Spoilers Timeless: Season 1 on NBC

[Christopher]

Her knowledge is more and more useless every time they travel, as things should keep changing. They can only depend on her if they go further back in time than they've been before. if they're visiting the 1960s after screwing around with the 1790s, she's not much help anymore.

As I've pointed out several times before, it's actually quite common in time-travel shows (e.g. this, Legends of Tomorrow, 12 Monkeys, Travelers, Continuum, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, etc.) to posit that history resists major change, that the cumulative pressure of historical events and processes tends to produce the same overall outcomes even when small-scale or local events are changed. After all, you can't sustain an ongoing series if the heroes -- or villains -- can too easily achieve their goal. So change has to be possible, but difficult. That's typical of the genre, and it's clearly the case on this show.

Granted, though, the more they change things, the more details Lucy should be getting wrong, even if the broad strokes remain consistent. There was an episode of Travelers that dealt with this -- one member of the team of time travelers from the future was the "historian," charged with remembering the events of the era and doing things such as raising money for the team's activities by betting on horse races with foreknowledge of the outcome, but after they made a significant change to history, a couple of the races he bet on had different outcomes than history recorded. So there were slight changes at first, and they'll probably continue to amplify if the show continues. It would make sense if Timeless followed suit, especially considering how much more frequently the past actually gets changed here.

 

[Guy Gardener]

They reset any changes they have made to time everytime they travel back a little further than any other time they have travelled, which erases their previous missions they have made up stream of when they are in history.

Earlier parallel versions of them selves then do-over versions of their earlier adventure, forward of where they are, who are doing exactly the same thing to all the other versions of them upstream from them.

 

[sojourner]

They reset any changes they have made to time everytime they travel back a little further than any other time they have travelled, which erases their previous missions they have made up stream of when they are in history.

Earlier parallel versions of them selves then do-over versions of their earlier adventure, forward of where they are, who are doing exactly the same thing to all the other versions of them upstream from them.

This actually makes perfect logical sense to me. It's finally happened. I've read too many of your posts.

 

[JD]

The historical stuff in this one was interesting, I'd never heard of Bass Reeves before, so I did enjoy getting to find out about a historical figure I've never heard of.
It was cool getting a story about Jiya.
Bringing in the earlier timeship pilot was a fun twist, and I'm always happy whenever Annie Wersching pops on a show I watch.
I just saw on WIkipedia that the show was sued by the company behind a Spanish series called The Ministry of Time. I can see a few similarities, both follow a three person team made up of two men and a woman who travel back to significant periods in their country's history, and one of the men had a wife who died. But they are pretty different too, in TMoT the team works for a government group specific set up to monitor "doors of time" to make sure no one is changing time, two members of the team are from the past, and there doesn't appear to be a Rittenhouse style arc.
EDIT: I just remembered something I wanted to ask about. How hard would it be for someone from the 1800s to use a modern rifle like James had at the end? It seems like most of the guns you see in that era were revolvers, so would he have even been to know how the change a clip?

 

[Guy Gardener]

There's a Spanish show similar to Reign called Isabella (both about historically real old timey young Queens, probably very different shows) that crosses over into Ministry of Time a couple years after Isabella finished it's 3 year run.

That is cool.

I would not mind seeing that on Timeless.

Possible crossover nominations. Criteria = Series made by NBC set in the past, after 2000 AD.
American Dreams
Aquarius
[URL='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusoe_%28TV_series%29']Crusoe [/URL]
[URL='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Playboy_Club']The Playboy Club[/URL]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquarius_(U.S._TV_series)
Aquarius is the winner obviously. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquarius_(U.S._TV_series)

 

[Mr Awe]

I figure Lucy felt guilty about letting her sister be erased by a change in history, so she felt the need to keep history on track as much as possible, no matter what. Which is the sort of thing that could put her at odds with Wyatt, given his intention to alter history.

I'd agree. It's a combination of feeling guilty about her sister plus her general desire to keep history in tact that worked together to drive her in this direction. Interestingly, for this specific case,. both Lucy and Wyatt agreed to double-cross Bass.

This might go to the point that Wyatt was mentioning near the end. In Westerns, characters are either a white hat or a black hat. Good or bad with no shades of grey. The real world isn't like that. In this case, you'd generally say that killing a wounded, unarmed, surrendering criminal would be wrong. However, maybe, just maybe, this is a grey area where you can make the case that shooting Jesse is the safest for history.

