Josh Dial posted this explanation of the time travel issues on in
this thread on
The Home Theater Forum. I think it is the clearest and most plausible account of what we've seen so far that I've encountered anywhere. Rather than try to summarize it myself, I got Josh's permission to cross-post his mesage here:
Regards,
Joe
Ofc we have a few more factors in the equation now, which I will try to present the best I can, but knowing me I'll probably be very messy about it so I hope some of you will bear with me and follow it through.
Well let's consider that nothing changed to the timeline and that everything that is about to happen actually happened the same way as Future2 in the above post, so we rule out future 3.
Then we have this slight problem in future 2 with the events that are happening there. We left that place during a battle between Peter aka Neo and Sylar aka Agent Smith, and very important the dead body of future Hiro.
Now the outcome of that battle actually isn't that important knowing both of the characters.
Outcome 1:
So let's assume that Peter wins the battle killing(or whatever superheroes do to their opponents...banish them from the planet or something) Sylar, he is still left there in that future with Hiro's powers which he can (as we saw) use very well, with the slight difference that NOW he knows that the past and the future CAN be changed. Hell nobody seemed to belive that time travel is actually possible and I would presume that even Peter hasn't explored that aspect of those powers, only Hiro knew to what extend his powers go. So now that he knows he (knowing the character who is always helpfull and cares about other human beeings like no one else) will probably try to change that future and do a little time jumping himself to points in time he thinks are relevant to change the future (present in his case) that way he will further more polute the time line and open way to all sorts of paralel timelines.
Considering that in the next episode we saw the meeting of the exploding man and peter we can safelly conclude that Future 2 is either not happening or peter (who won) has decided not to step into the past and change that particular moment of them 2 meeting, which in my opinion would be the best place to change the past if u dont want 0.07% dead people. So either future 2 is totaly invalid at this point (otherwise Peter will surelly stop himself from going nuclear), or Sylar won the battle.
But then again if Sylar won the battle that still leaves us with Hiro's dead body which we very well know Sylar can use to learn how his powers work and there for do a little time jumping of his own and jump to the point where Hiro is suppose to change Future 2 and stop him in doing so, because we all saw our Sylar kinda likes the future he made for himself.
This could further develop to a potential time paradox because if Sylar does something radical like killing young Hiro, then future Hiro is dead and future2 becomes imposible and so the ability to learn Hiro's powers are impossible and therefor jumping back to the past killing Hiro is impossible. But as they say, thats another story.
Either way we either have 2 people in the future who can further more make a time paradox, or future 2 is not happening. I would go with the conclusion that future 2 is not happening which further leads me to the conclusion that peter (on his own without future Peter of future Sylar doing something to the timeline) is somehow going to stop himself from blowing NY city, or he will blow up in some manner that will lead to a different future, one where there will be no need for either Peter or Sylar to change something previous to the blowing moment.
To the question of how Isaac was able to paint the pictures in which future 2 was seen, there is the perfectlly good explanation that he painted those pictures after Hiro met Peter in the subway so the timeline was already changed and he was seeing the only future he could see at that moment. He also drew the events that happened after Hiro and his friend took the trip to the future and came back, which indicates that those 5 years that happened ARE PART of the timeline he saw,but not a linear timeline but one multidimensional, meaning that trip had to happen in to the future, only to be a past event for what is about to happen. In order for the space-time continuum to survive we have to presume that their trip to Future 2 must happen and Future 2 must happen at some point in this multitimeline, because if we want to have any kind of future, call it future X, we must have Future 2 before that. But if we must have Future 2 then Sylar or Peter are both able to make changes to the timeline and that leaves room for any other Future/Past, it's this point where it gets messy, and thinking about it is almost similar to thinking about the G'kar's "meatballs" and I tend to avoid that so I'll stop and wait for the ending of the season
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My posts always get out of control
