You first.

ok so they destroyed the wormhole and she was never there? why are they not dead then?

Would they have been on the course to encounter the dark matter storm if they hadn't rescued her? Maybe it was another of those examples where by trying to prevent something, she CAUSED something.

By the way, this episode is semi-copied from the 1989 film "Millennium" which was adapted from a sci-fi story by John Varley.

"ok so they destroyed the wormhole and she was never there? why are they not dead then?"

There's no reason for them to be dead. It was her presence that got them in danger in the first place.

"By the way, this episode is semi-copied from the 1989 film "Millennium" which was adapted from a sci-fi story by John Varley."

There's an even earlier model, Asimov's novel "End of Eternity" written in the 1950s.

It's been a long time, but "End of Eternity" seems at best tangential. "Millennium" - and the original short story "Air Raid" - is about people from the future who travel to the past to "rescue" people who are about to die, such as in plane crashes, and bring them to the future to help repopulate mankind. No selling of "antique collectibles" such as "vintage starships" but still much closer to the plot of "Pria."

I was talking about the "End of Eternity" ending, where the main characters wipe out a lot of time changes by preventing time travel from being invented in the first place.

The "recruitment" angle you talk about sounds like Fritz Leiber's THE BIG TIME (1956) which also involves time travelers "rescuing" about-to-die people so they could take them away without changing history. The motive in THE BIG TIME is a lot more sinister: they draft the rescued people as soldiers in a Time War, since they have nowhere else to go. One of Leiber's related stories, "D*mnation Morning" is one of the most chilling sci-fi stories that I've ever read, where the narrator has only one hour to choose whether to be enslaved by the Time Warriors, or go back to original history and die. It would make a good horror episode in an anthology.

I read some Leiber but not that one. The cause/goal for Millenium was more like the "option" they were presented in the Pria episode: a life of comfort and luxury in the future. They were going to a different planet because Earth had been basically killed by future wars resulting in DNA damage etc that meant the surviving humans couldn't keep the race going on Earth etc. But still, people they rescued from death weren't being turned into soldiers or whatever.

In terms of "Damnation Morning" I would refer to the both original and "reboot" Outer Limits episodes "(A) Feasibility Study." It would be a different situation though for just a single person.

If you're not familiar with the story, I didn't find full videos on youtube, but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Feasibility_Study

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feasibility_Study_(The_Outer_Limits)

@Knixon said:

Would they have been on the course to encounter the dark matter storm if they hadn't rescued her? Maybe it was another of those examples where by trying to prevent something, she CAUSED something.

I agree. They diverted course twice because of her. Once to rescue her from the star, and a second time to take her to the nearest union station. So it was likely they wouldn't have encountered the dark matter storm if not for her. As for any possible paradoxes would have been reset when the timeline reset. Also, I don't think Pria was there originally for the Orville, but was after the mining ship hence why she got upset when Alara harmed her merchandise.

@Innovator said:

Also, I don't think Pria was there originally for the Orville, but was after the mining ship hence why she got upset when Alara harmed her merchandise.

I guess that's arguable, but it seemed like she pretty much stated that the whole mining-ship thing was just a ruse to get The Orville to rescue her. And that she could have escaped the star collision by other means if they hadn't fallen for it. Also the whole point was that since The Orville was "supposed to be" destroyed, and the people killed, that made it a perfect target for her.

"The Orville was "supposed to be" destroyed, and the people killed, that made it a perfect target for her."

Interesting loose end: The Orville was SUPPOSED to be destroyed, and wasn't, so her scheme did change overall history in the end.

@CharlesTheBold said:

"The Orville was "supposed to be" destroyed, and the people killed, that made it a perfect target for her."

Interesting loose end: The Orville was SUPPOSED to be destroyed, and wasn't, so her scheme did change overall history in the end.

Was it? Or could it have been that Pria having lost her initial target saw opportunity in the time-line change she unintentionally created.

Well Time Travel stories are always confusing. Even the good one. Every time i watch Back to the Future, at the end when Marty goes back to save the Doc Brown. I always think to myself. Why are you going back a few hours before he gets shot. You got a god damn time machine. Go back, a day, a week or a month.

Well, keep in mind that at least/especially in the BTTF movies, Time apparently had a mind of its own. Marty went back plenty early enough but was "prevented" from arriving back at the mall until he couldn't have run into the previous version of himself. Extrapolating from that, it seems likely that - according to these movies anyway - if he had tried to go back a day, a week, or a month, SOMETHING would have happened to prevent him from stopping the events that had "already happened."

I find that less egregious than the remake of The Time Machine. He tried more than once to stop his girlfriend from being killed, but apparently Time somehow "knew" that she was "supposed to" die and kept making it happen even after he blocked each previous event. What that leads to is predestination, which means that, quite literally, nothing matters.

I don't know. Millennium is a pretty obscure movie. I wouldn't be surprised if the writers haven't even seen it.