The local store had 1 of the 2 comics from this week. I take it as a win. In other news, I picked up another on-sale game off the Playstation Store, 890B. What a pile of crap. Walk slowly through a messy office (except on the one occasion the game lets you run because it's a timed thing), listening to stilted and unnatural dialogue. Your character keeps wondering why there's a head in his office. It's his office, shouldn't he know?
This game gives you an Achievement basically as soon as you take two steps, meaning it is what The Stanley Parable was mocking. I got to a point where to progress, I had to repair an electronic door lock via a series of well, you remember that game Snakes? You could play it on graphing calculators. Where you guide the increasingly long dark line through the gameplay area, picking up items without hitting the walls or your tail? It's that, seven times in a row before you can advance.
I did not advance, and for a game this bad, I'm going back to the old school. X-Play style, I give 890B, a 0 out of 5. Even for a buck-and-a-half, it was a waste of money, and this is as much of a review as it deserves.
The Time Sled reaches an earlier version of the FF chilling in Arizona, and Sue managed to use her forcefields to beat Braille into the hull explaining Doom's trick (and we see some earlier points in this whole "World Under Doom" where the heroes actually got the upper hand and Doom went back to an earlier point and countered it the next time.) They figure out where the machine Doom's using is hidden, in Antarctica, which provides time for a gag about Johnny ditching his winter gear (which Reed didn't make of unstable molecules) so he doesn't deprive whoever is around of seeing his pecs.
They try to smash the machine, it doesn't stay smashed. Doom shows up, looking kind of pudgy. Did he stuff a bunch of newspaper inside his armor for insulation? Sue and Ben try to fight him, while Reed and Johnny figure out a way around the machine being bound to time itself. Meaning, actually destroy the machine, destroy space-time. Johnny gets an idea, communicates it to Reed via Sue and fire made of hydrogen(?)
Basically, when things start to turn against Doom and he goes to load an earlier point in time, he just keeps getting the exact moment he's trying to escape. In this case, the Thing punching his iron mask off. Doom won't give up, so he keeps enduring the moment, trying to figure out a workaround, until his machine burns itself out. Which I guess circumvents the whole, "breaking time" thing. Ramos and North convey Doom's efforts through a page of the same panel, repeated again and again in increasing numbers on each row until you can't distinguish them any longer.
Either way, no more do-overs, and I think North is finally done with tie-ins to the event and can get back to just doing the kind of stories he was doing earlier.
5 comments:
But... doesn't Marvel time travel work on the basis that changing things creates an alternate reality? So the FF going back would just create alternates, as would Doom going back to undo the changes? Or did that get changed by Hickman's ego, I mean crossover?
Dwayne McDuffie's FF run posited there were a certain amount of change that the timeline could sort of, accommodate, I guess, without splitting. Time being elastic, sort of. I think Bendis ignored the "alternate realities" thing entirely when he had Beast drag the Original 5 X-Men to the present, or figured the "we'll telepathically repress their memories before they return to the past," was enough of a handwave.
The argument here - and presumably with Hickman's retcon about Moira - is Doom isn't traveling backwards in time so much as setting time back to an earlier moment, like winding back a clock, and then starting anew from that point. The future where he lost (or Moira died) has no longer happened, even though each of them remembers it happening, because they're going to take steps to avoid repeating it. Like he drew a line on a chalkboard, erased half of it, but remembers where the erased half was enough to continue the line in a new direction.
Which, yes, seems nuts to be casually arguing these characters can muck with time like that. You'd think Eternity or the Living tribunal would raise an eyebrow at such shenanigans. But these days, I think in-universe consistency only lasts to the extent the writers honor it. Otherwise, things work however they need to for a given story.
Shit, I don't know if that comment explained anything. If we accept there actually is a difference between what Doom's doing and the kind of time travel that normally creates alternate timelines, I think it's like, alternate timelines are created when someone moves themselves backwards in time to change things, but Doom's machine is rewinding time around him.
Which, again, seems like the sort of thing that would have major repercussions, but it's the best I can come up with.
Yes, you'd think the TVA (for example) would be even more concerned with a time travel method that breaks the rules of time travel.
Although I don't know if the TVA is still around. I know they got eaten in Avengers Forever, but I assume they've come back since they've been in the MCU.
There was a TVA mini-series earlier this year, I think. I assume it was basically Exiles with more bureaucracy since it seemed to involve pulling alternate versions of existing characters together to deal with. . . some sort of problems. But if they're resorting to recruiting a Gambit, they probably can't handle Sorcerer Supreme Dr. Doom.
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