The Rules of Time Travel in Avengers: Endgame

Ok, standard disclaimer first, this whole post is one big spoiler, so reader beware..

Second thing, I am not here to tell you how time travel actually works in the movie. And I am most certainly not here to tell you if the way it works in the movie could theoretically work in real life. Both these endeavors would take about 3,000 units of raw intelligence, and last I checked, I only have about 144.

I am only here to tell you what the rules of time travel are in this film, apparently. I listed these rules just to see if there is a set of rules under which every scene in movie would come together in a consistent, non-contradictory way, and viewed through the prism of these rules, I think the movie makers came pretty close. Kudos to them.

Rule #1: What's done is done. Traveling back in your reality changes nothing about what has already happened in your reality. Making changes in the past, like retrieving the infinity stones, creates an alternate reality (and thus a multiverse) but changes nothing that has already happened in yours. This is why the Avengers couldn't just go back and kill a young Thanos, an option which War Machine wondered about.. Doing so would have just bought them to an unpredictable alternate reality which, for all they knew, might have turned out to be worse than the current one. They wanted their current reality, but to bring back that half of the universe that Thanos had snapped into oblivion.  Rule #1 also explains something I spent quite a bit of time wondering about - why they needed to make a gauntlet and have the Hulk snap it. If all the stones were retrieved long before the year 2018, I wondered at first, how could the events of Infinity War have taken place? No stones, then no glove, then nothing for Thanos to snap, and half the universe never turned to dust. But apparently, the rule is, what has already happened cannot be changed, even if you go further back. When the Hulk snapped the new gauntlet, he wasn't changing the past, he was executing a new action that reverses the effect of a past action. It's like a computer file accidentally deleted. You cannot change the fact that the deletion happened, but you can go to the recycle bin and undelete it. To emphasize, this doesn't mean that one's actions when time traveling in the Marvel Cinematic Universe have no consequences, but rather than changing what has already taken place, they create alternative branches of reality. The Ancient One (aka bald lady) explained this quite clearly, after which Bruce Banner swore to return the stones in order to restore a universe with a single reality.

wired.co.uk

Rule #2: The time traveler can co-exist with his/her non-time-traveling self at any given place and time.  This is actually pretty clear and best illustrated by Nebula. She clearly came face to face with her old self and even killed her old self. Many of the Avengers also saw themselves, and Captain America even fought himself. If you're wondering how killing your old self doesn't also make you dead, refer to rule #1, nothing you do in the past changes what has already happened, and Nebula has already lived up to 2019. Killing her old self doesn't change that. The most interesting application of rule #2 is in the case of an old Captain America at the end of the film. Yes it was meant to be a sweet moment showing how even a superhero can make choices in life in the name of love, but initially it does lead to some logical discomfort, because if Captain America was old by 2019, who was that fighting just a few days ago in that final climactic battle between good and evil? He was even wielding Thor's smaller hammer for crying out loud. But our rules come to the rescue in a pretty neat and elegant way: after the final battle Captain America volunteers to go back to the past to return each of the five stones, after which he decides to stay in the 1940s where he made a different choice not to be a superhero but to be with Margaret Carter instead, and from thereon he quietly co-existed with his Superhero self, right up until his Superhero self went back in time to return the stones, and then there was one Steve Rogers again, the old, non-superhero one. So actually, for a few hours in New York in 2012, there were three of them co-existing. 😃 Yes, this is just my theory, but give me a better explanation of how an old Steve Rogers turned up on a bench at the end of Endgame and I will gladly take it back.

bustle.com

Rule #3: You can't change the past, but you can bring something from the past into the future. This doesn't need much analytical proof because there are very clear instances of this. Thanos had already destroyed the infinity stones, but while the Avengers could no longer change this, they could still have stones now by going into the past and bringing the stones into the future (the now). Gamora was also another very clear example, Thanos had thrown Gamora off a cliff to her death as a condition to gaining possession of the Soul Stone even before Endgame, but she was at the final battle because Thanos bought her from the past into the future. To keep with our deleted file analogy, although we can't change the fact that the deletion took place, we can still find, and use, an earlier copy of the file we might have saved somewhere.

Rule #3 is incredibly HUGE. Because it provides a loophole through which the Marvel Cinematic Universe can bring people back from the dead. Really. Think about it, eventually someone will realize that while they can't change the fact that say, Black Widow died, (Hulk said he tried with the gauntlet, but couldn't), what they can do is to time travel to a point in time where she was alive, and bring her to the future. If you think I'm crazy, well, I have one word for you: Gamora. 😀 This bodes very well for the viability of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and of course, its profitability. 😋

My Nitpicks: While the exercise of articulating these three rules does enable me to find a consistent logical basis for the entire Endgame story line, I do also have some nitpicks:

1. I feel the most logical place for the Avengers to time travel to should have been that garden planet where Thanos retreated to following his snap in Infinity War. As long as they went within the first two days, all five stones would've been there. Seems to me it would have been the most efficient time and place, but I guess it wouldn't have been much of a movie then.  I might be missing something, but I can't think of a single reason why they didn't go to that garden planet in those two days.

