CW's Flash

Sigh... Of course time travel doesn't make sense; it's complicated enough that an expert on time can't even put it into proper words.

If time travel ever makes sense, you're either traveling at +1 second per second, really lucky, doing it wrong, or high as a kite. Or all of the above.

edited 13th Jun '17 9:17:54 AM by WillDeRegio

I liked how the Librarians did it. you can go back, but literally the only way to go forward is one second per second living it.

Well off course Time Travel as a concept doesn't make much sense, but there are still several verses where they at least try to apply some kind of ruleset to it.

The Arrowverse has no kind of consistency in this regard whatsoever.

Legends off course being the worst offender.

What I liked about Legends is that the initial question A) why doesn't Rip just go back in time and stop Savage is answered immediately with "he already tried, he just f'cked up royally."

I mean it's not a perfect explanation and it kind of makes Rip the same kind of screw-up as his team but at least it was there.

And it still makes him a better time-traveler than Barry.

Though of course, at the end of the season they're left with the big unanswered question: "now that they'be taken care of the people actively preventing them from doing so, why don't they go with their original plan and stop Savage in the past?"

I would have liked to have seen more consequences from that. Someone whose influence is as global as Savage, it would've been cool to see some massive ripple effect if they actually were to succeed.

i mean the paradox there is even worse than a barry paradox. if they kill him anytime before roughly 1990-ish when the hawks came back after life 206, then this kendra and carter would never be born.

In The Flash, it feels like the rule is "whatever to screw Barry over", to be honest.

I can dig it.

Legends has never really cared about that. Stopping Savage at any point would have changed Rip's past such that he would never have started his crusade against Savage in the first place, and nobody ever even considers that a problem. Generally, time travel in Legends has the time traveler's actions be a part of history regardless.

Paradoxes are only really a thing on The Flash, and even then they only ever happen in strangely specific situations.

edited 14th Jun '17 5:44:08 PM by KnownUnknown

and only in negative ways, it seems.

Towards Barry.

Well, Barry's kinda a moron, so I can still dig it.

...Should I have started calling him Stupid evil Barry Allen? It feels like I should have.

It still gets a laugh out of me that at one point they prevent Eobard from going to the past in the first place, and the only effect this has is nearly killing Cisco. Out of everything it could have done.

HR's death stops Barry's time remnant from existing, therefore it should stop Savitar from existing, therefore it should have stopped HR from getting killed by Savitar therefore it should have stopped it from stopping Barry's time remnant from existing therefore oh god my head hurts.

edited 14th Jun '17 9:01:45 PM by alliterator

There are only a very few logically consistent time travel models.. and none of the shows use any of them.$

First consistent model: Closed loops. Whatever the time travelers do is how history always went. I hate this one because it turns all time-travel narratives into shaggy dog stories, but it logically hangs together.

Second consistent model: Time travelers appear in the present, and are utterly unaffected by what they do to change the future, because they are now one hundred percent a part of the present. Not only is killing your grandfather a-ok, killing your younger self is not a problem either. Usually this is described as a multi-verse, but it does not have to be, the logic is fine either way, tough this model has a meta-problem if it is a singular timeline (history will keep on being changed until you hit a reset that results in no more time-machines existing. Probably because everyone is dead)

That is mostly it. All other versions tend to just not stand up to any level of scrutiny.

There's also the old Ghost of Christmas Past model, where you can travel through time, but no one can see, hear, or touch you, so you can't change anything, just watch and learn.

That's actually how time travel used to work in really old Superman comics: he'd go back in time to Krypton, but was an invisible, intangible ghost the whole time he was there.

It's weird because the negative repercussions really started happening in the third season post-Flashpoint. There were many times in the previous seasons where Barry going back time was the best option. Heck, even Flashpoint was a better alternate reality than the current one we have today.

As weird as it is to say, it's not hard to see why Barry kept messing with the timeline. The first time he went back in time, he saved Central City and Cisco's life. Then another time, he saved the entire world.

edited 15th Jun '17 9:39:44 AM by deuteragonist

I made a tumble post that listed everyone's post flashpoint woes and ended with "if Flashpoint is supposed to suck, how do we know /this isn't the/real/ flashpoint"

I think I liked how Young Justice did it. can't go forward, only back, but you retain your memories of events as they happened in the 'original' timeline, not the altered one.

Seems like you could get around the "can't go back to the future" part by using suspended animation technology, though.

The bad thing about doing Flashpoint there is that Earth-1 lacks the number and level of heroes, villains and overall power to make a near apocalypse believable, so what they gave us isn't that bad. Yeah, things aren't as they are supposed to be, but it's not so bad.

That's true. But also remember that someone still died, it just wasn't Cisco. Also, that he ended up cockblocking himself since he changed the events that led to Iris realizing she was in love with him.

Now, when he went back in time during the second Arrow crossover, while there were immediate benefits, everything Oliver hid as a result of that alteration did end up coming back. Ollie ended being bound to the same promise, and Felicity did end up finding out regardless. Barry did say that these things still find a way to happen despite what you change. It feels like the consequences of these alterations tend to get bigger and bigger though.

So I blame Barry. I'm glad the Speed Force ate him.

The aesop of season 3, is that even Barry can become an irredeemable psychopath.

Zoom was right.

Existentialism is a crapshoot.

I maintain that the speedforce is totally amoral as a force of nature, caring only to preserve itself and the timeline. To that end, it tries to groom Barry, specifically, to be its champion, forcing him into situations where self-sacrifice and distancing himself from his loved ones are the most effective solutions. It punishes him harshly for stepping out of line and his happiness is only a priority in so far as it makes him a better protector of the speedforce.

I'm hoping Barry's latest disappearance is going to be a kick in the teeth, as maybe it'll realize that the way its treated Barry has led to him being a completely wasted investment. Or maybe it'll take the petty path and blame Barry for being too self-sacrificing now.

I like to take the view that the Speed Force's personality is formed by combining the personalities of all speedsters, past and future. So on the one hand, it looks out for Barry because it partially is Barry, as well as being partially Wally, Jay, and Jesse. However, it's also partially Thawne and Zoom, so it's also kind of a dick to him at times.