maybe in the original timeline, Rittenhouse got control of the patents and benefitted from them so Rufus just did a kink in their plans.
Spoilers Timeless Season 2 - SPOILERS
- Thread starter JD
- Start date
maybe in the original timeline, Rittenhouse got control of the patents and benefitted from them so Rufus just did a kink in their plans.
Somewhat off-topic, but I've been wondering how to do a board game version of the show Timeless. Basically, the board game could be a linear timeline and you would place cards at various points along the timeline, each card representing a certain version of a historical event. Players could essentially travel up and down the timeline and try to change an event. When you successfully change an event, you would draw a different card with an alternate version of that same event. Each event of course would give players certain bonuses or penalties and award points towards either Rittenhouse or our heroes. The goal would be to try to change events in your favor until the sum of your points across the entire timeline would add up to a certain number.
I wondered about those points as well. Both changing how the patent played out and the guard dying could have serious repercussions. I was also surprised at how unconcerned Rufus seemed about changing history in such a major way. They seem to have become rather blasé about changing the timeline!
I also wondered whether one of the reasons they decided to set this season in a bunker was to isolate us (the viewer) from changes to the timeline. That way, later in the season, when the characters go out into the outside world for some mission, we'll be shocked at the changes but the characters won't notice having been affected by the changes themselves. That would be a fun reveal.
I noticed the non-reaction as well. Either she's not happy with him, or the producers just want to keep it a surprise about how that relationship will go. I was enjoying the romance with Lucy, so wasn't happy to see this happen! I figured that Wyatt had some sort of search and alert set up for references about Jessica. Once he returned to the present, those alerts would've been sent automatically. It makes sense he'd have that type of thing set up so he'd known instantly after a mission.
I have read a lot of Lucy/Wyatt fanfic, and when they finally kissed, I thought, "It's about time, what took you so long, the fanfic authors did this ages ago!"
Interesting idea.
That could result in a very different world outside the bunker.
I wonder if Rufus ever read "A Sound of Thunder." Or maybe the first thing that Rittenhouse did was prevent that story from being written.
That seems like a likely possibility.
It was played rather ambivalently, but I get the feeling next episode will open with him taking a step back and getting slapped.
That's a good idea. If they're estranged, she wouldn't be texting him, unless he missed an alimony payment or something.
In a new timeline where the wife is not dead, then the Wyatt native to that timeline who is not there anymore would never have set those alerts... Unless you mean that the Life boat has a handshake that compares basic facts about the new timeline against where it came from.
Read it? He's lived it. He and the rest of the team have been seeing the present change around them ever since the pilot, ever since Lucy's sister was erased from existence. So it's bizarre to question his familiarity with the principle.
Plus, he's a sci-fi geek who helped invent a freakin' time machine. Of course he's read it.
Rufus didn't act out of ignorance. He knew perfectly well that he was changing history. But he and his friends and enemies have been changing history incrementally for over a year now anyway. That ship has already sailed. So he made a choice to change something in a way that would be beneficial. Like the motto of the Legends of Tomorrow -- "Sometimes we screw things up for the better."
But how would MAJOR changes impacting the world not impact the histories of anyone on the team? The only ones who are supposed to be 'safe' from changes in the timeline are those who aren't in the timeline when those changes happen. So just Lucy/Rufus/Wyatt. But it just means they themselves are safe. They could return to a world they never existed in or never joined the team in. Which would be really odd. Like let's say Wyatt never joined the team... So then someone else was on the team and then when they returned from a mission would it be like Wyatt replaced/eliminated that person from the timeline?
I think in this timeline his wife divorced him and remarried. I don't see him joining this thing if his wife was alive.
*EDIT* Actually thought more about it after writing that and then wondered if his reason for staying with the program was to someday try to change his wive's fate then would a divorce really be as big a factor? I wonder if this timeline's Wyatt was also trying to bring back someone who died, but it wasn't his wife. That his wife got into an accident, but they had a child in this timeline and it was the child who died. So all this time in the altered timeline he has been trying to change fate to bring back his child.
Last edited:
Again, this is not hypothetical. This has been Lucy's reality since the very first time jump, when she returned to find that her sister had never been born and her mother had never had cancer. Her whole arc since then has been about trying to get her sister back. And now Wyatt has experienced an equally major change.
So, sure, in theory, they could come back and find that they'd never been part of the time-travel project. But in practice, that won't happen unless the writers have a story that calls for it to happen. The status quo of the team and Mason Industries is protected by Plot Armor until and unless it suits them to change it. Like most time-travel fiction, the "rules" are just whatever suits the storytellers' goals at a given moment. So it's barely worth the effort to try to analyze the in-universe logic of something so arbitrary. This show has never cared much about in-universe logic.
Yea. If you take away Plot Armor was Rufus did probably should have bigger ramifications than almost any of their other changes to history. You just created a billion dollar company that never existed. That could alter the fate of millions of people or more just through the Butteryfly Effect.