But yeah, they either need to switch her up constantly, or drop some lines about her buffing up on the New history between each trip. Or have an encyclopedia they can download to a laptop in the lifeboat after each trip, so she's always got the latest and greatest. Probably also useful to save all the iterations so they can compare them all some day at the end of the journey; see how bad they screwed up the timeline(s).

Given the reality of this being a TV series, they won't have a new history every week. And, that would actually present some problems in-universe in terms of having access to historians that are up to speed on the project. However, I like the idea of brushing up on the latest version of history. Hopefully, they address this at some point.

As I've pointed out several times before, it's actually quite common in time-travel shows (e.g. this, Legends of Tomorrow, 12 Monkeys, Travelers, Continuum, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, etc.) to posit that history resists major change, that the cumulative pressure of historical events and processes tends to produce the same overall outcomes even when small-scale or local events are changed. After all, you can't sustain an ongoing series if the heroes -- or villains -- can too easily achieve their goal. So change has to be possible, but difficult. That's typical of the genre, and it's clearly the case on this show.

I think we have collectively acknowledged this necessity. However, sometimes it seems so artificial that it sometimes takes me right out of the story. The real world with all of its interactions is the ultimate chaotic, nonlinear system. Think of the butterfly effect. Small changes in the past can have huge, unpredictable ramifications in the present.

Who thinks that Wyatt can save his wife? I've been pondering this and think there's a surprise in the works.

I think there are three general scenarios. There's obviously the possibility that he can't save his wife and things stay the same. But, I think there are two general scenarios where he does safe his wife. He saves her and they are still a couple in the present or he saves her and they are not a couple in the present.

Before, I was thinking that the show would make it so he didn't save her to avoid the paradoxes that they don't want to address. However, if Wyatt saves his wife but then they get divorced around the time that she would've been murdered, everything else plays out mostly the same. Wyatt's ex-wife is alive and he lives out his life mostly the same as he did when she died. Perhaps an ongoing storyline will be his attempts to win her back? Remember that part of the reason she was murdered was because they were having an argument and she got out of the car. Perhaps whatever they were arguing about eventually led to the divorce.

I almost suspect that the outcome will be some sort of twist like this. I guess we'll see next week!

Mr Awe

 

[Christopher]

This might go to the point that Wyatt was mentioning near the end. In Westerns, characters are either a white hat or a black hat. Good or bad with no shades of grey. The real world isn't like that.

I don't think Wyatt was arguing in favor of that point, though. He was saying he'd believed the real world was grayer, but then he met Bass, who really was as good in real life as the heroes in Western movies. So I think he was reconsidering his cynical, ends-justify-the-means thinking. He was asking Rufus to help him find a different way than just murdering his wife's murderer, a more ethical way.

I think we have collectively acknowledged this necessity. However, sometimes it seems so artificial that it sometimes takes me right out of the story. The real world with all of its interactions is the ultimate chaotic, nonlinear system. Think of the butterfly effect. Small changes in the past can have huge, unpredictable ramifications in the present.

As I've pointed out several times in this thread, it's a misreading of the "butterfly effect" premise to think it means that small changes are guaranteed to cause massive consequences. On the contrary, it means that it's impossible to predict definitively whether the consequences will be large or small, because there are too many independent variables to allow taking every last one into account. It's not literally that one butterfly will cause a hurricane, it's that the butterfly is one of the millions of contributing factors that chaotically interact to influence the total state of the atmosphere, and the fact that it's impossible to account for every variable or model their interactions linearly means that it's impossible to make a deterministic prediction of what will result from a given action. Some of those variables' influences reinforce each other while others cancel each other out. Changing just one could have a large-scale, amplifying effect if it's the right change at the right time, or it could be damped out by other factors and have only a short-term, local influence. More probably, you'd need to kill multiple different butterflies in different places and times in order to prevent the hurricane they contributed to, or to create one that hadn't existed before. But the very impossibility of tracking every butterfly and taking every flap into account means that it's impossible to predict with certainty whether or not your intervention will have the desired effect. That's why it's called chaos theory -- because the outcomes are not deterministic or predictable.

