S01.E04: Party At Castle Varlar

[Thalia]

Quote

 The purpose of getting into grad school is to get out of it, so you check the boxes.  

22 years ago I got a PhD, in American History, from a well-respected University and was lucky enough to immediately get hired for a tenure track job at a state university.  Disclaimer:  I was never part of any time-travel experiments, and if I told you about them, I'd have to kill you.  

I left academia 14 years ago, but at the time I went to grad school, you still had to pass the foreign language requirement to prove you were a well-rounded scholar.  For the Americanists, this meant passing a test in any language you chose, even tho it had nothing to do with your scholarship.  (I wonder if they accept Klingon now?)  After two or three tries I finally passed the written Spanish test and happily went on with my life, barely able to read the menu at a Taco Bell.  

As for whether a black man played Rufus in the new James Bond movie, I paused on the "poster" they looked at on the tablet, and I'm pretty sure I saw a representation of a black actor.  

[ketose]

4 hours ago, iMonrey said:

I think it's easy for me to grasp this concept because I was a big Sliders fans. For those not in the know, that show explored the concept of alternate timelines/worlds/earths. In each one, history unfolded in a different manner. Since the lead characters came from their own world, they existed as themselves wherever they traveled, even if they didn't exist in that world, i.e. had never been born in that reality. However, if they had been born in that reality, then suddenly there were two of them: the ones who had traveled there, and the ones who had been born there.

Arrgh! That's a good question, if head-splitting. The best I can wrap my head around it is this: there were not 2 Lucys - one with a fiance, one without. There was just one Lucy who got in a time machine and altered history and, consequently, her own reality. But - not to the extent that in the new timeline she was never recruited by Mason Industries and never traveled back in time. If she had altered her own history to that extent, then yes - there should have been two Lucys upon her return.

Hey, that's a good point. Didn't they say they couldn't travel back to a past where there would be two of them? Or did they just mean it was too dangerous to encounter their past selves?

They should call the time pod Schrodinger's box.

[Netfoot]

6 hours ago, LoneHaranguer said:

He didn't write anything called Never Say Never Again either; that film was a remake of Thunderball.

A rubbish remake, that hoped to capitalize on the return of Connery.  It wasn't produced by Eon either.  This and the original Casino Royale, produced as a comedy and starring an octogenarian Bond, played by David Niven.  Also rubbish!  

Wait.  Where did the topic go?

[DAngelus]

On 10/24/2016 at 7:09 PM, Emily Thrace said:

FFS Ian Fleming was never active SOE. He actually washed out of Camp X. He just was a Royal Navy intelligence so he got to read their case files. He sure as fuck was never anywhere near Berlin. I wish this show would decide if it wants to take itself seriously or not.

Yes, exactly.  Fleming wasn't in MI-6, his accomplishments were setting up Operation Goldeneye (a framework for British Intelligence to operate in Spain, had Franco joined the Axis or the Germans taken over from him) and organizing 30 Commando, which ran with the front end of Allied advances to capture documents.  (As loosely seen in the movie Age of Heroes.)  Fleming followed the commando unit into Europe, after the invasion, but never behind enemy lines.

"James Bond" was a composite of several real-life spies, none of them Fleming.  The closest analogue would be Fitzroy Maclean, but his work behind German lines was in the Balkans, with Tito's partisans, not in Germany itself.

The bit about Fleming's brother Michael dying in the Blitz is entirely true, however.  But that wasn't the impetus for Fleming to join Naval Intelligence; he'd been recruited in 1939 and Michael was killed in 1940.  And of course the bombs dropped during 1940 were dropped from bombers; the "buzz-bomb" V-2 Rockets that von Braun created didn't hit England until earlier in 1944.   In 1940, von Braun wasn't even working directly for the High Command; he was still at Heinkel Flying Works, under Ernst Heinkel, putting rocket engines on Heinkel's fighter planes.  (Heinkel would eventually create the world's first jet aircraft, but that was after von Braun had been moved to the rocketry program.)  I mean, von Braun's engines gave greater speed to Heinkel's fighters that protected the bombers that dropped the bombs on London, but that's a bit of a tertiary connection, IMO.

Also, early in the episode, Wyatt says they're en route to Antwerp.  Well, that should have been a giveaway he's a spy, since the episode was set on December 7, 1944, and Antwerp had been liberated by the British three months earlier, on September 4th.  I mean, it could have been code, but why make the code that obvious?  If the "captain" hadn't been "Fleming", they'd have been screwed.

Still, on a personal note, it was nice to see an episode about Fleming, as he's easily the coolest member of what I call "Team 5/28", after our shared birthday.  I mean, better him than an ep about Rudy Giuliani, Marco Rubio, or Elizabeth Hasselbeck, I'm just saying.  Or even Jim Thorpe, Jerry West, John Fogerty, Gladys Knight or Carey Mulligan.

