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I really like this show, and I strongly agree that 17 minutes is fantastic, probably the coolest execution of the show's premise and a real fun trip. It makes me hopeful that they'll come up with some new real messed up way to use Traveler tech in season 3, on top of all the body possession we've seen so far. 17 minutes really changes the game with how the "who we can possess" rules work, and I think there's some real potential to spin that out further, and maybe change that up by having a "bad" faction just hijacking whoever the hell they want.
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Dec 1, 2018 06:35
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Caught the trailer just now, oversight of the team is a sensible direction but given how incredibly fast and loose the future has gotten with overwriting people (ala point a gun at them and suddenly "OMG they would have died now we can rewrite" or even looser reasons to take over somebody) it seems like they could save a lot of hassle with one targeted rewrite. I also hope that the Travelers at least try to pass it off as a fake confession made because their loved ones were under threat, even if it doesn't work, and I think it's real lame that magic forget-me-now pills are a thing. It kind of comes across as them walking back a big thing that would have been more interesting if it wasn't walked back at all. I'd like to see how most of the Travelers react to their friends and family just wanting out of their lives entirely, and losing that connection to the present that they were only ever supposed to maintain as an artificial cover. Still expecting it to be a fun ride.
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Dec 6, 2018 17:50
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Hoho, I did my typical heretic thing of skipping around episodes like crazy. I certainly saw some weird writing here and there, but that's par for the course I suppose. All I want to say for now is that while I would love to see another season, and there's certainly intriguing possibilities on the table for one, I don't know how the hell they top this as a series finale. I'd put the finale at well above the 17 minutes episode in sheer  and that's saying something.I definitely recommend watching this season on top of the show in general being interesting, I definitely go enough of a payoff even as things got amped up in all kinds of crazy directions.
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Dec 14, 2018 16:22
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I'll definitely be chiming back in here in a few days when general Netflix spoiler policy means you can just talk about whatever because I want to hear where people think the story could go from here, get some help in figuring out what exactly was going down in the very last scene, etc., but I also want to do that with no worry about spoiler tags.
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Dec 15, 2018 03:34
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I'm already hungry for news that Travelers has been renewed, which is weird because I certainly like the show but I like plenty of others more and I don't usually get this eager for renewal news literally the day of a season's release. Just something about it I guess. My gut feeling is that there will be a season 4 based on Travelers doing quite well in one of the rare pieces of data that reflect show popularity on Netflix, maybe a survey or something since they never release viewership numbers. It's also an odd move to pick up a show as your own thing and then cancel it after just a season. For now just tell your friends and get people watching it I suppose.
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Dec 15, 2018 04:52
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Rules I know of are basically give it 72 hours and then have at it, I think that's how I remember it being for Daredevil off the top of my head. Guess I can wait a few days to start wildly speculating about stuff. Regarding the last scene of the S3 finale, what's really throwing me off is that as far as I can recall, Marcy was developmentally disabled and David was a social worker helping her. Then when some rando jerks are about to kill her a Traveler takes over, beats them up, and then has to deal with the complications that result from suddenly being a very competent and self-sufficient member of society. Which come to think of it, isn't a very Protocol 5 approach. The guy who pops into the killer is like "cool, guess I'm off to prison forever now" after he completes his task, it seems like Marcy should have been some really poor taste "pretend to be mentally deficient" stuff if she played it by the book, though of course the whole team was way fast and loose with the protocols basically from the start. So if we're seeing a fully mentally capable Marcy meeting David for the first time on the bus, my assumption is that's us in the Traveler program Ver. 2 universe with Marcy's Traveler in place already, which would also seem to indicate that our team was sent in earlier than they were in the pilot. Based on that my rough guess for how S4 could go is that we pick up at an earlier chronological date in the timeline (probably very close to when the pilot begins), we have the same hosts for travelers but maybe some or even all of them are different traveler numbers, which gives the actors a chance to show their chops a bit. The team leader is downloaded into someone else instead of McLaren (giving the show some new blood to work with, and it seems like a no-brainer to have that be Traveler 3468 so you can do some fun "same guy in the same time, but played by different actors" stuff. Then right as they're getting situated McLaren shows up and tells them he's the only guy to make it from the last failed attempt, and he's there to lead them and make sure they get it right this time. Something vaguely along those lines. I mean, that's just some real rough fan ideas there and it sounds plenty intriguing to me, and an exponentially better hook to the next season than this season's "Er I dunno memory drugs and stretch that conflict over the season here and there." There's other stuff I want to discuss too but I'll wait a bit to just live that tag-free lifestyle. A week seems like a bit much to me personally, but if that's how people want it then who am I to argue. NowonSA fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Dec 17, 2018 |
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Dec 17, 2018 22:19
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Ah yeah I totally forgot that bit about Marcy last season, that makes more sense. Kind of pushes it more into them trying to write a solid series finale too, which is a bummer for me when I want more of this show.
