Headscratchers / Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

All Spoilers on this page will be unmarked! You Have Been Warned

Indy's belief in magic

• Frankly enough, how is it possible that, despite all his previous adventures, Indiana Jones doesn't believe in magic? Sure, All There in the Manual explained the inconsistently of him not believing in magic during Raiders of the Lost Ark despite seeing the heart-ripping scene of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as Indy later noting on his journal that he wants a medical explanation to explain that, but after decades of adventures (and that's without counting the Expanded Universe, where Indy comes across malevolent spirits or witnesses things like alternate dimensions or Biblical miracles), how can Indy not believe that magic exists after witnessing rocks burning after praying to Shiva, ghosts exiting from the Ark of the Covenant that made his captors vanish, an old man (well, a bad one) age into dust, water from a simple cup healing his father's mortal injuries and a UFO emerging from an ancient city that vanished all traces of it? If he knows that the Hindu gods, Christianity's God and aliens exist, shouldn't Indy consider at least that magic isn't that out of question?
  • Indy states in the climax of the film that he still doesn't believe in magic, but he started to believe that anything that happens has a rational explanation: it's just that he doesn't know yet of it.
  • Additionally, there would be a distinction between proof of divinity and proof of magic/highly advanced technology/whatever the basis for the unexplained. Just because the magic rocks and special box had very real effects consistent with written documents does not mean that the explanations or forces associated with them are in any way accurate. This very movie highlights that - there WAS a dragon at the Siege as far as the people understood it at the time. It just wasn't actually a dragon nor possessing of anything impossible; only impossible and unexplainable by those of the time.
  • We have a trope for this: By "No", I Mean "Yes". Indy doesn't want to say the word "magic", but he's admitting it is functionally magic.

Invitees to Indy's wedding

• If Basil Shaw is one of the best friends of Indiana Jones, to the point of even naming him his daughter's godfather, then where was Basil during his best friend's wedding in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? You would think Indy would invite the guy who named him the godfather of his daughter. You can also ask the same for Sallah, who for some reason, skipped his best friend's wedding even though according to dialogue in the film, Indy helped him and his family to emigrate to the USA after the events of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
  • Well, in Basil's case, he was already dead.
    • Perhaps. This movie is set in 1969, Crystal Skull in 1957. The flashback to Indy taking the dial is stated to have been 18 years earlier (this having been the length of time since he last saw Helena) which would date it to 1951. It is not stated when exactly Basil died, so it could have been before 1957. Alternatively, if he was still alive by then, his mental state (following his breakdown over his obsession with the Dial) and the fact that they didn't part ways on the best of terms, plus Indy's possible guilt over disregarding his instructions, may have been factors in not inviting him. Plus, trans-Atlantic travel was not easily affordable in the 1950s, even for an Oxford academic, so he may not have been able to go for financial reasons (in which case he would have probably just sent a congratulatory telegram).
  • As for Sallah, he does have a life outside of his association with Indy; maybe Indy and Marion couldn't wait to be married and Sallah couldn't get there on such short notice, or he might have been helping with other arrangements. Given that he's working as a New York cabbie by 1969, maybe he was waiting outside the chapel as the driver for the happy couple.

Number of times Indy has been shot

• According to this film, Indiana Jones has been shot nine times throughout his life (shortly after this revelation, Klaber makes it ten). The film reveals to us that Basil Shaw shot him by accident in 1944, and it's known that another of these occasions was when a Nazi mook shot Indy in the arm in Raiders of the Lost Ark. By chance, are there any other adventures throughout the franchise where Indy has been shot to justify this line?
  • Indy does get shot while leading a charge against a German position in East Africa during World War I, although the bullet doesn't actually enter his body — it's stopped by his locket. This is shown in the Young Indiana Jones episode Oganga, the Giver and Taker of Life. YMMV as to whether that counts.
  • In Indiana Jones: The Ultimate Guide, it's mentioned that Indy got wounded in the arm during a pistol duel with Belloq in 1934, two years before the events of Raiders.
  • Even beyond what's been shown not just in the movies, but in various spin-off material, there could have been several other off-screen adventures where he could have been shot.

