Quote:
Originally Posted by tsofian
Historically one of the biggest set of questions revolved around what Morrow knew and when he knew it. It is stated he is a time traveller. In that case he would have had concrete knowledge of the future, correct?
|
Why? He is hopping into a future where documentation, particularly of details, is going to be an extremely low priority. If he hopped into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, is he going to be able to take the time to find someone who can give a coherent account of what happened?
Quote:
Originally Posted by tsofian
I always thought that although Morrow could travel through time he was never exactly certain which timeline he was moving through. There could be a near infinite number of timelines.
|
I dislike this one because without the ongoing ability to travel in time everything becomes an exercise in futility.
Especially if there are infinite timelines, because then success just means you got lucky while failure means knowing that there is another timeline where you succeeded. If the characters are fighting for one post-apocalyptic wasteland out of many then there doesn't seem to be as much significance behind what they do.
The way I reinterpreted it, years ago, was that BEM could travel in time by virtue of some innate power, but lacking instruction on how to use it or any real references he had poor control over when he landed - even when he attempted to repeat jumps he tended to miss by some significant amount. His initial jumps were all short, and when he tried his first BIG jump forward... he wound up in a nuclear wasteland. Over the course of his wanderings, trying to remain hidden, he came across a devastated TMP team, and realized that their existence and name gave him a mission. Taking some ultra-tech from the wreckage he took a BIG jump
back... and would up in the 60's (or whenever).
Using his knowledge of and from the future and reinforcing it with the artifacts he had taken, he contacted a group of people who would become the Council of Tomorrow. Their first idea, once they accepted the truth, was to try and
prevent the war, but in their attempts they realized that there was only one timeline and that the Observer Effect prevented Morrow from actually changing anything - the war was a fixed point in time, so to say, but they had a lot of latitude in changing things in relatively small ways that they could use to create the Project.
About this time it was also realized that his gift was killing him - every jump was a huge strain on his brain, and at the point of discovery he likely only had a few more before he and his gift were lost forever. At his insistence, the CoT and fledgling TMP made some arrangements to make the most of the few trips he had left, trips that helped to set up the Project with funding and avoid any real exposure. The Project never had an exact date of the war, his pre-war jumps were trivial to date but his only post-war jump failed to date the war
at all, and it was feared that jumping too close to the war could land him
in it and kill him. Nonetheless, his last jump was an attempt to jump even farther into the future, far enough past the war to be safe from its effects and to hopefully find a civilization that could answer his questions, but he never returned and the Project continued without him.
Anyway, consider that an alternative.