And of course, chaos theory also says that processes whose exact outcome cannot be predicted will still tend toward certain attractors -- certain average configurations that the actual results will tend to approach, even if you can't predict exactly how much. For instance, a planet orbiting a binary star pair could follow a figure-8 path around both, but the exact size of the loops would vary from orbit to orbit in a way that would be impossible to predict. You know the general shape, and you can define the range of orbital paths that the planet will be confined to, but you can't predict exactly which path it will follow on each individual orbit. So applying chaos theory to time travel, it could be that the established course of history represents an attractor -- events tend toward that shape, and altering the past can affect the details of how history unfolds, but not sufficiently to shift it onto an entirely different path. The attractor will still tend to draw it back onto a similar overall course.

 

[Guy Gardener]

The only reason Bazz didn't shoot Lucy for shooting Jessie like he was going to shoot Wyatt for shooting Jessie, is Sexism. From a 19th century perspective, a big male brain wouldn't get pulled along by emotion and feel compelled to be stupid, while a little female brain couldn't help itself.

Tonto had just died in her arms.

Maybe it was just impotence?

She couldn't avenge or save her sister, but she could avenge Grant.

 

[Scout101]

Feel like the end of this one just shot another hole in the "lifeboat can't time travel" theory Christopher keeps insisting on. Wyatt was asking Rufus to help him steal the time machine and go back to make a change that will save his wife. Wording did NOT imply in any way that it would be waiting for a convenient jump and go rogue then, implied they were going to take the time machine on a side trip.

I guess you COULD try and read this as asking him to try and steal Flynn's time machine at some point, but seems like beyond a stretch in the dialog. Mission is to capture or kill Flynn, can go back and save his wife at any point after that. hell, stealing his time machine is almost as good as killing him, depending on where he's left.

Any other way to read that scene? (that won't tear a muscle stretching? )

 

[marillion]

The only reason Bazz didn't shoot Lucy for shooting Jessie like he was going to shoot Wyatt for shooting Jessie, is Sexism. From a 19th century perspective, a big male brain wouldn't get pulled along by emotion and feel compelled to be stupid, while a little female brain couldn't help itself.

Tonto had just died in her arms.

Maybe it was just impotence?

She couldn't avenge or save her sister, but she could avenge Grant.

Technically speaking, once Jessie died, there was no point to shoot her. Jessie was wanted dead OR alive.. By killing him, legally, she did nothing wrong. If he shot her, he would be a murderer. While he could certainly hold a gun on Wyatt to keep him from shooting, I don't believe he would have shot him in the end.

 

[E-DUB]

Wyatt can't just go back and prevent the murder. You can't go to a time where you already exist. If the murder is older than Wyatt, he could kill him as an infant or baby-nap him, bringing him to the present, place him with a loving family and hope for the best. Or he could put his efforts towards making sure that the killer's parents never meet/marry/hook up.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Technically speaking, once Jessie died, there was no point to shoot her. Jessie was wanted dead OR alive.. By killing him, legally, she did nothing wrong. If he shot her, he would be a murderer. While he could certainly hold a gun on Wyatt to keep him from shooting, I don't believe he would have shot him in the end.

Except that Bazz got every one's word of honor that they were going to bring him in alive. Or at least if he thought that women were people he would have made sure enough to have collected her word.

Wyatt would have been shot dead if he killed Jessie, so why did Lucy get a murder pass?

(Unless Reeves was bluffing about killing Wyatt? Which means that Lucy wasn't saving Wyatt, and might have known that her friend was not in danger at all, so there was really-really no reason to put James down.)

This was about honour and principle?

 

[Christopher]

Feel like the end of this one just shot another hole in the "lifeboat can't time travel" theory Christopher keeps insisting on.

I'm not "insisting on" anything. I'm merely describing what has been presented by the evidence to date, and declining to speculate beyond the evidence. So far, the show has not portrayed the lifeboat doing anything except following the mothership. I have no personal stake in the show; I'm merely describing what I observe. If my description is consistent, it's only because the information it's based upon is consistent to date, not because I'm unwilling to alter it. If new evidence emerges that requires modifying that hypothesis, then of course I will modify it at that time.

Wyatt was asking Rufus to help him steal the time machine and go back to make a change that will save his wife. Wording did NOT imply in any way that it would be waiting for a convenient jump and go rogue then, implied they were going to take the time machine on a side trip.

We don't know enough to rule anything out at this point -- which is why it's best to be patient and wait for evidence. We will see next week (or whenever) how their hijacking works and what it reveals about the functioning of the mothership. No reliable conclusions can be drawn until then.