The Spear of Destiny

• The Spear of Destiny is seen in the train during the opening sequence. Why would the Spear be there? The Indiana Jones and the Spear of Destiny comic book series showed us that the Spear was in Austria, England and Ireland by 1945, one year after this opening sequence's events.
  • Because it's a fake.

Sophie's whereabouts

• So... where's Sophie, Old Indy's daughter from The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles television series? Marion Ravenwood isn't evidently her mother and her last name doesn't seem to be Jones.
  • It looks like Sophie's been Exiled from Continuity due to George Lucas removing the Old Indy segments from that show.
    • Old Indy's hands are still shown at the beginning of every episode, so he should still be canon. By the way, the reasoning to remove the bookends was not because George wished to cause tension among the fans because they would believe that removing the segments would be a potential indicator that Indy would possibly not survive the then-unreleased fourth film?
    • According with several news reports Lucas did eliminated Old Indy from canon and did it precisely because the fourth film was in works, and among other stuffs, Spielberg preferred Indy to have a son instead of a daughter (therefore the show’s canon would cause a conflict), that and that they wanted to leave the fifth film also free. The hands can be of any other old Indy not necessarily George Hall’s character.
  • Given Indy's many past relationships that didn't seem to last prior to finally settling down with Marion, maybe she was from a different relationship that didn't work out and Indy eventually reached out to her.
  • There's no indication that she's strictly Indy's blood-related daughter. It's possible she could be an adoptive daughter - if not strictly legally adopted, someone he's close enough with to consider as his daughter (not entirely unlike Helena's goddaughter-godfather relationship with him in the film). As for her last name not seeming to be "Jones," by the time we see any of her in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles she's got two children - even if her last name was originally "Jones" it's most likely that she'd have been using her husband's last name by then.
    • The teleplays of the show do seem to indicate that Sophia is Indy's daughter and her kids are Indy's grandkids.
  • One for the WMG page perhaps, but maybe Sophie is not Indy's biological daughter but was in a relationship with Mutt and had children by him prior to his getting killed in Vietnam. Indy would not have known of this due to him and Mutt becoming estranged (and that estrangement could have lasted for several years, depending on how long he was in the army before his death; time enough to start a family). As a struggling widowed single mother, quite possibly with no surviving parents of her own, she finds out about Mutt's parents shortly after the events of Dial of Destiny and reaches out to them, following which they take her and her kids (their grandchildren) in. Over the next few years, she comes to regard Indy and Marion, who after reuniting find that they've been given a new reason to enjoy life thanks to connecting with grandchildren they never knew they had, as not so much in-laws as surrogate parents, explaining why (by the early 1990s) she more or less treats Indy like he's her actual father.

Indy's journal

• Canonically, after the fourth film, the KGB confiscated Indy's journal during the Soviet effort to take the Crystal Skull back to Akator and was presumably not returned to Indy until the 1990s if the television show is of any indication. If the diary was taken by Russia from Indy in 1957 and not delivered back until at least 1991 or 1992, it would explain why the diary didn't mention his adventures in this film, but what about his close relationship with Basil Shaw and his missions during World War II? They should have been worth a mention.

Continental drift

• Did Indy's hypothesis that they didn't account for continental drift have any merit as to why they overshot their time jump? Or was that just him spitballing?
  • He could well have been bluffing to make Voller nervous and abort the mission so he wouldn't alter history. If Indy realized that Voller was doomed to fail and the whole thing was a Stable Time Loop, he would have remained silent and let history play out.
  • Indy recognized Voller's wristwatch as the same one that Archimedes was wearing, which, combined with the apparent airplane engraved in his tomb, led him to realize the rift was going to take them much further back in time. Continental drift was his theory for why Voller's math was wrong, but in reality Archimedes just set up the dial to only send people back to his time.
• Still, on a Doylist level, why introduce the concept? Indy might be spitballing, but continental drift is a real thing, and that it was discovered later is a fact, you could usually handwave it but once it's pointed out it demands an explanation. That the movie doesn't give, instead contradicting itself by stating that Archimedes rigged the compass, and not reconciling the two things in any way. It feels like a very weird move and mostly padding and trying to manufacture tension, which isn't necessary since the action on the second plane could work for that.
  • From a Doyleist level? We have a trope for that, Voodoo Shark. The writers wanted an explanation beyond Indy spit-balling, and they wandered into Voodoo Shark territory in search of it.

