Legends of Tomorrow, the Flash/Arrow spin-off

So that timer that went off on Eobard's watch.

I'm thinking that is related to preventing Time Wraiths from appearing and why he wanted to leave quickly in the end. I think that's going to be a big handicap for the Legion this season.

Since the Legends isn't using Speed Force based time travel and thus don't have to worry about them.

That sounds about right. Either that or, as someone who was technically never born, he has to do some procedure every so often to keep himself from fading out of existence. Which might explain his current quest: he needs a way to rewrite reality, because reality doesn't want him to exist.

Indeed. Since he's no longer playing out his timeline to his inevitable erasure, he might be using the opportunity to avert his future death.

THANKS BARRY!

Except he also does unless the event concluding the first season played out differently.

Actually, something I'm not clear on— is this version of Thawne from after he was erased from history? Before he got stranded in Barry's time? He seems to know exactly who he wants to snag from history and at what point in their lives he wants them, but he didn't know who the Legends were the first time he met them, right?

edited 10th Dec '16 12:28:36 PM by Unsung

It makes the most sense for him to be the post-Flashpoint Thawne, whose existence makes even less sense than it did previously.

Post-Flashpoint, Thawne didn't lose his speed after killing Barry's mom and instead ran into the timestream to do shenanigans - which is evidently what leads into this. Despite this, the whole thing with Fake Wells still happened, despite Thawne not having lost his speed or been around in the past to do it.

I suspect we're not supposed to think about it.

The implication is that Thawne is a time remnant, that the act of time traveling creates a buffer against certain paradoxes like how he was erased in the Flash first season finale. They described it with the Back to the Future timeline board that jumping back in time creates a fixed point in time. So either he is the remnant created after Flashpoint or this is part of his attempts to screw with Barry long before he tried to kill Nora Allen.

Insert Doctor Who quote here.

Remember, thanks to the way Barry undid the Flashpoint timeline, there are now two Eobard Thawnes in the Allen house the night Nora was killed. One lost his speed and became the Fake Harrison Wells. The other seemingly retained his speed, and is actually the one who brought Barry back to the present.

edited 10th Dec '16 11:06:25 AM by RavenWilder

I assumed that, like the extra Flash, the extra Eobard faded away when they returned to "fix" things.

Yeah, both the previous Thawne and Barry fade away. Plus right after the stabbing we're shown events from the first two seasons, which I'm assuming meant they play out the same.

I assumed that, just as they faded out-of-existence when the new Barry and Thawne arrived, they faded back into existence when those two left.

So what do you think the odds are of Malcolm finally paying for his crimes in this show?

If they want to have him die in Legends of Tomorrow, they can always say that Thawne recruited him a few years into our future (say, 2020 or so). That would still leave him able to appear on Arrow, since from his perspective none of the Legion of Doom stuff would have happened yet.

Slight change of topic: it'd be hilarious if they brought in the Joker I mean the Trickster for this teamup. Even just for a cameo. Also between Malcolm Merlyn, Damien Dahrk, and Wells!Eobard Thawne they might have about all the guys in suits they need, but I'd still kind of like it if Max Lord or one of the Luthors turned up.

I'd be super impressed if they did bring in a Supergirl element into the show.

They might not want to through, to avoid giving the villains too many options. It'd be really cool though if one of the boss mooks they use later in the season is from Supergirl. But relative power levels might make that a tad difficult to do. Although the TV shows don't really have any issue fudging the power levels a bit for a better plot.

So apparently THIS will be the lynchpin episode of the season.

A young George Lucas and a glimpse into a world without Star Wars or Indiana Jones. I agree with the article, has the potential to be incredible or stupid and cloying. While the show (and the entire Arrowverse) definitely has fun with the pop culture references, this could be a breaking point.

Ray's head is so full of science there's no room for intelligent decision making.

Losing his science might be an improvement.

Agreed.

I'd've preferred if they did something like that with Tolkien instead. And even then, it's still a little weird.

As much as I love Star Wars, given the time period it was in if it didn't become what it was something similar probably would have - the world of sci-fi and adventure movies would be different, not gone. It's like asserting that if the Jackson Five never formed, pop music would've never been invented. Or pinning the entire future of rock and roll on Chuck Berry.

