Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20160326211319/@comment-995426-20160425055246

Okay, I just realized... In a time travel system where traveling back in time necessarily branches a new timeline (which is exactly what the Ulixes was trying to do), why did the Ulixes show up again, at all? Why did the other Honeycutt even arrive? Surely not just to take the Earth turtles on an adventure just to easily sweep them out of the plot. Honeycutt originally came to Earth for a specific reason based on foreknowledge, didn't he?

One thing I know about good time travel fiction, is that you don't mix a plot formula of branching timelines with a plot formula of stable time loops, especially since stable time loops are very difficult to write well because they're so much more prone to plot holes. The Time Scepter had a sort of good excuse for maintaining a stable time loop in that it was the arbiter of fate&mdash;though Turtles in Time wasn't otherwise written well, the Time Scepter still functioned this way even in other versions of TMNT. But Honeycutt traveled in the Ulixes based on the knowledge of what would happen if it didn't get there, correct?

So if the Earth has been saved and a new timeline has been created, there's no reason for another Honeycutt to travel there to save it, unless it's to change something else entirely created in the new timeline's future. (In which case, the returning turtles are now locked into this fate without a timeline-branching time machine to save them.) But considering the plot holes that have taken the story here thus far, I wouldn't discount the likelihood that the writers simply threw in a stable time loop to give the Earth turtles an easy exit with the fewest questions asked. Almost as if an editor said, "I don't care how you do it, just get rid of them."