The show uses a single, mutable timeline model of time travel. Key points of importance in this model include:
- There is only one timeline at a time
- Changes to the past overwrite the future, rather than creating parallel universes
- History is plastic, not fixed — actions in the past can dramatically reshape the present
Several episodes make the model very clear:
- “Pria” (Season 1)
- Pria comes from a future where the Orville was destroyed.
- When that destruction is prevented, her future instantly ceases to exist.
- She immediately vanished, either because she wasn't born in this future at all or because she couldn't travel to the past anymore. This rules out branching timelines, her original future wasn't preserved elsewhere.
- Kelly timeline arc
- Kelly’s accidental interference in 2015 creates a radically different present.
- The Kaylon eventually won the battle, and half the known universe was wiped out.
- The original timeline is erased, not coexisting alongside the new one. This is evident in the fact that Claire vanished after the memory wipe succeeded, which means the timeline was restored to what it was before.
- Gordon stranded in the past
- Gordon builds a family and a life, but that life is later erased when the Orville restores the original timeline.
- When the Orville manipulated time-dialation to jump 400 years into the future, they dropped onto their own future, not one where 2 Orvilles existed.
Comparatively, I'd say this is the same model used in Back to the Future.
With that out of the way, I now understand why Ed and Kelly forced Gordon to abandon his family. Within the Union’s framework, Gordon knowingly violated temporal law and altered history for personal fulfillment. His presence, and the presence of his family, who weren't supposed to exist, risked incalculable downstream harm. Allowing him to stay would only normalize private timeline ownership (Gordon insisted that his version of history remain intact because it would benefit him and the people he loved). That would also mean throwing away any meaningful temporal regulation the Union may have. If a single officer can say "my happiness justifies altering history", then the temporal law becomes unenforceable. I think this is where the show wanted us to realise Ed and Kelly's actions were legally right, but morally, that's another conversation.
Even though Gordon's family was historically illegitimate, they were still living, conscious, and emotionally real beings, and while the correction to the timeline was necessary, it would also harm their existence. A life doesn't stop being morally valuable just because it shouldn't exist, which was why the show framed Ed and Kelly's decisions as deeply uncomfortable, not righteous (Ed delayed the decision, Kelly pleaded with Gordon, they both showed visible emotional strain, and in the end, there was no triumphant resolution). I think the show did a good job in showing that for them, that was not a moral victory. And I would agree with them here, leaders sometimes must commit acts they believe are wrong to prevent acts they believe would be worse. When Gordon said that he couldn't believe he was so selfish, in addition to breaking temporal laws, I think he also meant putting Ed and Kelly in such a moral tragedy.
Let's compare with another instance in the show where the past was changed: Pria. These cases are similar on the surface, but the most crucial difference is the agency. Because they (Pria and Gordon) have first-hand knowledge of the timeline, they are burdened with the responsibility to protect it. They both refused to do so, so the consequences must also be theirs to bear. The Orville, on the other hand, committed no crime. Their survival was restorative, not creative. They acted to remove Pria's interference, and while that action did create a new future, it did not add new history. They were not responsible for protecting Pria's future, only their own, which was why the Union allowed them to continue existing (I imagine there will be reports after the incident, and the Union did have deliberations about it). At no point did anyone on the Orville, Ed especially, say "we deserve to live even if history says otherwise". They reacted defensively, removed Pria, and accepted uncertainty. They did not claim moral ownership of the future. Again, it's Pria's responsibility to protect her future, and not only did she fail to do so, but she also chose to interfere with the past in the first place. Once Pria was gone, the Orville proceeded forward normally, no one remained embedded in the past, and no further manipulation occurred. The violation ended with Pria gone.
