Surprisingly, the Time Travel in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" Makes Perfect Sense!
This will involve some heavy spoilers for the fifth Indiana Jones movie, so read at your own discretion. We'll end up with my absolute fav temporal paradox, though, so this might be worth your while. Ready? Okay!
So this time our MacGuffin is the Antikythera mechanism, an Ancient Greek orrery for astronomical calculations. In the movie however, this mechanism has another function. And weirdly, everyone calls it just "the Antikythera", as if they're all on fucking first-name terms with the thing. Antikythera is the name of the island where people found the mechanism, goshdarnit! But I digress.
So, the Antikythera device in the movie is told to detect time rifts that allow for time travel. And of course the ex Nazi bad guy wishes to change the course of World War II with it. So they enter some… target deytinationspace time coordinates? And the devices locates the nearest time rift that will bring them to the 1930s. Or so they plan.
But the Antikythera thingy does not bring them to somewhere 1930-ish. Not at all. Instead they end up 200 BC-ish, just in time to see Syracuse fall into the hands of the Romans. And to meet legendary genius Archimedes. Who in the movie has invented the dial of Antikythera. Indy and the gang chat a little with Archimedes, then everyone gets back into their respective timelines (except for the not-so-ex Nazis, they of course died). And it all makes sense. Because no one had to invent a time machine for this to happen. Even more so, no one had to invent a time rift sniffing device!
Because all that we needed for this plot to be coherent was a mechanism that would put out a specific set of coordinates on request. On any request, in fact, because in the whole movie it is only used once, so no one can say if it really would calculate any other coordinates then the ones that lead to that specific time rift leading from present day airspace to 200 BC-ish Syracuse.
So Archimedes built a device that gives out one specific set of coordinates. That should be possible for a genius of his size, right? And how he knew the coordinates, you might wish to ask now. Well, here's where my favourite temporal paradox enters the scene: The bootstrap paradox.
Archimedes didn't have to find out the coordinates. He just had to read them from the Antikythera dial that Indy and the gang brought with them from a future where Archimedes had already built the thing. Remembering these coordinates after seeing the future device should be easy for the legendary mind of his. As should be to draw the right conclusions about what the fuck had happened and what to do next. And that is where our paradox kicks in, because this way the information about the coordinates comes straight out of nothing. They are there because they always were there, but no one in fact calculated or observed the position of the time rift. Archimedes programmed the mechanism because he saw that it had to be programmed this way for the temporal loop to work.
Information comes out of nothing, and it still makes perfect sense. Gosh. I do love the bootstrap paradox. A perfect circle.
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Me, yesterday at 3 am: hey what if I gave the bb movie opening a tiny comic spin but with slightly darker tones
I know that overdue letter makes no sense ("hey who the hell pins up their financial issues on public spots like that"), but it adds to the panel so just let it be ~
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By the way while taking this shot I noticed something curious
In the shot from the movie where everyone is laughing and enjoying their pizza, Raph seems like he's looking concerned towards Leo for a second, before seeing him as his usual self and smiling
Given what's happened and the shot afterwards with Leo sitting away from the group, near the shadow, it makes me think if Leo really wasn't exactly himself for a bit after the movie and Raph was being concerned (feeling guilty?) about that
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Not “Only my reading of canon is correct” or “Interpretations are subjective and all valid” but a secret third thing, “More than one interpretation can be valid but there’s a reason your English teacher had you cite quotes and examples in your papers, you have to have a strong argument that your interpretation is actually supported by the text or it is just wrong and I’m fine with telling you it’s wrong, actually.”
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