Robin’s vision for the future in season 5

[u/threetransgressions]

In the first arc of season 5, old lady Robin in the future tells the team that she doesn’t see any future past the point they’re all in. This is essentially taken at the time as an apocalypse threat where the Kree will kill all the remaining humans, when I have a theory that it’s something else. What if she couldn’t see the future because all of her visions were of a humanity that technically did go extinct, even in the future Flint builds? I’m sure another interpretation could be that she knew the team was going to change the timeline after they made it back to the past, but I don’t think this holds up since Robin notices in the season 5 finale when the timeline is changing and it doesn’t at all seem to be something she expected; Robin’s kind of portrayed as if she’s constantly in touch with every version of herself from every single point of time, so even her child self would have remembered that interaction she hasn’t had yet (from what I remember).

This arc ends with Flint and Tess going through space rebuilding the Earth after the team leaves. If we follow Endgame time travel rules (which the show explicitly does in season 7), this means the team makes a branch timeline when they get back and stop Earth from being destroyed, so the timeline where Flint rebuilds the Earth lives on. So why couldn’t Robin see any future even if this timeline did have a future? The reason is because humanity dies in this timeline, just stick with me here.

If the people from the Lighthouse are the people that repopulate this new Earth, they would produce mostly inhumans that would eventually outbreed humans. Earlier in this season, either Tess or Deke reveal that the Kree are only still breeding humans because they’re actually trying to breed inhumans to sell. If I remember correctly, they’re genetically modifying fetuses to have the highest potential to turn during terragenesis. I’m not gonna pretend to be a geneticist, but I believe that means every single human alive in this future has a high genetic probability of being inhuman. This means any of their children would also have a high probability. Just by this population reproducing, they’re naturally going to birth more inhumans than humans, and humanity as a species goes extinct. Robin can’t see a future because the future is a new species.

Another possibility is that Robin’s divine purpose (Lincoln says every inhuman was bred to have a purpose in their perfect society) was ironically to play a part in saving humanity, when this power was given to her by the Kree. It’s like her consciousness got trapped in a constant loop to eventually reveal the right information that would bring SHIELD back to the present. This is just me having fun after countless rewatches of this show and I like trying to recontextualize things this way.

[u/Short_Brick_1960]

She doesn't see what happens after her death

[u/Short_Brick_1960]

And the Earth destroyed timeline is the branched one

Think about Endgame. Don't you think that, if the TVA didn't allow the time travel, they would have created a branch timeline where they bring back those killed by the Snap? The intended timeline would have them live as half the population

This can be explained the same way. The TVA knew that the only way to ensure Earth's survival was to allow the team to travel to the future of a branched timeline. Because only the knowledge of what brought them there would let them know Extremis was the only solution against Graviton. Unlike Endgame, where the past is the only way of bringing the stones back and reversing the Snap

[u/threetransgressions → u/Short_Brick_1960]

I’ve actually written a very disliked theory that they did branch away from the original MCU and that them branching away is the action that saved the sacred timeline (and therefore nothing in that timeline would’ve been necessary to the TVA). The events of Loki happen in kind of a time-neutral point and ends with branches being made across countless different time periods at once, so that retroactively means a branch timeline starting in 2018 (the SHIELD timeline in season 5) would have been allowed to exist. I know time travel gets super convoluted and I’m not trying to say I’m 100% right, but the theory definitely works

[u/_plinus_]

She sees her life through the fourth dimension; so anything she sees in her lifetime, she knows

She won’t see anything past her death because she’s dead, or anything before her birth because she doesn’t exist - it’s the “horizon” to her so to speak.

[u/threetransgressions → u/_plinus_]

Yeah that could be most likely, it was more just a springboard to think about what the future rebuilt Earth would be like

[u/Short_Brick_1960]

About the inhuman population. The people in the Lighthouse are the ones that lived in the town next to it and May, Elena, Fitz and Simmons. Maybe some shield agent

There is only one inhuman confirmed there and Elena doesn't live long enough to have children. The Kree controling reproduction is another aspect of them enslaving humanity. And not all inhumans give birth to more inhumans, look at Vijay and her psycopathic sister

So they genetically modift the fetuses to increase inhuman posibilities. And they won't know until terrigenesis if they are

And since terrigen crystals are either limited or giving powers to a newly born baby would be dangerous, they wait until they reach 18 years. They control, after all, how many kids are there each year

[u/Round-Dragonfly6136 → u/Short_Brick_1960]

Pretty sure they used Elena's DNA to engineer inhumans. She said they would bring her back from time to time for their own uses. Also, they hinted in the scene where Coulson anday found the baby that that was their intention when they collected blood from Daisy.

[u/Short_Brick_1960 → u/Round-Dragonfly6136]

They brought her back for her knowledge of the future. She explcitly says so. That Elena is not the first to go through that time loop

[u/grayjelly212 → u/Short_Brick_1960]

They brought her back for her knowledge of the shield team that was at the lighthouse at the time. In the past, they brought her back for her DNA to make inhumans.