MovieChat Forums > Timeless (2016) Discussion > Why the rush to go back? They have a TIM...

Why the rush to go back? They have a TIME MACHINE!!


Why did they hurry up with going back to 1937?
They could have taken all the time they wanted (even if it takes years!!) to prepare for the trip appropriately and then go back in time and do everything not messing up.

Or did I miss something?

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Why did they hurry up with going back to 1937?
They could have taken all the time they wanted (even if it takes years!!) to prepare for the trip appropriately and then go back in time and do everything not messing up.

Or did I miss something?


I thought it was more odd that they just seemed to blankly accept the fact that history was irrevocably changed by their ineffective actions... instead of trying to make sure history went on as planned. -- Seemed a bit of a reach to me.

I think they went back to the future quickly, because it wouldn't make sense to stay any longer, since the villain character they are chasing also went back to the future. -- Information they are conveniently given by the ships being tied to the same time-transcendent network.

Also, it makes more sense for an hour-long program to tie a bow to each mission, by bringing them back to the present, and assessing the fallout of their actions.

That said, for a science fiction show, this show still manages to strain credulity. Suspension of disbelief only goes so far.

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Wow. You're right.
Why bother to go back at all?

Instead of just keep on going with the present because their own timeline/dimension will not be affected. They should know no matter what happens there's is a 99,99999% chance something will be changed and most likely already has because the nutjob went back.
If he comes back he will end up in a different timeline/dimension which HE created. It does not affect them at all.

Very good point and should be made a main topic here on this board.

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Wow. You're right.
Why bother to go back at all?

Instead of just keep on going with the present because their own timeline/dimension will not be affected. They should know no matter what happens there's is a 99,99999% chance something will be changed and most likely already has because the nutjob went back.
If he comes back he will end up in a different timeline/dimension which HE created. It does not affect them at all.

Very good point and should be made a main topic here on this board.


I didn't say that, nor do I agree with trying to make sense of varying timelines.

I don't know what you're on about, but it's definitely not, "mainstream."

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Yep. Turns out you did not really answer to my theory and while I read yours I got the idea with not going back at all which is my new favorite time machine plot hole in general.

About my first post:
I was talking about going from "present day" TO 1937 in a rush. They could stay in "present day" for a few days, months or even longer to analyze what to do and then still go back to 1937 because the situation with the other will not have changed.
I was not talking about staying IN 1937 for a long time (because of the higher possibility to mess things up).

But that doesn't matter anymore because they should not go at all.

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I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Larry Niven (one of the "hard science" science fiction writers) but he posited a theory about time travel and changing the past.

His theory was it could never have a future where people could alter the past. It went something like this...

If you COULD change the past, then the past would continually be changing until you reached a future where inventing a time machine was impossible, and then changing history would stop.

I am sure I have explained it badly, but I love Niven's work and I like the way he looks at things.

And then, of course, he proceeded to write a series of stories where the protagonist altered the past (Flight of the Horse), although he explained that away later by saying that the "time machine" was actually slipping across other dimensions.

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If you COULD change the past, then the past would continually be changing until you reached a future where inventing a time machine was impossible, and then changing history would stop.


I love that!!

I also like it, tho, when the story adheres to Novikov's self-consistency principle .In that theory, you cannot go back and ALTER the past... things in the past happened the way they happened and nothing can CHANGE them... BUT, it is possible that certain things did happen the way they happened, because of time travelers.

I.e. it's not possible to go back in time and stop the sinking of the Titanic, because that's an established part of history. BUT--- it's possible the Titanic was sunk by a time-traveler. You can't go back in time and change things -- you can, however, cause things to happen as they were 'meant' to happen-- the end result, being that no matter what you think you're GOING to do when you get to the past--- from the universe's viewpoint, you've already done it and we're already living with the consequences.

You cannot ALTER history, but you can be the cause of it happening the way it happened. Kinda like the first Terminator film. TERMINATOR SPOILER: The Terminator tried to go back to the past and kill Sarah Connor before her son John was born, but-- joke's on him-- he actually CAUSED Sarah to meet Kyle and make baby John. Whoops.

Sometimes fires don't go out when you're done playin' with them.

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Or did I miss something?



Well.. what we're seeing is that there's a "delay", regarding how history gets altered. They don't explain how it works in the show, no--- so you missed nothing.

But it SEEMS like they went back in time, spent 3 or 4 days in the past before they altered something there--- and THEN the change moved up the timeline and affected the present.

