theopengrave hahahahahaha cool cool cool cool, just had an...
Tell me lol
My theory:
4x11 Alice seeing S1 Q from her S4 perspective made her finally truly understand how much he really DID love her and realize how important that is/was to her (going back to Q’s comment about “I loved you but you couldn’t trust that”).
4x11 Alice is also in the same outfit she wore in 3x08/09, in which she previously made some uhhhh, shall we say, rash & high-handed decisions! (And was singing “why can’t we give love that one more chance” with Q.)
We also know Alice will do supremely misguided shit in general out of love for Q, see: timeline 23.
Cassandra-Alice is still a dangling thread out there, and time magic has cropped up at several points in the show previously.
So it occurred to me that Alice, who knows she still hasn’t yet reached the limits of what she’s capable of, might attempt time travel magic herself to try and fix/save her relationship w/Q and stop them from falling apart, probably around early S3 era but maybe going all the way back to S1 with the idea in her head that now she KNOWS everything she needs to do to make things go smoother (e.g. with The Beast).
(...Thus allowing the writers to neatly sidestep having to actually resolve or further develop Q/El from its current state, instead resetting it back to something more potential/theoretical. 🙃)
If Hale said one word for the ending was “tragedy,” well, erasing two to four seasons of character growth & development for almost everyone is pretty fucking tragic if you ask me! Especially if that happens and then something else goes horribly wrong, preventing it from being undone!
(I could write a whole meta essay of its own here about Alice as classic Gifted Student: her incredible magical ability, her relationship with magic, her ongoing (and sometimes entirely valid!) belief that she knows best in any magic-related situation (esp high-level), and how much high-level stuff she ends up doing without knowing or caring about the full consequences, but just to sum up: it’s a whole thing that’s been going on repeatedly since 1x01. So it’s also entirely possible that if she DOES try it, that’s somehow a prelude to how she ends up as Cassandra.)
Keep in mind, though, that I am a cynical bastard who’s extremely capable of building wildly inaccurate theories from what seem like solid base concepts! Fingers crossed!