Where did the plane come from?

• Can someone clue me in how the chase around the globe, that arbitrarily terminated in Syracuse, had a Nazi bomber and a small company of soldiers prepared and waiting for Voller and his American goons on an airfield, when one of his goons still had to shoot the groundskeeper? I know Voller kept lugging his SS Standartenführer uniform around. I have no idea where the other Nazis sprang from.
  • Voller had spent the last few days pursuing Indy and the others to Syracuse; once he was satisfied that they were going to that specific island based on the instructions on the tablet, he could have called his allies to have the plane sent to an airfield there and be made ready for the next stage of his plan.
    • But the film gives no direct explanation, right? I didn't just miss expository dialogue?
    • There is no direct explanation, but the above seems like a reasonable theory.
    • How would he have contacted his supposed allies that just organised everything to be on that airfield while he was sitting in the middle of the Aegean in a dingy? In a world before mobile phones?
    • Simply used the Ship to Shore Raido that would have been on Renaldo's ship before he got in the dingy.
    • Or maybe Voller realised that the time fissures only happen in the vicinity of Syracuse, meaning that the fissures will take you back in time (to 213BC, specifically — not that he realises that) while the geographic location remains the same. Note that he has ensured that he doesn't just have a fully-functioning WW2-era bomber, he has it loaded with enough fuel to fly from Sicily to Munich. Regardless of wherever he might have to go to acquire the pieces of the Dial, he would've been aware that he'd need to be at Syracuse and ready to go at the exact time when the fissure happens in order to travel back in time.

Why Indy didn't destroy the Dial?

• So why did Indy ignore his friend's request to destroy the half of the dial?
  • He's saved dangerous stuff previously, usually under the rational that it's important to history. Logically, he might have known the dial is bad in the same way that the Ark was/is. But his whole life is devoted to history and he likely couldn't bring himself to destroy an ancient artifact.

Why take Indy on the plane?

• Why did Voller take Indy with him on the plane?
  • Possibly as an expert on the dial but also he may be planning to pin Hitler's assassination on him, a known virulent anti-Nazi and gunman.
  • He could have pinned the assassination on a random old American, but not Henry Jones, since the one he has with him is several decades older than Indy was in WW2. I think it's more likely wanting to show off, having Indy watch him succeed in changing history before he succumbed to his gunshot wound.

Archimedes' knowledge of the future

• How could Indy say that Archimedes couldn't know about Continental Drift if it has been established he had travelled to the future?
  • Most likely that Indy was bluffing to discourage the Nazis from attempting time travel?
  • It wasn't established he'd been to the future, just that he had things FROM the future. The engraving showing a bird with propellers implied things from the future had traveled to the past, which was proven later in the movie.

Traveling through the time rift without a plane

• How could Archimedes have travelled into these time rifts without a plane?
  • He never actually did, as Helena points out the time travel device was an intrigue he invented to bring help from the future to aid him defeat his enemies in the past. Possibly everyone assumed he had also invented some form of hot air balloon or hang-glider.
    • He didn't and there never was another rift. He just uses the completed dial he finds by the wreckage to read off the coordinates his version is supposed to display, because they must needs be correct. The rift just occurs naturally.

Traveling to Morocco while wanted for murder

• How can Indy just take a plane to Morocco when he's wanted for 2 murders and his picture is all over the papers?
  • Airport security is not what it was post 9/11 and lacks the electronic sophistication of the modern age. Moreover Indy may had some friends from his espionage days who aided him getting onto the flight.

Is Indy still wanted for murder?

• How can can Indy just resume his life in New York, isn't he still wanted for murder?
  • Presumably after the CIA were double-crossed by Voller they decided to hush things up regarding the entire incident and the authorities are happy to drop all murder charges and let Indy and co be, as long as they keep their mouths shut.
  • Helena may have also explained what really happened to the authorities.
  • It's shown that the CIA knows that Voller and his goons were responsible for the murders (we see Mason calling this in), and were planning to arrest him for it before he double-crossed them, so presumably they'll be able to vouch for Indy, a man who, while having come up on their radar for the wrong reasons once or twice, does have an exemplary war record.
  • Indy also placed a call to 911 and interacted with a cop, so those two are also able to vouch for his innocence.
    • That cop was punched out by Klaber, so he couldn't have vouched for him in case the punch left him with amnesia.