In fact, since last episode was about JFK (born May 29, 1917) and this one was about Fleming (b. May 28, 1908), I was expecting next ep to be about somebody born on May 27.  But, no, no Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt or Amelia Bloomer on tap.  Nor even the two May 27-ers I know off the top of my head, MLB Hall of Famer Frank Thomas and ex-Taylor Swift backup singer Liz Huett.  A pity, as I was composing the outlines for those in my head…

"Following the revelation that Flynn is a lifelong fan of the Montreal Expos [who actually got their franchise on May 27, 1968, which I did not know], the team realizes that he plans to prevent the MLB strike of 1994, which cancelled that year's World Series and spoiled what was to be the Expos' best chance at the championship they never won, by killing the reigning AL MVP, Frank Thomas of the Chicago White Sox, and shaming the players out of going through with the planned strike.  Things get even worse when Lucy, Wyatt, and Rufus learn of Flynn's plan to pin the assassination on a distraught White Sox fan, Michelle Robinson, supposedly upset over her team's 77-year championship drought, and ruin the nascent political career of Robinson's husband, Barack Obama…"

OR

"Following the shocking news that Flynn is a huge fan of the actress Camilla Belle (he's seen 10,000 Years B.C. 10,000 times, he claims), the team travels back to 2011, desperately trying to stop Flynn from disrupting Taylor Swift's "Speak Now" tour by attacking during Swift's anti-Camilla slut-shaming song, 'Better Than Revenge'.  But is Flynn planning on taking his own 'Revenge' on Swift herself…or on the backup singer who plays Camilla during the choreography?  Guest-starring Elizabeth Huett as herself."

Okay, so maybe the Alamo is a better idea, after all.  But still…

Edited October 26, 2016 by DAngelus

[LoneHaranguer]

19 minutes ago, Netfoot said:

Wait.  Where did the topic go?

Sounds like you're suggesting that the writers should have limited their name-dropping to good Bond films, which is a fair point. Why remind viewers of rubbish just for the sake of an easier word play?

[legaleagle53]

13 minutes ago, DAngelus said:

"Following the revelation that Flynn is a lifelong fan of the Montreal Expos [who actually got their franchise on May 27, 1968, which I did not know], the team realizes that he plans to prevent the MLB strike of 1994, which cancelled that year's World Series and spoiled what was to be the Expos' best chance at the championship they never won, by killing the reigning AL MVP, Frank Thomas of the Chicago White Sox, and shaming the players out of going through with the planned strike.  Things get even worse when Lucy, Wyatt, and Rufus learn of Flynn's plan to pin the assassination on a distraught White Sox fan, Michelle Robinson, supposedly upset over her team's 77-year championship drought, and ruin the nascent political career of Robinson's husband, Barack Obama…"

OR

"Following the shocking news that Flynn is a huge fan of the actress Camilla Belle (he's seen 10,000 Years B.C. 10,000 times, he claims), the team travels back to 2011, desperately trying to stop Flynn from disrupting Taylor Swift's "Speak Now" tour by attacking during Swift's anti-Camilla slut-shaming song, 'Better Than Revenge'.  But is Flynn planning on taking his own 'Revenge' on Swift herself…or on the backup singer who plays Camilla during the choreography?  Guest-starring Elizabeth Huett as herself."

Okay, so maybe the Alamo is a better idea, after all.  But still…

The problem is that you can't go back to an era where you already exist, so both your 1994 and 2011 episodes would be impossible, since our trio were all born before 1994 (Lucy, for example, was born in 1983, so the latest year she can go back to is 1982).

I did some research on Wernher von Braun, and it seems that he wasn't quite as cavalier about the practical results of his work as the episode would lead you to believe.  It's true that his main concern was getting mankind into space (specficially, the moon and eventually even Mars), and to that extent he was decades ahead of his time, but he was very much aware of the human cost, especially when it came to the men who were killed during the manufacture of his rockets.  Also, the episode makes it seem as though he was simply a political football who would allow himself to be turned over to whichever side would most further his work, but the truth is that he voluntarily surrendered to the US because he was terrified of what the Soviets would do to him if they got their hands on him.  He fell deeply in love with the US after he moved here to work, and he became an American citizen in 1955.  He also eventually became one of NASA's first directors.

Edited October 26, 2016 by legaleagle53

[DAngelus]

I thought you couldn't encounter your previous self, which is why in the pilot they can't just "go back five minutes" and stop Flynn, not that there was an absolute bar on traveling within your lifetime.  If neither Flynn nor our team has been in Chicago in 1994, that would be okay.

Of course, in the particular case of Chicago, Rufus is from that city, so it would be dicey.  But maybe he's a Cubs fan, so he knows he didn't get to any White Sox games.  (He's specified as being from the West Side; the Cubs are in the North and the Sox in the South, so either is possible.)

[Cranberry]

They were fairly vague about it:

"Okay, just one thing that I don't get. Apparently, this time machine works. So why don't we just go back five minutes before Flynn stormed in and then shoot him in the face?"

"You can't go back to any time where you already exist, where you might meet a double of yourself. It is bad for the fabric of reality."

"Define 'bad.'"

"We tried it once. The pilot came back, but not all of him."

[legaleagle53]

16 minutes ago, Cranberry said:

They were fairly vague about it:

"Okay, just one thing that I don't get. Apparently, this time machine works. So why don't we just go back five minutes before Flynn stormed in and then shoot him in the face?"

"You can't go back to any time where you already exist, where you might meet a double of yourself. It is bad for the fabric of reality."

"Define 'bad.'"

"We tried it once. The pilot came back, but not all of him."

That seems pretty straightforward to me.  No going back to a time where you might run into yourself, so no going back to any time after your birth (since there's no way for anyone but you to know exactly when you might encounter yourself -- and memory being what it is, even THAT would be iffy at best).  It's also why their time trips are one-and-done with no do-overs possible. That's also why Ian Fleming couldn't have become a fourth member of their team in 1944, as useful as his skills would have been.  They'd have no way to send or take him back to the time he left once he was in 2016; the closest they could come to sending him back to 1944 would be to send him back to a time after his death in 1964.