2. The film was quite clear that five years had passed in real time between the demise of half the universe and the events of Endgame, but by the end of the film Peter Parker is shown going back to school without seeming to miss a beat. Shouldn't his peers be five years older than him by now? Unless they also turned to dust too and came back. But... all of them? 😐

3. I seem to remember quite vividly that in Infinity War, Vision had already sacrificed himself by having his girlfriend Scarlet Witch destroy the mind stone lodged in his head, but Thanos used the time stone in the yet to be fully functional gauntlet to change the past, revive Vision with the stone still whole, before taking it from his head, and killing him. So, doesn't this show that the stones do have the power to change the past? Time travel can't., but the gauntlet can. So while the Avengers would still need to time travel in order to get whole stones, it seemed they could have done a whole lot more with the gauntlet once they had it in their possession.

In the final analysis though, what I've realized is that these MCU movies are entertainment and  I really ought to watch them as if I'm reading a comic. I must admit that for some reason, watching a live action film makes me instinctively hold them up to a higher standard of realism, which really ought not be the case. No one could be as smart and cool as Tony Stark right? Billionaire, playboy,  genius, philanthropist. 

"I'll Make It..."

Wikipedia

The 1986 film Hoosiers is, in some ways, arguably, the best basketball movie ever, and anyone from my generation who likes basketball has most likely seen it. It's filled with "guy" themes like loyalty, perseverance, achievement, second chances, and redemption. I remember crying when Everett told his dad Shooter that he "did good, real good..." 😢 Hmmm... and now as I think of it, one other sports movie moment where I remembered crying was in Field of Dreams when Ray Liotta's Shoeless Joe Jackson called out to Burt Lancaster's Doctor Archibald Graham as the latter stepped off the field one last time to tell him that "you were good.." In hindsight, apparently, such understated statements that give recognition trigger something in my soul, but what exactly that something is, is probably too expensive to pay a psychologist to find out. Besides, who cares? 😄

It bothers me a bit when people try to figure out how "accurate" the movie was. I don't think it was meant to be accurate, it was not really the story of the small school Milan which won the Indiana High School State Championship in 1954. It certainly drew inspiration from the Milan story, but I don't think it was meant to be an account of that piece of history.
 
Through the years some great trivia also emerged about the movie, and when I say great, I mean great (Allow me write as if I am speaking to people who, like me, have watched the movie dozens of times):

1) The eight Hickory Huskers were not professional actors (with the exception of Everett) but rather were handpicked for their basketball skills and the fact that they were deemed to look "right" for the parts. Most played organized ball, with one notable and ironic exception - Jimmy Chitwood never made the varsity of his high school! In contrast, Ollie was a very good high school player, with Rade probably the most accomplished, having gone on to play college ball, albeit not Division I.

2) The names of the South Bend Central starting five, which Gene Hackman wrote on the blackboard prior to the championship game, were all real surnames of the members of the Hickory Huskers team. How cool is that?! If you'll remember, coach Dale was heard saying that the opponents' "best player (was) Boyle". Boyle is the actual last name of the guy who played Whit - Brad Boyle.

3. The religious one, Strap, apparently was the most likely to get drunk in real life.

4. A tragic piece of trivia was that Merle committed suicide in 2003. Of all eight members of the team, Merle's character was probably the one I would least expect to be struggling with inner demons. Merle was the boy scout, the slightly corny one, the one who always did the right thing - whether it be listening to Coach Dale from day one and making four passes before a shot, or trying to win the state championship "for all the small schools that never had a chance to get here." But I am confusing Merle Webb the character with Kent Poole the man who portrayed him, though that is a mistake for which I am sure all other fans of this movie will forgive me. Such is the power of this film.

5. Some have made charges that the movie had a subtle racist undertone in that an all-white team beat a powerhouse team with three black starters. Personally, I always found that to be simply a reflection of the realities of that time - it made perfect sense to me that larger schools in larger cities were more integrated than small rural ones. If anything, what I did find strange was that the coaching staff of South Bend Central was almost entirely black. My impression was that this was probably not yet possible during that day and age, but being no expert on American civil rights history I could be wrong.

