#we’ve just seen it with the George and caiti thing

[mojo-yous]

I have a feeling that Shelby’s bravery has unlocked Pandora’s box and that a lot more people will come forward with stuff that ccs have done.

[kalinara]

Crazy LoT theory time (brought to you by the same person who suggested that the team would kill Vandal Savage with Rip Hunter’s nudie pen.  Basically, my predictions are 95% wrong.  But usually pretty entertaining.)

I’ve been reading a few interviews and synopses, and I have developed a theory/prediction.  (This theory involves Rip Hunter.  Which should only surprise you if you have never been to my blog.)

 I was thinking of this interview, and specifically this part:

“The crazy thing is there won’t be just one new version of Rip’s character this season. There will be multiple versions, and they’re not all improvements,” Klemmer previews with a laugh. “You will get to see Arthur Darvill do a full-on Jekyll and Hyde transformation — maybe Jekyll-Hyde-Jekyll, or Hyde-Jekyll-Hyde.

And then I thought about the summary for Turncoat:

A GOOD FIGHT — When The Legends find a new Time Aberration they learn they must travel to the winter of 1776 to protect George Washington and the American Revolutionary War. Unfortunately, things don’t go as planned, forcing Sara (Caity Lotz) to send out Nate (Nick Zano) and Amaya (Maisie-Richardson-Sellers) to help.  Meanwhile, Jax (Franz Drameh) and Stein (Victor Garber) who are busy protecting the incapacitated Waverider from their new enemy, are forced to step into roles that they don’t think they are prepared for.  Brandon Routh, Dominic Purcell and Arthur Darvill also star, Alice Troughton directed the episode written by Grainne Godfree & Matthew Maala (#211).  Original airdate 2/7/2017.

And I have a theory.

I think the “new enemy” will be Rip Hunter.  We’ve seen linked images of him as a red coat.  And if anyone knows how to incapacitate the Waverider, it would be the Captain who’s flown her for thirteen years.  

So maybe, when he realizes he can’t get any info from Phil, Eobard tries something else, and we get a genuine adversary Rip in the process?

I’m a little nervous about the Jekyll and Hyde comparison, because while I LOVE the idea of adversarial-Rip, I’m not really interested in EVIL Rip.  Rip Hunter is a man who couldn’t kill Vandal Savage when he had him helpless in Egypt, and couldn’t kill Per Degaton as a child.  That core of morality is part of who Rip is, and I have no interest in seeing some kind of conscienceless mass murderer wearing his face.

But...it occurs to me that there’s a way that this could work that could really appeal to me.

Say Eobard scrambles his brain to the point where Rip recognizes that he’s a Time Master, but convinces him that the team are Time Pirates.

It might not even be that hard to do, depending on how much knowledge Eobard has regarding the team’s shenanigans.  I’ve said many times that I think Sara is an infinitely much leader than Rip, but he’s the better Time Master.  We don’t see her keeping as close an eye on the timeline as Rip does (see: the constant reminders of Louis XIV in Out of Time), or checking up on alterations later.  Season One had quite a few instances where Rip caught the after effects of a fuck up, and ended up undertaking efforts to have the team fix them.  We don’t see Sara engage in the same level of oversight.

This is not a knock on Sara, by the way.  She’s still a fantastic Captain.  It’s just, I think, the difference between someone who’s trained all his life to keep the timeline intact and someone who’s had the job thrust on her.

But, for all that the team has done pretty damn well overall, there are a couple of glitches that I think would look really bad from an outside point of view.

The first, and biggest, is Shogun.  Because in Shogun, the team, and ONLY the team, was the time aberration.  There were no time pirates, no machinations by Eobard Thawne, nothing except Ray Palmer not being able to keep hold of his Atom suit, and Nate Heywood not wanting his new friend to get married to the Shogun.

And because of those two things, they end up in a massive battle with the Shogun’s forces during a time when isolationism from the West is a pretty big thing, and causing said Shogun to die ten years before his historical death.

That’s actually a pretty big deal.  A bunch of foreigners murdered a Shogun ten years early.  What effect is that likely to have on the country’s isolationism in general?  Do we think that would inspire Tokugawa Ietsuna, assuming he is still Iemitsu’s successor, to be more or less open to commerce with the West.  (And who’s to say Ietsuna would have the same policies in 1641 as he does in 1651?  How many of us would have made the same decisions ten years ago as they would today.)

That’s not even getting into how the colonial powers eventually would force open Japan’s borders two hundred years later, or how Iemitsu’s isolationist ideals were revived in the sonno joi movement which led to the Meiji Restoration.  Or how the switch to expansionist policies afterward during Meiji and Taisho ended up influencing the idea of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and Japan’s role in World War II.

History isn’t just one event, it’s one event impacting another, impacting another.  George Lucas didn’t go to film school, and Ray Palmer never invented the atom suit, and a bunch of people may not have been saved by the Atom.  And so on.

Maybe it didn’t end up changing much.  But it absolutely could have.  And it only happened because of the Legends.  No one else. 

Another one that could easily be turned back on the Legends is Compromised.  Compromised was the Ronald Reagan episode.  If you recall, Nate introduces his device to help them find time aberrations before they happen.  They go to the White House, where Sara sees Damien Darhk, Martin Stein’s younger self is fooling around and so on.

But...did the Legends really prevent a time aberration there?  Or were they the aberration?

I mean, obviously Damien Darhk was there and up to no good.  He’d infiltrated the White House for some nefarious purpose.  But here’s the thing.  Damien Dahrk was the natural Darhk of that timeline.  He’s already there and scheming before Eobard (an actual time traveler) shows up.  So presumably Damien and his entire plan are ALREADY a part of history.  Since history doesn’t record an explosion there, something else must have happened to change it.

Eobard is a time traveler, of course.  But what exactly did Eobard do in the episode except try to recruit Darhk.  There is no real evidence that he influenced Darhk’s scheme.  Which means that Eobard did not cause this time aberration.

The Legends did.  The Legends attacked Darhk, stopped his scheme, revealed their powers publicly, and created a lot of havoc.  That’s not even getting into Martin getting his younger self laid.  Now, we know from season one, how dangerous public power use can be.  Firestorm’s appearance in 1975 led to the Soviets creating a whole Firestorm project in the 80s.  So what might the White House do, now that THEY’ve seen metas?

Maybe nothing will come of it.  But it could have.  Because of the LEGENDS.

I mean, most of the other episodes are different.  Something else happened to fuck up time first: time pirates causing civil war zombies, Eobard killing the JSA, Turnbull getting dwarf star metal, the Legion of Doom.  And so on.  The Legends do a fine job dealing with them.  

But Shogun and arguably Compromised are situations where fairly big potential changes can be laid exactly at the Legends’ feet.

So.  We have Eobard Thawne, a man who managed to control and manipulate the Flash for almost an entire year.  And he’s got in his hands an already mind-fucked Rip Hunter.  How hard would it be for Eobard to convince his very confused captive that the Legends are far bigger threat to the timeline than he is?

Especially if he can point to the events of Shogun and Compromised as “proof”

And as we learned from Marooned, Rip Hunter is legendary when it comes to bringing down Time Pirates.

Eobard might not be able to get the information from Rip but there’s a nice compass and part of a spear that could be within his grasp...

And for Rip’s part, we’d get a Rip-as-adversary plotline that wouldn’t involve the poor guy turning into a cliched villain.  He could still be exactly as kind and moral as he is now.  Just...he thinks he’s trying to stop some very bad people.

It’s just a theory, but I think it’s a fun one.  Maybe I’ll turn it into a fanfic.