I was working while watching this episode,
so there's something I didn't quite get :
I know that Sam saves his brother and that
the reporter (even though she's dead) gets a
pulitzer. But, what was it exactly that altered
time so that Al was a prisoner for an extra five
years?
Rene, Re:
I know that Sam saves his brother and that the reporter (even though she's dead) gets a Pulitzer. But, what was it exactly that altered time so that Al was a prisoner for an extra five years?
If Sam hadn't darted off the save his brother, he could have rescued Al. That was Tom's mission.
Thanks.
Thanks.
I'm guessing that when Al said that in his mind,
he was always, he means that he still has the
memories of the original time line.
I always thought that Al was trying to change history so he didn't have to be a POW for 5 years, as he did originally. I thought that comment about being free in his mind just meant that the VC didn't completely break him and so Sam shouldn't worry too much about missing the chance to save him. After all, Tom (and assumably his entire company) died in the original timeline, so he couldn't have saved Al without Sam's help anyway. Still, Rene's comment has me thinking now.
Re:Rene
What I think what Al meant by always being free in his mind, that while he was a POW he was free mentally, though not physically.
What was that "Thanks to you, little brother"
thing? Did Tom know about Sam in this episode?
Was it really necessary for Al to tell Sam about that last photo? Sam was already feeling bad about that reporter dying, when she didn't in the original timeline...why tell him that Al could
have been saved from 5 years as a POW....
And another thing...it's Sam's body that leaps...
right? But what happens to all the alcohol in
Sam's system when he leaps? He's drunk...he leaps
and suddenly he's sober again.
In the pilot episode, Al tells Sam that a week had passed from his first leap to his second leap as a baseball player. So, Sam is bouncing around back and forth in time inbetween leaps.
What I don't like about this ep. is the casual way sams kills lots of vietnamese at the end. Sofar, sam has seen lots of evidence how the future is altered by small deeds. It was always very important to change the future not too much because nobody can foresee it. Now, not only do Tom and his company survive, to have children, and grandchildren, sam also killed 10 to 20 vietnamese, who would have lifed, had children and grandchildren in the original time line. Thats a very major messing around, a lot of influences suddenly changed, but sam is sad about 1 life of the reporter. Ususally he is more thoughtful and compassionate.
I also missed some general comments about the vietnam war being wrong, the way the US treated the civilians and so on. It was only save tom and everything is fine. A little disappointing for me.
Re: "sam also killed 10 to 20 vietnamese, who would have lifed, had children and grandchildren in the original time line. Thats a very major messing around, a lot of influences suddenly changed,"
You are assuming that those Vietnamese soliders in the original timeline didn't die later in some other battle.
There is a great novel that is sort of a sequel to this episode by L. Elizabeth Storm called Pulitzer.
NNAN: Navy SEALs operate out of a base apparently staffed by Marines and are flown to their objective by the Army. That seems like quite a feat of combined ops for the 1960s.
Chu-Hoi spends most of the mission carrying a pistol a few feet from Tom's head, but at the end she suddenly has a rife. Interestingly, even though she was well-placed to quickly kill Tom and then attack the others and all had been led into a trap, in the original timeline Tom was the only member of the team killed; I don't think any of them were even captured. The situation looked much more dire than that before Sam saved the day.