MovieChat Forums > Travelers (2016) Discussion > One thing I don't get

One thing I don't get

posted 8 years ago by Thirdover4
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If they are taking the bodies of people who have died according to their history, aren't they changing the timeline simply by having each of those people continue to live, at least in the physical sense. They are rewriting history every time someone pops into the past and wouldn't that have a major effect on the timeline they are trying to control? Wouldn't it be safer to take the bodies of people they know lived longer lives, the moral aspects aside, and have them continue on at least as long as history recorded it? If you look at it from the Ray Bradbury (who I met, by the way) theory that killing a butterfly in the past can have a major impact on the future, then they are jumping into the time flow river and splashing around like kids at a pool party.

[–] wwoods-3 8 years ago

If they are taking the bodies of people who have died according to their history, aren't they changing the timeline simply by having each of those people continue to live, at least in the physical sense.

Yes.

They are rewriting history every time someone pops into the past and wouldn't that have a major effect on the timeline they are trying to control? Wouldn't it be safer to take the bodies of people they know lived longer lives, the moral aspects aside, and have them continue on at least as long as history recorded it?

I guess it is the moral aspect. They're killing the people whose bodies they're taking over, but they can tell themselves that they're only taking away the last few minutes of their hosts' lives. They -- and we! -- would probably look at it differently if their targets had had decades of life ahead of them.

If you look at it from the Ray Bradbury (who I met, by the way) theory that killing a butterfly in the past can have a major impact on the future, then they are jumping into the time flow river and splashing around like kids at a pool party.

The Traveler-verse doesn't seem to work according the Butterfly Effect. Nothing seems to have a major effect on the future -- even the Helios operation. Travelers from before and after that took a while to notice differences in their recent histories.