Headscratchers / Justice League: S1 E24 to 26: "The Savage Time"

• Something that has bugged me about "The Savage Time" is this: All Earth, post-WWII, has been completely changed, so it makes sense that Batman is radically changed and the Flash doesn't exist. Perhaps Wonder Woman never left Themiscyra. But what about other heroes who span worlds? Perhaps J'onn was never revived by astronauts, so maybe the Imperium never invaded, but what about Hawkgirl, who would have been sent to Earth anyway (Earthly politics aside, the Gordanians would still be fighting the Thanagarians), Superman (since Krypton would still have been destroyed), and Green Lantern (it might not be Jon Stewart, but Earth would still fall under the Guardian's protection - they would have sent a Green Lantern of some sort in). Also, what about the villains? Grundy should still have existed in this timeline, as his origin took place before WWII, and Etrigan and Morgan Le Fay should still have been fighting it out. Brainiac should have still come to Earth in search of assimilating all knowledge and then destroying it, and Aquaman should have still been in his palace in Atlantis. Gorilla City should have been encountered in its hiding place in Africa, and Icthulthu should have tried to overrun the Earth with its monsters. Basically, I really like the episode "The Savage Time", but this has always bugged me.
  • Earth really wasn't too aware of the Green Lantern Corps until Hal Jordan became a "public" GL; in the DCAU/this timeline, it's possible GL simply never went public on Earth. With no League, Hawkgirl could simply never have become a superhero and just played the role of a spy. The last place Jor-El would want to send baby Kal is Savage's Earth, and the villains...well, they don't appear in every episode, so it could be as simple as "the ones who exist just failed to make an appearance in this episode."
    • Two more possibilities for Hawkgirl. 1. Since Savage (ha ha ha) Earth appears to have a higher standard tech level than Earth, it may have been possible the Thanagarians called it off as soon as they learned Earth wouldn't be as easy pickings. By the present, Darkseid had tried to take over Earth, but was stopped by Superman. If the people of Earth could hold back a God of Evil, the Thanagarians may never have made the plan to begin with. 2. Hawkgirl was found and... well... if you know what the Nazis did to the Jews, just think what would have happened if they got their hands on an ALIEN.
  • Touché. That does make sense, and considering how powerful Savage's tech was (being able to give the League a run for their money in WWII, and undoubtedly advancing since then) it seems at least plausible that he could have fought off the various alien invasions.
    • Fridge Logic: Doesn't that actually make Savage's Earth a better place than the mainstream DCAU, at least in some ways? In the show-as-is the world basically has to rely on a handful of more or less well-adjusted supermen narrowly averting the regularly attacking supervillains and hostile alien empires; here, the government apparently has the resources to deal with the threats of the week themselves. And given the sci-fi technology, it's a pretty sure bet the general standard of living is also higher. Of course, a quasi-fascist government (even a bowdlerized one) probably isn't a very nice one to have, but still ...
  • Regarding the villians (or at least the ones from Earth), it's simply possible that they didn't show up because they weren't alive in this universe. The only reason they lived in the normal timeline was because the Justice League simply threw them back in jail every time. Considering how compassionate the Nazi system of justice was, it's likely that any criminal that caused any public disturbance would be killed on the spot (feasible since what's in this universe 60 year old technology could contend with the Justice League) and anyone associated or even close to them would be quickly and thoroughly vaporized.
• A much simpler question: how in the flying blue hell did they get forward in time?
  • You meant back? For if we're to believe Planetary on that one, you can go back in time ONLY till the point of turning on the Time-machine. Which however doesn't explain how that guy managed to move through time at will with no problem =/
• Another one from the same episode: if Savage thought the best way to dominate the world was rising to power during WWII, why did he choose the side that lost the war? I mean, a coup in the USSR seems just as feasible as one in Nazi Germany, and even without altering history they already controlles half of europe by the end of the war. And even if it had to be the Nazis, why did it have to be at the worst possible moment in the war? Is time travel so expensive that sending a laptop to 1940 was so harder than sending one to 1944?
  • The laptop obviously popped out well before 1944. Even if you know how to make highly advanced weapons it still takes time and resources to actually build them. Not to mention, Savage's leadership appears to be pretty well ingrained. This suggests he's had some time to consolidate his power and didn't just take over yesterday.
  • Because he needed to be on a side that was trying for world domination, and that he could successfully take over. The leadership of the US and England at that time was more or less beyond reproach, so he couldn't have just had himself elected, while Hitler was the subject of several assassination and coup attempts. Also, even if he had gotten control of the US or England, he probably wasn't going to be able to convince either country to go ahead with the world domination thing. As to it popping out in 1944, maybe that's as far back as Savage could go with the time machine at that point.
    • Again, why not the USSR? They won the war too, after all. And it wouldn't be too hard to imagine a coup against Stalin succeeding right after the first German victories.
    • The Soviet Union was arguably a much better choice. Unlike Germany they already had vast natural resources under their control. They also had a much larger population. Given even modest improvements to their organization and efficiency they could have easily steamrolled the Nazis. This shouldn't have been all that hard, since most of the Marxist true believers had already been imprisoned or executed before the war began. The only problem might have been that decentralizing power would tend to fly in the face of Savage's ego.
    • One, the Nazi ideology is much more in line with Savage's inclinations than the Communist. Two, Stalin was more paranoid than Hitler, and less easy to manipulate.
    • Three, Savage knows the USSR was destined to eventually collapse due to the inherent economic fallacies of Marxist Communism. Taking over the USSR would mean dramatically reforming their economic model to prevent that from happening, and presumably Savage wasn't interested in that.
    • Also, Savage needed to pick the side that was losing the war so they'd accept the help from "the man from the future" and not just laugh/lock him in an asylum.
