confusion about first episode..

In fact they HAVE to prevent the host from dying. They justify taking over someone's body and life, because they WOULD have died. If they waited until they actually died, they wouldn't have a live body for the traveler to enter.

Sorry, justifying taking over those about to die, out of respect for the 21st Century person's right to live out their lives?

I think that is just speculation.

And it is contradicted by something Marcy said. In several early episodes a pre-pubescent child has come up to them, and in a robotic voice identified they had a message for them from HQ, in the future. Then the child get a stunned look on their face, as if they had experienced an absence seizure, and wanders off.

Marcy explains that childrens brains are flexible enough that a future consciousness can be projected into them, temporarily, without killing them, and that children can shake this off. However, adult bodies, which have a future consciousness projected into them, die, unless that 21st century person was about to die.

In early episodes we saw a countdown timer in the lower right of the screen. The
projection of a future person's consciousness was shown to happen with the countdown timer showing a couple of seconds of life left.

That doesn't really make sense. In Grant's case, it is as if the holds of the consciousness of the original 21st Century FBI Agent McLaren, on his own body, had been loosened because he was scheduled to die.`

There have been films where everyone had a particular time when their "number was up", and the fun begins when there is a bureaucratic screw up and someone's soul is plucked too early. "Heaven Can Wait", and "Here Comes Mr Jordan", being too examples. But these models are all based on the Christian meme of souls.

Even though the Travelers have tried to be discrete, there have been thousands of them, on thousands of missions. They started secret factories to secretly manufacture their gizmos. They bet on the races. They did all kinds of stuff. In spite of their goal to leave as few ripples in time as possible, those thousands of missions must have left a million ripples in time, large and small.

How many people were affected by those ripples? How many died early, or later, than they would have if Travelers hadn't left any ripples?

I think this erodes any notion they knew they could take over McLaren, because his number was up.

reply share

add reply

formatting help