@thomasguide2 said:

This whole savitar thing was stupid. They had savitar trapped and decided to put him into the speed force. Huh? Why not have Barry just toss it into space? Or just have Cisco send him to another dimension. Why haven't the time wraiths been chasing ( remember those) savitar? Iris is dead now, but won't stay dead for long. Barry will reverse this with yet another trip back in time. This entire 3rd season was flashpoint and it'll get wiped out. Iris will be alive and the only one that will even know anything about savitar will be Barry.

So basically Barry Allen is Bobby Ewing. :)

@GForce59 said:

@thomasguide2 said:

This whole savitar thing was stupid. They had savitar trapped and decided to put him into the speed force. Huh? Why not have Barry just toss it into space? Or just have Cisco send him to another dimension. Why haven't the time wraiths been chasing ( remember those) savitar? Iris is dead now, but won't stay dead for long. Barry will reverse this with yet another trip back in time. This entire 3rd season was flashpoint and it'll get wiped out. Iris will be alive and the only one that will even know anything about savitar will be Barry.

So basically Barry Allen is Bobby Ewing. :)

I think that was a dream, no?

So many problems with time travel. Like how can Barry control where he goes? I'm gonna run to 2024 now. This time I'm going to the 1800's to get Snart. Way too convenient and way too powerful. Now why not go to ancient Rome for the day? And yeah, just bring Iris back. Why not?

As for creating time remnants, it seemed like the first time it happened Barry was surprised. He was running, looked over and saw another Barry. I don't think he did that on purpose.

@thomasguide2 said:

I think that was a dream, no?

Yes. The whole season was just a dream. That cop-out can only work once. :)

The effectiveness of even the one time is debatable; it stirred up a fair amount of discord at the time, I think, and has long since become synonymous with the concept of doing a cheap resets by "making it all a dream" or otherwise ditching the outcome of less than favorable outcomes by undoing them - which plenty of shows, including this one, have done through some variation. In this case instead of a dream, it's usually time travel. Thawne/Wells kills Cisco? Barry travels back in time (for the first time); Savage kills Team Flash and Team Arrow, and everyone in who knows what size radius? Time travel. Savitar kills Iris? Probably time travel.

The question of course will be, how far back and how much can you undo before you've invalidated too much of what the audience just sat through? The problem with the "it was all a dream" conceit when it originated, was that it said an entire season never happened; which is at the very least confusing for audiences to then reconcile what, in this world of admitted fantasy is supposed to be "real," if at any moment they can pull the rug out and say, "nope, not this time; just kidding." It's right up there with saying an entire series was the daydream of a child with autism, or killing off half a dozen main characters, only to have them be inexplicably alive on a desert island. It screws with the necessary trust between the audience and the story tellers that the story they're telling is something we should care about, is suddenly actions no longer have consequences; because the outcome of any given plot isn't important if it's going to be undone.

@Talon007 said:

So many problems with time travel. Like how can Barry control where he goes? I'm gonna run to 2024 now. This time I'm going to the 1800's to get Snart. Way too convenient and way too powerful. Now why not go to ancient Rome for the day? And yeah, just bring Iris back. Why not?

As for creating time remnants, it seemed like the first time it happened Barry was surprised. He was running, looked over and saw another Barry. I don't think he did that on purpose.

This was my main problem with Barry's time traveling. His pin point accuracy. I still enjoy the show, but I really wish they would hire some better writers.

@GForce59 said:

@thomasguide2 said:

I think that was a dream, no?

Yes. The whole season was just a dream. That cop-out can only work once. :)

This is tv, they can use it as much as they want. I'm sure Dynasty or Dallas I don't remember which show J.R. is from are not the only shows to have done that.

Whatever winds up happening, I'm 100% sure Iris will be back in some form or another. If Barry doesn't erase the entire season then he will just go back in time and pluck her out of the past. Or there will be some asinine explanation of how she will be back. Barry will create a time remnant of Iris in the past or he will create a time remnant from both the past and the future ( cause why the hell not since the writers of this show can just pull shit out of their asses) and bring a remnant into the current time. It makes no sense whatsoever so I'm pretty sure they will go with that idea.

This was my main problem with Barry's time traveling. His pin point accuracy. I still enjoy the show, but I really wish they would hire some better writers.

He has a flux capacitor? Who the hell knows?

@thomasguide2 said:

This was my main problem with Barry's time traveling. His pin point accuracy. I still enjoy the show, but I really wish they would hire some better writers.

