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Falcon and The Winter Soldier (spoilers)


Ser Scot A Ellison

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Now that I'm not on my phone anymore here is how I see it:

The universe is constantly splitting into alternate timelines. each instant trillions of creatures make decisions and each decision creates another timeline. The universe just has infinite ram so it's not an issue to run all these threads at once. No timeline ever gets "trimmed" unless maybe through some kinda magic stuff. There's also no universe consciousness merging threads where the differences aren't too major.  That's just weird unless you want to get into religion stuff. 

The other way to make timelines is via time travel. Because you're going back to a point on your timeline and causing something to happen that had not before: your presence. It doesn't matter if you're there for a second and don't even exhale, you still changed things by existing for that one second. 

The time GPS lets Cap travel back to a specific timeline without just creating another instead. That I got from someone on here. It's never actually established anywhere, but it's the only way that Cap can return the stones + hammer. But he can't return them unnoticed, so there's some awkwardness where he explains things. Once he's done he jumps back to the 1940's without using the GPS to keep him in an established timeline. So now he has a new timeline where he can marry Peggy, stop Hydra, save Bucky, stop Thanos, Ultron, The Mandarin, Trump, etc. and it's fine because he's just fucking around in another timeline he created via time travel. Then he uses the GPS to return to the main timeline years later after his wife has died. So he was not lurking in the shadows in the main timeline the whole time. 

All of this could be contradicted by the Loki show in June, but that's what I think is the most elegant explanation right now. 

1 minute ago, briantw said:

The way time travel is explained in Endgame, effectively any change they make won't impact the MCU timeline, but will create an alternate timeline.  This is why they can't just go back and choke baby Thanos in his crib, because that would create a splinter timeline but has nothing to do with the infinity stones.  

Right. 

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4 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

I think this is all very Back-To-The-Future ish and Endgame goes out of its way to avoid that. All the creating and undoing of timelines. In the many-world theory, there are an obscene number of other realities that already exist, and I’m positing that the Avengers visited one such reality to try and steal the space stone. Loki escapes with it, and as far as the inhabitants of that reality are concerned, that’s just what happened. Nobody created it, nobody can undo it. You could argue that the Avengers created the circumstances by which that reality differs significantly, but ultimately that’s just semantics - it’s not really any different from saying Tony ‘created’ the MCU timeline by becoming Iron Man. It’s just some stuff that happened.

If you're taking the course that the removal of stones makes a branch timeline, but the prime MCU is not changed, then Loki taking the Tesseract before it can be taken to Asdard, so Loki can take it from there is another branch. Just because it didn't leave the time period in question, the circumstances of the situation have diverged...

 

And my head hurts now...

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11 minutes ago, RumHam said:

So now he has a new timeline where he can marry Peggy, stop Hydra, save Bucky, stop Thanos, Ultron, The Mandarin, Trump, etc. and it's fine because he's just fucking around in another timeline he created via time travel.

So you're saying 98 year old Cap defeated Trump in the 2016 election?  I could see it.  That, or convinced Biden to run.  They're about the same age I think, it's plausible they're friends.

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8 minutes ago, RumHam said:

The universe is constantly splitting into alternate timelines. each instant trillions of creatures make decisions and each decision creates another timeline. The universe just has infinite ram so it's not an issue to run all these threads at once. No timeline ever gets "trimmed" unless maybe through some kinda magic stuff. There's also no universe consciousness merging threads where the differences aren't too major.  That's just weird unless you want to get into religion stuff. 

Totally agree with all this, and I hate universe-consciousness invoking theories. 

Quote

The other way to make timelines is via time travel. Because you're going back to a point on your timeline and causing something to happen that had not before: your presence. It doesn't matter if you're there for a second and don't even exhale, you still changed things by existing for that one second. 

I differ slightly here in that by travelling at all, you’re already in that divergent reality, you didn’t create it as such. You just affected it once you arrived.

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The time GPS lets Cap travel back to a specific timeline without just creating another instead. That I got from someone on here. It's never actually established anywhere, but it's the only way that Cap can return the stones + hammer. But he can't return them unnoticed, so there's some awkwardness where he explains things. Once he's done he jumps back to the 1940's without using the GPS to keep him in an established timeline.

I guess I agree that Cap had this option, I just don’t think it’s narratively satisfying or in character for Cap to live with an alt-Peggy and never give his Peggy her dance. 

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1 minute ago, DMC said:

So you're saying 98 year old Cap defeated Trump in the 2016 election?  I could see it.  That, or convinced Biden to run.  They're about the same age I think, it's plausible they're friends.