Those who, like me, have gone over the movie countless times, might have also noticed that the basketball scenes are not exactly flawless. Take the iconic "picket fence" game, a clip of which is shown above: in the wider shot, it is actually Jimmy (15) who closes the passing lane and steals the ball, but in the subsequent tight shot, it is shown to be Buddy (14), more consistent with the instructions Shooter gave during the timeout, which was for Rade to deliberately get "taken out", and for Buddy to "drop down and take his place". This is just one of many discrepancies in the basketball scenes.  I think this just shows that in making a movie, scenes are usually not shot in sequential order. The wide shots were probably taken earlier, on a day when extras had been hired to fill the stands. The tight shots were then taken later, as the script was also constantly being fine-tuned, so sometimes the wide shots and the tight shots do not necessarily match.

Profile from Wikipedia, Screengrab from Fandango

Through the years I have also come to learn that the court where the championship game was played is actually Butler University's Hinkle Fieldhouse. In the screengrab of the playing court I posted on the left, you can see the word "Bulldogs" painted on the far end of the court. This stands for "Butler Bulldogs". For the movie, the shaded lane was changed to the size and shape of the "keyhole" of that era; how they did that I am not sure, as I believe for first class playing surfaces they don't simply paint and repaint over the floor. I actually have dreams of visiting that facility, I love the fact that the pole holding up the goal was made of an iron tube, which I've always imagined  would make the ring particularly unforgiving. It's a court made for only the purest of jump shots, and therefore a perfect place for the best Indiana high school hoosiers to play for the state championship.

The other day while watching the movie yet again, or at least certain parts of it, I called my 14-year old daughter to watch the final time-out with me. It being a school night, that was the only scene I allowed her to watch before shooing her away to do homework. I wanted to know how she would understand that particular scene. I think It's a scene that is open to some interpretation. When the movie first came out, it was 1986 and I was 17. I probably didn't get to watch it until a couple of years later at maybe 18 or 19. At that time I thought it was a Larry Bird moment showing Jimmy Chitwood's supreme confidence in his ability to rise to the moment. True enough, my daughter also had the same offhand impression as she asked me if the Jimmy Chitwood character was a bit of a "glory hog".

I have come to believe though, that the scene was meant to show how much of a true team Hickory had become. In a team that has come together to reach its highest and most sublime form, everyone is focused on the singular goal of winning; there are no petty jealousies and none of the passive-aggressive deference so often found in talent-laden but immature teams. The Huskers on the court all felt Jimmy had the best chance at making a basket at that moment, and they collectively let it be known to their coach. The coach was smart enough to recognize how mature his players had grown, and wise enough to adjust and take a step back. This stood in sharp contrast to their first game that season, wherein Coach Dale told them that they each had the weekend to decide if they wanted to play on the team, a team wherein what he says is the law, "absolutely and without discussion." The last timeout was meant to show not that Coach Dale had changed, but that he was good enough to recognize when a team needed discipline, and when it had grown together enough to not require such a heavy hand.

This still leaves the question though, of why Jimmy said "I'll make it" and not "I'll take it". 😊 Well, on that point, I believe it was because great and mature players have moments in games wherein their advantage in skill is so great that they are in total control of what is going to happen. I'll digress a bit here to illustrate: this is exactly what Larry Bird, at his best, was. There are many stories of him telling opposing defenders what he was going to do, and then proceeding to do it exactly as he described. This doesn't mean that Bird was in total control of a game 100% of the time, but that there were moments when he was. Moments when he knew exactly what he was capable of, what his opponents were capable of, and what the other four opponents needed to be focusing on. He would then know what kind of shot he could get, and great enough to almost always make those shots if he could get them in ideal situations. Sadly, entire generations of players, even players who reached the NBA, heard those Larry Bird stories and mistook them to mean, as I once did, that Larry Bird was great because he talked trash. At my current age I have come to realize, or at least believe, that we had the logic in reverse order. What was true, was that Larry Bird could talk trash because he was so great. Braggadocio, in and of itself, doesn't  make jump shots with no time left on the clock.

"David put his hand in the bag and got a stone and slung it, and struck the Philistine on the head... and he fell to the ground.."

   
 

Hidden Treasure

Even though I love food, I've been a bit hesitant to blog about the subject, because I do realize that having eaten a lot of food does not automatically make one an authority in the judgement of its quality. However, I found this gem of a place along Banawe Street that made me throw caution to the wind, as the saying goes..

As a lifelong resident of Quezon City and having gone to high school somewhere near the Banawe district, I am quite familiar with the area; and through the years I have seen food outlets come and go. Having witnessed which businesses succeeded and which failed, I have come to have something of a conviction that the area's market for food requires a very specific price point. An economist might say that the demand for food in the district is very elastic relative to price - meaning demand can be highly reactive to every unit change in price. Now don't get me wrong, I am not saying that food in the area must be cheap, and I am most especially not implying that the people in the area are not financially well off. I know for a fact that in the midst of the unassuming auto supply and car accessory shops, reside many millionaires and possibly even a billionaire or two; but for some reason that is beyond my ability to analyze, for the most part, only food outlets with a very specific mid-range value proposition thrive in this area. That has been my observation through the years. The food outlets that find success in this area tend to have somewhat moderate pricing and, necessarily, a corresponding middling food quality.  So I was - and there is no other way to say this - plainly shocked when I had a late lunch at the 28 Treasures HK Roast + Dimsum sometime last week. I was stunned at how high the food quality was.

