Ep 6 (Helios 865) was really stupid - Travelers (2016) Discussion

[–] Sluggr-3 8 years ago

Timeless is calling.

My Chimp DNA seems to have lost its password temporarily. Sluggr-2

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[–] Loves-Bitch 8 years ago

I thought it was bad that they had used all the men, with Gleason killing them all, before they used Gleason. If they would have just sent a traveler into Gleason first, or even second after the killed the first one they sent, then it's unlikely that his men would have shot him. But no, they wait until he had killed all the others before coming up with the smart choice of inhabiting him.

To Love and win is the best thing. To Love and lose, the next best.

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[–] kayvanzirak-266-620269 8 years ago

Their directive is to not kill anyone in the past so to not adversely affect the future. The cult were trying to shoot to disuade them from continuing forward, but Gleeson made the decision to go in and therefore sentence him and his team to death, and you wouldn't send multiple travellers to die in the explosion if you can get it done with one. I admit that it would have made more sense to inhabit Gleeson to begin with but perhaps the Director, which is an AI, works differently to a human in decision making terms, so would habe a traveller inhabit one at a time until the mission is complete, but to be honest, it doesn't matter as it heloped build tension for the viewer as we would be waiting to see if the plan would succeed.

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[–] gswan 8 years ago

Their directive is to not kill anyone in the past so to not adversely affect the future.

The Travelers had leaked either a highly toxic gas, or genuine nerve gas. All the Travelers had been given the antidote.

Major Gleason left one guy behind, to monitor the site, when he took Dr Delaney back to his HQ. Two of our Travelers tried to warn him to run away, but when the gas hit him he died in mere seconds. (I think this suggests they released actual nerve gas.)

Gleason and his men weren't wearing gas proof suits, and had not received the antidote. So, why aren't they dead?

FWIW, a gas mask alone will not protect one from nerve gas. Once it is aerosolized it can be absorbed right through one's skin. Even a microscopic aerosol droplet can kill you.

Even if the gas didn't kill Gleason and his men, they are about to be killed when the antimatter containment fails, and releases energy equivalent to a hydrogen bomb. So, they didn't really have to worry that killing them would leave ripples in history.

An early Michael Chrighton novel, entitled Binary, was very educational about nerve gas. Our hero has to administer the antidote to nerve gas -- Atropine -- when he defuses the fiendishly clever Rube Goldberg terror bomb the fiendishly clever bad guy left behind.

Crighton was a smart guy, and a medical doctor, and he has his hero watch a foreign training film where a condemned man is killed by nerve gas, rather than the cyanide gas used in American lethal gas chambers. Crighton was specific and detailed about the onset of symptoms of nerve gas intoxication. In his training film the condemned man took more than a minute to die, and experienced revolting symptoms, like loss of control over his bowel and bladder, before the onset of fatal convulsions.

Back before the 1991 Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein's Iraq still possessed nerve gas weapons, it was standard procedure for a "volunteer" to manually mix together the two binary components that react to form their nerve gas. That volunteer would be given a shot of Atropine; he'd pour the second chemical into the reservoir in a chemical munition -- turning it into nerve gas; seal it up; load it in a cannon, and fire it at the enemy before it leaked enough nerve gas to kill the rest of the crew of his battery.

American chemical weapons are safer for the artillery crew. The two precursor chemicals are each in sealed reservoirs, that burst when shell is fired. The spin imparted by the cannon barrel's rifling serves to mix the two precursor chemicals together; a relatively small bursting charge ruptures the reservoir, and aersolizes the gas, when it hits its target.

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[–] watchingthroughthewindow 8 years ago

Yep, I like the show butthey did drop the ball on this one.

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[–] Ken-Rivers 8 years ago

As the Engineer knew the anti matter was going to explode and hence everyone there would be killed, she could take her time knowing that there would always be someone left for the Director to take control of in order to flip the switch.

A traveler could not be sent into Gleason first as Gleason was the last to die. The first of his men that the Director sent a traveller to inhabit was the first man Gleason killed. The next man Gleason killed was the next man to die and the next man due a traveler, etc. etc. Until the last man left was Gleason who was then due to die by anti matter explosion.

The "time loop" that gets me is that Gleason would not have shot the first man, if the Director had not sent a Traveler into him and the only reason the Director was able to send a Traveler to the first man was that Gleason shot and killed him.

aaaahhh

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[–] sensurert 8 years ago

What i found ridiculous was how that woman thought Gleason would just let her flip the switch.

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[–] meira-hand 8 years ago

But no we need this super stupid dramatic conclusion where all of his squad is taken over, he decides to kill them, for no reason at all since he has no clue what's happening. So this is a guy who kills his own team for not following an order. Then he tries to kill himself.

