S01.E01: The Rabbit Hole

[Jordan27]

On ‎2‎/‎17‎/‎2016 at 6:36 AM, shapeshifter said:

On ‎2‎/‎16‎/‎2016 at 10:12 PM, bilgistic said:

Did I read too much into it, or is the time jumping what caused Al's cancer? Jake says to him at one point that he (Al) was "fine five minutes ago". Don't spoil if it's the case; I'm only speculating.

Assuming the cancer reached an inoperable stage during the years Al was back in the 60s when treatment was limited, that means James Franco's character will have aged 2 years each time he pops back through the portal into the present, right? And how many times did Al reset? Maybe his cancer developed over 6 or 8 years in the 1960s (3 or 4 resets).

He will age the same amount of time he spends in the past, not two years.

[Jordan27]

I really liked it.  And I really like time travel stories.

I was glad they at least included making money by knowing past events like sports.  I know who won all the big games and I would be as wealthy as I wanted to be if I went back in time.   Don't know why he didn't give himself a way to make more money rather than working.  Time would be better spent on the case than teaching in school.  But, obviously, that would be boring and it's more of a plot point to have him meet all these people at the school.

The look of the sixties was great.  And I liked Franco's performance. 

Looking forward to the next episode to see if it gets even better.

[hincandenza]

On 2/16/2016 at 3:14 PM, Miles said:

When Franco asked the old man why he didn't just kill Oswald and he said, that he needed to be sure that Oswald was actually guilty, I was like "why?!". You kill Oswald, if he was guilty and you go back to 2016, JFK will never have been assasinated. Congratulations, you succeeded. If JFK was still assasinated, you go back to 1960 and everything resets. No harm, no foul. But now you are one step closer to finding the real killer without wasting years.

But really the reset-thing makes this whole endeavour pointless. Sooner or later, maybe in 10 years, maybe in 300, somebody will stumble through that time portal again, reset history and you will have wasted your life. Plus, think of the poor schmuck who does the stumbeling. His whole world will be completely changed (since from his perspective JFK always lived) and he can't do anything about it.

In conclusion: The premise is stupid.

Looking past the premise, it was okay. I guess we'll see how it plays out in the next few episodes. But I doubt that Franco alone will be able to hold my interest. He better aquire a sidekick fast.

As an aside, if I had made enemies of local gangsters on my first day, I would have reset that shit, hard, and then maybe memorised some lottery numbers, for next time.

Yeah, if I was Jake this would have been a 15-minute miniseries.  I'd simply say "Fuck Kennedy", memorize some recent powerball numbers from the last few months, then do a Back to the Future II/III telegram trick, to be delivered to myself a couple of weeks earlier from when I went through.  It'd tell me to go into the woods to an exact spot, dig up a box, and inside would be instructions on what numbers to play.  Then I could sip pina coladas poolside at my Malibu mansion, and never again think about the 35th President.

19 hours ago, Jordan27 said:

Your statement is silly.  If Kennedy is not shot, why would someone stumble through the rabbit hole and kill Kennedy?  Could something else in history be changed?  Maybe, maybe not.  No way to know if someone didn't already stumble through and change something.

It's actually not silly.  I mean, the premise is inherently going to have contradictions, it's a fake idea: there aren't portals in diners that take you back in time 50 years to rewrite history, so any story about them is going to have weird paradoxes if you dig deep. But Miles is not saying someone stumbles through 300 years later and kills Kennedy!

The rules seemed to be that there was an "original timeline" (the one we know of as our world/history), let's call it "OT".  This is basically the "gold standard" timeline.  Any time you go through the portal, you can make changes by being there, which becomes a new "altered timeline" (AT)- such as Kennedy not getting shot, etc.  Provided no one goes back through the portal, this is now the "real" timeline.  However, the Time Gods or whomever "remember" the OT, so when you return through the portal, you don't just undo the last change, like editing a Word document; you reset everything back to OT.  There is never more than one AT, if any at all; there's no "game save history" to go back through.

Consider this:

1. The world is running through "OT", as we all remember it, and as Al and Jake remember it.
2. Jake goes through, makes a change such as saving Kennedy, then returns.  We are now on "AT", which Jake likes and leaves as the new history.
3. Flash forward 300 years, it is now 2316.  Jake and others are long dead.  The world is awesome and cool and sparkly, thanks to Kennedy not dying.
4. Some random person accidentally walks through that space, is transported back to 1960- some 356 years earlier- and freaks out.
5. Random person immediately turns around and returns to the OT world... which is not their own timeline.  
6. AT- this person's entire world- has been permanently erased, since Jake is long dead and will never go back through to do whatever he did.  
7. That OT world in 2316 is probably hugely different than whatever AT world Jake would have created by altering the timeline.

Miles' point- which is fair, and not silly- is that unless that portal closes itself up, it's only a matter of time before someone accidentally wanders through and undoes all changes.  Thus, the OT is inevitable: eventually, whatever Jake did will be undone when someone else goes through, no matter how long it takes for that to happen.  

Not to mention- and this is the real horror of it- the longer a gap of time between Jake in 2016 and that random wanderer, the more shocked and misplaced the poor bastard will be when he or she returns to their "present time": they'll be returning to an OT in which they never existed, and of which the history is wildly different.  It's basically the premise of one of the most famous time travel stories of all time, Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder".

[KaveDweller]

I also don't think we know what happens if someone walks through the portal while Jake is still back in the 1960s. Say he decided to stay there forever with Sadie. Ten years later someone else goes through the portal. Does it reset? What happens to Jake?

All time travel stories have paradoxes like that because time travel is not possible and goes against all logic. When we think logically, we find holes.

[ganesh]

Conceivably, if someone goes through the portal, then it is 'locked' until they return. Which I have no idea if this is the case or not, but it's a workaround.