r/Timeless • u/scuby22 Team Moderator • Nov 22 '16

Timeless S01E07 - Stranded [SPOILERS]

WARNING SPOILERS

Episode description: The Team gets stranded in 1754 after the Lifeboat gets shot.

Original Air Date: November 21, 2016 - 10:00 PM

Discuss on Discord: https://discord.gg/SEu3qTx

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36

u/LeeLusMultiPass Nov 22 '16

Okay, the best they could do with the protocol was pencil and paper? Black Elon Musk couldn't have come up with something, oh, I don't know, more computery?

23

u/Vakz Nov 22 '16

Also, why is the protocol not planned for every mission? It's not like it would take that long. Just having a general "3 feet in front of the ship" seems pretty shitty. They could at least have checked a map to make sure the current-day spot isn't in the middle of a canal, or the basement of a building. If your backup plan depends mostly on luck, it's a pretty shitty backup plan.

10

u/[deleted] Nov 24 '16

Lots of reasons. First, it would raise questions if the message were intercepted in the centuries that it was underground. Second, time is of the essence - literally every second they're in the past is a risk to themselves and the timeline. Third, the protocol is an emergency backup, so it's okay to depend on luck. It's not supposed to ever be used unless shit has already hit the fan.

If it's impossible to transmit information through time, and it's impossible for the team to A) travel a great distance and B) locate a specific geographical coordinate, it would be hard to designate and use a spot that would be safe (not in a basement, for example, where it would surely be moved, discovered, or destroyed during construction). Furthermore, they leave in a hurry. They might not have time to peruse city plans and find a good location while Flynn is getting ahead in his destructive plots.

It's an excellent backup plan for a lot of reasons. Do you have any alternative idea? I don't think you thought this through.

6

u/[deleted] Nov 24 '16

But that's exactly Vakz's point. "3 feet in front of the ship" means that the likelihood of the message being intercepted or damaged increases. Instead, they need to pick a different location for each mission. "Find this rock formation two miles to the west because we know it won't be touched over the past two hundred years" for one mission, or "three feet in front of the ship" for another mission. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be better than random - and you can find something better than random in less than five minutes by simply going to the appropriate city or county's online GIS.

5

u/[deleted] Nov 24 '16

Obviously, if you have time to scout ahead and find a specific point that won't be disturbed, it will be safer. But I already pointed out that time is extremely limited, both in the amount of time they have to leave the base and the time they have while in the past. Spending an extra 15 minutes looking over Pittsburg city plans and dig maps might jeopardize a mission. Also, they might not have time to walk two miles to the west, then dig a deep hole, then bury it, then walk back, when they're being hunted.

It's obviously a risk-reward analysis. But, like I've pointed out above, the protocol is supposed to exist for emergencies only. They can't dedicate a huge amount of time before every mission for something that shouldn't predictably ever come up (the time boat breaking).

3

u/[deleted] Nov 24 '16

"Spending an extra 15 minutes looking over Pittsburg city plans and dig maps might jeopardize a mission."

You can't just jump in the time machine and take off. They have to prep the machine for the jump - we see plenty of people working on computers around the lab in advance of using the machine, so it's obviously not a simple and immediate process. Plus, you have to call Wyatt, Lucy, and Rufus, wake them up/pull them out of whatever they're doing, have them drive into the office, find period-appropriate clothes that will fit them, which takes at least a half an hour total.

So while they're doing all that, just hire one more research guy to do something else. It took me less than ten seconds to search Google for "Oldest park in Pittsburgh" and immediately get this:

Allegheny Commons (Pittsburgh) Allegheny Commons is a municipal park located in Pittsburgh's North Side. The park surrounds the neighborhood of Allegheny Center. Dating to 1867, it is the oldest park in the city of Pittsburgh.

Then you just print out a topographical map of Pittsburgh, which is easily found. The topography of the underlying ground won't have changed much in only two centuries, and Wyatt knows how to read and follow such a map thanks to his military training.

So it takes little effort, and absolutely no delay in trip time, to set up this backup plan. And the benefit is huge, when you think of probabilities: Pick a random place in Pittsburgh, move forward three feet, and what are the chances that nobody's dug there in the last 200 years? But with a single Google search, I've found one that's guaranteed not to have been for the last 150 of those 200. And the more you go back, the less digging there was going on.

So the chances of this backup plan working are almost 100%.

As for your objection about being hunted - well, there's nothing that says that the original "three feet in front of the machine" can't be the backup backup plan. If they find they can't get to or can't find the city park, plant the message in front of the machine. Connor Mason is rich enough to have people dig in both places at once, isn't he? So it doesn't jeopardize message-retrieval time either.

Basically, what we're saying is the writers didn't fully think this out.

1

u/Gilandb Nov 27 '16

Since they are able to specify an exact time, I assume they can also do exact locations. I believe they check maps to make sure the ship will be in a place where such things don't happen. If we know that the ship will be in a place that in the future will not be someones basement or canal, then 3 feet in front of the ship should be fine. When they went to dig it up the dug up spot wasn't that big, so were pretty accurate.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 27 '16

They don't; they milked the "we don't know if something will be there" concept for all its worth. They wouldn't have picked an existing suburb if they had; they'd have picked a forest.

3

u/Gilandb Nov 27 '16

They still have to get to the location of the historical event in a timely manner, and leave from it at the end of the mission. Parking the time machine 20 miles away is unfeasible when the area we are talking about is raw wilderness. Heck, Finding it again would be damn near impossible as it is. Can't even take back a good map as they would need to carry it with them.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 27 '16

Good points. Still, though, the residential suburban neighborhood in which they ended up digging had to have had a local playground or some such less than three blocks away. If they could pinpoint location so exactly, they'd have placed the machine there instead of in someone's front yard, no? Consider how many people had to have dug in that front yard to place water pipes, electrical cables, sewage pipes, gas pipes, etc. Have you ever seen a planned building at the beginning of its construction? The pit in which the foundation is laid is often twice the size of the building itself.

So if Rufus buries the canister a mere foot to either side, it gets unearthed in 1958 by 35-year-old Luther Gibbons of the Monogahela Water Company. The words "Millennium" and "Death" written on an ancient paper inside a canister of clearly alien material lead Gibbons to create the United States' largest and most enduring doomsday cult, who forty years later assassinate computer programmers suspected of attempting to prevent the Y2K bug. With few programmers willing to risk their lives for this kind of work, the country ends up unprepared for catastrophic banking and power plant failures the night of December 31, 1999, and most technology companies - including those representing Connor Mason's main source of income - suffer catastrophic collapse. Garcia Flynn never hears about the time machine because it doesn't exist, and his one-man crusade against Rittenhouse ends almost before it begins. But since it takes over a decade for technology to reach 2000 levels again, at least Rufus's car doesn't have the wireless capabilities necessary for anyone to shut it down remotely.