Gordon's family, on the other hand, was purely additive. They existed only because Gordon stayed. They themselves are the violations, and Gordon only strengthened those violations when he claimed ownership of the timeline (he argued that their lives gave the timeline legitimacy, undoing it would be murder, and his happiness justified permanence). This is a line the Union cannot cross, as it would lead to privatized timeline ownership and eventually, it would set the precedent for temporal colonialism. If Gordon is allowed to stay, who's to prevent others from going to the past and creating families, empires, or even religions? Power, not ethics, would determine which timeline survives, which is why temporal laws are harsh but necessary. Gordon's family was innocent, meaningful ,and loved, but they are also a continuing claim on the past, a permanent alteration point, and a precedent that could break the system.
As such, it's much simpler and safer to restore the timeline as they know it, but I also like how the show showed Ed and Kelly actively trying to minimize harm, even though the law did not require them to. Or as I'd like to call it, mercy. They proposed "Come with us now, and your family will continue to exist." They are essentially allowing the violations to continue and gambling with the future, just to accommodate Gordon. They are offering Gordon something beyond legal obligation. Legally, they could have immediately corrected the timeline, erased the family without negotiation, and treated Gordon as a pure violator, but they didn't. Had Gordon accepted, his family would have still lived on, history would have still been altered, but that's a risk they're willing to accept. Ed and Kelly showed mercy toward the family, not Gordon, because undoing the timeline entirely would cause direct harm to innocents. Even when they announced their intentions, Gordon should have seen the reason behind and come with them to preserve his family, but he refused. He was actively saying, "This version of history stands because I chose it", and that's when mercy is converted into precedent. At that point, Ed and Kelly can no longer compromise without destroying the law itself. By structuring the choice this way, the show tells us that Ed and Kelly are not moral automatons, they, too, have their own judgment of temporal law. It's Gordon who was at fault. Mercy was offered, mercy was rejected, Gordon loses everything, but Ed and Kelly carry the guilt, and we the viewers were left with the knowledge that a less tragic ending was possible, but only if Gordon let go.
Incidentally this episode is the only episode, of any season, of any show, that I cannot and likely will not ever watch again. Father of three. Fucked me up. (Let me clarify it’s THAT POWERFUL, in my opinion, and done very well)
The third season had many strong emotional moments where I thought about whatever it was in the following days.
In season 3 it really picked up story lines and effects
My serious opinion they should do a season 4 I have been watching Sci-fi all my life im 60 years old and this show has excellent potential to really skyrocket
If I were Gordon I would have killed Ed and Kelly when they first showed up.
Seriously yeah, like as a father - god it just hits me deep
Yup, like... Sorry, but I've got kids now. You never should have come here. Didnt you read my Obit?
Bahahahah exactly, times have changed, go back to the future and deal with your own dysfunctional relationship 😂
Now imagine Gordon later finds out what Ed and Kelly did to make his entire family vanish into temporal nothingness. How would someone react to learning that their best friend used time travel to just delete an entire decade of your life and caused your child to never exist.
This episode was a heart ripper.
Didn’t they do that? I seem to recall him saying something like he couldn’t believe he was that selfish, or something like that.
Oh god. You could well be right. I will try to rewatch it when I'm feeling a bit more emotionally stable.
I felt like it was a bit of a cop out, honestly.
They shouldn't have even remembered it themselves.
Given the reigns, I would have made it a more unconscious discomfort. Kelly crying for no reason. Ed feeling this awful tension in his chest when he looks at Gordon, and some part of him recoiling or looking away.
Despite their minds being reconfigured by the resolution of a paradox, perhaps their body or (maybe) their soul remembered what it cost them to get back.
Imagine how her other husband must have felt having Gordon cut in on HIS kids.
Oooooooh see now THAT is a good response!!!!!
Gordon undoubtedly knew in his heart there would be attempts to rescue him. He knowingly broke temporal guidelines doing what he did. And in the end, Gordon agreed Ed and Kelly did the right thing.
A version of Gordon agreed Ed and Kelly were right. The Gordon who spent a decade in the past was a different man.
Yes. The original Gordon who was sent back in time that returned to the 25th century.
Didn’t doc draw out a branching timeline and suggest they needed to return to their own branch?