He has a flux capacitor? Who the hell knows?

Now who's pulling something out of their ass?

@LadyJEsq said:

@thomasguide2 said:

This was my main problem with Barry's time traveling. His pin point accuracy. I still enjoy the show, but I really wish they would hire some better writers.

He has a flux capacitor? Who the hell knows?

Now who's pulling something out of their ass?

It's not out of my ass, it's from Back to the Future. It was the time travel mechanism in the Delorean.

@thomasguide2 said:

@LadyJEsq said:

@thomasguide2 said:

This was my main problem with Barry's time traveling. His pin point accuracy. I still enjoy the show, but I really wish they would hire some better writers.

He has a flux capacitor? Who the hell knows?

Now who's pulling something out of their ass?

It's not out of my ass, it's from Back to the Future. It was the time travel mechanism in the Delorean.

Oh wow, I missed the reference! Next time the DeLorean is here, I'm going to have to take a look inside and see if I can see it. I walked right past it when it was parked outside Harry Caray's on my way to work. I was surprised there wasn't some form of security for it.

This is tv, they can use it as much as they want. I'm sure Dynasty or Dallas I don't remember which show J.R. is from are not the only shows to have done that.

It was Dallas. The CW is doing a Dynasty reboot next season.... for some reason...

There really hasn't been anything quite like that, where an entire season was said to have not been real. There are some comparable example; St. Elsewhere turned out to be a daydream of an autistic teen; and whatever the hell the ending of Rosanne was meant to imply, when it turned out she was writing a story, where she changed relationships and behaviors of her family members - saying how her sister, rather than her mother, was actually the one who was gay; putting the opposite men with her daughters, and saying Dan survived his heart attack, meaning he had actually died. The problem with all of these was the backlash from fans who felt it betrayed the conceit of the narrative to say none of it was real. I mean, none it is real, but by make it fiction within the fictional framework, a lot of people felt it detracted from the substance of the story.

I don't think Dallas lasted much longer after they pulled that stunt; and I believe they had a hard time keeping straight what was supposed to have been a dream and what was still canon; because erasing an entire season of stories seriously rolls back the clock on a lot of development. It also became something of a joke; and was later parodied by Family Guy, using the actual two actors from Dallas, with Victoria Principal waking up and finding Patrick Duffy in the shower, recapping the events of the preceding episode, with Duffy's character asking what Family Guy is.

Newhart went the biggest buy making the entire series a dream, but they designed it as a huge joke, where Bob Newhart's character wakes up as his character from his previous long running series; in bed with the woman who played his wife on that series. This after weeks of speculation that the series would end with him dying.

@GForce59 said:

@Talon007 said:

So every time Barry time travels he makes a remnant? There must be so many since he time travels on almost a daily basis! The whole thing is ridiculous. The writers knew it was confusing so they has Cisco draw a diagram... which made things no clearer whatsoever. And they had no explanation when Barry said, "What if I kill myself?" "Who knows what will happen? That's the thing about time travel!" They got carried away with that and every season the villain is a speedster/time traveler. Too much. I say Julian dies now in place of Iris and that causes Caitlyn to snap out of her Killer Frost haze and stop Savitar.

I'm wondering if they're trying to confuse us on purpose. I wouldn't be surprised if the writers themselves aren't sure what's going on. Perhaps they realized they made it too confusing without meaning to. (I thought Back to the Future was confusing!) When you have to have a character explain the situation to others--in essence explaining it to the audience--you've gone too complex. We should be able to follow along on our own...not need to have it explained to us. This is utterly ridiculous. I'm truly disappointed in how lame this is.

But I would like to know the answer to your question...does Barry really create a new time remnant every time he time travels? I thought he created them "manually." They're automatic as well?

I believe a remnant can only exist when there are at least two of the same speedster in one time. If you or I, without the speedforce travelled back in time around 5 seconds, we could meet our past selves. But since our past self is now distracted by our future self or decided the time travel he was about to make in 5 seconds is already a success, they may not travel back. Now we don't have the speedforce, so in about 5 seconds the future self will be erased because the past self didn't travel backwards in 5 seconds time.

But when you throw the speedforce into the mix, the speedforce allows the same speedster to exist independently of time or at least to a certain extent. You could call it a sort of time travel protection, so the one who travelled back in time and the one who was about to travel back in time now exist in the same space at once without risk of erasure. This is why time remnants are usually killed off, rather than erased through time related stuff.