Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! Puzzles about the Time Trapper/Infinite Man Confrontation

The Time Trapper lives at the End of Time. Somehow his power is supposed to be connected to the final moment such that he can claim to be the "living incarnation of entropy".

The Infinite Man's origin/power is connected to the fact that he has been cycled through time countless times in an endless loop.

Brainiac Five uses the Infinite Man against the Time Trapper because IM represents an alternative conception of time from that which the TT embodies, one in which time folds back in on itself. The IM is living proof that time is circular, and therefore the last moment that the TT rules is not truly the last moment. The IM is supposed to defeat him by pushing him forward through time, and thus to the moment of creation, thereby demonstrating that the TT, contrary to his own beliefs, does not really win in the end, because the "end" is not really the end.

The problem is that time in the DCU just cannot be circular. Just as the circularity of time would show that there's really no "end" of time, it would also show that there's no real "beginning". Yet so much of the DCU mythology is founded upon the notion that there is something special about the creation point.

Zero Hour was predicated on almost-circular time, wasn't it? The post-ZH universe came after this one was destroyed, and the new creation point was simply a really big Damage blast. But the new universe wasn't quite identical to the old.

For that matter, the Flash once destroyed an entropy incarnation by taking him to the end of time, then continuing forward into the next universe. (He didn't seem to worry about whether he'd left all his friends behind in the old version...)

And in "Rock of Ages" Metron subscribes to nonlinear time: "In the game of gods, creation itself is the playing field. Sometimes Darkseid wins, sometimes we win. Each time, the universe is remade, as you have witnessed."

I think these all suggest that the universe is "pseudocircular"--it gets reset every zillion years (or earlier if something goes wrong) and proceeds similarly but not identically to the last time around. The creation point--or rather, the infinite sequence of creation points--seems to be genuinely "special" in that virtually nothing complex survives through it (except for gods and Flashes and Time Trappers and Infinite Men, of course.)

Plus add the confusion of hypertime aren't there zillions of starting points? Much like Alan Moore's Promethea stuff (that sometimes gives me a headache)....i 'think' there was one about time being circular yet happening at multiple times...the snake coils or somethings. 0000000

I don't know...but i DO know as a 12 year old that story by Levitz/Giffen blew me away and to this day is one of my all time favorites!!!

Jorge

EDE, there is some evidence that can arguably be used to support the ciruculur time theory, in terms of the beginning of time.

DCU mythology constantly focuses on the beginning of time, using Krona, the GL Corps, etc. when doing so. However, in Crisis on Infinite Earths, we see that the big hand that Krona always saw when he saw the beginning of time was actually the Anti-Monitor's. The Anti-Monitor, however, did not exist at the beginning of time, but had travelled back to the beginning of time to reshape the universe. Doesn't the very nature of this indicate that the concept of a beginning of time is a farce, since there were beings present at the beginning of time that did not start at the beginning of time, but came much later?

I could be getting all misguided on this psuedo-science, but to me that may be a fair point.

If one considers that the Infinite Man proves that there is no true end of time and there is a loop, one may also consider that the very nature of time travel itself, in being able to journey backwards in time to the very beginning, ensures that the beginning of time was actually never the beginning at all! Thus, when the Anti-Moderator reached through and created the universe in Crisis on Infinite Earths #10, he effectively proved that time is a loop, since he restarted the universe by re-changing the beginning, although it wasn't really much of a beginning at all.

My thoughts .

Maybe the Infinite Man wasn't proof of circular time after all, but rather just a loop along the line. He didn't really defeat the Time Trapper, who returned in 5YL within Lar Gand and, again, to confront Glorith and be replaced by her. Or something - I was never too clear on how all that was reconciled - how could Rokk enter the "Infinite" Library, but wait for himself at the end of Time? Ouch.

How many concepts of time are there? DC seems to have used linear, circular and something in-between, as described by Silicon Dream.

I always looked at it as if the "End of Time" where the Time Trapper resided was actually a side-dimension where time has no meaning (kind of like the Linear Men's Vanishing Point or Kang's Limbo from Marvel's Avengers stories) rather than the actual END of time in a linear sense.

That way, it can coexist with the circular time theory posited for the Infinite Man.

I think you should all bang your heads some more and digest this conundrum

Here's how I understand the Time Trapper's existence at the "end of time":

So, you may wonder, if he only exists in the universe's dying moment, he sure accomplishes a lot in that instant! And the Legionnaires come and battle him and stuff, and that sure seems to take awhile... a lot longer than an instant!

Well, the key to this is that time (at least in the final moment) in densely ordered, so that final moment actually consists of an infinite number of points. The Time Trapper's own subjective experience of that time is such that it is constantly speeding up. So, for example, suppose the final moment of time is one second long. The Time Trapper experiences the first half second of that moment, then, in what from his subjective point of view seems to be the same amount of time, experiences the next 1/4 of that final second, then 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, and so on. From the Time Trapper's point of view, even though he lives in the final second, he never actually reaches the end, so he is effectively immortal.

I think the Trapper is around from the beggining of time. He is an infant. Since we are always heading towards entropy he grows stronger and stronger until the last second? And yes that last second can be forever I think.

Now if the Infinite Man shows up on the next cover? What then???