Edited October 26, 2016 by legaleagle53

[KaveDweller]

27 minutes ago, legaleagle53 said:

That seems pretty straightforward to me.  No going back to a time where you might run into yourself, so no going back to any time after your birth (since there's no way for anyone but you to know exactly when you might encounter yourself -- and memory being what it is, even THAT would be iffy at best).  It's also why their time trips are one-and-done with no do-overs possible. That's also why Ian Fleming couldn't have become a fourth member of their team in 1944, as useful as his skills would have been.  They'd have no way to send or take him back to the time he left once he was in 2016; the closest they could come to sending him back to 1944 would be to send him back to a time after his death in 1964.

I think it seems straightforward too, but I thought the opposite. They can't go back to anywhere they've been, but they can travel within their own lifetime, as long as it is a location they weren't in. If the risk is just running into themselves, I don't see any reason they have to avoid every year of their life.  Unless people moved around a lot or did tons of travelling, they should easily remember what state/region in they were in on a particular date. Honestly, it just seemed like an easy way for the writers to say they weren't going to have do-overs and to answer the question of why they didn't go back ten minutes to stop Flynn. 

If the show lasts a long time, I fully expect them to retract this rule at some point and revisit a previous location. It will be a sweeps episode.

21 hours ago, henripootel said:

Actually, it is. Having experienced the world in their own timeline, they carry the physical results of that timeline, namely the biochemistry which enables them to remember their own past (which may now have changed).  Their memory of the past doesn't bring things into existence, so just because Lucy remembers her sister doesn't mean that the new timeline will cooperate and pop her into existence.  Nor will Lucy's or Rufus' expectation that Wyatt might disappear mean that he actually will.  Timey-wimey - if you exist, you exist, and not every effect has a cause, not with time travel.

Just like their memories, they themselves are artifacts of the previous timeline.  They exist, and it doesn't matter if the new timeline agrees with their memory, just like with Lucy's sister.  So it's entirely possible to exist but have no parents in the current timeline that might have produced you here.  You're not a product of 'here', so the cause-effect need not apply.  This is why the whole Back to the Future 'Marty fades away' thing is ridiculously wrong (in a movie that actually gets rather a lot right about time travel).  If you exist, you exist, even if nobody remembers you or your parents or whatever.  The guys from your own timeline will remember you, but that's about it.  The guys back at the base should really prepare for this because it's bound to happen eventually - random chance means someone's folks didn't meet this go-round, and now you've got an operative with 'no past' that they have no memory of ever meeting.  

Yes, they carry the physical results of the old timeline, and it is like the picture Lucy had of her sister despite the sister not existing in the new timeline. But I still think a picture is different than a human existing. A picture is something that captured a moment in time. The picture always exists long after that moment ends. I can understand the argument comparing a person to the picture in that we are all composed of matter, but it just doesn't seem logical. You could argue that he's an exception because he was in the time machine, but engaged Lucy went into the time machine too, and she doesn't seem to exist. Unless she exists in another alternate universe. (Ugh, I'm starting to confuse myself).

But my point about Lucy and Rufus's expectations was that everything we're saying is theory. Until someone actually goes back in time and kills their own parents, we don't know for sure what the results would be. In real life, there is no time travel, and I think there's no way to explain time travel working. There are always paradoxes. So when TV shows do it, they have to do things that don't totally make sense. You can't use logic to predict the rules they will come up with.

[Emily Thrace]

1 hour ago, legaleagle53 said:

That seems pretty straightforward to me.  No going back to a time where you might run into yourself, so no going back to any time after your birth (since there's no way for anyone but you to know exactly when you might encounter yourself -- and memory being what it is, even THAT would be iffy at best).  It's also why their time trips are one-and-done with no do-overs possible. That's also why Ian Fleming couldn't have become a fourth member of their team in 1944, as useful as his skills would have been.  They'd have no way to send or take him back to the time he left once he was in 2016; the closest they could come to sending him back to 1944 would be to send him back to a time after his death in 1964.

Its actually about the law of conservation of matter. If you already exist in a timeline your matter is there so if you go back you can't be duplicated. So you end borrowing matter from either your past or present self.
 

Quote

 

Yes, exactly.  Fleming wasn't in MI-6, his accomplishments were setting up Operation Goldeneye (a framework for British Intelligence to operate in Spain, had Franco joined the Axis or the Germans taken over from him) and organizing 30 Commando, which ran with the front end of Allied advances to capture documents.  (As loosely seen in the movie Age of Heroes.)  Fleming followed the commando unit into Europe, after the invasion, but never behind enemy lines.

"James Bond" was a composite of several real-life spies, none of them Fleming.  The closest analogue would be Fitzroy Maclean, but his work behind German lines was in the Balkans, with Tito's partisans, not in Germany itself.

 

Ian Fleming was a "man of his times" if you being charitable and racist misogynist if your not so seeing him fawned over was a little much for me. His actual reaction to Rufus probably wouldn't have been nearly as liberal for one. It also bothers me because so few the members of the SOE and MI-6 got any credit for what they did so giving it to Flemming is also rather unfortunate. If TPTB wanted to include a recognizable face why not go with Christopher Lee? He actually was in MI-6 and with his death being so recent it would have been a nice tribute. I'm sure they could have made a few good "Dracula's castle" jokes out of it.

Edited October 27, 2016 by Emily Thrace

[Cranberry]

That's what I meant by vague -- you can interpret it as, "You cannot go back to a time when you already existed" or, "You cannot go back to anywhere you could conceivably run into yourself." And what did "not all of him" mean? Was the pilot messed up mentally, or was Rufus being literal and the guy came back with only some of his matter?

[KaveDweller]

18 minutes ago, Cranberry said:

That's what I meant by vague -- you can interpret it as, "You cannot go back to a time when you already existed" or, "You cannot go back to anywhere you could conceivably run into yourself." And what did "not all of him" mean? Was the pilot messed up mentally, or was Rufus being literal and the guy came back with only some of his matter?