So theoretically, that's how it works--- even in the present day, the team only has those 3 or 4 days BEFORE Flynn strikes in the past, to stop him--- before history is changed and all the "butterflies" take effect.

But you're RIGHT... that still doesn't explain why, when they know he went to 1937, why they didn't go back to 1936, establish a friendly rappor with the local police a YEAR in advance and then wait on Flynn to show up.

(Like what Spock & Kirk did, when Mccoy went back to the 1930's they went back a lil' bit earlier and made friends with Edith Keeler, so they could jock-block McCoy when he finally showed up.) Except--- well, doing that could screw up even MORE stuff.


Sometimes fires don't go out when you're done playin' with them.

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that still doesn't explain why, when they know he went to 1937, why they didn't go back to 1936, establish a friendly rappor with the local police a YEAR in advance and then wait on Flynn to show up.

(Like what Spock & Kirk did, when Mccoy went back to the 1930's they went back a lil' bit earlier and made friends with Edith Keeler, so they could jock-block McCoy when he finally showed up.) Except--- well, doing that could screw up even MORE stuff.


Because... reasons. Namely, it's its own television program, which isn't bound to the theories or story-lines of other science-fiction works of yore, that have dealt with time-travel.

So, as they have aptly said during the show, they may very well, "make it up as they go along."

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I can think of several technobabble explanations they could have used, but you're right that it's sad they didn't even bother trying.

For example, a follow-up jump might need the other pod's tracker to still be active. Perhaps that tracker is like an airliner's black box, where it runs off an independent battery that has limited life.

What bugged me is, just what sci-fi model of time travel are they using? If there's only one timeline, then none of them would have remembered the original Hindenberg crash because once the hijacked pod left, it never happened. Nobody would even have any idea what the "original" past was! Some stories try to work around that problem by having the revision move through time like an expanding wave in a puddle. That gives the future crew a limited window before all their memories and histories change.

(That was the "Back To The Future" model, using fading photographs as a metaphor to show the approaching wave of changes. Though I never did buy the one while Marty's on-stage. How would the time-wave of changes moving towards 1985 affect Marty while he's in 1955?)

If there are multiple branching timelines, it makes sense that everybody still remembers the Hindenberg...but then all the hijackers did was create a new timeline split at that point. The heroes timeline hasn't changed at all, so why try to undo anything? Just recover your stolen pod, improve your security, and move on with life.

This model prevents paradoxes, but isn't as much fun since you can never change your own past. You can only create a new future for the people who were there. That's mostly useful if you want to take your boomstick back to the Dark Ages and conquer the primitive screwheads there, staying in your new timeline forever.

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Though I agree, and am not trying to defend the show when I say this, but I thought they raced back in time to ensure the guy didn't go after all the known scientist and eliminate them from time, thus stopping them from ever coming after him & his crew.

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Good point! But you have to remember the people that took the time machine are criminals and of course you want to catch criminals as quickly as possible.

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There's something that you have to accept and that is that people who write science fiction for TV (and often movies) either don't understand basic logic and causality or they are quite happy to treat their viewers like they are stupid.

There are at least four different ways that you can do time travel to the past without treating viewers as if they are stupid:
1. There is a multiverse with near-infinite possible timelines. In such a universe, every change you make in the past creates another timeline. One example of this is James Hogan's "The Proteus Operation". This kind of time travel means that if you travel back in time and do anything, you cannot return to the same timeline you left. In fact, it's possible to return to a timeline in which time travel was never invented, or you were never born. It's even possible to meet multiple versions of yourself, like in David Gerrold's "The Man Who Folded Himself" (the main character in the book ends up living with many different versions of himself from different timelines).

Note that there is a subcategory of this that includes bubble universes -- a great example of this is "Corrupting Dr. Nice" by John Kessel. He actually has tourism to the past, entire bubble universes that have been turned into luxury tourist destinations.

2. There is only one timeline, but some periods of time cannot be touched because they are key to history. This one is less plausible, but it's been done well in books like Connie Willis's "Doomsday Book". It's not logical because any analysis leads to the conclusion that there is some invisible hand that prevents changes to the timeline.

3. Time travel is allowed, but you whatever you do in the past, you've always done and were always going to do, so you can't actually change the timeline. The main problem with this is that it eliminates the possibility of free will. This is fine from a logic standpoint but is a bit unsatisfying from a story standpoint.

