My God. See? This Krypton trailer is why you shouldn’t let people time travel. You end up doing horrible things to people.
“Yeah, hi. We need you to go ahead and go put yourself through a metric ton of anguish and brooding angst in order to topple an oppressive government so that your grandson can be exiled to our planet where we’ll make fun of him because he wears his underwear outside of his pants. Oh, and by the way? Those tremors your planet has? Don’t worry about them. Don’t call the Green Lantern Corps about them, either. You know how cranky they can get.”
Great Caesar’s Ghost. From this clip, Adam Strange didn’t even try to finesse the Observer Effect and come up with a way to save Krypton without generating temporal paradox. When any one of us could have come up with at least three methods in our sleep*. I’m telling ya: smash the time machine as soon as you see one…
Moe Lane
*In no particular order:
- Send Kal-El, sure. But lie to him about his planet blowing up.
- Send Kal-El, sure. But move somewhere else.
- Send a clone of Kal-El, and then either do #1 or #2.
I can actually see this existing as a closed time travel loop. i.e. bad guy from the future travels back in time to destroy Krypton two generations before Kal-El will be born. That causes someone from Earth to go back in time to warn Kal’s ancestors. Jor-El later finds out about the warning, confirms that Krypton will be destroyed, and sends Kal-El to safety on Earth.
That would also explain exactly *why* Jor-El picks Earth out of all the myriad possible worlds – because he already knows that Kal-El would be safe there.
The one nagging thread left untouched by it is why Jor-El doesn’t figure it out early enough to build a rocket that will hold the rest of his family along with Kal. But it could turn out that no one believes the time traveler from Earth when he mentions Krypton’s impending destruction, and Jor-El doesn’t confirm the truth until it’s too late.
Though something tells me that won’t be what the writers go with.
Now you’ve got me thinking there IS a time machine…
I generally hate time travel stories. That, AI, and cloning should be banned. I’ve never read about anything good coming out of those tropes.