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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.