I don't see how Dad-Jimmy could go back and have children. There were only three minutes to spare between the completion of the receiving end of the time machine and the first doomsday event.
Sunner on a Rock
Re: Temporal Paradox: Averted
Rather than natter on the main page, I would like to discuss here the issue that there is no reason to expect a Temporal Paradox in this comic. Each decision creates an independent branching world, so for example if Father!Jimmy goes back and prevents Baby!Jimmy from getting his real father's memories it isn't a paradox, just another parallel world. The same "Man Who Folded Himself" trick allows later versions of Jimmy to come back over and over and keep repopulating the world.
Re: Mundane Utility
Technically, the Killotron doesn't destroy parallel worlds. It just creates myriads of humanity-free worlds, populated by wild animals and feral pets, with people only left on the handful of worlds where chocolate ice cream (for instance) was spontaneously generated by random quantum fluctuation. Since everyone (but young Jimmy) accepts this as an ordinary fact of life, this is All the Myriad Ways with a vengeance, even in the "utopia" ending.
Edited by 67.177.202.102
Re: removal of Screw yourself:
Arguably, this doesn't necessarily come into play. From the different memories, it's fairly certain that the Jimmy which the story starts with is the Jimmy split off when Dad-Jimmy goes back in time, and Scientist-Jimmy is still the original. Notably, though, none of the people after Baby-Jimmy kills everyone are female.
One interpretation is that everyone before Baby-Jimmy kills everyone are 'real people' and everyone after is Jimmy; this means that everyone except Baby-Jimmy (who grows into Boy-Jimmy) is in on the secret, with only Jimmy not knowing because he was a baby at the time and the one Jimmy that was stopped from accessing his dad's memories. However, if Dad-Jimmy went back and had children, that would instead mean that some of the people in his world aren't Jimmy. With only the characters shown, it's difficult to say one way or another.
Beyond this, the machine doesn't seem to grant Jimmy the wide-ranging powers that might be expected from Scientist-Jimmy's boasts, or he could presumably just create some more people, but even this is just a guess.
Edited by 65.93.215.17 Hide / Show Replies