University classes in August

• The film takes place in August. Why is Indy teaching a college-level archaeology course during the tail end of summer? I know that summer classes exist at the college level, but generally those don't run past July. If this is the start of the school year, why is Hunter College forcing him to retire and just upend the whole curriculum?
  • His students seem generally disinterested and bored, regardless of the hubbub around "Moon Day" (which seems to be news as of that same morning, but not a single student in the classroom completed the reading, which speaks to their apathy even prior to the event). It's possible that this is a summer course, perhaps even a remedial one (hence why no-one did the required reading, as this lot certainly don't come across as particularly bothered by their chosen subject) and one which is winding to a close (hence the references to the impending finals and Indy stating outright that he's only going to teach them what's in the exam). It seems as though this is one of the last days of lectures for summer courses with only exam days remaining, which would explain holding his retirement party on the last day that all faculty is expected to be present, and his replacement is expected to start at the beginning of the next full semester. Not every instructor or professor wants to teach summer courses, but a man who's trying to fill the empty spaces in his life that age and marital separation have left might be more inclined.
  • He also doesn't seem to have been forced to retire. He's lost his passion following his son's death, with the ending implying he lied to Helena (and possibly himself) about Marion's grief being the cause of the divorce and that it was actually due to his depression, hence upon Marion's return she said she was told "Indy came back". He most likely chose to retire and is simply finishing off the last of his obligations.

Voller surviving the prologue

• The prologue has Voller get knocked off the train during his confrontation with Indy, hit straight in the head with a metal pipe from a trackside water tower. And, thirty years later, when he reappears, he's none the worse from the experience; my question is how? He took a blow from a metal pipe, straight to the face, while riding in a train that's certainly going faster than 30 or 40 miles per hour. And, even IF it was going that slow, there was still a solid piece of metal that knocked him off the train and into the woods. He should have had brain damage from that even if he survived, or at the very least some scarring, not to mention the potential injuries from the fall. Realistically, he should have had his skull cracked open and died. So how the hell is he okay without any marks whatsoever?
  • Several possible reasons. The pipe was swinging away from him upon impact, meaning that the force upon hitting it went all to send it flying and not back in recoil, lessening the blow. He did suffer from the impact as upon seeing Jones again in 1969, he clearly does not recall him properly which hints that his memory got a bit blurry from the impact. How he lacks any lasting facial injury could be chalked up to having a time period of 25 years to recover and perhaps using surgery to smooth out the scarring from being visible. Also, the human skull is much sturdier than given credit for, as it requires a pressure force of 1,100 pounds to crack in the first place.
  • To be fair, considering that this movie is part of a franchise where jumping from a plane with an inflatable raft or locking yourself inside a lead refrigerator to avoid an atomic bomb's radiation are both survivable, getting hit in the head by a trackside water tower doesn't sound that lethal.
  • He's protected by the Stable Time Loop.

Why was Voller even involved in the events of the prologue?

• Voller was a literal rocket scientist. What was he doing as part of a Nazi contingent tasked with retrieving looted antiques and works of art?
  • It's 1944 and the Nazis are in retreat. In such circumstances, it would be plausible for Voller to have got separated from whichever unit he was with and end up on what seems to be the only train heading back to Germany. Maybe he was able to convince the officer in charge that he could be of some use (which, to be fair, he is — none of the other Nazis can tell that the Lance is a forgery).
  • Voller is shown to be very good at identifying different types of metal (he knows the Lance is a forgery because he can tell that it 's made from a modern alloy) and his expertise is more on mathematics than specific rocket science. It's more likely that he convinced the United States that his mathematics and science knowledge would be useful for their Apollo Program and they gave him a new identity ("Schmidt") and a university posting as a result.

