Supergirl - S5 Ep11 - Back From the Future Part One

Wait, Winn thinks Lex is a hero? I get him not having his Pre-Crisis memories, but him having no concept of Lex being untrustworthy after living in the future for years would suggest that history never comes to regard him as the villain he really is.

So what, in this new timeline Andrea never got turned into the shadow manipulating assassin/thief? What’s the point of that?

How does one go about getting a secret elevator installed? Asking for a friend.

Is that the same Non-CGI Martian Manhunter outfit they gave J’Onn when they introduced it an episode or two ago? I swear the last time/first time it looked more like what his outfit looked like in full CGI mode, but this looks different somehow. And it just looks weird on him on.

See, this is arguably the problem of having J’Onn leave the DEO, but still be part of the team effort. They either had to come to his office, which was an impractical staging area for their more secret heroing efforts; or he’d need to meet them back at the DEO. I wouldn’t be surprised if Alex and Kara at least, to say nothing of Brainy, ending up leaving the DEO by the end of the season and working independently; perhaps running into conflict with the DEO.

So does J’Onn own the space he’s been using as PI office? Because I think his landlord might have some concerns or questions about how he’s using his space.
Also, in theory this whole space existed before he converted it into a secret headquarters; right. It just apparently sat empty for the last year or two or however long J’Onn’s been away from the DEO – I can’t even keep track any more.

Wait, I know I’ve complained about this a lot over the last few weeks, but how the fuck does whatever J’Onn is doing to restore knowledge of Pre-Crisis work??? By all rights he’s somehow, inexplicably restoring the memories each person had before Crisis, but in this instance, Winn hadn’t been around for years before Crisis happened; so how does he know about Lena killing Lex? How does that knowledge or anything else he wouldn’t have been around for fit into his new perspective of Pre-Crisis?
This is such a cluster fuck.

Why is Winn the only one having this sort of volatile reaction to being caught up? With everyone else, J’Onn does his Vulcan mind meld thing and then they went about their business. There might have been a few comments, a gasp; Mia fainted, but that’s also because she remembered her fiancé being a psychopath and murdering one of their friends….

Really, whatever technology Toyman is using, Winn – who has been living a thousand years in the future for years – is like nothing he’s ever seen before? How is that even fucking possible?

Oh, fuck you. Yeah, there are some assholes out there, but I’m a little hard pressed to believe that Toyman would so readily gain followers with his lame ass anarchy speech.

I have mixed feelings about Winn’s “anti-trolling legislation” comment. On the one hand, that can be a slippery slope; one person’s “troll” is another legitimate criticism. I got called a troll the other day for daring to comment on an Arrow Facebook post that I didn’t like the finale. But on the other hand, in terms of any measures that might actually, effectively curb truly legitimate, garbage content that is a real detriment to society, whatever that might entail, would invariably be a good thing, but it’s depressing that it could take over a century before that becomes widely adopted….

Oh, fuck you Andrea. And here I actually thought that after everything that went down the first part of the season, they were going to ease up on the horrible boss routine and actually try making her more human, more personable. But nope. I look forward to Leviathan activating you so the super-friends can kick you ass.

Since when has “Wildcat” been Brainy’s nickname? And why would that possibly be his nickname?

As ever, how the hell did Other Winn managed to build these fucking tigers from scratch, when he’s at best been on this world for two weeks; and according to Lex was arrested shortly after arriving and has only been free for a day or two?
Also, how are these things resistant to Kara’s heat vision??

If ever there was a time not to wear a mask, it’s when fighting your murderous identical doppelganger from a parallel in front of a crowd and probably a fair amount of press; especially if said double is not wearing mask, exposing your identity anyway and ruining your reputation through misidentification. Take the fucking mask off and let people at least know there are two of you.

Okay, the wanted poster is gone, but what about Winn’s standing as a domestic terrorist in the present? Is there anything that now clears his name?

“Press the button. Now think of what you want.”
Lena holds the cube, suddenly a bunch of Supergirl porn starts flashing in front of them.
“I should have been more specific….”

Wait, why is Winn wearing glasses during game night? Is he doing the whole glasses=secret identity thing now?
I assume a thousand years from now they’ll have come up with a more effective way of correcting vision problems than prescribing glasses…..

In fairness, this isn't strictly an Arrowverse thing.  First and foremost, they're just using the conventions created in the comics; albeit mixing and matching developments that the comics have done over the course of decades and wedging it all into one big pile.  
And that itself then plays on the general "many worlds theory" or at least a simplistic, layman's view of it. 

I can't attest to any real scientific authority on the theory myself, but it's one that's captured my imagination since I was a kid.  There's just something that's always intrigued me about the concept of parallel universes and I've pondered the logical intricacies from a philosophical standpoint going back as far when I was in high school, where I, and I kid you not, tapped out long elaborate treatises on my PDA - that is, until it slipped out of my shirt pocket and skidded across the asphalt of my high school parking lot and everything on it became inaccessible.