4. Time travel stories in which changing the timeline is not considered because it's irrelevant to the story. An example of this is the movie "Time after Time". This really isn't a separate premise, just one in which you don't have to actually decide on the way time travel works because it never comes up in the story.

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3. Time travel is allowed, but you whatever you do in the past, you've always done and were always going to do, so you can't actually change the timeline. The main problem with this is that it eliminates the possibility of free will. This is fine from a logic standpoint but is a bit unsatisfying from a story standpoint.

This is actually the only philosophically coherent account of time travel, but I don't agree that it eliminates free will. Free will is just as present (or absent, depending on your opinion of determinism) in the past as in the present. In any time period, there are many things that a person did not do -- not because the person lacked the free will to choose to do them, but simply because they weren't done. Something else was done instead. E.g., today (my immediate past), I did not fly on a jetliner to Moscow. Why not? Well, I suppose I could adduce a great many reasons, but one of them would not be that I did not have free will and therefore could not have chosen to fly to Moscow. I also can infer that if I ever will have traveled to the past, I did not kill Hitler before he rose to power. Why didn't I, if indeed I was there? I don't know, but it wasn't because I lacked free will. Time travel has no effect on that.

You have a point that this perspective on time travel tends to restrict the types of stories that can be told, mainly because the "change the past and observe the paradoxes!" trope is so overwhelmingly popular. However, a story with rigorous temporal logic can often be more satisfying than the philosophically looser, "anything goes" time travel tales. One well-known example is the film version of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The time travel sequence is elegantly constructed and does not involve changing the past.

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It actually does eliminate the possibility of free will -- it does because it eliminates the possibility of going back in time and changing things that you know have happened, even if those changes are easy.

Easy example, let's say you wake up and drive to work and you get into an auto accident. Getting into that accident may set off a whole chain of events in your life that are negative (something similar happened to me in real life, although I don't have access to a time machine). Someone ignores a red light and smashes into your car. You know if you had arrived at that intersection 5 minutes earlier or 5 minutes later, you'd have avoided that accident. The existence of free will means that you should be able to go back in time to either delay yourself or to make sure that you leave a bit earlier. The only way you should not be able to do it assuming you have access to a time machine, is if you lack the free will to do so -- you've never done it before, you will never do it in the future.

What you may be forgetting is that the timeline doesn't just include all of the big events in history, but also all of the tiny events in your life. If you posit that you can travel back in time, and no matter what you do, nothing will change, well the only way that can happen is if you lack the free will to make those changes, because some changes are incredibly easy, It's the 'foreknowledge' (after you've traveled back in time) that makes those small changes easy. Big changes may be hard, but if you believe in the butterfly effect, they actually may be easy also (only not so predictable).

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It actually does eliminate the possibility of free will -- it does because it eliminates the possibility of going back in time and changing things that you know have happened, even if those changes are easy.

No, time travel and free will are independent concepts. Being able to jump around in time has no logical or physical connection to the existence of free will in a rational being. The fact that, under the "can't change the past" interpretation of time travel, the events in the past happen only once and cannot be redone, does not mean that the people who were involved as actors in those events had no free will.

Your argument is really the much older and more traditional complaint that certain types of knowledge may be incompatible with the existence of free will. For example, 1,700 years ago Augustine addressed the argument that because God knows in advance everything that will happen, people can't have free will. Events in the future are "fixed" and we can't choose otherwise; therefore, free will doesn't exist. Augustine's counterargument was that mere knowledge of what is going to happen is not the same as the event's being required to happen. What he said was (and this is an interesting comment from the point of view of time travel theory), "God's knowledge of future events does not cause them to happen, just as my knowledge of past events does not compel them to occur." In other words, knowledge -- even certain knowledge -- is not the same as causation. I'm not claiming that Augustine's argument is perfect, since he conveniently omits any mention in this context of God's supposed omnipotence. But I think his point about events in the past is correct.

If you were a time traveler with amnesia, would you believe that you had no free will? I.e., if you were in the past but had forgotten what was "supposed" to happen, and therefore didn't have to worry about making a conscious decision to attempt to change the past, would you conclude that you had no free will? Of course not. There would be no reason to believe that your theoretical capacities as a rational being would be any different in one time period than another, even if one of those periods was in your own past. Therefore, simply adding back your knowledge of the past should have no impact on whether you are "free" or not.