Voller not recognising Indy

• He acts like he doesn't recognise Indy at the auction scene, which is the first time they've laid eyes on each other in 25 years. Granted, Voller may not remember what happened on the train due to his falling off it after being whacked on the head with the pipe from the water tower (of which more above), but immediately prior to going to Tangiers he sees a government file on Indy which includes a (relatively) recent photograph, so when they meet he should know exactly who he is. Plus, he's apparently been looking for the Dial for some time with the resources of the CIA at his disposal (shortly before she gets killed, Mason outright confirms that the CIA has been "humouring" his obsession with it as he was vital to the Apollo programme), so surely he must have figured out Indy's connection during the course of his research and put two and two together regarding their previous encounter even if he can't actually remember it?
  • Voller is technically a war criminal going by an alias. He very clearly recognized Indy from the photo before going to Tangiers, he's just playing dumb because, at that point, he was still being protected by the CIA and likely didn't want to admit knowing Indy in a room full of armed criminals when Indy is telling everyone he's a Nazi. It would be extremely stupid to confirm in any way that you know Indy and that he's telling the truth. Best case, they decide to turn him into the authorities, letting the dial slip from his grasp. Worst case, they decide the world would be better off with one less Nazi and kill him.

The origin of the Dial, how it works, and how Archimedes built it

• Archimedes made some kind of time compass? How? I've seen people say that he planned the whole thing, bringing in help from the future, and rigged the dial to bring them to that time but I didn't get any of that. How did he even know about time rifts to begin with, conceive of a way to navigate them, build it despite being in such a primitive time period and limited by the resources (it was made of clockwork but controls time?), and even manage to rig it to bring them to that specific time and place? Given that it is a stable time loop some of this can be handwaved, but it still relies on him building this thing correctly from looking at it for a short time—and that it works, given that he couldn't test it and, as mentioned before, is made of clockwork.
  • It's a compass, not a time-machine and all it does is pointing at one specific rift in time at all times when assembled. It doesn't create the time-rift at all nor control where it will take you when passed through. And thanks to how time-travel works in this setting, it seems more likely that the time-rift itself sets its own coordinates onto the dial, using Archimedes as the medium through the dial.
  • It's a time compass that uses super advanced mathematics to predict rifts in time, which Voller believed could be programmed with specific equations to find rifts leading to various time periods, when in reality it only ever points towards rifts leading to the Siege of Syracuse and operates on Stable Time Loop logic so any travel to the past has already happened. It doesn't create rifts or program them, it just finds them. It's all handwavy pseudo science indistinguishable from magic, but the internal logic is consistent.

Why does nobody know who Indy is?

• In the 1944 section of the film, the Nazis are able to peg Indy as an American spy... but the don't ever seem to recognize him as Indiana Jones, the guy who's been a perpetual thorn in their side since before the war started, the guy who kept them from obtaining the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail. Shouldn't he be the most wanted man in the Axis Powers by now? And in 1969, the CIA agent doesn't recognize the man who brought her agency an incredibly dangerous mystical artefact that's locked away in Area 51... or the guy who broke into Area 51 looking for space aliens?
  • Indy's adventures don't really leave that many survivors on the enemy's side of the matter so nobody could really tell anyone about him to anyone afterwards. And for the mysterious artefact, that is classified by the highest level of authority so everything connected to it is under wraps as well, including his identity.
  • It's almost certainly this. To recount the previous movies: Belloq and his German employers were all killed when they opened the Ark of the Covenant. Donovan, Dr. Schneider, and the Nazis with them died to the Holy Grail (drinking from or being too obsessed with it to just let it go) or being crushed by rubble when the temple collapsed. And Spalko died to having her mind be burnt out from alien knowledge while her men died from falling rubble or the dangers of the jungle. There would be basically not witness from the antagonist side. And, as Raiders of the Lost Ark showed, the American government is likely to hush up and bury any of Indy’s more crazy adventures due to the supernatural elements of them. It’s not surprising that no one knows who he is, especially since none of his more insane finds (The Ark, the Grail, etc.) were ever made public, so the average Joe isn’t likely to know Indy as anything special. The more connected might find his service record and some of the missions he did for the government, but nothing that the real-world audience would know him for.
  • Also, the CIA didn't even exist when Indy brought the Ark to the USA in 1936 — it was founded in 1947. So whichever US government agency was responsible for hiding the Ark in Area 51, it wasn't the CIA — and in any case, secretive government agencies being what they are, it's unlikely that said agency would have told that many people elsewhere in the US government ^note  heck, sometimes in movies that feature Area 51, even the President himself has no idea what's going on there . The CIA is in any case primarily concerned with foreign intelligence gathering and so would not have been primarily involved with the Area 51 break-in in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, after which it's the FBI that goes after Indy. Additionally, Indy served in the CIA's predecessor organisation, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), during WW2 so the high-ups in that particular agency could well hold him in high regard in any case — although it would stand to reason that not everyone who works there would have necessarily heard of him, especially operatives like Mason who would've joined a couple of decades after the war finished.
  • While Indy has over many years built up a reputation as a noted archaeologist (albeit one with a somewhat dubious reputation from his younger, fortune-hunting days and in all probability the subject of various rumours about some of his "fieldwork" and what he got up to in both world wars), he's probably not so famous as to be recognized on sight outside of academic and archaeological circles.
    • Let's not forget that much of the work he'd have done in conjunction with any government would have likely been highly classified and it had been, presumably, decades since the last time he'd worked with the US government. There's no reason anyone should know who he is outside of his work as an archeologist, because the US government would likely not appreciate there being confirmation of something as religiously significant as the Arc of the Covenant existing and being stored in a warehouse somewhere. There's no reason the events of Temple of Doom would have been known outside that particular circle. Same with Last Crusade, because it was a personal mission involving his father and all the antagonists ended up dead anyway.