God, I hate that my life includes things like reading about time travel and thinking "oh this sounds like Git repos"
Didn’t Doc rebase instead of merge?
Fractals all the way down man... all the way.
Fractal turtles.
With the way Doc branched it, I think it was just easier to explain the the timeline changes rather than get into a whole bit about alternate and branching timelines.
“No Marty this is Hill Valley alright, but I can’t imagine Hell being much worse.”
I think the "branch" he wrote on the board signified a change into an alternate timeline, not a parallel timeline. I'm pretty sure Doc used that terminology, too.
Nice. So I just took that as Doc's call to return to where the timeline skews to restore that singular timeline to the way it was before Biff took the almanac back to 1985 because that was the only way they'd be able to get things back to "normal."
He took it back to 1955, but otherwise, yes
Ack! Yes.
“He stole it, bastard stole my idea!”
Are you referring to the scene in part 2 where he draw on the chalkboard? What he was trying to say was that their timeline had been changed by Biff - He draw the original timeline, and then he said Biff went to 1955 and changed the past, creating a new timeline. He drew both on the same 'graph', so perhaps that could have made it confusing. The reason why Doc and Marty ended up in the alternate 1985 is because there was one timeline and it had been changed. Similarly, in the first movie, Marty's changes in 1955, telling his dad that he can do anything if he put his mind to it, changed things so that his dad had a better job with a lot bigger income in 1985.
This is the relevant quote from his (Doc’s) perspective:
Yes, he said that. He used "alternate" simply to express it was different to those three because they had travelled from the future to this 1985. The only way that they could have travelled from the "original" 2015 to the "alternative" 1985 was if it was all one mutable timeline. Otherwise, they would have simply travelled back to the same 1985 they had started in. But, since the timeline is a single, mutable one, they were forced into the new 1985 when they time travelled. Just like Doctor Who.
He did. He explained it as an "alternate timeline" for himself, Marty, and Einstein. But he likely meant "alternate" as in "different" for them.
There is a deleted scene where Biff fades away after returning to 2015 (we get the first part of that scene in the final version, showing Biff falling/holding himself). However, technically, based on the rules established early in the first movie, Marty should still have faded away at the end of the first movie because he was a different version of himself than the version born because George laid out Biff and in the 2nd, Biff really shouldn't have been able to make it back to the same 2015 he left from (Marty sure as hell didn't make it back to the same 1985 he left from). Don't even get me started on Jennifer being left in a timeline that no longer exists.
He drew it out as a branch to make it easier to understand, but the way he talked about it is in line with the mutable timeline theory
Exactly. This is why when they travelled back to 1985 from 2015, they arrived in an alternate timeline than the one they started in. They had to change the events in 1955 back to before Biff changed them to return to the timeline they left from.
Unfortunately that's not how time travel works, the best you can hope for is to return to a *similar* branch, realistically when you time travel the universe you popped into now has a whole bunch of matter and energy moved around that it didn't have before, nothing you can do will ever change that fact
This was already obvious. Seth avoids all of the pitfalls of multiple timelines and alternate universes by keeping one single, almost fragile, timeline. If you mess up the past, it affects the future and potentially not in a good way. It can possibly save their lives (“Pria”) or destroy the Union (“The Road Not Taken”).
But then you have the grandfather paradox
That would involve the past or someone else’s future.
Which was the standard way of presenting time-travel for TV and Film, but it does run into causality problems. The "grandfather paradox" is just one easy to understand example way to explain a self-contradictory loop, better explained in Avengers Endgame by Bruce Banner: " I don't know why everyone believes that, but that isn't true. Think about it: If you travel to the past, that past becomes your future. And your former present becomes the past. Which can't now be changed by your new future..."
I'm sort of surprised that McFarlane would opt for that interpretation of time travel, it's a bit old fashioned and played out. Then again, I don't care for the use of the multi-verse either, I find it to be too easy a tool for writers to get what they want.
I'd be interested in a sci-fi show where time travel to the past is impossible, but you can have technology to "view" it.
