Itās Rip Hunter appreciation week!Ā Ā
I admit, I thought about skipping it.Ā Iām not much of a fic writer (one a year has been my average) and thereās only so much meta you can write when you havenāt watched a show for three years or so.
But what the heck.Ā People do more with less.
So todayās prompt isĀ āTime Wants to Happen.ā
I know that Legends of Tomorrow is a time travel show, but Iāve always been disappointed at how disorganized they are in terms of portraying the effects of time travel and changes in the timeline.
Rip killing George Washington was a big deal.Ā But the team killing a Tokugawa Shogun ten years early (during the height of anti-Western exclusionism no less) had no effect at all!
A part of me assumes itās just because the majority of the showrunners donāt give a shit about Japanese history.Ā But thatās the kind of thing that should change things.
Amayaās village being saved brought Mallus forth (and wiped out the entirety of the Vixen tv show and Iām not completely okay with that), but apparently they killed of Spartacus recently and nothing happened?!
Iām not entirely certain about the latter part, because as mentioned, I havenāt been watching.
But it does remind me how one of my hopes for the Time Bureau, before it became a cardboard cut out obstacle for Sara and Avaās grand romance, was that it might address some of these contradictions.
There are folks who STILL, to this day, refer to the Time Bureau as some kind ofĀ ābetrayalā of the Legends.Ā This is infuriating for so many reasons, not the least of which being that the Legends were actually trapped at the end of Aruba/beginning of Aruba-con in a collapsed time anomaly, and only got out because Rip had created the Time Bureau and got them out.
The idea that Rip might have created an organization to handle the day to day management of time in a structured, orderly and most importantly ACCOUNTABLE fashion was a good one.Ā And if the show had thought about it, it would have been the perfect way to explain how the Legends can go around careening from event to event, fucking up history, without wiping themselves or civilization out entirely.
Tokugawa Iemitsu dies ten years early.Ā Oops.Ā But what if thereās someone who could recruit/hire a shapeshifter, or an android, or something like that to take the guyās place so that history could stay on course for the next ten years.Ā Easy fix.
Heck, it could make the wholeĀ āI am Spartacusā idea darkly hilarious if they ended up replacing the prematurely dead guy with a duplicate.
There are so many ways that the show could have used the Time Bureau without interfering in the Legendsā unique mayhem.Ā Ā
And thereās room for conflict, because sometimes bad shit happens.Ā And sometimes the Time Bureau will have to facilitate that because thatās how history is.Ā But sometimes thereās wiggle room.Ā This was something I thought the show did really well with Zariās origin and the Helen of Troy episode.Ā I could imagine Rip, and other like minded individuals, working to find places where the timeline could bend or be nudged to allow more people to be saved, or more catastrophes to be avoided.Ā And perhaps sending in the Legends to bash it all into submission while keeping plausible deniability.
Missed opportunities, I guess.
But I suppose in the end, I think thatās what Ripās probably doing now.Ā Thereās no time bureau anymore, but Ripās still out there.Ā (Comic Book Rule #1: no body, no death).Ā He had those pellets in Return of the Mack, so maybe he sets off the drive, freezes time with a pellet, slips out in Eobard Thawneās old time sphere, and goes off to create a bunker in Arizona with a shit ton of chalkboards.
Every time the team does something like let Spartacus die much too early, Iām going to assume history doesnāt implode because Rip fixed it afterward.Ā It works for me.