Why did Archimedes hide the dial?

• If Archimedes built the dial specifically so anyone who used it would be sent back to the siege of Syracuse and would be forced to help him, and there was nothing else they could do with it because he rigged it so it would only go back to 212 BC, then why did he go to so much trouble to stop anyone using it? If he was planning for someone to use it, then why would he break it in half, have one half buried with him, hide the directions to the tomb inside a wax tablet containing cryptic false directions written in code and then dump the tablet in the sea?
  • The dial is (kind of) a time machine; it wouldn't matter exactly when someone finds it if it always sends them to the same place. Hiding the dial may also be a way to ensure that anyone coming through the rift has technology advanced enough to help by delaying the find for several centuries.
  • Archimedes goes through the hassle of hiding the dial after encountering Indiana and Helena - it's in his own tomb, after all. Knowing then that the rescuers would come from 2000 years later, he had to ensure that it would remain hidden that long.

Is the Dial really a loaded deck?

• The end of the movie implies that the Dial is only really set to allow someone to find the time portal to the Siege of Syracuse…and that's it. No semi-freedom for time travel like Voller and Indy believed. But, the very nature of the Dial being mathematics means it can be replicated and applied in other forms, like any other series of mathematical formulas or theories. With that in mind, it's not impossible for someone who understands the math behind the Dial to recalibrate and use it for the purpose that Voller wanted and travel to when they wish. There’s also the implication that Basil Shaw was able to understand at least part of the math during the years he studied the Dial, and his reaction to its potential. Moreover, he was able to find the time when the time portal was supposed to appear and where said portal would open to through studying the Dial. So, with all that in mind, is the Dial really a loaded deck?
  • It's a loaded deck in the same way the one used by Helena is. Sure the deck contains every card, so theoretically you could pick any of them but she presented it in a way that anyone who doesn't know the trick would automatically pick the card she wants. That doesn't mean that if anyone does know the trick he wouldn't be able to pick another card. In the same way sure you could theoretically get any equation from the dial and Go to any time, but Archimedes built it in a a way that the first rift you would pick would be the one he wants regardless of where (or when) you want to go. If you know that before you could find a way to overcome this issue sure, but if you don’t you would fall for the trick.

Aren't Voller and his Neo-Nazis gonna change the future?