Why opt for it? Less problems. And always the opportunity at some point for something to go wrong, the past has been changed, and there may not be a way to fix it.
I don't think you're reasoning that Pria immediately vanished, so therefore, there is only one timeline holds water. She may have vanished in our timeline, but remained in others.
And by your rules, the crew of the Orville changed history by not being destroyed, as it clearly must originally have been for Pria to come back to steal it in the first place. So by Union time law, Ed should have let the ship be destroyed or taken to the future to not change things for his own benefit.
I’d also like to add that, IF they could fix the issue with the Orville being destroyed simply by removing them from their objective present time, couldn’t Ed’s family’s existence also be fixed simply by removing them and bringing them to the family’s objective future?
Gordon. No, because Gordon is from the future and she was from the past.
For it to be able to be resolved correctly she would need to go missing in a way that already coincides with how she originally disappeared/died.
Right Gordon. Sorry, brain fart. I’ll just use it as an excuse to re-watch it again. 🤷🏼♂️
Not to mention that because she had a relationship with another man prior to Gordon's intervention, any descendants she would have had now no longer exist. Removing "new" her and their kids doesn't negate the change in descendants and what effects they would have on the timeline.
It's his future, they haven't done it yet so they can do whatever they want. If they went back to warn themselves before meeting pria that would be altering the past to change the future.
I always thought she was bullshitting. Her original score failed, so she settled on the Orville, unaware of how much this random mid-size ship did to save the galaxy later on. Because they destroyed the wormhole in the past, she would never have been able come to this timeframe, so she disappears. There's no further paradoxes so it cleans itself up. However, if she had succeeded, the Orville would no longer be in the past,which means the Kaylons destroy all organic life, which means Pria can't come back.
The Orville did not change history, Pria did. They are not responsible for protecting a future they don't even know what it looks like, only Pria does. That's why I say the responsibility to protect the timeline lies with people with first-hand knowledge or have experienced it. Pria, younger Kelly, and Gordon.
From a pure time-travel theory standpoint, you're correct. Pria's disappearance only proves that she can no longer exist in the timeline we observe. It does not logically exclude a branching multiverse, a “she returns to her own branch” model or a hidden persistence of her origin timeline. But the Orville, and by extension the Union, operates under an epistemic, not metaphysical, rule: You are responsible for the timeline you can observe, measure, and affect. Even if other timelines might exist, the Union has no way to detect them, no way to interact with them, no way to verify moral outcomes in them. For all practical purposes, they do not exist as ethical objects. I think that's operational monism. Even if other timelines exist, they’re ethically irrelevant if you can’t access or safeguard them. Gordon’s actions still risk destroying the only future the Union can actually defend. The Orville's survival doesn't, as nobody in the entire universe knows what the future looks like if it's destroyed.
My only thing about this is Pria's one-off joke when Ed asks her if she's done this before: "Have you ever heard of Amelia Earhart?"
Is it not the case that with that line, Ed's past would be temporally changed by destroying the wormhole that caused Amelia Earhart to disappear (And probably other missing vessels)? Meaning he is not only changing his future, but his past and therefore his present.
If Ed had arrested Pria and had the Union guard the wormhole, that would have been a solution without interference. Similarly, if he had somehow sealed the wormhole against additional incursions, but not by collapsing it so it disappears from all points in time simultaneously, which is shown to be the case. As is, Ed apparently does exactly what he and Kelly accuse Gordon of and laughs it off by saying "What, should we kill ourselves?"
Granted, this is more of a plothole than anything since the story seemingly forgets that history was changed by Ed's actions and ignores any butterfly effect from Amelia, at all no longer being time-napped
If I'm not mistaken (it's been a while since I've watched that episode), Pria explains that she and others like her swoop in just before a doomed ship/person/whatever is destroyed, so it would not change the timeline.
With Amelia, specifically, I think it would go like this:
Unaltered timeline: Amelia Earhart crashes and dies. The world searches for her but they are unable to find anything conclusive. Everyone assumes the worst: Amelia crashed and died.