It means the writers haven't decided yet and are giving themselves options.

[DAngelus]

6 hours ago, Emily Thrace said:

Its actually about the law of conservation of matter. If you already exist in a timeline your matter is there so if you go back you can't be duplicated. So you end borrowing matter from either your past or present self.

So you're saying that next week, our crew won't actually travel back to 1836, they'll just be gathering matter from 1836 and their "spirits" or whatever will inhabit it?  Then why is the machine shown to vanish?  If their physical bodies don't travel from 2016, then where do they go?  And, conversely, if their 2016-bodies do travel in time, why would they need to "borrow" matter?

I'm confused, I admit.

[sjohnson]

Conservation of matter is an argument against time travel of any kind, not just time travel to your own timeline. 

[legaleagle53]

6 hours ago, DAngelus said:

So you're saying that next week, our crew won't actually travel back to 1836, they'll just be gathering matter from 1836 and their "spirits" or whatever will inhabit it?  Then why is the machine shown to vanish?  If their physical bodies don't travel from 2016, then where do they go?  And, conversely, if their 2016-bodies do travel in time, why would they need to "borrow" matter?

I'm confused, I admit.

That's NOT what @Emily Thrace is saying.  They'll physically go back to 1836 all right, but once they return to the present, they can't go back to that era again because they'll already have existed then.  You can't go back to any era that you've already visited because you've already left your physical footprint there, and there's too great a risk of your encountering the past self of you that went there the first time. Two versions of the same being cannot occupy the same time period.

Edited October 27, 2016 by legaleagle53

[GoMocs]

I happen to live in the town where Von Braun settled...

See where he lived!

http://www.al.com/news/huntsville/index.ssf/2014/12/wernher_von_braun_historic_hom.html

[mahree]

On 10/25/2016 at 11:29 PM, MisterGlass said:

I've missed the joke. It did not occur to me until seeing the names in a row that they are all references to Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure - Bill S. Preston, Ted "Theodore" Logan, and Rufus, who gave them the time machine.  If his last name is Carlin I'm going to laugh.

 

It is, per IMDB:

http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0549837/?ref_=tt_cl_t3

[mahree]

Can anyone who still has this (or any other episode) still on the DVR confirm that, at the very beginning of the credits, the flip-board thing that resolves into the show's title displays the date to which they are returning in that episode?  I thought so but forgot to go back and check after I was done watching.

[DAngelus]

1 hour ago, mahree said:

Can anyone who still has this (or any other episode) still on the DVR confirm that, at the very beginning of the credits, the flip-board thing that resolves into the show's title displays the date to which they are returning in that episode?  I thought so but forgot to go back and check after I was done watching.

Yep, it started at "12071944" this time, before flipping.

Still not seeing why Flynn/the team can't be in two separate places on the same day.  This episode had them in Westerberg, Germany on 12/07/1944; if they know that they never left the area of Schloß Varlar (which does exist, it's not a random name), why couldn't they have an adventure set on the same day on the American side of the Front?  (Or in NYC, Paris, Moscow or someplace else.)  

Say Flynn wants to kill General Anthony McAuliffe, commanding Wyatt's grandfather and the rest of the 101st Airborne division, so that during the upcoming "Battle of the Bulge" (aka "Operation Watch on the Rhine") the American commander at Bastogne will surrender his encircled troops and allow the German offensive to move forward and reach Antwerp and wipe out the Allies' northern wing, rather than rejecting Gen. von Lüttwitz's demands as McAuliffe famously did ("Nuts!") and holding out long enough for Patton's 3rd Army to come in from the south and save the day.  

Obviously, Wyatt would have to make sure he didn't accidentally knock his grandpa onto a land mine and wipe himself from history or anything like that, but how would his being in Westerberg in this episode on 12/7 mean that he couldn't be saving McAuliffe from Flynn in Reims, France (where the 101st was recuperating from Operation Market-Garden, the failed A Bridge Too Far offensive in October, before being rushed to the front after the initial German attacks on the 16th) on the same day in some future episode?  Reims-Wyatt and Westerberg-Wyatt will never meet, so that whole "don't encounter yourself" issue would seem to be out the door.

And I don't see how it relates to Emily Thrace's "conservation of matter" concerns, anyhow.  Forgive me if I'm seeming thick, here.

Edited October 27, 2016 by DAngelus

[orza]

The issue is not about returning to locations it's about time. They cannot return to any time they already existed in, either through visiting that time or having lived through that time earlier in their life. This is the rule spelled out in the first episode.

Edited October 27, 2016 by orza

[iMonrey]

Quote

Ah, but this just begs the question - what happened to engaged Lucy after she traveled back in time?  Someone else asked this upthread - if that Lucy got into a time machine in her timeline, she disappeared along with all her memories, and when the time machine returned, our Lucy stepped out.  Kinda horrifying for engaged-Lucy, she's still just gone.

Well . . . there isn't an "engaged version" of Lucy, that's the thing. There were never 2 Lucys. Because the timeline where Lucy is engaged did not exist until Lucy went back and screwed around with 1937. In other words, there were not 2 simultaneous timelines going on, one in which Lucy was engaged, one in which she was not. There was just one timeline, and Lucy went back to 1937 and altered it. 

[KaveDweller]

3 hours ago, orza said:

The issue is not about returning to locations it's about time. They cannot return to any time they already existed in, either through visiting that time or having lived through that time earlier in their life. This is the rule spelled out in the first episode.

