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Hi, Aren. Glad you’re such a fan.

First of all, I love your time-travel analysis. I used to be into time travel myself and my friends and I would spend ridiculous amounts of time and brainpower thinking and overthinking the possibilities in our favorite books and movies.

For OPERATION DO-OVER, my logic was this. There are two ways to look at time travel. One is that every “fork” in the timeline creates two parallel realities, leading to potentially endless possibilities, all of which must exist somewhere.

But there’s another approach – the one from Avengers: Endgame – where characters follow a single unbroken line regardless of whether they jump forward or back in time. In this analysis, Mason lived seventeen years, jumped back five for a few weeks, and then jumped forward five and continued on from there. And while things certainly changed – with Ava, for example, and especially with Rufus – there were never any alternate realities. Mason traveled a path where Rufus had died for a while. Then, after a detour, he was on a path where Rufus was still alive. But for Mason, it was all one path (although you’re correct that, at the end, he would have had some shared history with Ava that he himself could not remember – some awkward moments for OPERATION DO-OVER 2?)

Does that make sense?

———-Gordon Korman———-