A bright idea about Legends
Aug. 16th, 2020 03:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI have been thinking more about Legends of Tomorrow and the 'rules' of time travel
... and also having imaginary conversations with Eobard Thawne, as you do.
So I got frustrated at the end of season one because the Time Masters perceived history as ending in the war in 2175 and so from their point of view had to make Hard Choices about what to do... but as soon as the Legends blew them up that was no longer an issue.
Because things work out when you're good guys?
But logically it can easily be because the Time Masters maintained their control over the timeline by making the only real decision makers the Council, who fit in a few stacked circles in one room. That's a pretty limited set of brains to do all the thinking. And they're all Lawful Neutral at the most optimistic interpretation, and the only way through they could imagine was to put a stronger Lawful Evil in charge, because hey, law and order. Without them other methods can be imagined, as demonstrated by the cheerful anarchy left in the Legends wake.
Because the Time Masters could not have imagined the Legends.
Time Master control also strongly implies they're the only time travellers. They can't imagine themselves the boss of free will if other parties can go back and undo them in turn. They called people Time Pirates for the crime of unauthorised time travel. How is that piracy? Well if all ships are Time Master ships, time travle implies stealing ships. Bit of a leap, but. In order to believe they have control over time they need to have a monopoly over it, and in order to do that they'd need to control scientific development. We've seen them acquire Stein at birth (since they took credit for manipulating Rip into doing exactly what they wanted) and he had only a basement full of theory. What do they do to people who actively work on it? Well there were a lot of Time Masters, and they're not all Captains or Council. I reckon they've stolen a bunch of scientists.
Stargirl has a staff but who invented it? Where are Starman and sons?
I realise I am speculating beyond the text but: in order to control time they needed to control time travellers, and in order to do that, control time travel, and the invention thereof. There are inventions that can never be allowed to be known outside of Time Master circles. They're not just classified compartmentalised, they've got ways of erasing memory and they're not afraid to use them.
So.
Some things dont get invented under Time Master rule, because that is a necessary prerequisite of Time Master rule.
Time Masters may have all of those unexisted things. But they're using them to control Time. On Earth.
The Waverider is a spaceship, but Hunter doesnt usually use her that way. It was a surprise to the Legends that they could go into space. Timeship usually hangs out in the temporal zone instead.
But time travel is necessarily space travel. That bit the Doctor says to Rose about the world turning, and he can feel it, that isn't the half of it. Everything is in motion, always, spinning and interacting in increasingly elaborate ways the more bodies you try and hold in your head. To travel to a different piece of Earth's history in the exact same geography necessarily means you're standing in a whole different spot in the universe relative to every other celestial body, all the other stars and planets, everything. Time travel is space travel. TARDIS.
Okay, but what if the kind of space travel that gets you there in a human lifetime is also time travel?
If restricting invention on one restricts what you can do in the other...
2175 becomes the end of the road for humanity
because we were all still here.
Eggbasket.
Time Master intervention to restrict, say, power sources capable of powering time travel, or understanding of physics that can lead to time travel, would also logically drag every other area of human endeavour, including space travel.
If space travel is time travel, because arriving at another point in space 'now' is... complicated, since the now you can see from here is a different now than you'd arrive in... Or if it's just fundamentally the same method, like learning about extra dimensions where it's a short step away...
Eliminating Time Masters eliminates the bottle neck by freeing up scientific development across the timeline.
Except! Time Masters will have been. They existed. The damage they did to time in order to control it arguably remains done.
And Rip Hunter's whole life is a case in point.
For the other Legends the closed loop paradox ends when Leonard Snart blows the Oculus and re enables free will for all of humanity, making sure time isn't just another prison.
Rip? Hunter had a habit of quoting the founder. That must get bitterly ironic to him, if he could see it before the end. He went and spent five years of his life founding what was intended to be a better institution, the Time Bureau. But the rules he managed to establish decided he also was bound by them and locked him up. The institution took so much damage it went hardline against travellers. Ava, in the last episode I have watched, was pushing a very ends justify the means line where protecting humans - only humans - is the only thing that matters. And they're also having some trouble with economics and political implications, which I'm sure could eventually lead to taking off for the vanishing point. Rip Hunter may well have closed the loop and founded the Time Masters.