I think they were really vague in the first episode, it wasn't spelled out whether they meant location or time.  Rufus said in they couldn't go back to any place they've already been because they couldn't risk running into themselves. Adding the line about running into themselves suggests that's the problem, not just being in the same time period.

I still think they were being intentionally vague to give themselves room down the line, and set up the premise of going to a different place/time each episode.

[ketose]

10 hours ago, iMonrey said:

Well . . . there isn't an "engaged version" of Lucy, that's the thing. There were never 2 Lucys. Because the timeline where Lucy is engaged did not exist until Lucy went back and screwed around with 1937. In other words, there were not 2 simultaneous timelines going on, one in which Lucy was engaged, one in which she was not. There was just one timeline, and Lucy went back to 1937 and altered it. 

Obviously, there was an engaged version of Lucy because everyone else who knew about it remembers that she was engaged. That gets back into the Schrodinger's Cat scenario. Either Lucy is engaged or she's not, but we don't know until the pod door opens.

[3girlsforus]

On 10/25/2016 at 11:29 PM, MisterGlass said:

I've missed the joke. It did not occur to me until seeing the names in a row that they are all references to Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure - Bill S. Preston, Ted "Theodore" Logan, and Rufus, who gave them the time machine.  If his last name is Carlin I'm going to laugh.

I had completely missed this. And yes.... Rufus's last name is Carlin

[jcin617]

16 hours ago, KaveDweller said:

I think they were really vague in the first episode, it wasn't spelled out whether they meant location or time.  Rufus said in they couldn't go back to any place they've already been because they couldn't risk running into themselves. Adding the line about running into themselves suggests that's the problem, not just being in the same time period.

I still think they were being intentionally vague to give themselves room down the line, and set up the premise of going to a different place/time each episode.

They were a bit vague about it.   I can see how actually running into yourself or altering events that you were a part of (even if you didn't see yourself) could create a paradox that would be bad.   But just being in the same general place/time in general seems a bit of a reach.   Although it's a standing rule on Doctor Who too that you can't cross your own timeline without the risk of severely damaging the fabric of space-time.

Edited October 28, 2016 by jcin617

[DFWGina]

On 10/27/2016 at 9:29 AM, GoMocs said:

I happen to live in the town where Von Braun settled...

See where he lived!

http://www.al.com/news/huntsville/index.ssf/2014/12/wernher_von_braun_historic_hom.html

I lived in Huntsville/Madison for about 15 years and was shouting at the tv "Don't kill Von Braun - we need him for my past"  LOL  My husband and I met when I lived there and that might alter my early career at Redstone and my life in general :-)

Edited October 28, 2016 by DFWGina

[BooBear]

On 10/25/2016 at 11:50 AM, Shanna Marie said:

I liked this episode a lot. Yeah, there are factual things to nitpick, but it was fun. It's reminding me of early Warehouse 13 in the overall vibe. I like that they gave Wyatt some skill other than shooting things and getting into fist fights, and we saw that he is actually quite capable of shooting things (just not the main thing he's supposed to shoot). And it wasn't just the super historian who knew something about the time, place, and situation. The guys also had relevant knowledge due to personal interests (and a lot of Bond movies). The team is starting to gel pretty well. I didn't get so much a shipping vibe between Lucy and Wyatt as a kind of sibling thing. In particular, when the guys were watching her with Ian Fleming through the binoculars, it really sounded like brothers spying on their sister.

I thought it was good too. It was as if they got new writers who had been asking all the questions we had and they wrote it into the script. Did anyone notice that the meat of this episode was rather short with a lot more focus on real time. That might be the way the story will have to start going. With more or equal real time implications and less focus on time travel.

Garcia there seemed to step up his pleading with Lucy to believe that he is on the good side, odd that Lucy never seems to take him at his word. But he again did a poor job of selling it getting her taken captive my the nazis. 

One thing that is really bugging me. Why does Wyatt feel it is his job to buckle Lucy in every time they get in the time machine. 

[Lugal]

This one was pretty good, even though I don't really know much about Ian Fleming.    Wyatt is still the weak point for me, although we did get some insight into him this time.  Seriously, I know they're Nazis (but not all of them wanted to be there, a lot of those guys were drafted) but just shooting them out of the time machine could play hell with the future.

It would have been interesting if von Braun had gone to the Soviets instead of the Americans, but I'm not sure how much of a change it would bring since it wasn't just von Braun.  Operation Paperclip brought a whole lot of Nazi scientists over to the US after the war.

4 hours ago, BooBear said:

One thing that is really bugging me. Why does Wyatt feel it is his job to buckle Lucy in every time they get in the time machine.

Yeah.  It's one thing when she's in the corset and hoop skirt to go to 1865, but pretty much any time after 1910, it's kind of weird and unnecessary.

On 10/26/2016 at 4:10 PM, DAngelus said:

In fact, since last episode was about JFK (born May 29, 1917) and this one was about Fleming (b. May 28, 1908), I was expecting next ep to be about somebody born on May 27.

My grandfather was born on May 27.  But don't screw anything up there because I generally like existing.

[legaleagle53]

1 hour ago, Lugal said:

This one was pretty good, even though I don't really know much about Ian Fleming.    Wyatt is still the weak point for me, although we did get some insight into him this time.  Seriously, I know they're Nazis (but not all of them wanted to be there, a lot of those guys were drafted) but just shooting them out of the time machine could play hell with the future.

It would have been interesting if von Braun had gone to the Soviets instead of the Americans, but I'm not sure how much of a change it would bring since it wasn't just von Braun.  Operation Paperclip brought a whole lot of Nazi scientists over to the US after the war.

