Let's talk time travel and our favorite temporal swashbuckler: Maria Helena!
In physics, making a time-travel device is quite easy. The recipe involves three steps:
- Make a wormhole (a tunnel from one volume of space to another volume of space, probably with spherical openings on each end). Leave one end in your kitchen, and put the other in a suitcase.
- Take the suitcase and leave your house, travelling very close to the speed of light. Since you are going close to c, your experience of time - and that of the wormhole - will run slower than the universe around you.
- After you've travelled for a while, stop, turn around, and come back home. Empty your suitcase into your dining room.
Voila! You now have a time machine. Since the kitchen end of the wormhole aged more than the dining room end of the wormhole, you can jump into the kitchen end and not only will you appear instantly in the dining room, but you will be in the past! You can control the duration of the time jump by changing how long you travelled with the suitcase. (Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne's book Black Holes and Time Warps gives this exact recipe. Unrelated: he also talks about gravitational waves, if you want a refresher.)
The time machine in your house can be used for all kinds of fun shenanigans. You can serve meals before they're cooked! What's even more fun, though, you can harass your future self as he or she is doing the cooking. Here's a thought experiment: suppose I set both wormholes on the floor such that I can see both of them through the doorway. I take a billiard ball and a pool cue, and I use the pool cue to shoot the ball into the kitchen end. It comes out the dining room end, in the past. Great. For my next shot, I carefully align myself...take my cue and get ready to shoot the ball into the kitchen wormhole. I'm aiming so that when the ball zips out of the dining room wormhole in the past, it will roll through the doorway into the kitchen, and knock my cue aside before I shoot the ball into the kitchen wormhole in the first place. Heh, heh, heh! As I kneel down on the floor and ready my cue, suddenly a billiard ball zooms into my cue, tipping it aside so that I miss my shot - and also knocking my billiard ball into the kitchen end of the wormhole! It turns out that the only way time-travelly events can possibly happen is if they are completely self-consistent across all time. I tried to set up a simple version of the "Grandfather Paradox," where my future self would prevent my past self from taking actions that allowed my future self to try to prevent my past self from ... and so on. Events must be self-consistent. My actions to try and prevent my past actions (shooting the ball into the kitchen wormhole) inadvertantly triggered those actions in the first place. What's more, the "prevention" always took place - at no time did I ever make a clean shot into the kitchen wormhole, without my cue getting knocked aside. That's why we can't ever go back in time and kill Hitler.
We know that Maria Helena goes into a life of piracy and acquires a Timeship, adopts the name La Capitan (Villians), spends her career as a time pirate (La Capitan [Standard]), and in her mature years, La Comodora sends Chrono-Ranger back to change the course of her life when she was young. How does all this resolve?
If physics in the Multiverse works as I described above, everything must be self-consistent. So, whatever Chrono-Ranger does to La Capitan (Villians) cannot prevent La Capitan (Standard) from her existence as we know her. Four options:
- Jim blows off La Comodora's mission.
- Jim tries to carry out La Comodora's mission, but his actions cause La Capitan (Villians) to evolve into La Capitan (Standard).
- Jim tries to carry out La Comodora's mission, but fails. La Capitan (Villians) evolves into La Capitan (Standard) as she always must, and La Comodora becomes regretful and gives a past version of Jim the same mission.
- The mission is actually to improve La Capitan (Villians)'s capabilities, and the improvement causes her to become the more powerful La Capitan (Standard).
I think option 1 is unlikely, given the nemesis icons. Jim accepts the mission, and his power name is True Purpose. He's not going to blow Maria Helena off.
Similarly, I don't buy option 2 or option 4. In the case of 2, La Comodora has the virtue of experience. Why would she ask Jim to do something that she knows will cause her own source of regret? In the case of 4, which is certainly allowed by the phrasing "fix the mistakes of her youth," I don't imagine Jim would really be on board with the plan. La Comodora might have tricked him into it, but that leaves unexplained why she has turned to the heroic side for the OblivAeon struggle (pirates are hit-and-run types, after all; the type who would "[sail] to the end of time and [see] the lack of a future beyond OblivAeon"). Option 4 is possible, but I think that the more likely is option 3.
Jim must fail. He goes back in time, tries to stop La Capitan (Villians), and she defeats, tricks, stalls, or otherwise prevents him from doing whatever he's going to do. She becomes La Capitan (Standard). She comes to regret her actions in her youth. And it is out of that regret that she sends Chrono-Ranger on his forlorn quest. I suspect she would not do this if she remembered La Capitan (Villians) killing Chrono-Ranger, so I imagine he will come back to her a bit grumpy. But no matter what, in order for events to be consistent, Jim must fail. Otherwise we would have...a...PARADOX. A large one. A tremendous one. A--
PARADOJA MAGNIFICA!
La Capitan's Relic Timeship is named after this phenomenon. Does it cause paradoxes? Does it resolve them? Does it separate her from the flow of causality such that she remains consistent with herself, while causing disruption in the timelines around her?
If so, let's try an alternative physics. I'll call it the Days of Future Past physics.
La Capitan (Villians) grows up to spend her career as a time pirate (La Capitan [Standard]), and in her mature years, La Comodora sends Chrono-Ranger back to change the course of her life when she was young. Jim succeeds. La Capitan (Villians) does not become La Capitan (Standard). Jim wakes up the next day to a timeline without the villainous La Capitan, knowin' he did a job well done.
But because that didn't happen, La Capitan (Standard) does not in turn become La Comodora, to send Jim back. Instead, when she would be becoming La Capitan (Standard), she finds herself challenged to "survive her own origin story" - as La Comodora: Curse of the Black Spot.
In this version of events, something else happened: La Capitan (Standard) ceased to exist. She never happened in the first place. She never crashed Nick and Jackson's double date. She never held up the Arizona Science Center. And she never accidentally broke Eugene out of prison. This version of events leaves us with an entirely different background to the Sentinels, and perhaps one fewer member of the team.
Otherwise, that would be a...