After watching the season finale, I suspect they are pressured to insert an "exciting, loud, action" episode, at six episode intervals to keep some audience interested. Episode 12 was also filled with craziness like this and as the season finale, of course the obligatory cliff hanger. Both episodes annoyed me as they seemed out of character for this show, but I accept it if it keeps the show running.

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[–] nospheritu 8 years ago

I took this as a math problem. If they jumped into Gleason first, another member of his team would shoot him and so on. Gleason with the handgun was taken last and was unable to kill himself having used all of his ammunition taking out the other members of his team.

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[–] dmc101 8 years ago

It's quite simple:

The snipers were only there to delay the military, not stop them. The delay had to be for the right amount of time. None of this would have been a surprise to the Director, since it was all in the past and known, so there was no change of plans, per se, since everyone did as they were told. Human reactions are figured into the equation as human history is documented. Travelers, however, can throw a ripple that has to be fixed by rerunning the algorithms and finding the solution.

The explosion went as planned, the people who died were supposed to die. Originally all of them were killed by the antimatter breach that was stopped in the convoy, not just a few, 11,000 or so and I believe that included those who were killed in the explosion at the lab even though they went the other direction at one point. They couldn't have driven fast enough to get away from a 100 megaton nuke.

The reason it wasn't taken care of earlier, as some have asked, is that you have to have the right amount of natural deaths (accidental or not) in the right areas to send teams.

The show is thought out pretty well. Time travel allows a lot of leeway but has a lot of paradoxical issues as well.

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[–] gswan 8 years ago

It's quite simple:

The snipers were only there to delay the military, not stop them. The delay had to be for the right amount of time. None of this would have been a surprise to the Director, since it was all in the past and known, so there was no change of plans, per se, since everyone did as they were told. Human reactions are figured into the equation as human history is documented.

The snipers were
not needed, to either kill, or delay Major Gleason and his men, as they should have died when they got too close to the poison gas leak. I explained this here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5651844/board/nest/264462756?d=264486107#264486107

WRT your assertion that the delay had to be for the right amount of time... You are forgetting how much improvising they had to do. They didn't anticipate Delaney's arrest. The excursion to free her was completely improvised. If the smarty-pants back at future HQ looked ahead and saw that Gleason was going to follow them, those smarty-pants should have told them to wreck Gleason's vehicles, or blow up a bridge he would have to cross.

If Smarty-pants, in the future, were watching ahead, and telling them mistakes not to make, one mistake to avoid would have been when Marcy gave Dr Delaney a shot with the antidote to the poison gas. She should have given Delaney shot that combined the antidote with a sedative, to make her woozy and agreeable, or knocked her out.

They wasted a crucial minute convincing Delaney to put her eyeball up to the iris reading bio-identification device. If they had given her a sedative they could have scanned her iris without all that arguing. Preventing that delay would have meant they activated the device before Gleason's arrival.

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[–] jonnypenn84 8 years ago

Oh *beep* you're right.

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[–] MadSimian 8 years ago

They couldn't just shoot the laser as soon as it was ready to go.

If you are familiar with the term, deflection(aka "leading the target") is the reason why. Basically, you have to shoot slightly ahead of a moving target because you are compensating for the target's forward motion. Otherwise, if you just shot at it while it is in the "crosshairs", your projectile(in this case, an x-ray laser beam) will merely travel to the point the target WAS at when you fired i.e. you'll miss. Also, the laser device isn't stationary as it is moving along with the rotation of the Earth so you'd have to compensate/calculate for that movement as well.

In other words, taking all of that into account means that they would have to fire the laser at exactly the right moment to ensure it hit the asteroid and, thusly, Traveler teams would merely need to delay any resistance until that moment occurred(meaning the other poster is basically correct in their assumption).

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.

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[–] gswan 8 years ago

Basically, you have to shoot slightly ahead of a moving target because you are compensating for the target's forward motion.

During World War 2, or even at the time of the moon landing, this might be a difficult calculation. (The LEM's computer only had 10K of memory.) But today, with today's computers, doing this calculation, keeping it updated, in real-time, would be trivial.

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[–] MadSimian 8 years ago

You've missed my point entirely.

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.

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[–] jonnypenn84 8 years ago

That's a damn good theory!

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[–] tofudragon2000 8 years ago

Here's the thing, we don't know many times the Director has sent this team back there or how many time he tried this.

It's possible, he's been overwriting the team with their saved consciousness, like how Grace reset Marcy, everytime they failed and this specific path of not killing any of the soldiers is how it would enable Blue to get to Gleason and activate the machine.