As even Lucy understood (and admitted), Wyatt had no choice but to shoot the young Nazi who would otherwise have summarily opened fire on them at point-blank range before they even stepped out of the time machine.  That's a "kill or be killed" situation, and what good would it have done for any of the team to be killed almost immediately upon arrival? 

And von Braun would never have survived in the hands of the Soviets.  He was well aware of what they would probably do to him and to any other Germans they captured in retaliation for the German atrocities that had been committed against the Russians, which is why in real history, he voluntarily surrendered to the US.  Soviet Russia (or even Soviet-controlled Germany after the war) was the last place he wanted to be.

Edited October 29, 2016 by legaleagle53

[Shanna Marie]

On 10/26/2016 at 6:10 PM, DAngelus said:

Still, on a personal note, it was nice to see an episode about Fleming, as he's easily the coolest member of what I call "Team 5/28", after our shared birthday.  I mean, better him than an ep about Rudy Giuliani, Marco Rubio, or Elizabeth Hasselbeck, I'm just saying.  Or even Jim Thorpe, Jerry West, John Fogerty, Gladys Knight or Carey Mulligan.

Really, all those people on May 28? Because that's my dad's birthday. I'll have to tell him he and Ian Fleming have the same birthday.

9 hours ago, BooBear said:

One thing that is really bugging me. Why does Wyatt feel it is his job to buckle Lucy in every time they get in the time machine. 

Didn't she have trouble working the restraint on the first trip? It wasn't just the hoop skirt. She struggled with the restraint before that. I think it's also a military thing, not necessarily to actually buckle the other person in, but to check the other person -- maybe not with a restraint like that, but with parachutes, etc. Rufus has obviously used these restraints before, since he's the pilot, and they're similar to what Wyatt might have used in the military, while it's a new thing for Lucy. Though I would hope by now she could buckle herself in, and then he could check to make sure she's secure. It may just be his way of giving himself something to do so he doesn't think about the fact that they're about to jump back in time.

[DAngelus]

14 minutes ago, Shanna Marie said:

Really, all those people on May 28? Because that's my dad's birthday. I'll have to tell him he and Ian Fleming have the same birthday.

Well, lots of people on any given day, obviously. (And events, too—the Golden Gate Bridge opened to traffic on a May 28, and groups which formed on that day include the Sierra Club, Amnesty International and the PLO.)  One of the more enjoyable features of Wikipedia is those sorts of daily lists, IMO.  Did you know that Bruce Springsteen and Ray Charles have the same birthday? (September 23; the Boss just turned 67 last month.)

My favorite coincidence along those lines is that the actors who played the parents on the 1980s sitcom Family Ties (Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter) not only have the same birthday, but the same birthdate; they were both born on June 21, 1947.

Happy birthday today [10/28] to Dr. Salk (in memoriam), Caitlyn Jenner, Bill Gates, Julia Roberts and many, many more. 

Edited October 29, 2016 by DAngelus

[green]

On 10/27/2016 at 1:16 PM, orza said:

The issue is not about returning to locations it's about time. They cannot return to any time they already existed in, either through visiting that time or having lived through that time earlier in their life. This is the rule spelled out in the first episode.

The show's rule is that they can't run into themselves.  It's a big world so you could return to 7 December 1944 thousands of times and not really risk running into yourself.  Just stay away from a certain castle or Germany in general.

12 hours ago, legaleagle53 said:

As even Lucy understood (and admitted), Wyatt had no choice but to shoot the young Nazi who would otherwise have summarily opened fire on them at point-blank range before they even stepped out of the time machine.  That's a "kill or be killed" situation, and what good would it have done for any of the team to be killed almost immediately upon arrival? 

And von Braun would never have survived in the hands of the Soviets.  He was well aware of what they would probably do to him and to any other Germans they captured in retaliation for the German atrocities that had been committed against the Russians, which is why in real history, he voluntarily surrendered to the US.  Soviet Russia (or even Soviet-controlled Germany after the war) was the last place he wanted to be.

Are you kidding?  He would have been greatly prized.  The Russians were out collecting as many top German scientists as they could find and one of them ended up heading up their space program.  There was a standing joke in the late 50's and early 60's about "our Germans" vs "their Germans" and which set of Germans would lead their new country to the moon first.

The nabbing of these scientists was highly competitive between the Soviets and the Americans as the war wore down and both sides wanted as many of the prized brains as they could find for their own military programs and eventually space programs.  So each side had specialized teams running around trying to grab as many of them as possible like some crazy computer game of "Collect the Nazi Brains".

None of them would have been in any danger at all unless some Red Army buck private accidentally stumbled over one and didn't know who he was.  But same could be said for a stray American soldier running into one or a bomb falling on one of them before they reached a bomb shelter in time.

[Raja]

5 minutes ago, green said:

The show's rule is that they can't run into themselves.  It's a big world so you could return to 7 December 1944 thousands of times and not really risk running into yourself.  Just stay away from a certain castle or Germany in general.

Are you kidding?  He would have been greatly prized.  The Russians were out collecting as many top German scientists as they could find and one of them ended up heading up their space program.  There was a standing joke in the late 50's and early 60's about "our Germans" vs "their Germans" and which set of Germans would lead their new country to the moon first.

The nabbing of these scientists was highly competitive between the Soviets and the Americans as the war wore down and both sides wanted as many of the prized brains as they could find for their own military programs and eventually space programs.  So each side had specialized teams running around trying to grab as many of them as possible like some crazy computer game of "Collect the Nazi Brains".

None of them would have been in any danger at all unless some Red Army buck private accidentally stumbled over one and didn't know who he was.  But same could be said for a stray American soldier running into one or a bomb falling on one of them before they reached a bomb shelter in time.