Which is depressing.
But Ray Palmer, relentlessly cheerful Paladin, was never part of the Time Master plan. And Mick Rory, Rebecca Silver, was not part of their chosen history either. Even just those two can make so many changes to history between them. But there's a whole ship full of Legends, and they keep making friends in weird places, and that's going to change everything.
If the impact of the Legends makes a fundamental difference to how the Time Masters come to be...
... anything can happen. Anything. Finally.
Including travel to other planets, peaceful contact, and generally being a lot more like Supergirl's Earth, though obviously Crisis is a complete explanation in itself there.
... but I kind of like the idea the Legends broke a path for a kinder world, and in so doing created an Earth where all their friends get to live together.
I also like the idea that they are gradually creating so many loopholes that they'll crochet a net that doesn't need Snart's sacrifice to hold it together.
Then he's just quietly, casually, back again.
Maybe he got time scattered. Maybe they all did, the Time Masters who invented things included. A dogmatic Time Bureau wouldnt leave them be like that, they'd be anachronisms, but an institution that actually incorporates the principle that sometimes we screw time up for the better?
That changes, however chaotic, can be of the good?
Oh, all kinds of everything can happen, then.
So it's not just that the laws of time vary according to the needs of the plot
it's that making that true and embracing it can be what Legends are actually about.
All of which feels like a pretty bright idea right now.
But it spun out of me imaginging that Eobard with the spear actually closed the loopholes the Legends used by creating a reality without time travel, though Eo in specific is the last person who'd limit himself that way, but then I had to figure out physics and philosophy of what Time even is, let alone Time Travel, and then I figured it would screw up space travel and... all that stuff I just wrote clicked together.
I feel smart but also slow.
Also I feel like the writers are just doing their thing and will not, in fact, be building up to return Snart, because grief and guilt and not being able to undo your own life is what the story is About
but there's a bunch more story I haven't seen yet
so who knows.
I like this, there's ideas to work with.
... and also having imaginary conversations with Eobard Thawne, as you do.
So I got frustrated at the end of season one because the Time Masters perceived history as ending in the war in 2175 and so from their point of view had to make Hard Choices about what to do... but as soon as the Legends blew them up that was no longer an issue.
Because things work out when you're good guys?
But logically it can easily be because the Time Masters maintained their control over the timeline by making the only real decision makers the Council, who fit in a few stacked circles in one room. That's a pretty limited set of brains to do all the thinking. And they're all Lawful Neutral at the most optimistic interpretation, and the only way through they could imagine was to put a stronger Lawful Evil in charge, because hey, law and order. Without them other methods can be imagined, as demonstrated by the cheerful anarchy left in the Legends wake.
Because the Time Masters could not have imagined the Legends.
Time Master control also strongly implies they're the only time travellers. They can't imagine themselves the boss of free will if other parties can go back and undo them in turn. They called people Time Pirates for the crime of unauthorised time travel. How is that piracy? Well if all ships are Time Master ships, time travle implies stealing ships. Bit of a leap, but. In order to believe they have control over time they need to have a monopoly over it, and in order to do that they'd need to control scientific development. We've seen them acquire Stein at birth (since they took credit for manipulating Rip into doing exactly what they wanted) and he had only a basement full of theory. What do they do to people who actively work on it? Well there were a lot of Time Masters, and they're not all Captains or Council. I reckon they've stolen a bunch of scientists.
Stargirl has a staff but who invented it? Where are Starman and sons?
I realise I am speculating beyond the text but: in order to control time they needed to control time travellers, and in order to do that, control time travel, and the invention thereof. There are inventions that can never be allowed to be known outside of Time Master circles. They're not just classified compartmentalised, they've got ways of erasing memory and they're not afraid to use them.
So.
Some things dont get invented under Time Master rule, because that is a necessary prerequisite of Time Master rule.
Time Masters may have all of those unexisted things. But they're using them to control Time. On Earth.