I'm gonna go with "in that timeline Steve makes Sam Captain America in 2015 and Trump has a stroke. "

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5 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

If you're taking the course that the removal of stones makes a branch timeline, but the prime MCU is not changed, then Loki taking the Tesseract before it can be taken to Asdard, so Loki can take it from there is another branch. Just because it didn't leave the time period in question, the circumstances of the situation have diverged...

Well, the Ancient One refers to removing stones from their reality entirely, which Loki didn’t do. The circumstances have indeed changed, but not from what was always going to happen in that reality; their history records that the Avengers stopped the attack on NY, but then failed to capture Loki. For them, that is the ‘correct’ 2012.

The Ancient One’s speech is actually a weird bit of dialogue. It feels like two separate questions welded together; she says the stones create the flow of time. Remove one, and you get a branch. Why’s that bad? It sounds implicitly bad, but she then just says “because we won’t be able to defeat Dormammu”. Isn’t the whole concept of the stones creating time flow redundant then? What does that actually do for the plot? The outcome would be identical if you just flushed the time stone down the toilet, never mind all this metaphysical stuff.

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16 minutes ago, Ghostlydragon said:

This is why they should have not had Loki get away. It creates so many arguments and debates about timelines that it would just have been easier to not do it :P

Well, it would seem the reason they had Loki get away is because they wanted to include him in the future, or post-Endgame - but did not want him involved with the Infinity War/Endgame arc.  Which makes sense in-universe as both him and Thor agree bringing him back to earth was probably a bad idea in the first place.

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3 minutes ago, DMC said:

Well, it would seem the reason they had Loki get away is because they wanted to include him in the future, or post-Endgame - but did not want him involved with the Infinity War/Endgame arc.  Which makes sense in-universe as both him and Thor agree bringing him back to earth was probably a bad idea in the first place.

True. It will be interesting to see Loki with none of his future development and see what happens next and how this will affect other events.

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Finished the second episode. 

The talk of the “Big Three” made me realize why the teacher in Spider Man: Far From Home thought everything was being cause by witches. 
 

Just a little while beforehand The Scarlett Witch had taken over a friggin town, and then fought another witch. I’m sure that made the news and was fresh in his mind. 
 

Edit: And on the main timeline’s infinity stones. When Thanos “destroyed” them, I thought they were really just dispersed. Won’t they coalesce again after a few million years?

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2 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

I think this is all very Back-To-The-Future ish and Endgame goes out of its way to avoid that. All the creating and undoing of timelines. In the many-world theory, there are an obscene number of other realities that already exist, and I’m positing that the Avengers visited one such reality to try and steal the space stone. Loki escapes with it, and as far as the inhabitants of that reality are concerned, that’s just what happened. Nobody created it, nobody can undo it. You could argue that the Avengers created the circumstances by which that reality differs significantly, but ultimately that’s just semantics - it’s not really any different from saying Tony ‘created’ the MCU timeline by becoming Iron Man. It’s just some stuff that happened.

It doesn’t change the existing timeline.  It creates a different coexisting but independent timeline.  That’s many-worlds.

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I think that the previews for the Loki show indicate they'll be getting into time travel a bit more:

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Loki is apparently "D.B. Cooper" which means he time travels to 1971 at some point, which is backed up by some of the visuals in the trailer, and clearly the "reality patrol" or whatever Owen Wilson's outfit is, seem to make going around fixing the timeline from massive fuckups, which I assume is what happens to Loki. It looks like he teleports from New York to Mongolia - still in 2012 presumably - and gets apprehended by these guys there.

 

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On 3/29/2021 at 6:10 AM, felice said:

I would assume the Thanos-less 2014 branch also still exists. The Stones might have been returned, but without Thanos and his army, there's no way for future events to end up consistent with the original timeline.

 

On 3/29/2021 at 7:49 AM, felice said:

My take is the universe doesn't like branching, and it only happens when the changes are too extreme to be reconciled. Possibly all branches tend towards eventual merging; the branches where the Avengers borrow then return the stones merge back into the main timeline almost immediately because the changes are insignificant, while it might be millions of years before the question of whether or not half the population of the universe vanished for five years is irrelevant ancient history. The permanent removal of an infinity stone might be one of the few changes extreme enough that the branch can never reconnect with the original timeline.

 

On 3/29/2021 at 2:34 PM, DMC said:

Agreed.  I mean, just even starting to think about the timeline where 2014 Thanos/Gamora/Nebula disappear makes your head hurt.  That would mean the GOTG didn't get together, Loki and Heimdall survive, and, of course, all of what happened in Infinity War didn't happen.  Sounds like a pretty good timeline overall.

