Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-26431570-20150914005621/@comment-995426-20160407231026

No, you see... The principle is that, whenever someone travels back in time, time moves forward in a new parallel universe, which changes depending on how the time traveler influences past events. The time traveler can change the past however he wants, but it will never actually affect the timeline he came from&mdash;it will simply be a newly branched parallel reality. So, if the Ulixes turtles can save the Earth, it won't actually remove them from what they've created, so there will still be two groups&mdash;the time traveling group, and the group that never left Earth because Earth was never destroyed.

The principle here is the avoidance of stable time loops as a fundamentally flawed plot device in time travel fiction. I know the show already used a stable time loop with Renet and her Time Scepter, but it seems different from Honeycutt's technology-based time machine in that it seems to be a relatively more supernatural arbiter of the "correct" flow of time. In that sense, the Time Scepter can never change its own past. But the Ulixes traveled back in time specifically to change the past, so that already suggests different principles are already at play.

Of course, the much simpler explanation is that all the show's time travel scenarios have been really badly written to begin with, and the writers will pull whatever plot holes they please from whatever orifice to force a bad plot to work. But my suggestion at least hopes the writers and their editors aren't going to be this bad forever. Part of my motivation for suggesting this is because this show has been very, very good before, but recently it has been very, very bad, and I really wish and hope that it can become very, very good again, and the show is faced with a golden opportunity to toss out a bad mistake by having the Ulixes turtles sacrifice themselves to save Earth turtles. TMNT works best as solid character-driven fiction with a stable plot. I do not like pulpy TMNT. XD