But I don't agree with your exclusion of "waiting for a convenient jump." After all, Wyatt asked Rufus to help him think of a better way to save his wife. That implies it's something they're going to take time to figure out, not necessarily something they're going to do at the first available opportunity. So it could indeed be that they're waiting for a convenient jump. Given that we know Rufus has control over the lifeboat's landing coordinates in space, it could be that they'll consider a number of possible times where they could intervene in the past, then redirect the lifeboat's arrival to a different location when Flynn goes to one of those times.

Any other way to read that scene? (that won't tear a muscle stretching? )

Certainly, with a little imagination and an open mind. It could be, of course, that it is theoretically possible to send the lifeboat to a different time, but it's extremely dangerous to do so. It certainly does seem to me that their intention is to hijack a standard, authorized jump -- to make it look like they're taking a standard jump, but reset the arrival coordinates (in space or time or both) so they don't come out where they're supposed to. This only makes sense -- it would be far easier to steal the lifeboat if they can make it look like an authorized launch and then go off course, rather than if they have to break through all of Mason's security and launch it without any help from the support crew.

And of course there may be other possibilities that we can't think of because we don't know what we don't know. Just because we can't think of a possibility, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist; it just means our information is incomplete.

 

[Mr Awe]

I don't think Wyatt was arguing in favor of that point, though. He was saying he'd believed the real world was grayer, but then he met Bass, who really was as good in real life as the heroes in Western movies. So I think he was reconsidering his cynical, ends-justify-the-means thinking. He was asking Rufus to help him find a different way than just murdering his wife's murderer, a more ethical way.

I took that scene so many different ways. Yes, I think that was what Wyatt was saying. He was surprised that someone who truly is a "white hat" actually exists. However, there are other things to consider. For one, this is the opinion of one fictional character about a, historically based, but yet ultimately fictional character in this story. I don't know if the real Bass was like this portrayal. In the real world, people tend to be more shades of gray and I'd expect that the real Bass was too. Also, complexities are what help make the world shades of grey. In this story, Bass wasn't aware of all the facts and so while he was "purely good" for the intents of the story, he may have made the wrong decision given the larger context. Good intentions and all. What should Bass have done if he knew the full, larger context? Suddenly, that's a less clear than the simplified scenario that he thought it was.

Regardless, the point still stands that the real world is not black or white, but filled with shades of grey.

As I've pointed out several times in this thread, it's a misreading of the "butterfly effect" premise to think it means that small changes are guaranteed to cause massive consequences.

Yes, you've pointed out your opinion on the matter multiple times. That doesn't make it fact though. I do believe that there would be a tendency for effects to multiply. They'll start out small but eventually they'll cause new people to be born and die who shouldn't have in the original timeline. Then, things start to really magnify because the new people or lack of certain people really start to cause events to play out entirely differently. And, it doesn't take much for one person to be born instead of another. Timing off by a tiny bit, etc. One of the other millions of sperm gets lucky!

And of course, chaos theory also says that processes whose exact outcome cannot be predicted will still tend toward certain attractors -- certain average configurations that the actual results will tend to approach, even if you can't predict exactly how much.

Some systems do that while others don't. It comes down to the specifics of the system. Some systems will tend towards some equilibrium while others don't. You can't generalize. In fact, there is a whole field of study about how to keep unstable, chaotic systems in control! That can be difficult!

Wyatt can't just go back and prevent the murder. You can't go to a time where you already exist. If the murder is older than Wyatt, he could kill him as an infant or baby-nap him, bringing him to the present, place him with a loving family and hope for the best. Or he could put his efforts towards making sure that the killer's parents never meet/marry/hook up.

We've discussed this on here several times. You don't need something so drastic. If you can alter the timing of the conception in the mother even slightly, there's every reason to expect that a different sperm will fertilize the egg. After all, there are millions that are trying! Shoot, even if you just changing the room temperature might do it. All Wyatt would need to do is simply detain one of the parents with a distraction, say asking for help with a broken down car or something. Timing is off and voila the murderer is not born.

Mr Awe

 

[Christopher]

I took that scene so many different ways. Yes, I think that was what Wyatt was saying. He was surprised that someone who truly is a "white hat" actually exists. However, there are other things to consider. For one, this is the opinion of one fictional character about a, historically based, but yet ultimately fictional character in this story. I don't know if the real Bass was like this portrayal. In the real world, people tend to be more shades of gray and I'd expect that the real Bass was too.

What's that got to do with anything? I was talking about the character Wyatt Logan's state of mind in the closing scene of the story, not about larger moral debates in real life. I'm merely pointing out that, in that particular scene, he was questioning the idea that morality should be gray, not simply endorsing it. After all, he'd been endorsing it earlier in the story, and he would've undergone no growth if he'd just restated the exact same position at the end.

