Agents of Shield has a Fitz problem
Agents of Shield has a Fitz problem.
There, I said it. Don’t get me wrong, Fitz is one of my favorite characters. His story line has been interesting, though they did kinda hand wave the brain damage bit. I have no problem with the character himself. I don’t have one with the actor either. Iain De Caestecker does an amazing job. The Fitz problem involves the current story line and time travel paradoxes.
If you haven’t watched the latest episode of Agents of Shield, The Last Day, you might want to go watch it first. This post will include spoilers. Now that you have been warned, lets dive into the Fitz Problem.
We have to start by laying some groundwork. This latest season deals with time travel. Most of the team is sent to the future by means of another obelisk, while Fitz must ‘take the long way’ and sit in cryogenic stasis for 70 years. The team is trying to prevent an extinction level event that can wipe out humanity.
It seems kinda late. Earth was destroyed long before the team arrives in the future. The Last Day is full of flashbacks, which begin filling in what exactly has happened. We get the hint that the destruction happened in 2018. Previous episodes placed the blame on Daisy, Quake. That’s the first hole in the story.
If the team is in the future, how does Quake destroy earth? The show tries to rectify this situation by showing flashbacks in which the team is still in the past, right up until and after the destruction. The question that comes up is: can time be changed?
There are two basic options here, yes and no. AoS established in season 3 that people cannot change time. Fitz himself explains that it is a linear path. The very act of knowing the future cements those events in place.
The flashbacks seem to point toward the same idea. If the team is in the past when earth is destroyed, then that means they make it back from the future, and live through the destruction anyway. This would be a nice circular time travel story, but it has some issues.
The first issue is the MCU and the other Marvel television shows. The television side of the MCU is considered B Cannon, which means it is official unless the movies contradict it. So far everything has meshed pretty well. If earth does end up getting destroyed in 2018, that is going to throw a wrench in the works. Earth’s destruction wouldn’t happen in the movies, and not in the other series on tv. I don’t see AoS going this direction and splitting from the rest of the universe.
The next issue is character knowledge. Events in the Last Day make it pretty clear that the team in 2018 does not remember the events that happened to the team in the future. This seems to indicate that the team in the future never made it back. In effect AoS has created an alternate timeline. In one timeline the team is on earth when earth is destroyed, in the other timeline they are not there because they have already been transported to the future.
This would mean that the obelisk not only sent them through time, but to a different timeline or alternate universe. Among other things this means that either Quake is not responsible for the destruction of earth, or one timeline still has an intact earth since Quake was taken from that timeline before the destruction.
Of course there could also be some type of memory wipe that prevents the characters from remembering the events while they are in the future. I doubt this is the case, but it is a possibility.
So what if time can be changed? I’m leaning toward this being the outcome, but it has problems as well. It still doesn’t answer the question of the team in the flashbacks. If time can be changed, then the team in the future should have wiped those events out when they fixed time. This in effect would create another timeline. We would then be dealing with three different timelines: the one where the team disappeared, the one where the team stayed, and the one where the team fixed the problem.
A third option is the progressive success option. It is really an extension of option two. In the progressive success option the team doesn’t succeed, at least not at first. Each time they get a little bit closer, and events repeat in roughly the same way until that little bit becomes enough to change the outcome. If you want an example of a progressive success story, watch the Doctor Who episode Heaven Sent. The Doctor tries a task and dies, only to restart again at the beginning to try the task once more with no memory of the previous attempt. The events play out almost the exact same each time, but he makes it ever so slightly further than the last time around. Eventually he succeeds.
The problem here is that in a progressive success story the team in the flashbacks would still have knowledge of what happened in the future.
Now to Fitz himself. Fitz is in the future with the rest of the team, which is awesome. The problem is the way he got there. He came from the first timeline where the team disappeared. If Quake destroyed earth, then his timeline would be different than the rest of the team. Unless the possibility of multiple timelines and paradoxes is resolved, Fitz would find himself 70 years in the future in a world where his team is still missing because they disappeared to save an earth that was never destroyed since they weren’t around to destroy it. This problem extends to the weapons that Fitz stashed.
If the Fitz in the future now is from the current timeline, then he is not the Fitz that was with the group when they were taken. This still doesn’t fix the problem with the flashback group having no knowledge of what they did in the future.
When all is said and done we currently have two different teams that lived two different events. I am curious to see if the writers fixed this problem in later episodes, or simply let it slide in favor of telling a compelling story. Either way I will keep watching.
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Stephen Mayo lives in Montana with his wife, daughter, and three cats.
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