Ultimately over the years I've reached a very nuanced opinion, based on admittedly on the barest and arguably anecdotal scientific knowledge of about parallel universes.  I still like the concept, to a certain extent, from the perspective of fiction and fantasy; it presents all sorts of possibilities to play with.  And I still remain and ardent fan of the tv series Sliders; through all its various production faults and backstage drama.  In hindsight it has taken on an unintentional quality of a modern day tragedy story; where had everything that went down behind the scenes not become a factor, the show probably would have followed a more conventional trajectory of having the four main characters faces regular peril, but still manage to beat the odds at every turn and more than likely ultimately return home none the worse for wear once the series was over.  Instead they ended up with a story where the character end up succumbing to the odds that are stacked against them; which is, of course, tragic.

From a real world perspective, I've come to dislike the idea of parallel universes.  Again, I speak with absolutely zero authority on the matter, but I don't want parallel universes to be real; I hope there is no multiverse, for a variety of reasons.  I feel like there are some unsettling implications of other versions of ourselves enacting every conceivable and inconceivable scenario of our lives, both good and bad; which lends to the thought of whether we ever then experience those other existences in some sort of perpetual life.

From a logical standpoint, again, with only the most rudimentary understanding of things; I don't understand the logic that just because some other outcome is possible, that somehow or for some inexplicable reason, that other outcome should take on its own separate reality.  Especially when you take into consideration the vastness of the universe as a whole and say that an infinite number of universes could be nigh identical, save one for some infinitesimal occurrence here on earth - this little speck of dirty in the comparative expanse of the universe.  Everything in each of these other universes are exactly - exactly the same everywhere else in the universe, except that Elvis lives for a few extra years.  
And that's just from the conceptual perspective of a diverging multiverse concept, where one universe branches off at any given proverbial fork in the road, enacting each opposing results; simultaneously splitting off for all the other divergence points....  It just seems like a literal cosmic cluster fuck.  
And maybe those realities than branch off recombine if or when they somehow manage to reach a point of synchronicity, where everything is exactly the same again, but that could conceivably run anywhere from nanoseconds to the entire span of the lifetime of the universe. But the main mental hurdle I keep coming to is, why?  Why do any of those things have significant enough impact to warrant reality to work that way?  And I concede that there may be something deep within the math or science that gets to the root of it, but from the outside it's baffling; and kind of strikes me as a bit indulgent to think anything we might do in our speck of a corner of the universe has any barring on the universe as a whole. 
And even if some might say that maybe it's not "every action" that results in the split between universes, that seems even more inscrutable to me; because then why is X a divergence point as opposed to Y?  And again, why can we suppose that anything that we might do rises to a high enough level of significance in the universe to even be a factor?

I mean, take Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment, where he suggested that if you put a cat in a box and that may be exposed to a time released poison, something where the release of the poison is outside of any conscious control, meaning you don't know if or when the poison has been released and therefore you don't know if or when the cat has died, until you open the box the cat exists in a simultaneous state of being both dead and alive.  
And if I'm not mistaken, some element of that usually plays into this many worlds theory; where this state is produced by saying that the cat can exist in both states, living or dead, by being alive in one universe and dead in another, divergent universe - which is probably an overly simplistic way of explaining the thought experiment.  But one of the things that has always struck me about that thought experiment is that it requires our observation of whether the cat is alive or dead and completely ignores whether the cat, another living being, is capable of consciously observing its own existence.

I know the many worlds theory is also often used, again if I'm not mistaken, as a way of explaining possible paradoxes through time travel.  And I get that to a limited degree, but at the risk of going off on a tangent, I often get feel like way time is looked at isn't as objective as it should be.  It seems like we speculate or even try to calculate aspects of time, without objectively qualifying what time is, much less proving it is a specific thing that can be measured in such a way as not to be influenced by internal factors of our physical reality.

Then you have the premise that for sure has been used in the comics and at least inferred in the Arrowverse shows, where the universes aren't constantly branching off. Instead, there are an infinite number of universes that all immediately existed from the dawn of time and somehow all manage to follow their own uniquely divergent path; even if the differences between different universes doesn't occur for billions upon billions of years.  How or why any of those realities could follow parallel development up to that point of divergence, only for them to go down separate paths is anyone's guess.  Ostensibly it's why any of those other possibilities actually are possibilities; which is to say that any outcome is not the result of the cascading sequence of events leading up to.  If I'm playing Blackjack and the my hand adds up to 16, I have the decision to stay or hit and take another card.  Whatever decision I make, is it actually my decision, is it actually possible that the other outcome could have happened; or has the confluence of events in my life, and the lives of everyone else currently or previously living, down to the fluctuations of the subatomic particles that make up not only my body, but the air and matter around me, including the cards, along with all of those factors leading up to it, spanning back through to the beginning of time and converged at that moment and resulted in the only decision I could have made in that moment, regardless of alternatives that might be open to me?

And I would like to conclude this post by saying, quite truthfully, that I have never been drunk nor high at any point in my life; for whatever that's worth....