But that's not what the story was about. Time travel fiction is fundamentally a metaphor for our wish that we could correct the mistakes of the past. Traditionally, the message has been that acting on that impulse does more harm than good, but we're at a point in our culture where we're recognizing that those past mistakes are still doing damage today and need to be more aggressively repudiated, and so we're getting more time travel fiction embracing the wish-fulfillment of correcting those past wrongs as a symbolic statement about fighting for equality in the present. From Doctor Who's "The Fires of Pompeii" and "Thin Ice" to Legends of Tomorrow's "Abominations" and "Helen Hunt" to Timeless and Hedy Lamarr, we're getting more time travel stories whose message is that preserving the status quo is insufficient reason to turn a blind eye to the suffering and injustice it causes.
Agreed about the magnitude of the change.
However, changing history doesn't work in Timeless as you suggest. The travelers returning to the present remember history the way it was and have to learn about changes by research and having others tell them. We see that time and time again during season 1. And, Wyatt had to get some sort of alert or message to let him know that Jessica is alive. He didn't know immediately upon returning.
What we haven't seen is some change that either causes a team member to not be a team member in the altered timeline or to not exist. What happens using Timeless rules of time travel? Does the person vanish upon return?
Or, as I suspect, does that person continue to exist but there is no logical explanation or memories of that person from the point of view of those who remained in the present. However, the fellow time travelers would continue to remember the team member and their history with him/her.
The alerts could exist in his phone, which would make them safe.
That would be a horrifying moment. It would also mean that the Wyatt from that timeline never left-- resulting in two Wyatts. For that matter, the time machine could return to an empty bunker in a world where Mason Industries was never destroyed, resulting in two time machines and two of each of them (and possibly an entirely different crew for the time machine).
...If his phone and logins and accounts are the same brand and other specifics. 
You people don't read enough fanfic. I don't think there's any reason why they couldn't come back to discover that there's another version of themselves around.
Doubles can't exist, which is why they can't be there back in time during their own life time, therefore the same complications exist if they go back to a present where they already exist.
They Die or become temporally impacted and wish they were dead, any time a version of our friends return to a present day were they have doppelgängers... So we only see the only see the timelines where that doesn't happen.
Although, that would mean that aside from the pilots turning into Chronenbergs... The people in charge would now have two time machines. Actually why not send the life boat back in time, on autopilot for 5 minutes to the factory/garage next door? We already saw that home base can "catch" the life boat with the technology on hand when the guidance system on the life boat is f#cked, so the lifeboat can be operated remotely up to a point.
They Die or become temporally impacted and wish they were dead, any time a version of our friends return to a present day were they have doppelgängers... So we only see the only see the timelines where that doesn't happen.
Although, that would mean that aside from the pilots turning into Chronenbergs... The people in charge would now have two time machines. Actually why not send the life boat back in time, on autopilot for 5 minutes to the factory/garage next door? We already saw that home base can "catch" the life boat with the technology on hand when the guidance system on the life boat is f#cked, so the lifeboat can be operated remotely up to a point.
True. They could be using Lamarr Phones in the current timeline....If his phone and logins and accounts are the same brand and other specifics.
It would be a pretty cool twist.
That's right, they did say that, didn't they? I remember there being some question of how old Max Headroom was when they went back to the 60s. I don't know if that necessarily follows that doubles couldn't exist, though, since it would be separate personal timelines rather than one overlapping timeline.
Okay, I call foul -- the writers aren't even bothering to stay consistent with themselves. In the first part of the episode, they stated accurately that September 22, 1692 was only the most active day of hangings in the trials; 11 people had already been hanged over the previous several months, and 9/22 was actually the last day on which hangings took place. And of course the trials themselves had gone on for months before that. So it makes no sense to turn around and say that saving the victims on that one day somehow fundamentally altered the whole concept of the Salem Witch Trials and wiped the term "witch hunt" from history. I mean, even aside from the above, the Salem incident was hardly the only witch trial in history. So that's just stupid. (In fact, the literal use of the term "witch hunt" is attested as far back as 1630, even if the metaphorical use emerged in the 20th century.) How could they do their homework so carefully in establishing the facts of the historical event and then just forget everything they'd learned? Maybe that last Rufus/Jiya scene was added in a rewrite by someone else.
Also, it's really downplaying Ben Franklin's importance to American history to say that the only thing that would be lost in his erasure was the principle of dissent. There would be no United States if Franklin hadn't convinced the French to ally with the revolutionaries, and if not for his work in negotiating the treaty with the British after the war.
Also, it's really downplaying Ben Franklin's importance to American history to say that the only thing that would be lost in his erasure was the principle of dissent. There would be no United States if Franklin hadn't convinced the French to ally with the revolutionaries, and if not for his work in negotiating the treaty with the British after the war.
Plus no United States likely means no Mason Industries = No Time Machine.
Similar threads