Though to be fair, it's not like that sort of thing has ever been important to Legends before. Why, just a few episodes before had the idea that Elliot Ness dying meant Al Capone was never ever defeated ever, which is also a very pop cultural idea.

edited 1st Jan '17 9:51:58 PM by KnownUnknown

The article only says that Ray and Nate didn't become inspired to become a scientist/historian due to the lack of those movies, not that the genre would die. And there's no reason to assume that there would be another Star Wars for Ray to latch onto, at least not in the same way.

Watched Babylon 5 instead of A New Hope => Became an Optometrist instead of a Physicist. Boom, Butterfly Effect.

edited 5th Jan '17 4:29:57 PM by Soble

I think that underestimates the cultural impact of Star Wars, not just on sci-fi, but on movies in general. Obviously this is just one show's take on it, but I do wonder how different the sci-fi landscape might be if we never had Star Wars to make it mainstream and cool, to bring it back into the realm of pulp and pop rather than a high-concept niche genre for people who were in it for the hard science rather than the escapism. And Star Wars was also part of the initial wave that created the whole notion of blockbusters— crowd-pleasing action-and-special-effects bonanzas.

I can only imagine what it was like for those people old enough to have been young enough to see it when it first came out, but the historical impact of Star Wars is probably easy to underestimate. It's not the same as the the difference between the world before and after the internet, television, or telephone, and I don't know if it's as significant as the advent of sound or colour in film, but it's still one of those things where I imagine (and have read) that it's genuinely hard to picture the world before it if you've only experienced the world after the fact.

By way of comparison— Tolkien effectively created medieval fantasy as we know it today, and is probably more influential within that genre. But that genre didn't permeate the consciousness of the whole world to quite the same extent as Star Wars. Star Wars, by way of comparison, wears its influences on its sleeve and never pretended to be completely original— but it caught fire across the whole world, not just a certain segment of a given generation at a specific point in time.

It's possible I could be explaining this better, but I think that gets my basic point across.

Make no mistake, I'm well aware of the cultural impact Star Wars has had on history, society, and the development of film and storytelling across many genres since its release - and not simply due to being one of those writers who was, in fact, affected by that influence. What I'm calling bull on is the idea that if Star Wars didn't exist, a work of that impact would never have come along to fill the void. Or stuff like the idea that one of the characters never grew up believing in heroes because he never got to watch Indiana Jones as a kid.

Generally speaking, it's the idea that "in a world where x thing doesn't exist, rather than evolving in a different way the world is just missing a huge chunk of itself." Which is a pretty restrictive way to do time travel stories so yeah, it gets an eyeroll from me.

It's why I brought up the Michael Jackson -> pop music reference. Did Michael Jackson and his cultural influence go a long way towards defining pop music, introducing new avenues and genres to wider audiences, and shape the way blockbuster artists act and are received in the modern age? You betcha. If anything, people routinely underestimate just how impactful Mike was to the music industry. But looking at the state of the industry at the time he hit the scene, it's also not unreasonable to think that if the Jackson Five and Mike never blew up as they did, someone else could and honestly would have taken their place in history (pop culture, like nature, abhors a vacuum) - as a creative medium, there are tons of people poised to catch lightning in a bottle at any given time, only to be diverted when one of the few manages to do so at just the right time to spark a cultural revolution of sorts.

edited 5th Jan '17 9:08:55 PM by KnownUnknown

It might not have been that another seminal work of science fiction never came along, it's just that that piece of science fiction never reached the cultural impact that Star Wars had and thus never impacted as many people. For example: Dune is completely separate from Star Wars and might still have been made into a film (and how), but without Star Wars backing it up, it might not have become so popular. And still, there were other shows and films that were made solely due to the success of Star Wars (like Battlestar Galactica).

So perhaps it's not "There was nothing" and more "There was stuff, but it never achieved the same popularity and thus never had the same impact."

That's kind of silly too. It's the same the idea that the world, as we know it, is inherently more rich than any other possible world. The assumption that, if things were different, then the world couldn't possibly have things in it that are as valuable as what we have.

It's admittedly the kind of issue that can only really come up in time travel or what-if fiction. Though on the other hand, I have a similar issue with the way aliens are written sometimes.

It's just, I dunno, being able to write an alternate universe that has as much life in it as our own despite missing many of the things we consider key to our own lives just feels like such a better use of the opportunity. I personally can't imagine a world without Star Wars in it, but if I were writing a story involving a world like that I would certainly put in the effort to do so.

edited 5th Jan '17 9:23:06 PM by KnownUnknown