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Dec 17, 2018 22:30
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Combat Pretzel posted:Regarding a potential season 4: A complete do-over would probably not work, if it involves a new bunch of characters. That rarely does. Keeping the same ones, for another round, that'll involve some mental gymnastics from the writers. I suppose they have ideas already, with what 9/11 not happening. I had the same thought and checked it out, 9/11 still went down, or at least we have no evidence to the contrary. 3468's in there with 10 minutes and change before the first plane hits, compared to when 001 was downloaded there with like 3-5 minutes before the plane hit. We're trained to expect someone looking out and not seeing stuff go down in a time travel thing as "hey that thing was stopped" but yeah, he's just looking out on the city being normal like it would have been a few minutes before it the attack. I'm still a fan of the general template I laid out in my previous post as a way to tackle next season. As far as a renewal, the marvel shows aren't a great comparison since on top of being a different genre there was the broader "hey this is a Disney property" angle to it. Points in its favor is that it's a sci-fi show on a platform that doesn't have all that much sci-fi to it, especially when only counting Netflix originals. Altered Carbon is the other show in that category, but that's harder sci-fi and must cost way more to make, and hey that was renewed. Travelers is legitimately binged in high numbers as well, it's kind of quietly popular. I think they wrote a finale that works as a series finale if needed, which in theory almost every show should do just in case, but it's still a really fun premise to explore and it's a rare showrunner/writing team that only has three seasons of ideas for any show, and I feel like that goes double for something high-concept or science fiction based. Cojawfee posted:What if 3468 keeps living as McLaren, somehow still ends up with Kat, and lives a normal FBI life. Then he ends up searching that building and realizes he's about to be replaced by himself. That was the other somewhat obvious possibility I have in mind, though I think that could be an indication of them being the ultimate good soldier. Seems like they're more useful as the X factor and possessing extra knowledge instead.
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Dec 17, 2018 23:43
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Cojawfee posted:I guess it all depends on how you view time travel. If you believe in a Back to the Future style timeline where changing the past splits off a new timeline, then all the people you know will never get a better future. You can't change anything about your own timeline, you can only create a new one. So even if things get "fixed", your original timeline is still just as lovely as ever. Your original timeline has to exist in order to be able to send you back to create the good future. I figured we were under general branching timeline Back to the Future rules. It's the simplest way around the paradox of "if you change it to an ideal future that doesn't require a Director then there was never a Director to go back and fix it in the first place." Probably some wiggle room in there too where each tiny change doesn't create a whole new timeline per se, so you can have your thousand travelers working together to try to fix the world and not be creating a new timeline as each one gets sent back. Just like anything involving time travel you kind of have to just go along with the ride and not try to make proper sense of it. Back to the Future is kind of a standout in the genre for using the simple branching timeline method and limiting the use of time travel to a small handful of times in each movie. It keeps the rules basic too and follows them. Travelers by comparison you have thousands of different people messing with time, the possibility of anybody being replaced, etc. etc., whole lot more to juggle there.
