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I'm a little confused with Logan going back in time. I'm kind of applying Back to the Future time travel rules, where Doc said the future would change all around Jennifer and Einstein and they wouldn't be the wiser.

If he went back in time to try to change things, wouldn't the present change instantaneously? I assume the final battle was added for dramatic effect but I'd think unless events occurred in real time in both timelines, he should just get sent back. If he succeeded, then the ending is as it was in the movie with the room being empty and intact and no one dying. If he didn't succeed, then he'd wake up and they'd all die?

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    Whether they said it explicitly or not, it's apparent that Kitty needs to maintain her power in real-time in order for the subject to stay in the past. It stands to reason that this would also create a "temporal bubble" around Kitty in the present to protect her from the changes, otherwise Butterfly Effects might "interrupt" her by changing where she (or the subject) are at the present time, or simply removing the reason she started using her power, thus preventing her from doing it. Ah, time travel. Such a magnificent plot-hole-generator.
    – Steve-O
    Feb 26, 2017 at 13:22

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The fact that the whole time travel is based on some arbitrary magic mutant power allows them to solve this potentially pradoxical issue in a rather convenient way, which is that Logan's changes to the timeline don't take effect on the future until he wakes up from Kitty's grasp.

This is explained by Kitty before she sends him back:

Basically, your body will go to sleep while your mind travels back in time. As long as you're back there, past and present will continue to coexist. But once you wake up whatever you've done will take hold and become history. And for the rest of us, it will be the only history that we know. It will be like the last 50 years never happened. And this world, and this war, the only person who will remember it is you.

This is also later referenced by Xavier when Bobby wants to wake up Logan because Kitty is injured:

Bobby: She's lost too much blood. She can't keep going like this.
Erik: We have no choice, Bobby.
Bobby: We can wake him up.
Xavier: No! They need more time. I had a glimpse into the past. If we wake Logan now we may set our fate on an even darker course. They need more time.

This even suggests, that they don't have another chance to change things after waking up Logan. So their current timeline will actually vanish in favour of the new timeline once he wakes up and won't just go on in parallel to it.

So until Logan wakes up, none of the stuff he does in the past has any influence on the future. But at the very point where he ends his time travel it basically introduces an explicit synchronization point and the new timeline he set in motion will take effect, with the original timeline vanishing.

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  • Thx for re-watching and finding this for me. I think I watched it 5 times in the last 3 days and I still didn't catch the first quote.
    – Classified
    Feb 28, 2017 at 21:38

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