Pria's altered timeline: Amelia Earhart is about to crash and die. Pria swoops in just in time and takes her to the future. The world searches for her but they are unable to find anything conclusive. Everyone assumes the worst: Amelia crashed and died.
Orville destroys the timetravel wormhole timeline: Amelia Earhart crashes and dies. The world searches for her but they are unable to find anything conclusive. Everyone assumes the worst: Amelia crashed and died.
The manner in which Pria conducts her business is designed for minimal impact on the timeline. Ideally, if things always go to plan, there would hypothetically be no impact. So destroying the timeline wormhole and stopping Pria would not change Ed's present.
Yeah I remember that now! I think I was under the assumption that Pria was just saying that to cover up the fact that her group was actually the one causing these accidents in the first place.
Which is it?
Or
In both cases, an outside influence changed history for their own benefit, but somehow, only one requires Ed to make the tough decision. In the other, where he gets to live, he's free to ignore the law.
Ed is Gordon's superior officer. Therfore Gordon, and his actions, are Ed's responsibility.
You are absolutely correct, but you arrived at the wrong conclusion. Pria changed history for her own benefit, not the Orville. The fact that they survived had nothing to do with it, they committed no crime and were not responsible for Pria's actions.
Exactly, because to them, it is/was the present and not the future or the past. They are not changing a timeline, they are simply living in theirs. They only had Pria's word that she was from the future and she'd already lied to them more than once, so even if they had some responsibility to a future that they didn't come from, they had no reason to believe her.
He has no proof that the ship had been destroyed or not.
It's the classic paradox example of a person building a time machine solely for the purpose to go back in time to kill Hitler before he rises to power, but if they succeed and kill Hitler and Hitler never rises to power, then the purpose of the time machine no longer exists and therefore the person can't travel back in time to kill Hitler, which means the purpose to build the time machine suddenly exists again and now you're stuck in a logic loop.
The show very briefly tries to explain away the paradox with some technobabble in the Gordon family episode when Issac mentions that the timeline is still in quantum flux. Basically implying that for a period of time, multiple timelines can exist simultaneously (effectively a quantum state) but after a period of time this flux will end and the timeline changes will become permanent.
However, this still doesn't fully explain away the fact that people can still remember events from timelines that don't exist. The quantum flux state is implied to be short lived. The Kelly episode highlights the fact she remembered the alternate timeline YEARS after visiting it. If the "original" timeline never existed, then Kelly should have had no memory of it.
Honestly Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles handled it best. You can't change the future you came from, only create a new timeline with a future that is different than the one you experienced. Your timeline still exists, but once you make changes, you are now on a branched timeline. They had one episode that handled this well - one person comes back, then his girlfriend comes back, but the timeline she came from wasn't his original timeline because him coming back changed the timeline.
You guys will not get me into a discussion of time travel logic, I’d rather chew broken glass.
It's really hard! "Would that this hoodie were a time hoodie!"
Just talk to your father, Craig.
I hate temporal mechanics.
haha I know, it's just some shower thoughts I'd like to get out.
I think that when Pria disappears it should mean the Orville gets destroyed instantly, since Pria never travels back in time.
If we take Pria disappearing to mean a single timeline, that also implies that if the existence of Gordon's family would have sufficiently distorted the timeline to have any measurable effect at all on the future in the time of the Orville, they would have disappeared too, so the rescue was unnecessary temporal shenanigans other than wanting their friend back.
I think they've adopted the great science fiction tradition also widely present in Trek where time travel works exactly like it needs to in that episode to tell that story. In universe, we can hand wave it away by saying different methods of time travel work differently and affect the timeline in wildly different possible ways.
I'm also going to continue to believe a timeline where Gordon is with his family and thinks the crew just gave up and left him alone exists and nobody can stop me, lol.