Gleason needed to kill all his men in order to feel enough guilt he would be willing to suicide which would allow Blue to transfer over. It's possible that his men would die from the toxin anyway, but Gleason would've somehow survived and this was the only path of getting Gleason to become an available host.

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[–] nakkas 8 years ago

That's a quite compelling argument! Maj Gleason proved to be quite a turd early on, when he lied to his driver about following him behind the truck.
I also thought that maybe for very basic tasks of short duration the Director can send a sort of minor AI into a host, so as not to sacrifice human lives (or maybe terminally ill travelers?). Or that maybe all the consciousnesses that took over Maj Gleason's men were all the same, resetting into a new host right after the former got shot but before they actually died. I remember Gleason smiling after his transfer, so that would speak against him being a minor Al though.

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[–] gswan 8 years ago

Here's the thing, we don't know many times the Director has sent this team back there or how many time he tried this.

In episode 1.11 Trevor tells 21st Century Grace Day that there are "no do-overs". So, now, we know the Director only sent Travelers to this time once.

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[–] chrisjdel 8 years ago

You need to look at this from a time traveler's perspective. The engineer Bloom clearly knew exactly how things would end when she spoke to MacLaren, telling him that when the soldiers entered there'd be no way out and it would all be in the Director's hands - get it? He got it. She also knew she was about to be shot, wondering out loud if was just too much to ask that she be the one to turn the key.

Even if massive amounts of research are needed in the future between responses, those responses can follow one after another in rapid succession here in the present. You get the illusion of an all-seeing all-knowing supervisor who's waiting around every corner and knows everything you're doing. So even when you have suddenly been forced to improvise, the future has had as much time as they needed to adjust and put a new plan in place. It's like magic!

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[–] gswan 8 years ago

Even if massive amounts of research are needed in the future between responses, those responses can follow one after another in rapid succession here in the present. You get the illusion of an all-seeing all-knowing supervisor who's waiting around every corner and knows everything you're doing. So even when you have suddenly been forced to improvise, the future has had as much time as they needed to adjust and put a new plan in place. It's like magic!

Taking lots of time to be perfectly prepared for your mission makes sense if you have reason to believe you are the only time traveler monkeying around with the past.

But the Directorare has sent close to four thousand Travelers back, and each Travelers mission causes ripples, that are chaotically bouncing off one another, causing chaos. If you take time, in the future, to prepare the perfectly trained and equipped squad, by the time you send that squad a ripple may have changed the situation so your team is the worst team, or the problem is unfixable.

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[–] chrisjdel 8 years ago

Taking lots of time to be perfectly prepared for your mission makes sense if you have reason to believe you are the only time traveler monkeying around with the past.

But the Directorare has sent close to four thousand Travelers back, and each Travelers mission causes ripples, that are chaotically bouncing off one another, causing chaos. If you take time, in the future, to prepare the perfectly trained and equipped squad, by the time you send that squad a ripple may have changed the situation so your team is the worst team, or the problem is unfixable.

Or you have things like quantum computers and artificial intelligence that can hold the intricate patterns of ripples and make the necessary adjustments. Also bear in mind, something that just happened 90 seconds ago for you could have resulted in the whole plan being reworked and new Travelers dispatched to times before yours to do additional prep work. Suddenly you get a message to look inside a trash can and there's equipment waiting. Just as you're finished setting it up, reinforcements arrive. Everything changes in a highly coordinated way to put you back on track again.

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[–] gswan 8 years ago

Or you have things like quantum computers and artificial intelligence that can hold the intricate patterns of ripples and make the necessary adjustments. Also bear in mind, something that just happened 90 seconds ago for you could have resulted in the whole plan being reworked and new Travelers dispatched to times before yours to do additional prep work. Suddenly you get a message to look inside a trash can and there's equipment waiting. Just as you're finished setting it up, reinforcements arrive. Everything changes in a highly coordinated way to put you back on track again.

Your comment reminds me of a funny and illuminating account David Parnass had from his time as one of the most senior computer experts overseeing the assignment of grants for Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (aka Star Wars, the fry-in-the-sky xray laser program, and "smart rocks" and "brilliant pebbles")

Parnass was a very prominent and well respected American professor of Computer Science, who had a background in realtime process control, who had taken a lead role in computer projects where computers controlled weapons being developed by the US military. In 1983, when Reagan announced SDI, there was great excitement. Trillions of dollars were going to be spent, and enthusiast kept saying how brilliant it was.

I knew something about realtime process control, worked in that fieild for about a year and a half. I thought the plan was way too ambitious, and had other technical objectives. Proponents would meet the sensible objections with comments like, "you raise some good points, and if only had the same top secret clearance I do I could tell you all the convincing counter-arguments."