The Waverider is a spaceship, but Hunter doesnt usually use her that way. It was a surprise to the Legends that they could go into space. Timeship usually hangs out in the temporal zone instead.
But time travel is necessarily space travel. That bit the Doctor says to Rose about the world turning, and he can feel it, that isn't the half of it. Everything is in motion, always, spinning and interacting in increasingly elaborate ways the more bodies you try and hold in your head. To travel to a different piece of Earth's history in the exact same geography necessarily means you're standing in a whole different spot in the universe relative to every other celestial body, all the other stars and planets, everything. Time travel is space travel. TARDIS.
Okay, but what if the kind of space travel that gets you there in a human lifetime is also time travel?
If restricting invention on one restricts what you can do in the other...
2175 becomes the end of the road for humanity
because we were all still here.
Eggbasket.
Time Master intervention to restrict, say, power sources capable of powering time travel, or understanding of physics that can lead to time travel, would also logically drag every other area of human endeavour, including space travel.
If space travel is time travel, because arriving at another point in space 'now' is... complicated, since the now you can see from here is a different now than you'd arrive in... Or if it's just fundamentally the same method, like learning about extra dimensions where it's a short step away...
Eliminating Time Masters eliminates the bottle neck by freeing up scientific development across the timeline.
Except! Time Masters will have been. They existed. The damage they did to time in order to control it arguably remains done.
And Rip Hunter's whole life is a case in point.
For the other Legends the closed loop paradox ends when Leonard Snart blows the Oculus and re enables free will for all of humanity, making sure time isn't just another prison.
Rip? Hunter had a habit of quoting the founder. That must get bitterly ironic to him, if he could see it before the end. He went and spent five years of his life founding what was intended to be a better institution, the Time Bureau. But the rules he managed to establish decided he also was bound by them and locked him up. The institution took so much damage it went hardline against travellers. Ava, in the last episode I have watched, was pushing a very ends justify the means line where protecting humans - only humans - is the only thing that matters. And they're also having some trouble with economics and political implications, which I'm sure could eventually lead to taking off for the vanishing point. Rip Hunter may well have closed the loop and founded the Time Masters.
Which is depressing.
But Ray Palmer, relentlessly cheerful Paladin, was never part of the Time Master plan. And Mick Rory, Rebecca Silver, was not part of their chosen history either. Even just those two can make so many changes to history between them. But there's a whole ship full of Legends, and they keep making friends in weird places, and that's going to change everything.
If the impact of the Legends makes a fundamental difference to how the Time Masters come to be...
... anything can happen. Anything. Finally.
Including travel to other planets, peaceful contact, and generally being a lot more like Supergirl's Earth, though obviously Crisis is a complete explanation in itself there.
... but I kind of like the idea the Legends broke a path for a kinder world, and in so doing created an Earth where all their friends get to live together.
I also like the idea that they are gradually creating so many loopholes that they'll crochet a net that doesn't need Snart's sacrifice to hold it together.
Then he's just quietly, casually, back again.
Maybe he got time scattered. Maybe they all did, the Time Masters who invented things included. A dogmatic Time Bureau wouldnt leave them be like that, they'd be anachronisms, but an institution that actually incorporates the principle that sometimes we screw time up for the better?
That changes, however chaotic, can be of the good?
Oh, all kinds of everything can happen, then.
So it's not just that the laws of time vary according to the needs of the plot
it's that making that true and embracing it can be what Legends are actually about.
All of which feels like a pretty bright idea right now.
But it spun out of me imaginging that Eobard with the spear actually closed the loopholes the Legends used by creating a reality without time travel, though Eo in specific is the last person who'd limit himself that way, but then I had to figure out physics and philosophy of what Time even is, let alone Time Travel, and then I figured it would screw up space travel and... all that stuff I just wrote clicked together.
I feel smart but also slow.
Also I feel like the writers are just doing their thing and will not, in fact, be building up to return Snart, because grief and guilt and not being able to undo your own life is what the story is About
but there's a bunch more story I haven't seen yet
so who knows.
I like this, there's ideas to work with.