• Helena tells Indy that one of the reasons for which she refused to let him stay in 212 BC was because if he stayed, he could have caused a Time Paradox and they had to leave the past untouched. However, what Voller and his Neo-Nazis did isn't gonna cause a paradox already? First of all, Voller's Nazi uniform would possibly lead to a change of events in which the swastika turned out to be years older so Hitler wouldn't be able to come up with it as his Nazi symbol. Not to mention that the corpses of Voller and his Neo-Nazis would have been buried where maybe some other corpses were going to be buried and the plane's remains would have possibly been investigated. And secondly, Klaber gunned down several Greek and Roman soldiers, so entire bloodlines should have been surely wiped out from existence thanks to that...
  • The uniforms would likely rot or fade away due to time, and the plane would likely be buried or lost due to the same. After all, there's about 2 millennia between the Siege of Syracuse and the Nazis being created. As for the bloodline aspect, it's entirely possible those men were always going to die in the siege so any changes to the timeline were going to be minimal at best, or they were just unremarkable enough to not have major effects on time. They may have also fathered children before the Siege, so their descendants would still be around.
  • There's also implied to have been a Stable Time Loop in play.
  • And for the swastika if what you're implying is that Hitler invented it, well no. Swastikas exists for thousands of years as solar symbols of many cultures since Prehistory, Hitler choose it precisely for that.

What would happen if Basil did indeed smash the Antikythera?

• What would happen if Indiana Jones did not stop Basil from smashing the Antikythera back then? Considering that apparently that the Antikythera's creation is a Stable Time Loop whereas its creation would only be possible if the Nazis took it to travel back in time to the Siege of Syracuse and crash where Archimedes would find Voller's watch and study its mechanisms in order to complete the Antikythera. So if the Antikythera was destroyed before any of that would have occured, what would happen next? Would that cause a Reality-Breaking Paradox where the entire world ends up destroyed as a result or would history just rewrite itself with the smashed Antikythera being Ret-Gone and Archimedes' tomb having the frieze with Propellers erased along with Archimedes' watch.
  • Likely he wouldn't as the Stable Time Loop seems carved in stone and would make itself happen no matter what. Might have been what drove him insane. He wanted and tried to destroy it, but the powers to be refused to let him, driving him mad instead to ensure that the dial would trade hands from him to Indy later on its journey to complete the loop.

Who was the third civilian?

• When Mason tries to deport Voller and his men back to the USA, she mentions that his men killed three civilians. Who was the third civilian they killed? Klaber and Hauke only murdered Mandy and Plimpton.
  • It’s implied that they killed that cab driver they backed into and then argued with.

A Roman Trimene shooting down a twentieth century airplane

• Seriously, could a Roman weapon, even a metal one, damage, let alone take down, a huge bomber?
  • Yes? Even if it is a old-time wooden ship, it was equipped with weaponry that fired off huge metallic spears at whatever it was aimed at and airplanes are not equipped with defenses against huge metal spears piercing through them. Especially not the engines.
  • Roman vessels did indeed have huge ballistae like that, with a range of up to 460 metres, and the plane is flying low and slow. Planes are also surprisingly fragile, given that the metal used to make them is always as thin as the manufacturer can get away with in order to to save weight. It would only take one lucky shot to mess one up.
  • Yeah, that's the main point: armor is heavy, plane need to stay up. The greatest advantage of modern planes would be the altitude and ability to fight better from a distance, but as mentioned the plane was already damaged and flying too low to expect that. Not to mention that it wasn't ready for combat, Voller was expecting to go back before the beginning of the war and only wanted to fly to Berlin, fighting actual hostile forces was a surprise.

What was Voller's "sales-pitch"?

• Considering how we were introduced to Klaber practicing German in the hotel room and how the crew in the airplane that would come with him to 1939 to carry out his plot were dressed accordingly to that time-period, it's clear they were in-the-know regarding the more fantastic aspects of Voller's plan. However, this leads to two questions: 1) How on Earth did Voller convince his men that time-travel was real?, and 2) that he would be able to pull it off without issue?
  • Also, given that they are obviously neo-Nazis (or at the very least Nazi fanboys), how was he able to convince them that it was Hitler (a man venerated by neo-Nazis) who screwed up and should therefore be killed so that the Nazis can win the war?
  • Neo-Nazis during the 60s were a lot into weird "Esoteric Nazism" stuff that believe all sorts of crank pseudoscience like that the Third Reich had contact with Aliens, used UFOs, was making superhumans etc. Convincing them of time travel isn't that far fetched. As for killing Hitler, that part of the plan might be left out and he would just say they will be helping the Reich in one particularly crucial battle.
    • Or he could have just hyped himself up as a superior fuhrer and/or educated them to see a specific version of the ideology that put Voller as its pinnacle. It's not a large movement, after all, but a limited number of loyal followers, and you can always find outliers that think that they could do better than their idol, or that killing the founder of the ideology to make him a martyr could bring greater benefits, or stuff like that.

