I’ll regret it for the rest of my life. Won’t I?
What happens when you travel to the future to see the outcomes of a decision you haven’t taken yet?
Spoilers for The Dan in the High Castle under the cut.
Martin: I – I do want to want to do something. I mean, I have all this, and you, so I should be –
Gabbie: Taking care of yourself.
Martin: No.
Gabbie: No, you should be taking care of yourself.
Martin: But if it means giving this up, you’re right, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life. Won’t I?
Gabbie: Don’t know. If only there was some way to find out.
Martin: Yeah. What? Oh! I’m a time traveller! Gabbie, do you want to come to the future with me and see if I regret –
Gabbie: Yes, please!
Indecisive as ever - and aren’t we all, for that matter? - Martin Gay can’t seem to make up his mind what he wants to do. On the one hand, he no longer wants to have anything to do with the Time Spanner - not after discovering there’s a faction of angry supernaturals (be them angels, robots, or some other ominously powerful entities) after him; on the other hand, there’s Gabbie, spurring him on, and if there is one thing he’s not prepared to give up, that’s her - the light bulb in his lampshade, the food in his fridge, as Laika earlier pointed out in her role as the narrator of this story.
It’s only natural that Martin is immediately on board with Gabbie’s suggestion to travel to the future to see if he regrets giving up the Time Spanner, and the power it entails - well, as soon as he finally catches on to what she’s actually suggesting, that is. Yet, once again, to observe is to change; as they soon discover, the apparently (or, not so apparently - but that’s probably for the listener to decide) bleak future is not a consequence of Martin giving the Time Spanner to Daniel Kraken, which eventually results in... Martin not giving him the Time Spanner.
(And is he even free to make any other choice at this point? Or are they all trapped already, part of another causal loop there’s no escape from?)
Gabbie: You must be able to reach it! Otherwise, how do you go back and give it to Dan?
Martin: Well, I’m hardly going to now.
Lord Kraken: Give what?
Gabbie: Wait, wait, wait. If you don’t give it to him –
Martin: Then how –
Lord Kraken: How what?
Martin: How have you done all this?
One might argue that seeing what kind of a nut job Lord Kraken proves to be during their brief encounter in the future is reason enough for Martin not to want to give him the Time Spanner; but on the other hand, he wouldn’t have known that without actually going to the future - though to be fair, Martin should have probably got wind of the fact as soon as Kraken forced him at gunpoint through a magic mirror, and into Heaven. So, in a way, Martin doesn’t give his boss the Time Spanner because he finds out he never did - and quite possibly, also because he finds himself trapped in 2018 in his effort to prevent Kraken from getting his hands on yet another magic mirror.
As to the end of this episode, Martin never goes back to his own time. A mere handful of minutes after saying goodbye to Gabbie - but a whole two years for her, and crazy like a crazy person on top of that - she comes back to save him, which means Martin has no real reason to travel back to 2016 now. (Though I guess we’ll have to wait and see if when we finally get the rest of the story.)
His present appears to be in the future, at least for now; and while we still don’t know the precise date most of this episode is set on, the fact that Gabbie claims she joined the Yellowcoats three months ago might point towards it being sometime in March/April 2018, though that’s merely a conjecture at this moment in time.
(I’m still trying to gauge how likely it is for a hail storm to hit South London that early in the year; a quick google search has failed to yield any conclusive result on that front, which in retrospect is probably for the best.)
Only time will tell whether Martin regrets his decision to travel to the future and see if he regrets it - broken Time Spanner notwithstanding.