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Dec 18, 2018 17:59
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Also interesting that the Director's morality is what's keeping Travelers from easily fixing the future. If the rule was "take over anyone, anytime" then you're stopping people who do things that negatively impact the future immediately upon transfer just by taking over the body, taking over world leaders to fix things from a position of power, etc. The Director doesn't even cheat its own rule by having a Traveler come in and get a world leader in their sniper sights or something and make them a candidate. Probably some time travel reasons that being that drastic about it is a bad idea, causing a lot of variables nad such. Could be a fun angle to take in season 4 if the Director takes the proverbial gloves off and we see fewer protocols or more aggressive protocols put in place.
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Dec 18, 2018 20:06
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We're about a week out from the season 3 premiere so I think we can dispense with spoiler tags now. Plenty of cool places to go next season, and I like that they really can't walk back this new dynamic the way they did with parts of the season 2 finale. I think Marcy's out as a traveler candidate since she had only been in a position to die due to 001's messing with her head to disable her, and with that not happening that death isn't on the table, so I can get behind the idea floated that she's the normal human and David becomes a traveler, give that actor a chance to flex. With it seeming more like a full reboot I don't think we'll get the back to the future 2 style "interacting with events we've already seen" all that much, though I still really like the idea of McLaren coming in as the boots on the ground guy who lived through their early missions and makes sure they go off without a hitch, and I think having the new timeline's 3468 download into a different body and interact with McLaren is just a really fun possibility and would really jazz up the show. You could make the Vers. 2 3468 take over Kat for maximum drama. It does get iffy since there's no particular reason for a lot of the cast to stay in the show, unless version 2 also happens to involve taking over mostly the same people. There's also the outside chance that 2001 McLaren becomes a bad guy like 001 did, though I don't expect that, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's seen as an agent of chaos or a disruption to the grand plan by the Director and he has to deal with that when he tries to help out, maybe try to convince his team to not listen to the Director's order. While McLaren going along with his life and willingly getting taken over is kind of poetic, it feels like a missed opportunity if they take that approach. On the other hand, if he goes through all the motions and fakes being taken over (which is a cool move that I was kind of hoping someone with knowledge of how traveler's work would pull on them), having blocked the body possession through knowledge of how the tech works and proper planning, that's a perfectly neat wrinkle to work with and I suppose the next best thing if I can't get the "my two 3468's" scenario.
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Dec 21, 2018 17:05
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Yeah there's all kinds of wacky things you can do to asteroids to deflect them, even just getting something out there to toss literal paint on it can cause a deflection if you do it far enough in advance. It seems reasonable that there's enough "this isn't a hoax" and "this is how you should go about fixing this problem" details in there that it's gonna be solved without further future interference. Really the biggest Traveler time-hack of all, based on what we've seen, would be sending them to the 21st, gather just all the extra intel, then have a time machine set up in the 21st to then send them back even further to the 90s and start working on it from there. Easy enough to get a TELL when you have plenty of time to look into your host's past. If you really get trippy with it you could have someone constantly overwriting themselves, or basically creating their own extended groundhog day loop. That'd be doable just in the 21st as well. Who knows if the mind can handle that much repeated stress, but they've made it seem like the big deal difficulty is the big time deference between the future ant the 21st. You can certainly overwrite the same person more than once with a traveler host as well. Establish a solid TELL as a baseline, start doing stuff to try to fix the future (preferably with you working things behind the scenes 001 style), see how that goes. Then after a year of that you overwrite yourself at that TELL point, do the same thing but better. You're kind of doing things the way the Director does them but at a smaller scale and with better intel and specialized knowledge and training about how to get done what you want to get done. I'd dig this being explored at some point, someone who's kept overwriting themselves and gotten past the moral quandry involved in that.