It's possible that humans have no free will in any situation. As I've noted, this depends on your view of determinism. But if free will does exist, it exists equally in all temporal frames of reference, whether the events in question have already occurred, are in the process of occurring, or will occur later from the point of view of the actor. This is true even if it is also true that each event happens only once and cannot be changed after it has happened.

The only way you should not be able to do it assuming you have access to a time machine, is if you lack the free will to do so

I think this statement is just incorrect. Why would the absence of free will ever be the only reason for being unable to do something? That would make sense only if the single, solitary cause for an event to happen or not happen were an individual's psychological choice, but that is simply never true in reality. Every event has multiple causes -- indeed, a web of causation -- no matter how "cause" is defined. Nothing in the world outside my own subjectivity is determined solely by my mental processes, i.e., acts of will. Indeed, much of the time my choice is one of the least important factors in determining whether or not an event occurs. Even if I choose right now to fly to Moscow, that doesn't mean I'll get there.

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Why would the absence of free will ever be the only reason for being unable to do something?

You are missing something here in your logic. I'm not arguing that you should always be able to change anything in the past. That's not my argument at all. I'm also talking about one specific model of time in which there is only one timeline.

Assume that I can travel back in the past if they wish to. And let's say that I have a memory of myself from the future going back into the past to warn myself about a car accident. In a model of time travel in which this has always happened, how could I have known about the car accident that never happened because I've always warned myself of it? It's impossible. Therefore I can't have done that. On the other hand, let's say that I am in a timeline where I do experience the car crash. How come I can't change that? Wouldn't I want to?

There will ALWAYS be for someone an incentive to change what has happened to them. Let's say that all of those people can travel into the past. Why would they not all do so? There's only one possible reasons: they CAN'T do it. Since I explained, you cannot avoid having an effect on the timeline, given that you can travel along it, that necessitates that in EVERY possible time travel situation, you will fail to do so. Every one. Talk about unsatisfactory explanations. That leaves an inability to do so through lack of will in every possible case, or the impossibility of time travel.

Physicist Richard Muller wrote a hypothetical story. Mary has a gun that can fire a bullet that is made of tachyons -- a particle that travels backwards in time. She fires that gun at John. Because the bullet is traveling backwards in time, John is dead seconds before Mary fires the gun. So the question is, is Mary responsible for John's death? Since John was already dead when she fired the gun, she would argue that you cannot murder a dead man. The only explanation is that Mary has no choice but to fire the gun, given that John is dead from her bullet.

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Assume that I can travel back in the past if they wish to. And let's say that I have a memory of myself from the future going back into the past to warn myself about a car accident. In a model of time travel in which this has always happened, how could I have known about the car accident that never happened because I've always warned myself of it? It's impossible. Therefore I can't have done that. On the other hand, let's say that I am in a timeline where I do experience the car crash. How come I can't change that? Wouldn't I want to?

You are conflating about three different paradoxes in this paragraph: the grandfather paradox, the bilking paradox, and the paradox of the causal loop. But none of those are definitively inconsistent with free will. In fact, because they are paradoxes, they can't be used to conclusively demonstrate anything about the world, including whether or not free will exists.

And again, the point about time travel is not that, "I can't change that." It's that you didn't change that. Whether you wanted to or not is irrelevant. Suppose you get out of bed on Saturday morning and think, "I want to see Deepwater Horizon today. I have decided that I absolutely will go to the theater today and see Deepwater Horizon." But come midnight, you haven't seen it. It doesn't matter why -- there could be a hundred different reasons. Maybe you fell asleep. Maybe your lost your wallet. Maybe there was a power failure. Maybe you got sick. Maybe your spouse/paramour found something else for you to do. Whatever the reason, at the end of Saturday, would you say, "I remember that I wanted to see the movie today, but somehow I couldn't do it! I must not have free will!" I don't think so.

With respect to your other argument, as I mentioned in my previous comment, you greatly overestimate the importance of a person's "will" as the fundamental cause of events around him/her. There are plenty of things that we try to will into reality that never come true. That doesn't mean that our will isn't free, but only that its efficacy is limited.

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I'd like to add that the first writer to consider "change the past" logic was, of all people, Lewis Carroll, in a little-known novel called "Sylvie and Bruno". Somebody goes into the past and makes a change, but there's no sign of the change when he returns home. He's told that making a "permanent change" won't work.