When they are discussing what happened to Gordon, LaMarr says that the timeline is still in flux and their actions are still a variable. It's a bit of wibbly wobbly timey wimey handwaving, but it establishes that anything could still happen if they don't go back for Gordon.
Omg the Gordon was infuriating, you have the element, all you have to do is go back in time, what was it 10 years, and bring THAT Gordon back, idk what the FUCK made you think bringing Gordon with a family back was a good idea, if you had used force to go he wouldve just killed himself or found a way back
So its impossible to propperly show anything but this method on tv as you an only present the timeline the crew sees. There may be more but a show focused on the crew they can only see their timeline they would need a version of startrek section 81 or what ever its called
There have been many models presented in tv history, notably Marvel's branching multiverse or Harry Potter's fixed timeline. I went down a really deep rabbit hole a while back about time travel models, so now I just can't get them out of my head.
But in the context of a episodic series they dont have as wide a net like marvel that multiple teams sharing the load of a master plan an implimenting peices of it to have a full picture. Harry potter had the budget and scale. I get what your saying but wasting time talking about background in a show that they go nearly minute to minute in film schedule even 3 mins about timelines can cut critical narritive. In an hour show its like 20 mins of commercials 30 minute episodics are really crunched.
while I appreciate your in depth analysis the episode tells us explicitly that splitting a timeline is possible.
"You just sent that sandwich into the past, and that's why it appeared ten seconds ago.
Well, why wouldn't you just keep it? Then you could have two sandwiches instead of one.
If Commander Lamarr had not followed through with his intent to send the sandwich into the past, it would have caused a temporal paradox. In which case an entirely new universe would've branched off from this one, all because of a sandwich."
So by going back to retrieve younger Gordon they created a paradox that created a new universe. So older Gordon and his family are safe.
That dialogue only confirms branching is possible, but only under a very specific condition: only if a paradox is left unresolved. In the sandwich case, if and only if Lamarr doesn't send it back, the causal loop breaks, and that unresolved contradiction forces a branch. Branching is a failure mode, not the default.
When Ed and Kelly retrieve younger Gordon, younger Gordon is removed before older Gordon’s life begins. The future in which older Gordon exists simply fails to occur, and there is no unresolved causal contradiction. Nothing requires older Gordon to exist for younger Gordon to be retrieved. In layman's terms: no loop, no paradox, no forced branch. Older Gordon isn’t “contradicted”, he’s just prevented. That’s erasure, not branching.
That was true until they interacted with older Gordon, now the paradox is, how can they have memories of Gordon and his family if he never existed. They can't, so he must exist in a split timeline.
I agree with this interpretation. The episode with Gordon's family also makes a strong point to mention the observer effect on the timeline, and aside from Gordon because of when they got him, the crew all still remember the events of that timeline, and this is the only situation in the show where an alternate timeline was observed by characters who took that knowledge back to the main timeline. I'd argue that if that timeline was truly erased from existence then it shouldn't be remembered by anyone.
How do you remember something that never happened?
The air they breathed in, soil that got on their shoe, microbes they inhaled, and skin they sheded, and memories they made came with them or were left in that alternate universe. If you remember it, doesn’t that prove that it’s a branch.
It’s one of those timey wimey things you let slide. 😉
I visualize it as a single timeline with a small loop in it, in which it is redirected once, then twice, back to its original direction. Between Gordon's involvement with Laura and Ed's resolving of that issue, it was pointed in a different direction, for example. Single timeline stories with time travel kinda need the time travel to always have been part of the timeline.
Cool. Thanks for taking the time to create this essay!
One of my favorite episodes of the franchise. I can’t freaking wait for Season 4
One thing I’ve always thought was interesting was the existence of Pria sort of implied that there was no Kaylon threat. Had the timeline continued as it “originally” did, the Orville being destroyed/abducted, Isaac never infiltrates the union and the Kaylon don’t have the information to say they want to exterminate everyone. Even though they might still do that. By saving themselves, the crew of the Orville severely altered the time line. But who’s to say that’s a bad thing. I still am not 100% convinced that it is much different than Gordon saving himself.
