Time travel reset buttons-best and worst

Cafe Society
61

The worst use of the time-travel reset button I’ve ever seen was the ending on John Byrne’s Superman/Batman: Generations 3. I was expecting that the ending in the 30th century would rely heavily on the Legion of Super-Heroes, and that we’d see the heroes somehow drive off the Parademons to begin their cycles of retreat to the prior century, which is the cause of everything we see in the prior issues. Instead, we get almost no screen time for the Legion, and Superman stopping Darkseid’s time travel plot before it can begin, which means that everything in the foregoing issues never happened, and leaving no plausible explanation why Superman would have found Darkseid and killed him (yes, you read that right) since the incidents he killed him over never happened either.

That ending was just a total mess. A major disappointment, given how good the first two “Generations” series were, and, quote frankly, that one was as well, if not for the lame ending.

62

Dare I ask if Batman was prepared in the 30th century?

63

Maybe he can go back in time and do that. Of course these posts will disappear, having been reset.

64

Wasn’t there an episode of Red Dwarf where they take JFK back in time so he could be his own assassin on the grassy knoll?

65

I considered doing that, but everybody else needed the lecture left in. Right? :dubious:

Thanks, Dex.

66

I liked Keith Laumer’s short story, the name of which I can’t remember, which got expanded into the not as great novel “Dinosaur Beach” In this world, time travel was invented and wasn’t originally regulated very well, so researchers got sloppy and left artifacts behind, accidentally messed with time, and so on.

So, the government set up an organization to clean up the past and correct all the problems the first iteration of time travellers caused.

Of course, in trying to fix that, history was changed further, so later on, the government set up a second organization to fix the problems the first organization caused.

They then, later, set up a third organization to fix the problems of the second organization.

The narrator is a member of the fourth organization, trying to clean up the problems of the earlier organizations.

Of course, at the end of the story, we find out that’s not true. He’s really a robot, under extremely deep cover, and a member of the seventh organization to try to fix the timeline, set up in the far future by a superintelligent computer after humanity had gone extinct. The earlier organizations were unable to fix the problems that time travel caused because, their members being human, they were concerned about their own existence. The computer realized that the only way to really fix the problem was to keep time travel from existing, even though that means the computer will no longer exist, and so our hero manages to do that, thereby wiping out himself, his organization, and all of human history after time travel was invented.

67

I liked Red vs. Blues’s story.

Church unintenionally went back in time, so he tried to fix things so he wouldn’t, and ended up causing all of the things he tried to stop.