[Spoilers S7] Timeline shenanigans

This may seem like an odd thing to get hung up on given how many things were poorly handled in S7, but the way that time dilation was treated really bothered me. The whole season felt like it was written by someone who saw Interstellar once, a few years ago, didn’t really understand it, and was just like “Hey, I saw this cool thing in a movie once, let’s throw it in our show!”

I drew up a super basic diagram here. It’s obviously oversimplified but I just wanted to give a rough estimate of the relative distances of different planets (and moons) that we see in S7 from the black hole based on the time differentials shown in S7. Earth is not on the diagram because presumably it’s a fair distance from all of the different planets and even further away from the black hole than Skyring is. The only reason I’m assuming that Skyring is even anywhere near the black hole at all is because of Becca’s mention, otherwise I would’ve assumed that that was somewhere else entirely as well. I’m going to mostly ignore what Becca actually said in the message that they found on Skyring though because it just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. She made it sound like Skyring was receiving a stronger time dilation effect from the black hole but that’s not how it works. The planet closest to the black hole would experience the strongest time dilation, meaning it would have the slowest clock. Since time is moving slower on Sanctum than it is on Skyring, this means that Sanctum is experiencing more time dilation and is closer to the black hole.

So, there are a few issues that I have with all of this. First off, the time dilation effects shown are extremely inconsistent. In S6, Octavia spent 10 years on Skyring and then at least a few days on Bardo (over 20 years’ worth of Skyring time) with only a couple of minutes passing on Sanctum. In S7 on the other hand, it seems like the 5 years that Gabriel, Hope and Echo spend on Skyring equate to over a day’s worth of time on Sanctum. It takes a couple of Sanctum days for the disciples to find out what happened on Skyring. Given that the days Octavia spent on Bardo in S6 took under a minute of Sanctum time, it also doesn’t make much sense that multiple days pass on Sanctum for the few months that they spend on Bardo in S7. If a few days can pass on Bardo in a Sanctum minute, then a few months should only be a matter of hours. Let’s say that Octavia was only on Bardo for 3 days in S6 and those 3 days took 2 minutes on Sanctum (although I think it took less than that). In that case, 30 Bardo days would take 20 Sanctum minutes. That means that 3 months on Bardo would pass in 1 Sanctum hour. So for a full day to pass on Sanctum, they would’ve had to spend 6 years on Bardo (3 months/hr × 24 hrs ÷ 12 months/yr). I’m pretty sure that more than a day passed on Sanctum during all of Sheidheda’s shenanigans so they should’ve been on Bardo for decades, not even accounting for the time that passed on Skyring. Since they clearly weren’t on Bardo for decades, that means that the time dilation effect is extremely inconsistent. And that’s not getting into the ridiculousness around memory loss when passing through the anomaly. I’m just not even going to get into that mess.

Let’s move past all that for a moment though and pretend that the time dilation effects were remotely consistent. My next issue is Sanctum’s timeline. Sanctum has one of the slowest clocks that we see in the show. The only planet we see on which time seems to move slower than it does on Sanctum is Nakara. Earth is absolutely nowhere near a black hole and is fairly small so time dilation on Earth would be minimal compared to any of the other planets (or moons) that we see in the show. That means that time ought to move even faster on Earth than it does on Skyring (since Becca claims that Skyring is still in proximity to the black hole). For the sake of simplicity though, I’m going to pretend that time on Earth moves at the same rate as time on Skyring (i.e. that neither planet experiences significant time dilation). The time that elapsed between the original apocalypse and the beginning of S6 is about 228 Earth years (97 years on the Ark, 6 years in the bunker, 125 years in cryo). At a rate of 10 years per Sanctum minute (the closest estimate we have for Sanctum’s time dilation factor), those 228 Earth years should’ve only taken about 23 minutes on Sanctum. Essentially, that means that the primes wouldn’t have had time to do anything before S6 began. They would’ve still been setting up camp. They would’ve landed on the surface, started getting their bearings, and then within 20 minutes the Eligius IV would’ve shown up. I’m not accounting for travel time within the black hole’s influence here because it’s essentially irrelevant. Travel time would’ve been the same for both ships and if anything factoring it in reduces the amount of time that would’ve passed on Sanctum because they likely didn’t actually arrive until after the bombs went off. So, the time dilation introduced in S7 makes all of S6 completely impossible. Of course, it also makes things difficult for Gaia. With a time dilation factor of about 10 yrs/min, 1 Sanctum day would be about 14,400 Earth years. Since more than a day passed on Sanctum while Gaia was back on Earth, she should’ve been long dead by the time they made it back to her. The others that Cadogan sent to Earth actually should’ve died during that Sanctum eclipse too. At a rate of 10 yrs/min their lifespan would’ve been somewhere between 6 and 8 Sanctum minutes and the eclipse definitely lasted longer than that. That also makes it essentially impossible that Cadogan would’ve been able to heal Sheidheda and send him to kidnap Madi within Madi’s lifespan. Raven would’ve had years to get that helmet working and make her way back to Sanctum to rescue their people.

I know that science in this show rarely makes any kind of sense at all. This one just seemed really inconsistent and ridiculous though. Why introduce something that makes such a mess of all of your timelines without any consideration to any of it? It really is just silly handwavy space magic. They may as well have just had the anomaly be a magical time traveling portal given how little attention they paid to any kind of internal consistency whatsoever.