Reference to CTC was a big hint to me

When Mason described the ship's function by saying it used a 'closed timelike curve'-- or CTC -- that was a big hint, to me, that something isn't being revealed. This is just a GUESS, tho-- so not a real spoiler.

CTC is actually a legitimate theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_timelike_curve

If you think of time flowing thru the universe as being like water going thru a hose.... a closed, timelike curve would be like a bubble that forms in a weak spot of the hose--- kind of an offshoot of the timeline that isn't a part of the main timeline. A looping 'timeline-segment'.

"Donnie Darko" fans might call it a 'tangent universe'. It's a separate pocket of the timeline: "timelike" because it mimics the behavior of time, closed because it isn't part of the "main timeline". It's KIND of like a parallel universe, a little echo of a part of our timeline, which cannot complete itself, and is mostly "quarantined" from the events in the main timeline.

It lets you get around a "grandfather paradox", by suggesting that you and your grandfather lived in a CTC, you came backwards in time-- an act which pushed you out of the CTC, and you killed your grandfather in the main timeline-- where nobody's heard of you cuz you never existed before. OR-- the flipside happens: you launch your time-machine with the intent of killin' grandpa and it pushes you into a CTC; you kill him THERE, but to the point of view of the MAIN timeline, all your grandfather knows is you once hopped into a time machine and were never seen nor never heard from again.

It COULD be that a CTC is like the pearl that traps the bit of dust inside an oyster--- "trapping" paradoxes, so they don't harm the universe.

What this says to me is that these big changes to history-- like the whole thing with the Hindenberg-- are NOT happening to the main timeline, they could very well be happening inside a CTC; the main timeline is still unaffected, but it's a question of whether any of the time travelers will find that out.


I think Mason has his own agenda for keeping this info from the team, and I think it will be revealed as some big surprise twist.

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