumped back further forward than he was supposed to.)
Then again, maybe the events of "The Night Room" justify those lectures, since it's suggesting that maybe the characters were wrong about how time travel works. From the end, it looked like Cole did change things up in 2043, but he wasn't simply erased like they thought he'd be. So maybe it needed to be established what the characters believed about time travel physics in order to set up the surprise when it plays out differently.
Which would be a relief, really, since there's a basic contradiction in the "rules" they've spelled out so far. We've seen Jones tell Cole that he couldn't risk meeting Railly in the past and changing their history so that she wouldn't be there at the hotel to save him, and other instances of "You must preserve event A so it leads to event B." But at the same time, they're working toward the goal of preventing the plague so that Cole never goes back in time in the first place. Do you see the contradiction? If he never goes back, what's to prevent the plague?
Fortunately, the final scene here suggests something that's also part of the routine, cliched rules of fictional time travel, but that makes sense in context: that the time traveler's own actions and existence are conserved. That a time traveler is "outside" of time and is thus insulated from the changes that affect everyone else, and so whatever actions a time traveler takes to create a new timeline are preserved rather than creating an irresolvable paradox.
It's still confusing, though, since for the most part, this show has followed a self-consistent loop model. They keep claiming that time can be rewritten, but up until the final scene of this episode, the only actual change in time that we've seen was the scratch appearing on Cassie's watch crystal. And what do you want to bet that the remains containing the source virus are the remains of one of Jones's prototype time travelers? After all, they showed that mummy under a voiceover of Jones saying that some of her test subjects were lost in time. Which suggests it's another self-fulfilling loop: She caused the plague by trying to prevent it. I was starting to wonder if it would turn out that nothing major could really be changed after all, but the final scene suggests otherwise. (Unless he's just jumped back further forward than he was supposed to.)