    • The USSR was not destroyed by "the inherent economic fallacies of Marxist Communism" had it been that the USSR would have collapsed long before when it did, it was brought down through a mixture of political upheaval in the eastern bloc not helped by Gorbachev's botched reforms to allow more open political expression and economic turmoil caused by their massive investment of manpower and resources into arming themselves and their invasion of Afghanistan going tits up and costing massive amounts of money. All of these seem like things Savage could have prevented since they where mostly caused by poor leadership.
    • Yes, poor leadership caused by the inherent fallacies of Marxist Communism. The political upheavals in the eastern bloc were caused in large part by extremely poor economic conditions resulting from the application of Marxist Communism, and their invasion of Afghanistan plus the nuclear arms race made things even worse. Savage could have taken over the USSR, but turning it into the world-dominating superpower he wanted it to be would have required a massive overhaul of their entire economic and political system. Nazism was much more suited to Savage's goal of world domination since it placed much stronger emphasis on the citizen's devotion to the State.
    • My guess is that Savage was on the side of the Nazi's already, most likely control over the Nazi's technology development, but wasn't in the position to take over power (he is immortal, and he may have been smart, but he just didn't have the tech to work with). That was, until his future self sent him the laptop containing all the tech, all the future knowledge of invasions/military movements, and where the enemy would be the weakest), that is the bargaining chip he needed to take power.
    • The mainstream Savage was a founding member of the Nazi Party, he picked their side because he openly supported it.
    • About the USSR and the "fallacies of Marxist Communism" he could just do what China did, you know? China is still a Marxist Communist country and its economy is pretty well and healthy and even the USA owes them money. China will probably surpass the USA as the main world power even with the terrible "fallacies of Marxist Communism" that they still follow. Savage could just make the same kind of economic reforms in the USSR than others did in China, with success. The real reason is that he despises Socialism because he doesn’t believe in the idea that everyone is equal and so the reason for choosing Fascist Germany is logic; Fascism is much more in tune with his personal ideology.
    • I agree that something like the Chinese approach might have turned the USSR into a powerhouse. But that's because the Chinese leadership effectively abandoned socialist principles. They reversed policies of collectivization in favor of private enterprise, albeit with sometimes heavy-handed "guidance" from the state. (It's not like they were ever "Communist" in anything but name. In a truly communist society, both private property and the coercive state are abolished, so "communist government" is an oxymoron.) The greatest threat to the advancement and future prosperity of China is the increasingly authoritarian behavior of the CCP.
• Another question from that episode: Savage's time machine can't take you back to a time when you already existed. Martian Manhunter is almost a thousand years old, according to Secret Origins. How did he go back in time with the others?
  • And Diana! Even if her origin has her in Themyscira until the 90's or whenever, she was still around back then.
  • Perhaps they meant that you can't travel to a place where you were at that point in the past. For example, he couldn't have traveled back in time to Mars but since he wasn't on earth during WWII it wouldn't cause problems.
  • Maybe I missed it but when was that rule actually stated in the episode?
    • It was stated in "Hereafter Pt. 2" with the future Savage explaining why he can't go back in time with Superman. Since the machine was built After the End, it might not have been as advanced as the one he used in "Savage Time".
• What kind of escape vehicle is a subway train? All they should have to do it follow the tracks to find Bat's hideout.
  • Subway tracks do merge in places. Bats would only have to go through a few forks in the road and have his own hidden private track to make that escape work.
    • He did disguise the entrance to his HQ as a dead end. Although you'd think a "disappearing" train would prompt the authorities to dig a little deeper...
• I don't know how this hasn't been mentioned yet: All that future technology. Germany still has factories producing the stuff, and while the ending handwaved an explanation for why they'd still lose the war in spite of it, history has been irrevocably changed in a major way. The Americans and Soviets aren't going to turn a blind eye to all that advanced technology...we certainly didn't in 1945. (think Oppenheimer and the space race) You would think the 1950s and early 1960s would be around the time they caught up with the early 2000s, and the early 2000s would have flying cars and other technology from Batman Beyond. Don't tell me that our heroes destroyed all the factories producing that stuff either. There would be notebooks, recordings, the minds of scientists all capable of rebuilding what they destroyed after they're gone.
  • That was explained in JLU, the Blackhawks helped clean up all the "weird sci-fi type weapons" and stashed all of it on an island.
• Where did Savage get all the resources to build war machines? Even if he had the specifications - building all of that should require large investments and that's not taking into account training of engineers and similar things.
  • Dude's been around for 10,000 years. He's been a conqueror and general high-roller in society since such things existed. He's got plenty of cash, and don't underestimate the wonders of compound interest.
    • "Resources" means a lot more than money. You need things such as iron, aluminum and copper ore along with smelters and mills to turn them into usable materials. You need crude oil and refineries to turn it into fuels and lubricants. You need rubber. (A major problem for the US in the historical WW II was that Japan controlled many of the world's rubber plantations.) Many of Germany's moves early in the war were aimed at securing resources they lacked, especially oil. You would also need to build or at least drastically retool factories to produce these advanced weapons. Depending on how advanced they were, they probably would have had to build tools just to build the tools to make them. Then there's the matter of training the engineers and laborers to build them and soldiers to operate them. Plus, if they were already at war they'd need spare parts and ammunition for existing weapons. One of historical Nazi Germany's big weaknesses was their eternal search for perfect super weapons. As good as some of their weapons were, they were never produced in sufficient numbers to provide a decisive advantage. By contrast, the Allies, especially the US and the USSR, tended to settle on designs that were merely "good enough" and then crank them out as fast as possible. Just to give one example, the Soviets built somewhere around 60,000 T-34 tanks during the war. German Panthers and Tigers were arguably individually superior, but Germany built fewer than half as many tanks of all models combined.