Okay so my biggest point of confusion with S4 is the whole concept of the Marigold needing to be destroyed for the timeline to be restored to its apparent single track.
Maybe I just need to rewatch, or maybe this actually didn’t make sense. I would not know because I haven’t read anybody else’s thoughts on this specific portion of the plot fuckery. Read at your own discretion because I am not being articulate right now and I ran in SO MANY CIRCLES while typing this up.
The Hargreeves siblings + Lila weren’t the only people created via Marigold. There were so many more! Per timeline AND overall. So why were they the only ones who had to die for it to work? To me that seems like they were working more on an “enough Marigold to cancel the Durango” concept, versus a “total destruction of all Marigold” one. Which doesn’t add up to what we’re being told is happening in the show.
Are we supposed to context-clue our way to the fact that the S1 Hargreeves siblings were THE original Hargreeves siblings, and that the timeline only split into all of those branches at the end of S1? And that it just so happened that the only way to fix everything was for them to die, specifically them and NOT any of the others—? Because now we’ve wrapped around to a point of contention for me which is that all of the marigold in the universe wasn’t destroyed, just 8 people’s worth in a single branch of the timeline.
It feels like the implication here is that fixing “the original timeline” and destroying all of the Marigold that existed at any given point in that one was the solution, even if it didn’t happen in that timeline— which would be accomplished by the ending of S4 (since the world ended in their original timeline canonically, and everybody died including the other folks with Marigold).
But this also implies that all of the other timelines that exist aren’t ‘as real’ as the other ones, which doesn’t really make sense to me in the established canon. They didn’t explain WHY the original 7 + Lila dying would fix things— why did it undo actions that had already occurred, across multiple timelines?
I would think that with the way things were explained, them dying would just kill the versions of themselves in that timeline, and the other timelines containing ample Marigold would continue to trek on as they are until whatever version of the Umbrella/Sparrow/Phoenix/etc Academy that existed there ended the world. And THIS is supported by the fact that we are shown that there are so many other timelines where OUR Hargreeves didn’t ever step foot- and yet we are shown and told via the photos & dialogue during Five’s conversation with himself that they ended as well because of the Marigold’s existence, not because of these specific versions of the siblings being there.
✨Anyways✨ I feel like I’m running in circles, and will continue to do so, but this is just where my brain is at trying to make peace with that ending.
