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Tightly related to other questions:

This whole question is going to be spoiler heavy up to the end of season 5. I've only spoilered the very biggest shock - the majority is openly discussed.

What we can observe

So, shockingly, they managed to break the time loop. I know... who would have predicted that?

We know that in both loops Daisy leaves the Quinjet and shouts something at another occupant before she walks away. (We infer that Coulson was inside it in both timelines.)
We assume that in the looped timeline, Talbot and Daisy fight, Talbot overpowers Daisy, and Talbot absorbs her and then shatters the Earth.

Robin specifically comments on the timelines having diverged, but she does so whilst going down the stairs with her mum, i.e. after Mack goes into the ship, and after Fitz and May follow him in to help, and after Mack leaves with her mum, while Fitz and May stay behind to fight the last Remorath soldiers.

Fitz is killed by a rubble-fall

caused by Talbot slamming Daisy into the ground from a great height, but that happens before Daisy takes the serum.

The change point is implied to have been Coulson's decision to not take the serum, but that doesn't start to change Daisy or Talbot's behaviour until the point at which she notices the serum in her glove.

i.e. after Fitz has been mortally wounded.

Question:

It seems to me that Fitz must have died, in the same way, and at the same time in the looped timeline.

Is there any other possibility?

If that's the case, how does Deke come to be born in that timeline? Are we supposed to infer that Gemma is already pregnant?

Is there anything else that would appear to contradict this event happening, in this way, in the looped timeline?

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  • Up until the point that the team was pulled to the future, the team led their normal lives. The team wouldn't have disappeared and there would have been no need, for you know who to go into stasis. The loop only exists because they keep trying to change it. We don't know how many times they've tried the same thing.
    – Whacko
    Jun 25, 2018 at 13:06
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    @Whacko There's no evidence that there was ever a timeline in which the team was not pulled into the future. Timetravel models don't always require a bootstrap iteration in which no timetravel ocurred.
    – Brondahl
    Jun 25, 2018 at 13:15
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    Reopened after the edit, since the original issue with this question (too many questions in one) appears to have been fixed.
    – Rand al'Thor ♦
    Jun 25, 2018 at 16:20
  • Nobody mentions Deke's grandfather in the future IIRC, so I think we are to infer that this always happened.
    – OrangeDog
    Aug 13, 2018 at 11:22

2 Answers 2

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The change point is implied to have been Coulson's decision to not take the serum

Not really. That's one of the things that changed, and the important one for the overall outcome, but not necessarily the only thing. Deke being present in the.. present, for example may have changed many things.

We don't know whether in the original timeline Fitz and May even went back onto the alien ship to help out, but there is some evidence that they didn't.

We know that in the future, both Mac and Polly died early (possibly before making it to the Lighthouse). Indeed, when Polly is taken away by Talbot, Robin asserts that it's the last time she will see her mother. It's only with Fitz and May's last-minute intervention that Polly (and, by implication, Mac) actually survive. Robin does see her mother again, so the original timeline is broken at this point. This is unrelated to what Coulson, Daisy and Talbot are up to.

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Short answer: We'll never know. As you mention and point out, everything is the same from what we saw in previous clips of Daisy going to fight Talbot in Chicago. We even got the same view of Daisy going to fight Talbot that Deke showed her earlier in the season.

With that in mind we have two choices. We have that no matter what happened, Daisy getting the serum or not from Coulson, Fitz was going to die. Or we have that Fitz did not die in the original timeline, and his death was a result of Coulson not taking the serum. If we assume the latter, then Deke being born is not an issue, considering that Fitz lived, even if Gemma was pregnant beforehand.

However, if we assume the former, that's when things get a little complicated. Again, we can assume that Gemma was pregnant before the Chicago battle, and this was the way it was always supposed to be, no matter the timeline. There's also the possibility that in the original timeline, Gemma finds Fitz in space while he is frozen. During the last scene of the episode when we see the team celebrating the end of Coulson's run on SHIELD, Coulson tells Gemma that Fitz is still out there, giving her some hope that Fitz is sill alive in some capacity.

So what did happen in the original timeline? We'll never know, but any one of those possibilities seem plausible to me.

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    I had assumed that finding frozen Fitz is only possible because the time loop has been broken. Otherwise he would still be needed in the future to complete the loop.
    – aherocalledFrog
    Jun 26, 2018 at 14:29
  • Deke told Jemma that both his grandparents get to the Lighthouse, that's why she kept babbling about the "invincible" thing. Fitz death wouldn't break the loop, it would only create a new timeline where Fitz is dead instead of Mack.
    – user102525
    Sep 24, 2018 at 18:53

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