I believe you are correct. However things didn’t play out the same way every time. Kinda like the one Stargate episode. I imagine there were some times where Hitler became an artist and not the Führer. Where Castro played major league baseball and was not a revolutionary. A time where the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria did not take place and there was no War to end all wars.
Well, a whole lot of things would have to be different to avoid WWI. The assassination was just the spark that set off the powder keg – it was quite inevitable.
If Admiral Perry hadn’t forced Japan to open their ports to trade, Japan would not have needed to become “more Western than the West” and would not have created a modern warship fleet that destroyed the Russian fleet, forcing Russia to negotiate with Austria and the Ottomans for fleet passage rights from the Crimean peninsula. Russia agreed in that treaty to allow Austria to suppress the Serbs, but repudiated the treaty when their ability to base a powerful navy out of Crimea didn’t pan out. So the US started world war 1 in 1853.
Pretty easy to stop if you just know where to push. That would also of course eliminate world war 2, but who knows what other wars or calamities we would have gotten instead.
Actually, I think Francisco is correct the time line would likely be the same till Monica and Shelly show up as jin would not want to screw up their chance of existence and risk her opportunity to stop the loop.
We know there were some variations; for example, Jin mentioned that she didn’t meet Aaron until seven cycles ago (and liked him so much she fell in love six more times).
I do like to think that Jin tried at least a few wild variations, back in the cycles we didn’t see. Never mind Hitler; shoot Columbus. Send Chinese traders to settle the New World. Get Napoleon the commission in the British Navy he tried for. Fund every damn fool thing Tesla wanted to build. Keep George III from inciting the American Colonies to rebel. Whatever – Jin had considerable freedom of action knowing that even if everything possible went bad there was always another Reset coming in 2012.
It’s groundhog day, only it’s 1450 years instead of a day…
There’s a lot going on in 1450 years so just repeating them 56 times would not be anywhere near enough for Jin to try out even a small fraction if the possible permutations, and once Monica entered the scene there were even less she could play with in the first 1440 or so years. Everything up until the moment Monica tried to kill herself had to be the same. After that she would have to experiment, testing what stimuli might push Monica to become able and willing to help repair the calendar machine. Oh and keep her from destroying the earth in a fit…
(kind of makes you wonder if that has happened a few times)
I’m guessing she kept meticulous notes and stored them in the library, or she’s got total recall of everything that’s happened.
Just look at what Murray’s character in Groundhog Day tried to break his loop. If I were stuck in a repeating time loop nearly 1500 years long, I’d try to change major things first in hopes of breaking it, then settle down and look for a cause. Step one would be to train my mind for the kind of recall needed over 80,000 years.
I imagine Jin tried all sorts of things, and then realized that the machine needed fixing. Once she did that, she set about finding the best hopes of fixing it and worked each time around to move towards that goal, until she finally got the psychology right and had all the random factors fall the right way.
Jin likely knew that the Calendar Machine needed fixing for it all in the first place, because her mother was the one to break it in the first place. At most, I would say three runs through the loop before realizing it.
That doesn’t mean she might not have tried causing a severe break, mind you. It could easily have taken a number of loops before she found Monica and Shelly and worked out a functional way to fix the machine. If she ever decided that “these two” weren’t going to work out for fixing things, she could easily have been desperate and tried major changes to find others… but that would be its own very risky endeavor, as there’s no assurance anyone else would ever meet the proper requirements to fix the Calendar Machine, much less act as a bridge for her mother
Am I right in thinking that means the last 1,450 years repeated 56 times so there were 57 Adolf Hitlers, 57 Boeing Coorporations, etc?
I believe you are correct. However things didn’t play out the same way every time. Kinda like the one Stargate episode. I imagine there were some times where Hitler became an artist and not the Führer. Where Castro played major league baseball and was not a revolutionary. A time where the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria did not take place and there was no War to end all wars.
Well, a whole lot of things would have to be different to avoid WWI. The assassination was just the spark that set off the powder keg – it was quite inevitable.
Now I’m done being a smartarse. 😛
Unless it started, say, 10-15 years earlier and was not nearly so deadly…
If Admiral Perry hadn’t forced Japan to open their ports to trade, Japan would not have needed to become “more Western than the West” and would not have created a modern warship fleet that destroyed the Russian fleet, forcing Russia to negotiate with Austria and the Ottomans for fleet passage rights from the Crimean peninsula. Russia agreed in that treaty to allow Austria to suppress the Serbs, but repudiated the treaty when their ability to base a powerful navy out of Crimea didn’t pan out. So the US started world war 1 in 1853.
Pretty easy to stop if you just know where to push. That would also of course eliminate world war 2, but who knows what other wars or calamities we would have gotten instead.
Actually, I think Francisco is correct the time line would likely be the same till Monica and Shelly show up as jin would not want to screw up their chance of existence and risk her opportunity to stop the loop.
That would only be after Monica and Shelly came to exist, which might not have been until the fortieth go round or so.
I’d say that the time loop has remained mostly the same throughout it’s duration, otherwise it most likely would have already been broken.
We know there were some variations; for example, Jin mentioned that she didn’t meet Aaron until seven cycles ago (and liked him so much she fell in love six more times).
I do like to think that Jin tried at least a few wild variations, back in the cycles we didn’t see. Never mind Hitler; shoot Columbus. Send Chinese traders to settle the New World. Get Napoleon the commission in the British Navy he tried for. Fund every damn fool thing Tesla wanted to build. Keep George III from inciting the American Colonies to rebel. Whatever – Jin had considerable freedom of action knowing that even if everything possible went bad there was always another Reset coming in 2012.
I now wish I was Jin in this situation. I can hardly imagine the possibilities.
And the pain, the guilt, the doubts, the maybes and what ifs. There is a bloody reason Jin wants to get out of the loop and die by growing old.
It’s groundhog day, only it’s 1450 years instead of a day…
There’s a lot going on in 1450 years so just repeating them 56 times would not be anywhere near enough for Jin to try out even a small fraction if the possible permutations, and once Monica entered the scene there were even less she could play with in the first 1440 or so years. Everything up until the moment Monica tried to kill herself had to be the same. After that she would have to experiment, testing what stimuli might push Monica to become able and willing to help repair the calendar machine. Oh and keep her from destroying the earth in a fit…
(kind of makes you wonder if that has happened a few times)
I’m guessing she kept meticulous notes and stored them in the library, or she’s got total recall of everything that’s happened.
for the sake of saying so
1450*56 = 81200
Just look at what Murray’s character in Groundhog Day tried to break his loop. If I were stuck in a repeating time loop nearly 1500 years long, I’d try to change major things first in hopes of breaking it, then settle down and look for a cause. Step one would be to train my mind for the kind of recall needed over 80,000 years.
I imagine Jin tried all sorts of things, and then realized that the machine needed fixing. Once she did that, she set about finding the best hopes of fixing it and worked each time around to move towards that goal, until she finally got the psychology right and had all the random factors fall the right way.
Jin likely knew that the Calendar Machine needed fixing for it all in the first place, because her mother was the one to break it in the first place. At most, I would say three runs through the loop before realizing it.
That doesn’t mean she might not have tried causing a severe break, mind you. It could easily have taken a number of loops before she found Monica and Shelly and worked out a functional way to fix the machine. If she ever decided that “these two” weren’t going to work out for fixing things, she could easily have been desperate and tried major changes to find others… but that would be its own very risky endeavor, as there’s no assurance anyone else would ever meet the proper requirements to fix the Calendar Machine, much less act as a bridge for her mother