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Dec 22, 2018 06:05
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Yeah, I can't say that it's a zero risk proposition, but it seems quite doable for a solid 10 cycles at least. Then maybe you start leaping into different hosts, having different members of the team do it instead, etc. 17 minutes had some real brain melting going on, but that was a lot of downloads into the same time frame coming in from the distant future. If multiple downloads at or near the same TELL are an issue then you can just not do that, really as soon as you hop into the host's past you can start establishing your own safe TELL "reset" points and just keep track of them. I guess eventually your brain pattern gets too old and that'll kill you, but you certainly get a lot of bang for your buck until then with far more efficacy than we've seen so far with the Traveler teams. Getting Helios taken care of properly, for instance, becomes a lot easier when you have multiple attempts at it from start to finish with the boots on the ground knowing exactly what went wrong. For maximum efficiency and redundancy you have a second traveler team shadow the first one in secret and that team has someone go back to fix things. It's kind of like the 17 minutes approach to fixing things going pear-shaped on a Traveler op, just getting more mileage out of the approach with what seems like a higher chance of success. There probably should be some kind of handwave for why this hasn't been tried before (to our knowledge) and why it's never come up as a possibility. My best guess is that the Director didn't want to put the decision/power to travel in time solely in the hands of humans, which my idea would definitely involve, and there's a good reason to be cautious about that with the havoc that 001 caused. In an extreme example, 99% of travelers using this strategy in the "right" way might not be worth the 1% of travelers who would act against the Director (members of faction for instance) or out of selfish self-interest. Or you get one total psycho in there and suddenly there's a timeline with a complete nuclear apocalypse that you need to clean up.
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Dec 22, 2018 08:57
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It might have already happened and I missed it, but I'm surprised the Director didn't pick out some super rich people who were about to die and overwrite them to fund all the traveler teams by putting their money into a secret offshore or crypto account or something. I don't recall "We need money to solve problem X or buy a thing to solve Y" coming up, and you can surely get money easily by abusing lottery wins or stock knowledge, but that seems like a lot of bang for your buck there. Maybe it might not be worth that approach with how much it could alter history, but then again the whole idea is to alter history in all sorts of ways, so putting that money to use instead of funneling it to a random charity or back into a business or heirs is probably a fine trade-off. Something in the back of my head tells me that historians have low-profile $25k-ish lotto numbers ready to go to grab cash and then increase that via investing, which I guess is fine too for most things and makes sense with the independent travelers cell thing going on. I also think that's one thing I missed in this season, we didn't see many other travelers cells in play, aside from being able to phone them up for future tech as needed. I would have liked to see some of what the other full-team cells might have been up to, maybe a few cutaways to them totally beefing it in the places that got blown up. It could have been fun to see more direct evidence of the FBI knowing about and keeping tabs on teams as well, aside from the throwaway line of them taking out a few cells in the S3 premiere.
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Dec 23, 2018 09:01
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"My two Mac's" with Mclaren and another instance of his traveler's future self downloading into a different body acting side by side. With traveling within the same 21st timeline as an established thing, and not necessarily requiring you to do it in the same host, have multiple instances of the same traveler (or small group of travelers, but this seems to work better with just one and maaaybe 2) active in the same timeframe. As an example of how this could work: Traveler is in the body of "Frank" in 2018. They travel back into a different body "Tom" with an arrival point in 2017. Now as Tom goes forward in time before long that same traveler is present at the same point in time in two different bodies. And you can repeat that a fair amount, maybe end up with about 10 of the same traveler consciousness active at the same time. Maybe you have some fun with one of those instances being killed and also simultaneously killing or undoing the consciousness transfer on multiple bodies, since they were further down the chain and would have only happened if that instance of the traveler was alive to do that. But that doesn't stop the bad guy (because of course if you do this it's coolest if it's a bad guy) since he can arrange for a different transfer to the past and start a new chain. It also adds a ticking clock to this traveler's plans since it's a very plausible rule that they can't keep up this duplication past the point in time that they originally sent their consciousness back, if they try to do so the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. Dang, that's the wildest thing I've thought of yet and probably what I most want to see the show do now. It's certainly a premise that's been done in time travel fiction before, but I'd love to see Travelers' take on it with the unique time travel gimmicks of this show.