I had a number of reasons to expect that the food would be of somewhat average quality. First was my aforementioned observations about the neighborhood in general. Second, and I apologize to the business owner for being frank: the name had similarities to the names of two fairly new players in the roasted meats niche - 8 Treasures Roasting at the Dasmarinas Petron Station in Makati, and Hong Kong Little Kitchen in San Juan, especially its tagline - "The Home of Legendary Roasts". So this created, at least for me, a general feeling that this 28 Treasures place might be something of a "me too" copycat, with the attendant mediocrity. Third, the place was small. I'm poor at estimating these things, but I think it had maybe a 20-person seating capacity. Usually, a food outlet that commits to serving high quality food will have grander ambitions about the volume of business it will be doing, because you do need a large market to sustain a more expensive kitchen, and will prepare for this accordingly with a relatively large floor plan. Yes, there is a recent trend towards small places serving quality food, but with only a first impression as my only basis, of course I still reverted to more long-standing biases.

I tried only two dishes, and found quality to be very high. I made a deal with myself to try never to use the word "good" in my food posts because that is subject to personal tastes and really, who am I to judge? Quality though, probably has more objective benchmarks - like appearance, freshness of ingredients, etc., so I will be so bold as to venture there. As a quick example, hakaw afficionados will immediately recognize the plumpness of these little darlings and everything that this plumpness implies.

I find myself rooting for this place, because the quality of the food shows both great skill and pride in one's work - two things I admire immensely. Perhaps the owners should be forewarned though, that we have a running joke in my family that when I like a food outlet, then it is practically a kiss of death. 😀 To be fair I think this is partly because I tend to like quiet places and a quiet place generally means it hasn't really "clicked" with the public at large - or to put it more succinctly, the places I tend to like are those that haven't found, for some reason, a large following. This necessarily means that the places I like are generally in the midst of fighting an uphill battle in connecting with a sufficient market, and thus have the odds stacked somewhat against their finding lasting success.

Prices at 28 Treasures, while not really high especially given the quality, are on the higher end of the Banawe range, so I do have some concern about that. Additionally, the owners show no signs of having any social media savvy, and in this day and age of the 'gram, this could be detrimental to their prospects. They are on Waze though, so if you are so inclined, punch in the restaurant name and find your way towards the corner of N. Roxas and Banawe. 

The Brown Derby

Ah, the power of a sign. Every time I would chance upon this sign along Calamba St. in the Banawe District, I always found myself feeling like how I imagine Anthony Bourdain must have felt every time he passed by a bun cha shop in Hanoi. As he once put it: "...bare aluminum table, low plastic stool, crummy neon light, early warning signs of great things to come..."

I do know the general feeling he is referring to - it really does seem like certain sights do fill us, or at least me, with a sense of presumptive expectations about the quality of an upcoming experience - whether gastronomic or otherwise. With a name like "The Brown Derby" and a color scheme that reminded me of the 60s, I suspected the original owner  was probably a baby boomer and was the type who wore white toe shoes and socialized in a derby hat. Surely, I said to myself, a man with that sense of style must have taken great pride in the food he produced. Belatedly, I found out that the name was probably just lifted from a restaurant chain in California that had its heyday in the decades after World War II. Ooops...

Yesterday, with the imagined, apparently erroneous back story still in my mind, I stopped as I drove past. I must say that the visuals of the place did nothing to detract from the narrative swimming within the confines of my mind that i still wanted very much to believe up to that point. Many details had a certain charm, like the bell one rang for service.

The first disappointment was that the place primarily sold all types of noodles and the local dessert pichi-pichi. I say disappointment because I felt this was totally inconsistent with a name like "Brown Derby". Determined to stay with my picture of an owner who wore a derby hat, I stubbornly ordered the item on the menu consistent with that image. For P49 I got myself a all-meat footlong hotdog.

 I must say that the place appears to be doing great, as the phone rang off the hook with orders in the few minutes I was there, so the noodles (many types) must be good. Either good or popular, most probably both.

As for the hotdog sandwich, it was okay. I would probably prefer it to the the usual run-of-the-mill hotdog sandwich one finds at the concession stands at the local supermarket. Would I make a special trip to get one? No. Would I have late-night cravings for one? Probably not. It was okay though.