Mr. Reindeer wrote:AXX°N N. wrote:I think so. She was mentioned in the Dossier as murdered ... and anything written in the Dossier, outside of Laura being referred to as murdered (by Briggs and Preston), is actually taking place in the new "official" timeline. So Teresa should still be dead, as well the saps Windom killed.
Hmm. That’s not my interpretation. I thought everything up until near the end of TFD took place in the original universe — or alternatively, in a constantly-shifting liquid membrance between countless realities, explaining the inconsistencies like Robert Jacoby dying twice (I still think Mark dealing with the deterioration of Warren Frost’s memory has a lot to do with the nature of reality in both books, which Mark has not denied when asked although he also understandably doesn’t want to talk about it). TSHoTP pretty clearly takes place in a timeline where Laura died — not only does Briggs discuss Laura’s death, but other sources like Dr. Jacoby do as well. As for TFD, I’d be curious to check if there are explicit references to Laura’s death throughout the book, but it seems odd that Tammy would have conducted extensive interviews and months of research and never came across any reference to Laura’s “disappearance” until near the end of the process. OTOH, I admit that your interpretation makes more logical story sense (that the timeline shift would have occurred right when Cooper disappeared and time traveled, not months later).
I'm not exactly settled on it myself. That it exists in a state of uncertainty has been appealing to me also ... I like your use of the word fluid. My reading of it being in the new timeline is in part due to my experience realizing it as a sequel to the new season, in terms of chronology. As in, I realize Mark has many other reasons for publishing it after the season, but I was struck by a bait and switch the first time I read it, as I interpreted it ... that if it's true that not only were things like Norma & Ed's wedding set after the new show, but much of the material, there's a strange structural thing going on, in that what we suspected we were reading as gap filling material, is actually this establishment of a wholly new timeline (because the past seems changed as the future, or are they one in the same?), whose existence begins at the end of the season. I was never certain how true that was in retrospect about events in TSHOTP; for instance, if the WTTP guidebook football game, perhaps, was canon to the old timeline, TSHOTP's version in the new one, post-Coop disappearance. This would include, also, retcons perhaps. Retcons retconned as retcons?
Totally forgot about Jacoby! This puts a logjam in my thinking. I was teasing out a potential reason why Briggs mentioning Laura's murder in his dossier wouldn't exactly shoot a hole in that reading, having something to do with his material coming from portal-hopping, secured against distortion somehow (because the way it was stored was awful strange) but I never developed it enough to feel confident... Perhaps Cooper's commute to the past, in real time, takes quite a few months?
There's another reading (perhaps not irreconcilable with these other ones) that's more thematic in a way, and that's that TP was specifically noticing the timeline's gradual change while no one else did, because she had been gravitating toward the center of this case ... but unlike Briggs, Jeffries or Cooper, she resists the pull and climbs out of it before it drags her in. I like that reading because it fits in with the many universes reading, which I have trouble reconciling with the Dossiers sliding from just one reality to another. Inconsistencies aside, it's sort of a binary. But in this case, there are multiple realities, but one has to sort of begin to dive into them ala tragic Cooper before one sees the differences, like peeling off the layers. There seems to be an implication, because most of the characters don't notice, that things like the Dossiers, or just written media in general, is a surface layer thing, which of course fits in with the themes on secrets and coverups.