Mark Twain did time travel in "Connecticut Yankee", but didn't really consider paradoxes. He dodged the issue by saying that Merlin and the Church wiped out all of the Yankee's inventions so that history ultimately wasn't changed.

In "Christmas Carol" Scrooge asked whether the future he saw could be changed. Turned out that it could. Dickens didn't consider changing a past.

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In "Christmas Carol" Scrooge asked whether the future he saw could be changed. Turned out that it could. Dickens didn't consider changing a past.

I think Dickens probably did consider it, and therefore carefully ruled it out by noting that the past on display was merely "shadows of the things that have been." Or as explained in Scrooged, "This is not live. It's like a rerun." Avoiding a trip to the "real" past eliminated any possibility of fixing Scrooge's past mistakes before they happened, which wasn't the story Dickens wanted to tell.

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The concept that making a permanent change won't work is bad logic. It violates causality, and without some kind of causality, you have complete chaos. Either that or you traveled only in your imagination. If you are actually physically present at a past point in your own timeline, but cannot interact with it, that goes back to either having no free will, or you are not actually present, because causality would dictate that everything has an effect. Even if you do nothing, your body has mass, it occupies space, it has a gravitational field, photons bounce off you, air molecules move around you and experience friction, your body radiates heat, possibly warming the area around you. You may even inhale oxygen, exhale carbon dioxide, and maybe even pass gas, or sneeze, or drool. If you do nothing, your presence alone in an earlier point in the timeline has an effect, even if that effect is difficult to measure. You've heard of the butterfly effect -- think of yourself as a butterfly, only with much bigger footprints.

As far as Mark Twain and Charles Dickens are concerned, those both fall into my category 4, where it's not relevant to the story. The story still works without that consideration. The fact that neither Twain nor Dickens considered the possibility of changing history doesn't matter because the story works. It's only when changing history becomes a part of the plot that it can ruin the story when done badly. I'm not talking about time travel being possible in a physics sense, I'm talking about it being just plausible enough that an intelligent reader will accept it without giving him a brain hemorrhage.

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Your missing the point of the fate scenario. It isn't so much that you lack the ability to effect the past so much as the fact that you already did effect the past. You were always going to from the very start. You going back in time is an event that will always happen, you just hadn't experienced it yet.

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The entire pilot episode was extremely rushed and full of nonsense. I expect it to be canceled in no time (pun intended).

Rhetorical questions that go through my mind:

If you owned a wealthy company working on a real time machine project, why have it above ground protected by only one weak fence with two guards on duty? It's a freaking time machine. Automobile prototypes have better security!

Why send a drunk soldier who is prone to letting his emotions cloud his judgement? It's a mission to save the freaking timeline, not a field trip to Pioneer Land.

Why didn't the present instantly change the at the same moment that the hijacked time machine vanished? That idea mentioned that they could have just decided to do nothing and remain in their unchanged timeline seems like the plausible answer, because I don't buy into that whole "waiting for time waves" to slowly catch up to the present.

If the "bad" guys have that book which the hipster historian supposedly wrote, then wouldn't they have known their Hindenburg plan was going to fail in the way it did? Ugh.

The only cool thing about this show is that the "bad" guys are not trying to destroy America in the cradle at all, instead they're trying to save it from the tyrants who would financially/politically corrupt the nation. But for them to mess around with such a big event like the Hindenburg is way too far fetched just to kill a few powerful people. They stole a time machine and had the perfect chance to hop around through history to eliminate their targets one by one without causing a lot of other problems.


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Why did they hurry up with going back to 1937?


First, any show dealing with time travel is going to have paradoxes, so the writers either have to "explain them away" (in some manner) or skip over them all together.

I would think that they would have to rush to the past, because things that change the past will have an effect on the future. If they wait too long to go back, who knows what kind of things will be affected.

At least one other poster mentioned that they could go back earlier than the mothership and spend time to prepare thwarting the "bad guys", but the longer they interact with the past, the more things they could accidentally mess up for the future.

However, the main reason (most likely) is that the writers have roughly 45 minutes to tell a story each week and watching the team waiting around for "years" to prepare would get old fast (no pun intended).

My 2 cents.

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However, the main reason (most likely) is that the writers have roughly 45 minutes to tell a story each week and watching the team waiting around for "years" to prepare would get old fast (no pun intended).

I know of at least one example of that. Stargate: Continuum, where Mitchell is forced to go 10 years further back in time than he wanted to and had to face the villain as a much older man.

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