ALSO (my previous post was getting too long and this is related but still a tangent lol) the good thing about seemingly endless timeloops is that, y'know, a lot of roads get you to the same places, and this gives you endless AU possibilities. Do KYAL recruit Whiteman because in the first few loops he stumbles across the body naturally like Hillinghead, Hasan, and Maplewood, and proceeds to make such a fucking nuisance of himself - Hillinghead and Shahara's tenacity, but with a non-corrupt Inspector to back him up-- that the recordings Mannix does for himself the first fifteen times are all like "You've gotta do something about this guy, everything still works out okay but he's just ANNOYING." I mean, can't prove that's *not* what happens. In the middle loop, does Mannix question whether Hillinghead really has to die, because a live father in law is more love for him, right? So he changes things slightly and now convincing Hillinghead to let him court the man's teenage daughter is uh. Like trying to get a stone wall to move. Hillinghead's not *forbidding* anything he's just very aware that he doesn't have the money or the standing to protect Polly from a man like Harker if things go sour so spend the next three years convincing him that Polly's safe with you and then if POLLY is still interested, then you can marry. The recording from that timeline: this is what my last recording said happened, this is what I changed, next time round change it BACK and make sure you tell yourself that time round that it's better off that the man is dead even if it seems cruel. In at least three loops Henry Ashe punches Julian Harker in the face, you can't prove that he doesn't. One loop absolutely everything seems to be going exactly like the last time except for no discernable reason Whiteman and Esther slip their tail and make it up to Inverness. Now it's just. Panic because who's gonna shoot Polly and Mannix with their gunman playing dad to some kid he's known two minutes, all the way up in bloody Scotland?