I can't remember if that line was used in Dr. Strangelove or The Right Stuff.

[Cobb Salad]

It was a line in The Right Stuff along the lines of "our German scientists are better than theirs" when Eisenhower and the pre NASA big wigs are trying to figure out what kind of person to recruit for their space program.  

[rur]

16 hours ago, Lugal said:

Quote

One thing that is really bugging me. Why does Wyatt feel it is his job to buckle Lucy in every time they get in the time machine.

Yeah.  It's one thing when she's in the corset and hoop skirt to go to 1865, but pretty much any time after 1910, it's kind of weird and unnecessary.

If the writers are planning well, since this is a detail everyone seems to be noticing, at some time in the future, he won't buckle her in, and it'll alert Lucy and Rufus to the fact that something is amiss. 

[sjohnson]

By far the greatest number of Nazi scientists preferred to go to the US. It was much more simpatico with their values. A disquieting thought, to be sure, but Nazis tended to like the apartheid in South Africa too. 

[green]

7 hours ago, Raja said:

I can't remember if that line was used in Dr. Strangelove or The Right Stuff.

And in The Right Stuff every time the Soviets launched another successful rocket or satellite ("ours -- aka the Americans -- always blow up") you see the triumphant laughing face of the Soviet's chief German scientist peering out at the audience gloating in the montage.

And yes indeed the German scientists preferred to be "captured" by the Americans because hello decadence and high living as opposed to really stark apt dwellings and very cold and l-o-n-g winters.

So did the ordinary soldiers not that they were going to America but they didn't want to go to gulags in Siberia like the remnants of Paulus' army that surrendered at Stalingrad so they did all they could to try and head west and surrender to anyone wearing an allied uniform.

Which brings up a sore point about Wyatt shooting the German sentries.  Yes he had to do it per storyline but they weren't likely nazis.  They were German soldiers -- and by 1944 most likely conscripts -- serving in the Wehrmacht, the regular German army.  They had no choice but to serve and some may have felt it their patriotic duty to serve even if they didn't like their leader.  Some may have liked Hitler too but they weren't all collectively nazis.  Not even remotely.  The Nazi Party members in the military would do most anything to join the elite SS units that were all reserved exclusively for party members and not hang out with these regular army minions.

So no Wyatt, you probably didn't shoot a couple of nazis.  You shot a couple of young men doing what most young men to in times of war.  Serve their country without really thinking otherwise about that duty.  They were just born in the wrong country for the wrong war and were at the wrong place so they got shot. 

[henripootel]

5 hours ago, green said:

So no Wyatt, you probably didn't shoot a couple of nazis.  You shot a couple of young men doing what most young men to in times of war.  Serve their country without really thinking otherwise about that duty. 

This may sound strange but I'd have to feel that Wyatt did the right thing here.  Not as a time traveler, maybe, but as a soldier.  He is an American and America is at war, not in Wyatt's time but Wyatt isn't in Wyatt's time.  One of the interesting things time travel raises: where do your loyalties lie?  It's not a meaningless question, and it'd be very interesting if the sentries had been American GIs.  You still can't afford to let them take the time pod or raise the alarm, so I think a 'greater good' argument can be made for shooting them too.  Be a pretty dark place for these guys to go but I don't think Wyatt can reasonably be expected to render moral judgement about everyone they encounter who might need some killin'. 

[Netfoot]

6 hours ago, green said:

So no Wyatt, you probably didn't shoot a couple of nazis.  You shot a couple of young men doing what most young men to in times of war. 

Wanna hear something weird?  I once had a girlfriend who came from Stuttgart.  I came home one day to find her sitting on the sofa, sobbing.  She'd just received word that her father had died.  She had an old photo of him in her hand.  He was wearing his SS uniform...

[shapeshifter]

4 minutes ago, Netfoot said:

Wanna hear something weird?  I once had a girlfriend who came from Stuttgart.  I came home one day to find her sitting on the sofa, sobbing.  She'd just received word that her father had died.  She had an old photo of him in her hand.  He was wearing his SS uniform...

Wow. That is weird, and surprisingly relevant to the episode discussion. I bet you don't often have an opening in conversation to share that story.

I do wonder if Wyatt would so easily shoot American soldiers that stumbled upon their Tardis (or whatever they're calling it).

[Netfoot]

11 minutes ago, shapeshifter said:

I bet you don't often have an opening in conversation to share that story.

True.

To be clear -- he wasn't a SS officer.  He was a rifle-carrying private in a chamber-pot helmet, similar to the guys shot by Wyatt at the start of the episode. Like most of the 800,000 SS troops.  But according to her, he was a card-carrying member of the Nazi party, who wholeheartedly believed in the righteousness of the party.  Then again, literally millions of people fell for Goebbels propaganda!  So...

[Dowel Jones]

Quote

Serve their country without really thinking otherwise about that duty. 

To be honest, though, "without really thinking" certainly serves the first guy proper.  Here he is, guarding an immensely secret area with missiles that go up into the atmosphere, and a shiny object plops down in front of him in a cloud of dust, the hatch opens, and three highly-unlikely-to-be-German-soldiers look out at him.  Yet, he just stares at them in slack jawed amazement and never shoulders his weapon.  The other two, I'm sorry about, but dumbness deserves death, at least sometimes.

[ketose]

On 10/28/2016 at 1:46 PM, DFWGina said:

I lived in Huntsville/Madison for about 15 years and was shouting at the tv "Don't kill Von Braun - we need him for my past"  LOL  My husband and I met when I lived there and that might alter my early career at Redstone and my life in general :-)

My mother was born in Germany to a German woman and an American serviceman a few years after the war. Sometimes you have to wonder just how much would change with slightly different actions in the past.