Parnass also thought the program was unworkaable, and also got the line of poop about how if only he hed access to the right secret documents he would change his mind. He says that his frustration over this BS claim is why he joined the oversight committee, which gave him access to everything. He would later confirm that there were no secret documents that made the program practical.

Getting back to your comment, Parnass, a brilliant and funny guy I really respect, kept butting heads with a General Abrahmson, the USAF guy in charge of SDI. He described trying to explain to Abrahmson, a non-computer scientist, the many, many fatal flaws in the program. He said that Abrahmson, a non-computer scientist, met all objection with the assertion, "Ah, don't worry, we'll be using 'expert systems'".

I'm sorry, handwaving claims a difficult program can be fixed by using artificial intelligence (expert systems are a kind of AI) always make me think of how Parnass demolished Abramson.

Using computer modeling, or AI, doesn't help you with projects you don't understand. Using a flawed model guarantees disaster. Surely you have heard of the aphorism "garbage in, garbage out"?

I am guessing you never studied computer science, have no formal background in AI, do you?

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[–] chrisjdel 8 years ago

I am guessing you never studied computer science, have no formal background in AI, do you?

Actually I do. Efforts to alter the past would basically be a problem in phase space analysis, studying the equilibrium states of a complex nonlinear system (I'd say hundreds of years of history qualifies as a fairly complex system) and trying to maneuver it toward a desired state. Chaos theory makes a better argument for why precise deterministic control of timelines is impossible.

As far as the limitations of computer systems, highly developed sentient AI would be more expert than the experts who created it and could understand intuitively problems a human being could barely comprehend. Forget garbage in-garbage out. What intelligence does is precisely to take garbage and sort it into something meaningful. It pulls knowledge out of noise.

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[–] meira-hand 8 years ago

 I have been waiting for this answer for a awhile. The quoted sentence annoyed me no-end.

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[–] meira-hand 8 years ago

Also bear in mind, something that just happened 90 seconds ago for you could have resulted in the whole plan being reworked and new Travelers dispatched to times before yours to do additional prep work.

Sadly, this option was debunked by Trevor's exposition to Grace in episode 11:

Trevor: We can only go as far back as the arrival point of the most recent traveler. That means no do-overs.

I have to admit that his exposition was very rushed and sounded sort of childish, more suited to the original Trevor than this future consciousness inhabiting his body and being very much older, behaved more maturely until that point.

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[–] Sluggr-3 8 years ago

Actually, time in the future and time in the past are not linearly related. In the 21st, there was about 5 seconds between bloom and each succeeding soldier being shot. But in the 26th century, a minute, hour, day, or week of time could have elapsed between each shot for the computer to analyze what had likely happened and then act appropriately. Granted, all the on-site data was vaporized by the blast, but the facility could have been streaming security cam footage in real time to an off-site location. So the AI in the future theoretically can watch the scene unfold frame by frame and then act accordingly.

FWIW, Portland got 11" of snow last night so I got nuthin but time to type today. Sorry. Meteorologist said his 1-4" prediction should have been 1-14"

My Chimp DNA seems to have lost its password temporarily. Sluggr-2

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[–] chrisjdel 8 years ago

Meteorologist said his 1-4" prediction should have been 1-14"

Did I say 1-4? Uh ... I meant one to fourteen. Yeah. Little slip of the tongue there. Didn't actually get it wrong.

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[–] dmc101 8 years ago

The events in the past throw curve balls to the future, which then sends travelers to the past for new and different reasons. It becomes a system of entropy until an ELE stops it all.

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[–] roguejc 8 years ago

Yup really stupid ending to that episode! There were 1 million things they could've done to stall Gleason and his team but they chose the worse possible one!!!

They could've easily driven the big old school bus, other vehicles miles up the road and block the rd etc and stage an ambush there instead since the 'old warriors' were all going to die anyway.

The old lady supposedly is some super smart woman.. didn't she think Gleason was going to shoot her anyway? Instead she walked AWAY from the key and decided to have a chat with him many yards away!!

Gleason is not an evil guy.. they knew that and they also knew Gleason has no frekin clue about the travelers etc. Instead of using guns and violence they could've easily just staged a blockage on the highway leading to the plant. Like forming a human chain.

There is no way Gleason would murder a bunch of innocent old people!
All they needed to do was stall for a few minutes, .. not to kill or totally disable his team since they weren't planning on shooting or killing them anyway due to the protocols.

How did Gleason and his men got into the building so easily? Why didn't they think to lock it and barricade it?

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