Time Travel Posts Always Give Me Headaches

I've been kicking this around for a few weeks, so let's see where it goes.

During Messiah Complex, Bishop was rather intent on killing the special baby, because it lead to the misery and squalor that he grew up in several decades later. I'm uncertain about what he hoped to accomplish with this. Did he think he could change his past, avoid that horrible childhood he had? Or was he aware of Kang's 3rd time travel law, which said that any attempts to change the past simply create new, alternate timelines, and don't actually affect the one you were trying to change? Oh, and hat tip to Dwayne McDuffie's last Fantastic Four issue for telling me that law exists in the Marvel Universe (I think I was first introduced to the concept through DragonBall Z, I didn't know it was a commonly used sci-fi approach).

But thinking about Kang's law, started me thinking about all the characters that come back in time to avert some horrible future, yet never seem to succeed. No matter what Bishop, or Cable, or Rachel Summers, or whomever else try, it never seems to make much of a difference. There's always another person showing up, telling the X-Men that the future is a bleak place.

Somehow or the other, that lead me to the idea of psychohistory (Which is something I picked up from Asimov novels, and also didn't think had reached wider use), which Reed discussed at the end of that same FF issue, how you can't predict the actions of individuals, but it's OK, because one person can't actually change history by themselves, they get canceled out by other individuals (does that mean Spider-Man's fighting crime is futile?), and it takes at least 4 people to do actually change things.

This lead me to start thinking about how Cable has often surrounded himself with people to help him accomplish certain goals, like the X-Force squad, and his cabinet members once he established Providence. In contrast, Bishop and Rachel seem to more often join pre-existing groups, but not act as the driving force for that group, rather they sort of go along with whatever missions that super-team is involved in. Which makes me wonder whether Cable has been more successful in his attempts to alter (preserve?) the future than those two have (actually, I'm not sure how much time Rachel spent trying to do that).

It's interesting that in Messiah Complex, both Bishop and Cable are making their plays solo. Each has their own plan, and they basically keep it to themselves. Bishop's decision to do so is understandable, since unless he wanted to team up with the Purifiers, he wasn't likely to get a lot of support for his "kill the baby" platform. But as I've (repeatedly) stated, it made little sense for Cable to go it alone, since he has any number of people he could have called on for assistance. Deadpool (which would draw Agency X into the mix), Domino, Prestor John, his former head of security (whose name escapes me), any of which would have improved his chances. And interestingly, he was only ultimately successful in spiriting the child to safety after he gained the support of Xavier and Cyclops, and the X-Men by proxy, in other words, he had a group working with him to the same goals.

Of course, he's on his own now, if the covers for his brand new solo ongoing (on sale this week!) series are any indication, and so it might be interesting to see if he can continue to make a difference all by his lonesome.