What Sallah knows

• After meeting up with Indy, Sallah shows that he doesn't just know about Helena engaging in criminal activity, he has newspaper clippings about it. Given that he must know that Indy is Helena's godfather (he's a family man and an old friend of Indy's, so it can't not have come up in conversation at some point over the years), why has he not told Indy about Helena before?
  • Maybe Indy's disillusionment with life in general following Mutt's death extended to him not keeping in touch with Sallah; just because they both live in New York, doesn't mean they'd necessarily see each other regularly if one of them wasn't making the effort to do so. Sallah could have only gone looking for Indy after seeing the news of the murders on the TV and realising that his old friend was in trouble.
  • Additionally, maybe with everything else Indy is dealing with, Sallah didn't want to trouble Indy further with news about his goddaughter getting up to shady dealings until it became relevant.

Mechanics of the loop

• While there’s no doubt that the dial caused a Stable Time Loop who are we supposed to believe initiated it? Are we supposed to take Archimedes at his word that he successfully rigged the dial to always go to 212 BC? Or are we supposed to take Indy’s hypothesis as the truth, and that Voller’s plan would’ve worked had he accounted for continental drift when calculating the dial’s coordinates?
  • The loop itself initiated it. All the Dial ever does is pointing towards where the rift to 214 B.C, the only rift that Archimedes ever witnessed and could tune the Dial to when he built is, is located, nothing else. The continental drift played zero part in any of this at all.
  • It's not a Stable Time Loop, though. Archimedes is shown being already working on the dial when they arrive, so he had set things in motion of his own volition before, the plane arriving from the future didn't initiate anything but merely confirmed to him that his plan was going to work, but then he finishes the dial on his own and both his and Indy's life proceed linearly forward. It was a successful plan on his part exploiting temporal rifts and time travel, no actual loop involved.
  • All we see of the dial back in 214 B.C is just the outer shell of it. Archimedes needed Voller's wristwatch in order to figure out and complete the inner workings of the dial in order to make it function.

Voller's plan post-Hitler

• There's already a question on this page re: Voller changing history, but something related but still separate that doesn't add up re: Voller's plan is this: Voller plans to usurp Hitler, claiming that he knows the mistakes Hitler made and the moves made by the Allies that ultimately won World War II, but if his plan actually worked and he went back to 1939, is victory really assured if, by killing Hitler, that changes the course of history in such a way that the Allies may not make the same moves they did before, and could still defeat the Nazis even if Voller was calling the shots? He's hinging his plan on knowing the moves the enemy made originally, not what they could do in the new timeline. Obviously, the movie shows that Voller's plan was FUBAR from the beginning, due to the way Archimedes designed the Dial, but what I'm confused about is if Voller ever considered this, and if so, why he still went ahead with his plan.
  • Crazed Nazis makes bad plan, Film at 11. Even if he failed to achieve his objective because he is an arrogant ideologue bent on world domination, he could still have wrecked history and made things turn out worse. Either way he had to be stopped, it doesn't matter if he was right in his beliefs about his abilities or not.
  • I should clarify that I wasn't questioning whether he should be stopped, because either way, whether his plan goes the way he, well, planned, or if it doesn't, Voller was a serious threat that needed to be dealt with. I was mainly just confused about how, from Voller's perspective, he expected to win the war based on knowing Hitler's mistakes and what the Allies did, when the reality is that if he does things differently, then this new history won't play out exactly like the original timeline did. He's obviously more strategic and intelligent than Hitler, but he can't see into the future if his actions in the past changed it into something different. That's why I'm confused. I hope I'm phrasing that in a way that makes sense.
  • Voller is the type of person that gets high on his own hubris due to believing that he is "the smartest person in the room" and fully believes his plans will eventually work out, despite the small "mishaps" on the way as seen in the chase on the rest of the Dial. Simple put, he is too overconfident for his own good.
  • He wouldn't just have his foreknowledge of history but also his additional 25 years of scientific knowledge to draw upon including, importantly, the atomic bomb and long-range rocketry.

---