I do think the Gordon episode shows that time, th past, present, and future, is co-occurring. Even though Gordon got left back in time, they all still had their memories of him and the moments leading up to losing him. Had they not saved him, would this continued to have been the case? There would definitely be paradoxes. The Orville crew still knowing Gordon shows that their experience is in a way linear but also adjacent to other timelines.
Ed only gets a pass in Pria’s case because they have no way of verifying if she’s telling the truth about their fate. The ship could have only been severely damaged in the black matter storm and she saved it to bring it back in better condition. She disappeared because they destroyed the wormhole she would need to travel through in the future.
If they did have a way of knowing for sure, the same temporal law they use against Gordon would have applied and they would have been forced to destroy themselves. The fact that Pria was the one who made the change doesn’t change the fact that they shouldn’t exist in that scenario.
Pria is guilty because she initiates and sustains a temporal violation for personal gain, while the Orville crew merely survives after her interference is removed and does not continue altering history. Even if Pria were telling the truth and the crew knew for certain they “shouldn’t exist,” the Union’s framework does not require retroactive self-destruction, because that would make temporal enforcement incoherent and unlivable. Gordon, by contrast, becomes culpable once he knowingly persists in the past, builds a family, and refuses correction, turning survival into an ongoing, expanding intervention. The key distinction is not uncertainty or outcome, but continued agency: temporal law targets those who actively maintain or expand a violation, not those whose existence is a downstream result of stopping one.
One example of this: imagine a Union temporal officer, Lt. Xelayan, stops a time traveler who went back to sabotage a 22nd-century hospital so a future dictator would die as a child. By intervening, he restores the hospital’s normal operation. One infant who survives because of this is Dr. Krill, who later grows up, has two children, and eventually helps develop a medical breakthrough that saves millions. Years later, temporal analysts determine with certainty that in the “original” timeline, the hospital explosion killed everyone inside — including Krill — and that Xelayan's intervention caused her entire lineage to exist.
If temporal law required retroactive self-destruction, then Krill, her children, and even patients saved by her work would all be legally obligated to die once this fact is discovered, despite having committed no violation themselves. Worse, Xelayan would now know that doing their job correctly creates future people who must later be erased, making every successful temporal correction morally equivalent to mass murder delayed in time. Faced with that rule, rational officers would hesitate to stop violations at all, because enforcing the law would guarantee future atrocities rather than prevent them. That is why the self-destruction rule would be incoherent. Your proposal implies “If certainty shows you shouldn’t exist, you must erase yourself.” That leads to absurd (and unstable) consequences: survivors of corrected disasters must die, any beneficiary of temporal enforcement becomes illegal and temporal agents are incentivized not to fix violations. The Orville is a beneficiary in Pria's case, and in Gordon's, Ed and Kelly are enforcing agents.
Your logic is deeply flawed my friend.
The uncertainly is absolutely the difference, because if Pria was telling the truth, the crew of the Orville and Gordon’s children are in the exact same situation. They shouldn’t exist. The fact that it’s death vs never should have existed in the first is irrelevant. The possibility of their existence changing future events is equal and that’s what violates temporal law. The only reason to not enforce erasure for both is because they know for a fact the kids shouldn’t have existed because Gordon didn’t belong in that timeline (or did he? different time travel discussion), while they can’t verify the truth of Pria’s claims. If the crew gets to live because Pria made the change, then the kids should get to live because it was Gordon who made the change.
Your example is at best a textbook logical fallacy and at worst just plain nonsense. If the Xelayan stops the time traveler, then Dr. Krill surviving isn’t an anomaly, so where does the analysis come from saying that they shouldn’t? That’s confusing.
