What do you think of that writer confirming that the journal HAS indeed changed since the pilot since we saw Wyatt shoot when Flynn said he knew he wasn’t going to shoot? Any thoughts?? (Ps so excited you’re finally watching mfmm!!!)
I think it’s basically what we always thought, which is that the journal isn’t set in stone and that there is still a lot of mystery around how it comes to be written and why Lucy goes to give it to Flynn and everything around that. The team has obviously made a lot of changes to history during their missions, and we’ve wanted that to be explored, and this serves as a counterpoint in the “fate vs. free will” paradox they seem to be bringing in with the whole Rufus plot. That is, Rufus died no matter what Jiya did, but the team is planning to save him, and the question is whether the future can be changed, as well as the past. The fact that the journal hasn’t happened exactly as whichever original Lucy wrote it down shows that they’re not bound to just one possible course of events, and that their choices matter. Most shows that incorporate this thematic exploration usually do in fact go for that (that free will is real and we can decide how our lives unfold) rather than the cynical/fatalistic “everything is doomed/foreordained/can’t ever be changed” hardcore Calvinist predestination. So it shows the team that the only way the future is really going to turn out is the one that they choose and fight to have. The journal has clearly remained accurate about some things/personal details about Lucy, since she’s still Lucy no matter what branch of reality she wrote it in, but yes.
As for ships, it doesn’t mean anything one way or the other. Flynn and Lucy were never going to be together in a romantic sense (or any other sense) just because the journal said so. In fact, I’d argue that Garcy only started to really happen AFTER Flynn gave up his dead-set insistence on the journal: he was convinced they were going to be partners because it said so, and came in 1000 degrees too hot and forgot he had to do the work to actually convince the real Lucy to like and trust him. After he apologized for that in 2x06 and told her he’d back off and they didn’t have to have a relationship if she didn’t want to, that was what made her think about trusting him and opening up to him (and less than 24 hours later, telling him that he was the easiest person in the entire bunker to talk to, after spending the night in his bed). So yeah. If anything, insisting on the journal version of events so hard was what doomed Flynn in s1, and once he backed off and made it about her, he started getting somewhere.
Plus, we don’t know that the journal said Flynn and Lucy WERE together/married/etc in the future; that’s a popular Garcy shipper headcanon, but we don’t know it’s true. After all, L/W shippers have also thought that the journal said Lucy and Wyatt were together in the future and Flynn knew it and/or was trying to get them together (which… yeah, I don’t think so, but anyway). The point is, that’s not the case for either ship anymore, and we had Lucy being referred to as Wyatt’s wife by a stranger in 1x16 (”your wife is fine” when they’re captured by McCarthy’s dudes) and then as Flynn’s wife by a stranger in 2x07 (”Sir, please control your wife.”) So if there has been some shift in the meta-status of that at all, it feels like it’s moved toward Flynn, which fits with what I’ve written about their changing relationships with Lucy in season 2 and how she has moved closer to one and away from the other.
I would also say that this reflects how I view the writers’ plans/intentions overall. I used to think that they had a 100% solid endgame plan and that it was going to be L/W no matter what, but they have clearly not decided which way they’re going to go and are much more open-ended with their s3 discussions (again, if literally anything ever happens with that, NBC is Still The Worst). So they’re not tied down to anything one way or the other, and while obviously I don’t know if that includes Garcy romantically, it is also canon that they’ve deliberately written it into the script (“Do we detect a spark or two?”) and it doesn’t matter if they originally didn’t intend for it. They watched 1x10 like the rest of us, went “shit,” saw the chemistry, and started writing for it. So they have proved that they’re willing to alter their plans and to change things for how the story is working and be true to the characters, so… who knows.