[officetemp]

Just some random comments:

The wardrobe room scene was something I would have expected to have occurred in the Pilot episode, but maybe the wardrobe room didn't exist until after one of the earlier missions.

I'm assuming that the formulae that Rufus jotted down in von Braun's notebook were the calculations that enabled the time machine to be designed and constructed.  I would think that von Braun's possession of such information would be much more significant than the novels that Ian Fleming chose to write in the 1960's.  And how twisty would it be if that notebook with the notations in Rufus' handwriting were discovered among von Braun's papers after von Braun's death?  (And that Mason industries acquired the notebook and Rufus' notes were what led to Mason Industries' development of the time machine before Rufus was even recruited to work on the project. . ..) 

Lucy's demand that they get her sister back is pretty problematic.  It's not as if Lucy's sister had been plucked out of the timeline and stowed in some extra-dimensional stasis chamber outside the space-time continuum by some omnipotent time-traversing entity (a Time Lord, if you will) so she could be kept in storage until the moment when she could serve a useful purpose.  Lucy would have to pretty much become a Time Lord herself to isolate the occurrence that would most likely lead to her sister being conceived in the first place.  If Lucy succeeded in ensuring that her sister was born, then she'd also have to make sure that sister would survive all the obstacles--anything as mundane as the flu or as random as a traffic accident--standing in the way of sister making it to adulthood.  And they've already altered the timeline four times, so on which event do you concentrate to ensure that sister is restored?  Or do you go back to before the Lincoln assassination to pre-empt everything that follows?

Speaking of journals, shouldn't Lucy have started her journal by now?  She'd have to have it on/near her person at all times to make sure it didn't change when they altered the past.  Unless, of course, she has perfect recall/eidetic memory and wrote everything down once the whole situation with Rittenhouse was/is resolved.  Also, when Lucy writes the journal, does she write things only from her point of view, or does she also chronicle Wyatt's and Rufus' recollections of what happened during each mission?

Also, why does the show not depict any type of debriefing after each mission?

I thought it was pretty pitiful that the Nazi's special rocket was set up on a patch of ground that was part dirt/part grass and hardly even looked level.  I would have thought that they'd at least have a reinforced concrete pad from which to launch the rocket.

[dubbel zout]

20 minutes ago, officetemp said:

Also, why does the show not depict any type of debriefing after each mission?

Because the team doesn't succeed in killing Flynn? Poor Sakira Jaffrey has to yell at them for failing each time. 

[henripootel]

6 hours ago, officetemp said:

Speaking of journals, shouldn't Lucy have started her journal by now?  She'd have to have it on/near her person at all times to make sure it didn't change when they altered the past.

Well, 'now' she may never start it.  She may have done so in some other timeline, the remnants of which aren't even familiar to us.  Be interesting if the journal told the story of how the Nazis developed time travel because they won WWII under Chancellor Rommel (who wisely invested in nukes, and used them), and were taken over by a crazy guy in a position to actually accomplish the Final Solution.  Luka was / is a partisan who stole the tech and changed the past, putting Germany in the hands of an idiot named 'Hitler'.  Bad as our WWII was, original-WWII might well have been worse, and Luka saved us all from it.  

Edited October 31, 2016 by henripootel

[CeeBeeGee]

On 10/25/2016 at 4:16 PM, SyracuseMug said:

It's possible that Fleming's background was changed due to the alterations of the Lincoln assassination or the Hindenburg disaster. So I can forgive the writers in this case.

By contrast, I recently watched an old episode of Time Tunnel where the guys went back to the Trojan War. In that episode, the Greeks spoke English, the gods (and Odysseus) were called by their Roman names, and "Ulysses" was in charge of the Greek army instead of Agamemnon. 

Those changes were a lot more difficult to reconcile.

Weirdly, in many translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey (at least those I've read), the Roman names are used.  I was so confused by this, I looked it up and found an explanation postulating that the Roman names fit the meter better. Still--WEIRD. Rome wasn't even a blip on the radar then--in fact the Aeneid has Rome being founded by a prince of Troy.

[Raja]

16 hours ago, officetemp said:

Just some random comments:

The wardrobe room scene was something I would have expected to have occurred in the Pilot episode, but maybe the wardrobe room didn't exist until after one of the earlier missions.

I'm assuming that the formulae that Rufus jotted down in von Braun's notebook were the calculations that enabled the time machine to be designed and constructed.  I would think that von Braun's possession of such information would be much more significant than the novels that Ian Fleming chose to write in the 1960's.  And how twisty would it be if that notebook with the notations in Rufus' handwriting were discovered among von Braun's papers after von Braun's death?  (And that Mason industries acquired the notebook and Rufus' notes were what led to Mason Industries' development of the time machine before Rufus was even recruited to work on the project. . ..) 

 

I took the wardrobe as now that the missions where on and not just in the experiment can we do this phase the timeline was pushed forward and Mason went out to acquire the wardrobe for his/the government's team.

 

As for the formula I thought it was just Rufus using shorthand to prove he wasn't whatever Nazis called Black people and was a man on von Braun's level to be taken seriously

[legaleagle53]

7 hours ago, CeeBeeGee said:

Weirdly, in many translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey (at least those I've read), the Roman names are used.  I was so confused by this, I looked it up and found an explanation postulating that the Roman names fit the meter better. Still--WEIRD. Rome wasn't even a blip on the radar then--in fact the Aeneid has Rome being founded by a prince of Troy.

Not quite.  Aeneas himself didn't actually found Rome, according to the Aeneid.  His descendant Romulus did.