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Dec 24, 2018 04:25
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Lycus posted:Especially if living in the post-apoc future is terrible. There's bound to be some pretty rad benefits to letting your entire consciousness die as part of an experiment. Their families are probably set for life eating actual food! That kind of early Trevor-style traveling is basically what I'm positing in my crazy "One traveler 10 bodies" idea, it's just being done with hops back to the past to let multiples of the same traveler be around at once. It still begins at the present so the only involvement of the future is that Traveler's first takeover of a 21st century body, and then they keep doing it 001 style but adding time travel to it. Having the traveler involved become increasingly deranged as they get further down the body transfer chain is an obvious move, but hey it'd still be fun to see.
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Dec 25, 2018 01:23
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I like that stuff Caros, reminds me of some elements from the game Zero Time Dilemma. I'm not against a reboot resulting in us following a mostly new cast of travelers, or the same travelers in different bodies, since that would make sense, but I'd be sad to see the actors put out of work like that. It's also very rarely done in a show, I can't even think of an example of that level of recasting off the top of my head, usually it's only a few people leaving and being replaced at a time, probably 3 at the absolute most. I guess the top of my head example would be 24, which had a core cast but they'd get killed off over time and new characters were always introduced. If you think they're going to get rid of Maclaren you're out of your mind, Erik McCormack is a producer on the show and by FAR the biggest name attached to the show. You absolutely keep that guy involved in a lead role as long as this show is in existence. Everyone else doesn't have complete immunity of being written out of the show, just usual "I've been on the show for awhile" immunity, which is typically enough but with how S3 ended might not be.
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Jan 1, 2019 12:30
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Yeah I really like this theory, and I'd love to get an architect from the Matrix-style info-dump full of time-words explaining as best they can how all this time travel stuff has been working all this time, with parallel quantum realities created and whatnot. You can't really make time travel make perfect sense, but I'm down for them to give us a character giving what's basically a 10-15 minute powerpoint presentation on how it works in the show's universe. Throw in some flashbacks to what the team did while we're at it. And hey, if you get that parallel reality explanation out there now you can bring in new antagonists with travelers figuring out how to hop between explicit timelines and not just forward/backward. Like, the Vers. 1 timeline we've seen so far is properly screwed, so maybe some travelers from there that make it through what was looking like an outright apocalypse situation get bitter and figure out how to get into the current vers. 2 "not already screwed" timeline, which might just be as simple as normal time travel back in time. Then they're bitter and pissed because the Director abandoned them, conflict ensues. The extra credit option is that some of them are from the current main traveler team. Have basically the rest of the living team (except possibly Trevor due to their bad brain issues) pop back in to their same hosts like Maclaren did, only they've lived like 20 years in the hell timeline and it turned them evil. Then since I never get tired of pitching "Same traveler but in different bodies" the vers. 2 team of the same travelers comes in with different hosts, and now Maclaren on top of being an advisor to guide this new team also has to deal with torn loyalties between this fresh-faced version of his time traveling pals and the ones he already knew who have been through all the poo poo he has, and then 20 or so years of extra awful poo poo. Just loads of ways you can go with another season, I've been on the fence since season 3 wrapped up pretty neatly, but if even I some schmuck on the internet can keep coming up with ideas that I want to see, I have to think a proper writing room can make some magic happen.
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Jan 2, 2019 01:02
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Milo and POTUS posted:So when they call him "boss"... He directed the season premiere too, so extra boss on that one. Depending on where they plug back in to the timeline Trevor could be fine for quite awhile. If it's a fresh start then he'd transfer in fine, since he hadn't before, and then the symptoms would show up later on. I'm not against "same hosts but different travelers" as a thing too, except probably for Marcy. That kind of goes hand in hand with "see the same stuff again but with a different approach" in time travel, which I also really like. I'd be completely down for them mostly handling the same missions from season 1 but doing them a bit better and with OG MacLaren doing things too, but since 99% of people would hate that I'd expect something like a one episode speed-through of the highlights from that time, kind of skip ahead to Helios and see that handled again.
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Jan 4, 2019 00:30
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