Yeah I just can't accept the idea that the loss of Thanos from the timeline is not significant enough to create a branch reality. Given what he goes on to do the idea is absurd. The only way you can make the idea make sense for me is if the branched timeline can only be created by the removal of an infinity stone but time travel puts you in a temporary pocket timeline which essentially gets 4th dimensionally snapped & dusted when you leave it without removing an infinity stone. And this model shouldn't be compatible with Steve being able to return to the main MCU timeline and live his life with Peggy. It does work with Thanos being able to return to our reality though, because MCU Nebula is with him so keeping the pocket timeline from collapsing even after Cap has already returned the stone.

It also doesn't work for Loki though, unless he is able to use the space stone to travel to the main MCU timeline, he does leave before the pocket timeline collapses after all.

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10 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

But that isn’t what happened in that timeline originally.  Therefore new timeline created from the point Loki stole the Tesseract because the Tesseract isn’t taken to be stored in the vault on Asgard.

And that's what the Ancient One explained to Banner. The reason you can't change your past (as Banner rightly points out to his ignorant friends) is because if you go back and try to do that all you do is end up creating a separate timeline, which is the bit Banner didn't understand with his explanation. The only question is whether creating a new timeline only happens when an infinity stone is knocked off course, or if there is an even significant enough to knock the timeline off course.

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I got the impression that any kind of time travel that changes events from what happened in the time-travellers past creates a branch reality, but it's only when you remove an Infinity Stone from its proper branch that it causes all the terrible events the Ancient One was warning Banner about.

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10 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

It doesn’t change the existing timeline.  It creates a different coexisting but independent timeline.  That’s many-worlds.

The thing is, if we’re going strict many-worlds, then there’s trillions upon trillions of other realities created every second, regardless of whether you travel through time. In this sea of branching, the fact that a handful of time travellers arrived is almost meaningless. So the idea that they ‘created’ any of these realities seems moot, when we’re all creating realities all the time, just by typing words.

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1 hour ago, DaveSumm said:

The thing is, if we’re going strict many-worlds, then there’s trillions upon trillions of other realities created every second, regardless of whether you travel through time. In this sea of branching, the fact that a handful of time travellers arrived is almost meaningless. So the idea that they ‘created’ any of these realities seems moot, when we’re all creating realities all the time, just by typing words.

Not necessarily. In the multiverse there may be a limited number, several thousand or 10s of thousands, operating in parallel not a branching fashion. So billions of new universes are not created in every moment. New universes created with every decision a person makes would render the notion of displacing infinity stones in a timeline entirely trivial, and if the Ancient One has any reasonable grasp of the multiverse and time she would know that and thus not make a fuss of preventing just another timeline. A Time Variance Authority would also not need to exist, because again, why would anything matter on that sort of macro scale in the face of essentially infinite or at least utterly uncountable universes? Only the microcosm has any meaning to any individual or collective of individuals.

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29 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Not necessarily. In the multiverse there may be a limited number, several thousand or 10s of thousands, operating in parallel not a branching fashion. So billions of new universes are not created in every moment. New universes created with every decision a person makes would render the notion of displacing infinity stones in a timeline entirely trivial, and if the Ancient One has any reasonable grasp of the multiverse and time she would know that and thus not make a fuss of preventing just another timeline. 

As I said before, I don't think it's the creation of another timeline that concerns her. It's that that timeline, her timeline, would not have the time stone if she lets Banner take it. So Doramannu wins in Doctor Strange. 

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One note on the last episode: it introduces Elijah Bradley, aka Patriot. We already had Speed and Wiccan, sort of, introduced in WandaVision and the door is open for them to come back. And the Hawkeye show is to feature Kate Bishop. What other Young Avengers do we think are likely to crop up? Is this Marvel planning for Phase 5?

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2 minutes ago, mormont said:

One note on the last episode: it introduces Elijah Bradley, aka Patriot. We already had Speed and Wiccan, sort of, introduced in WandaVision and the door is open for them to come back. And the Hawkeye show is to feature Kate Bishop. What other Young Avengers do we think are likely to crop up? Is this Marvel planning for Phase 5?

Yea I saw a YouTuber make this case (Screencrush I think) and it seemed inevitable that that’s where they’re headed. Scott’s daughter is somebody I think, Tony’s daughter, a few others. Actually I think the Young Avengers are looking in better shape than the regular Avengers, in terms of the groundwork that’s being laid. 

I’d be happy to see it, although I’m not sure I want Disney to steer the intended audience younger as a result. It’d be a shame to have a kiddier branch of the MCU that I didn’t really wanna watch. Well ... a shame for me at least.

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