Taking a leap and assuming you mean that they figured out the explosion is what should have happened all along (not sure how they’d know that), then yes, the same temporal law applies as it does to the others. They should go back and restore what was supposed to happen regardless of the future it erases. Arguing that the benefit of what Dr. Krill went on to accomplish means they shouldn’t do that is the logical fallacy. As you stated, it’s a continuing anomaly. Their medical breakthrough is good from this perspective, but who’s to say one of the people their breakthrough saved isn’t the great-grandfather of someone who is going to become a future dictator and do far more evil than Dr. Krill did good?
That’s the whole purpose behind the temporal law. Allowing anomalies - good, bad or otherwise - in the past creates uncertain futures.
What I think you’re struggling with is the logic of the law itself. But that’s a different debate.
It doesn't make sense because the post and OP's comments are ChatGPT. It's a very, very typical writing style, which is why it reads like an LLM without fully making logical sense. These kinds of posts fall apart under a little thought or scrutiny. The elaborate length of the post is another hallmark, among many here. The bullet points, the use of triplets (notice the three bullet points, repeatedly) , the em dash, comparisons such as: it's not this, but that - and the included em dash to follow this kind of structure. Allllll of those are perfect hallmarks of ChatGPT. Also notice the perfect grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure (and I just wrote another triplet there).
That's why it's important to notice when you see some detail that makes you say "wait, how does that make sense?" Keep asking how it doesn't make sense. You're intuiting that the writing is fake. Don't bother asking OP to make sense of it, because there's no actual sense in it. That's what you're picking up.
Hey Google, explain time travel!
Bingo. OP is karma farming, and if there is a person there, they didn't actually read the GPT output.
Either way, their logic makes no sense
Yes. Everyone got so upset at Ed and everyone else because of the way he treated Gordon in the past and his family. I thought it didn't really matter as once they went back in time again to get him all of that stuff would have never happened except in their own mind. I guess this is also why Gordon was not punished once they corrected the timeline as non of those events actually happened. In a sense it was like telling Gordon about a dream they had about him.
I thought a lot of shows & movies depicting time travel use this model as a default (including Star Trek - with the 2009 movie being an exception). But that doesn't preclude there being multiple universes.
I stopped reading pretty early on, but yep, The Orville uses the single-timeline theory.
What will really bake your noodle later is wondering: what if the laws of temporal preservation only exist because someone went back to create them and the whole timeline is unaware? Maybe Gordon’s family was meant to exist but another time travel shenanigan made it wrong so they got erased?
I want this kind of autism
Good ep, the other one where he found her iPhone was also a good ep, 2 of the best eps for the series imo
I get why they did it, but Ed and Kelly straight up murdered their best friend's family and then let the crime be covered up by Gordon's memory changing. It was brutal, and I hope in S4 they have to deal with some of the ramifications and the fallout.
That episode was so sad! The saddest part was he didn't even know what he lost.
One thing that sort of confused me in the Pria episode: Shouldn't the Orville have been destroyed? They destroyed the worm hole, thus making it impossible for Pria to have time travelled in the first place, therefore she wouldn't have been there to help them navigate that dark matter storm
The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.
We time travel to the future 1 second at a time so… they are wrong!
Thanks ChatGPT.
Edit to add from my other comment: It doesn't make sense because the post and OP's comments are ChatGPT. It's a very, very typical writing style, which is why it reads like an LLM without fully making logical sense. These kinds of posts fall apart under a little thought or scrutiny (such as in other posts, thinking for example, wait, no family would work like that in real life). A thought like that is a cue that it may be fake.
The elaborate length of the post is another hallmark, among many here. The bullet points, the use of triplets (notice the three bullet points, repeatedly) , the em dash, comparisons such as: it's not this, but that - and the included em dash to follow this kind of structure. Allllll of those are perfect hallmarks of ChatGPT. Also notice the perfect grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure (and I just wrote another triplet there).
There are far, far more ChatGPT flags in this post but those are a few obvious and recognizable elements.
That's why it's important to notice when you see some detail that makes you say "wait, how does that make sense?" Keep asking how it doesn't make sense. You're intuiting that the writing is fake. Don't bother asking OP to make sense of it, because there's no actual sense in it.