 

[Mr Awe]

What's that got to do with anything? I was talking about the character Wyatt Logan's state of mind in the closing scene of the story, not about larger moral debates in real life. I'm merely pointing out that, in that particular scene, he was questioning the idea that morality should be gray, not simply endorsing it. After all, he'd been endorsing it earlier in the story, and he would've undergone no growth if he'd just restated the exact same position at the end.

Yes, I know that's what you were referring to and I even agreed with it when limited strictly to that scene.

I hope you don't have a problem with the fact that I also had other thoughts about circumstances that tie into what he said at the end. Surely things are connected in the episode?

This is a discussion board and I'm discussing my thoughts about the matter and I don't have to be constrained solely to what you're discussing. I happen to think that events from the entire story, including the one scene you mention, touch on the whole black/white versus shades of grey issue.

And, that's what "it's got to do with anything".

Mr Awe

 

[Scout101]

going by the rules of the show, isn't hijacking an authorized launch and going somewhere/when else the most dangerous thing they could possibly do? Like "we don't exist anymore" dangerous? If Flynn goes to 1850, and you go to 1975 instead, you're not stopping him, he succeeds at whatever he's doing, and history from then on is WAY different, so whatever they try isn't going to matter anyway. if they can opt not to chase Flynn, no point in any of the show, period.

Still pretty sure it means the lifeboat can travel independently of the mothership. Even the 'hijack and go somewhere else' theory sorta has to imply it CAN go somewhere else and not blindly follow the beacon of the mothership...

 

[E-DUB]

One thing that's occurred to me. If the heroes are going back to stop Flynn from mucking around in time, what's to say they won't run into someone from their future trying to stop them from mucking around in time?

 

[Guy Gardener]

1. They cannot exist anywhere they have already existed. One of them only per the same minute in the universe. To get younger Flynn, our time team will have to find a moment in time where Garcia Flynn was, that they were not... Or send back a new team. New pilot, new historian, and new murderer, to stop him from screwing over the Hindenberg.

2. Killing a past version of Garcia, even a time travelling Garcia, will have no effect on the contemptuous Garcia that they are fighting, because he is paradox proof.

3. They met Flynn's mother, and gave Garcia an older brother. Flynn's ENTIRE childhood changed, and it tweaked nothing in present day. He may be paradox Proof, he IS paradox proof, but a version of Garcia has always stolen the mothership in every revised version of the series pilot so far.

4. If they meet persons from their future... Lucy's diary is from a future that has been written over, it really doesn't matter, since on one ever returns to the future they came from. So yes upstream travellers will have some foreknowledge of our time teams plans/outcomes, but as soon as the future time team stars interacting with the past, all that fore knowledge turns to shit.

5. Flynn always leaves a few hours before the time team does. Technically, they are they are from his future, which is interesting since they do not perceive to be in a wrong timeline full of awfulness, so it's almost as if Flynn doesn't do anything until after they chase him... When really he made massive changes that are now native to the new timeline they are in, or timelines are not demolished when a new timeline is created by tinkering with history, which is true since we see the command crew after the lifeboat leaves complaining about the wind, and they're all around after the mother ship leaves.

 

[Morpheus 02]

I took that scene so many different ways. Yes, I think that was what Wyatt was saying. He was surprised that someone who truly is a "white hat" actually exists. However, there are other things to consider. For one, this is the opinion of one fictional character about a, historically based, but yet ultimately fictional character in this story. I don't know if the real Bass was like this portrayal. In the real world, people tend to be more shades of gray and I'd expect that the real Bass was too. Also, complexities are what help make the world shades of grey. In this story, Bass wasn't aware of all the facts and so while he was "purely good" for the intents of the story, he may have made the wrong decision given the larger context. Good intentions and all. What should Bass have done if he knew the full, larger context? Suddenly, that's a less clear than the simplified scenario that he thought it was.

Regardless, the point still stands that the real world is not black or white, but filled with shades of grey.

Yes, there are shades of grey...but some of those shades are pretty darn close to white or black...just try the fill-color option on an MS Office object (like the 10% or 90% options)

I think that such a man like Bass in Timeless has existed....just because someone with such qualities is rare, doesn't mean they don't exist. (ANd according to my Facebook feeds, the current President & his administration apparently are the other end..no shades of grey presented with them)