How Can So Many Keep Messing It Up?

I am already getting tired of the TV show Flash and how overpowered the main character is. The character moments and just more and more inadequate to offset the bad logic and science they keep using. As far as I can figure, according to the show, running really really fast can give you just about any powers you can imagine. And it would help if they could be consistent, but I already figure that was asking too much.  Rarely are such shows able to keep the powers working the same throughout, as they get altered as needed for the story.  But this season ended with them really messing with their own rules big time, although they were already rewriting the rules throughout the season as a whole.

The rules I am talking about are their rules concerning time travel.

Now understand, time travel is a real easy thing that takes next to no effort for a 'speedster' in the show. It is something they do real casually all the time. But early on they hinted at the cost of messing with time and accidentally rewriting history. And when they put that out there originally, it seemed like they had some idea of how the rules should work and I was able to accept that as it wasn't too crazy, just missing the fine details as they almost always do. I understand you can't go and trace every little plot point to how a change in time would affect it.

So here they are ending the season with a time changing event, that somehow only changes one point in time, one that would not even be possible to have gotten to with what was changed. Once you remove the item that is keeping the character from being able to use his powers, that changes everything as to how you keep him imprisoned. The scenes we saw and everything we've been witnessing from the future would never happen. The item would not just vanish at the one point when it is most convenient for the character to have it vanish. That makes no sense at all on any level. It is just poor writing.

Then another character is erased from the timeline somehow (I did not get the logic of it there, as with the time line being messed up already earlier on in the season, my thought is she already changed her birth back then), and they do the time catching up with everything fade away, which I have never really liked. Once she no longer existed, everything she did still was done, meaning that somehow her not existing did not change anything. So all season, where most of the story line is motivated by her being there, still happened even though she never existed and just faded away... That does not make any sense with the logic of cause and effect.  Weak writing.

Regretfully the writers of the Flash are not the only ones guilty of not giving a damn about common sense rules for time travel.

All in all I loved Avengers: Endgame. That main thing that bugged me was their treatment of time travel.  They tried to imply rules, but really they just went all chaotic, without giving a damn about the idea of having rules. They did what they pleased with time travel with no sense of how it works and nothing in the way of repercussions. While it gave us some enjoyable scenes, all they needed to do was spend some time on creating real rules and then follow them. What we saw in Endgame is the time stream being totally screwed up to the point where a bunch of the MCU movies should never have taken place. The story line was left in a full on wreck with the ideas of cause and effect, but in the end that was all ignored and they pretended that there was rules that would fix it all.

Luckily the rest of the movie was enjoyable.

And these issues are not new. I love Back to the Future, but its views of time travel are flawed. A big difference is that they did set up their rules of time travel (even if I don't agree with them) and mostly followed them. The rules that get bent, you can come up with reasons for them. I am of the group that believes Marty died several times during the events of Part 2 and that Doc Brown had to play with time to be right where he was needed to save Marty's life. Although there is no logical reason to how Biff knew how to use the time circuits, but that has nothing to do with the rules of time travel.

Even Doctor Who rewrites its rules of time travel as needed. I still enjoy the show for the most part, but it does bother me when they decided to go against rules they have previously set up. Now a big part of that does come from being a long lived show that changes creative teams every so often.

In the end the whole concept of time travel is a hard thing to work with. Too many writers play with it without thinking it through. There needs to be rational results that fit with the ideas of cause and effect. Stories using time travel can be far better if a little thought it put into them first.