"STOP TOUCHING ME!"

"I'M NOT TOUCHING YOU!"

"YOU ARE!!"

"OUCH, SHEGO!! TELL HIM TO BACK OFF!!"

"Green Lass? I uh... can't reach the toilet."

Drakken: Fool me once... Monkey Fist: And I'll kill you. Drakken: Drakken: ....That's not how villainous team-ups are supposed to go. Shego: Uh, I think that's exactly how it's supposed to go. Drakken: Are you sure? Let me check the handbook. *starts flipping pages* Shego: *facepalm*

Kim Possible: A Sitch in Time (2003)

Edelgard: So, welcome to my Empire, you're just living in it! Back to work!

Kim Possible, the Tempus Simia, and fun with timey-wimey stuff

So, those of you who follow my blog will know that I recently finished Spoiler Alert, a Kim Possible fanfic following Kim and Ron's kid Max as he accidentally follows a vengeful Monkey Fist into the past and not-so-accidentally teams up with the past versions of his parents to stop the latter's shenanigans. Anyone who's read the fic will also know that I wanted to talk a little about how exactly I envision the Tempus Simia affecting the timestream and how that relates to its canon appearance in A Sitch in Time. For those of you who want to read the fic and haven't reached the point where I bring that up in the author's notes, you might want to turn back now: what follows is going to be rather, well, spoilery. It's also going to be rather long, so I hope some of you like detailed headcanons, lol

So, to refresh, A Sitch in Time follows a villain team-up using the Tempus Simia, aka time monkey, for time travel shenanigans as well as a team-up between the "present" day Team Possible and a future resistance using something called chrono-manipulators to chase after them. All good and well, but the time travel rules seem to... change over the course of the special. Rufus 3000 refers to the time stream as "polluted" and "in flux" and we see a ripple effect of the past changing in Ron's scrapbook, yet it's later revealed that Shego's meddling in the past caused Ron to move and thus disrupted Team Possible enough for the time monkey to get stolen in the first place, suggesting a stable time loop. Likewise, Kim, Ron and Rufus going to the future apparently removes them from the normal flow of time until they pop out of their destination time portal, yet somehow Rufus was able to have thousands of "descendants" (I'm assuming clones of some sort, but either way) at some point presumably after Shego took over. This isn't really all that unusual for a time travel story, considering the mind-bendy and paradox-happy nature of messing with chronology, but that doesn't mean that we as fans can't try to come up with a creative explanation. So what gives?

Well, okay, those of you who read the author's note already know what (in my interpretation) gives: the two time machines we see in that special use different forms of time travel. Namely, the Tempus Simia creates stable time loops (hence that being what we see in Spoiler Alert) while the chrono-manipulators can actually change the past to influence the future. And when these two forms of time travel come into conflict, things can get... weird.

So in my mind, there are roughly three different timelines that give us A Sitch in Time, with the latter ones overwriting the former. We'll call them timelines A, B, and C, with most of the special taking place in timeline B.

Timeline A is a fully stable time loop, with only the Tempus Simia in play, so it would chronologically start with the villains meddling in the past -- but we'll get to that later. Our starting point would be pretty much what we see in the "present" part of the special: Ron moves away due to Shego's later scheme, and with him either not present or "out of synch" with her, Kim isn't able to stop the villain quartet from putting the Tempus Simia together and escaping into the time stream. Drakken puts into motion his plan of crushing a younger Kim's spirit, and he, Monkey Fist and Duff Killigan turn themselves into toddlers to infiltrate Kim's preschool. This almost fails immediately, because the people in the preschool office aren't going to just let some unregistered and unsupervised kids waltz into a classroom (more on that later), but they later manage to sneak into the playground during recess. They torment toddler Kim a little bit, toddler Ron intervenes, they switch targets to him which awakens her kick-butt instinct -- basically at this point, it's the same thing we saw except for the absence of a time-travelling teen Kim.

After seeing that mundane bullying didn't work, the villain team skips ahead to the day of Kim's first mission to try again. Without the added pressure of time-travelling heroes, Monkey Fist and Killigan are just barely willing to let Drakken try his spirit-crushing plan again. But his overly-complicated plan of approaching Kim as preteens, distracting her from the laser grid mission, and planting seeds of doubt that will cause her to muck it up if she does ever get there fails at pretty much every turn.

It's at about this point that future Shego approaches her "present" self and tells her to grab the time monkey and go, which she does. It doesn't take much experimenting for her to figure out why the guys have so utterly failed with it: the Tempus Simia can't change the past, and the villains' meddling might even be part of the reason Kim was encouraged to go into crime-fighting. From here, Shego starts to get creative: using foreknowledge to make enough money to fund her schemes, putting evil think tanks together in times when nobody knows to go after her, and even figuring out that she was the one who got Ron's family to move away and proceeding to do just that.

With new resources in hand and Team Possible effectively broken up, Shego gets down to business. Being much more practically minded than her death trap-loving ex-employer, she returns to the present, catches Kim and later Ron by surprise when they're alone, and actually manages to kill them. Rufus escapes, but Shego figures that she won't have to worry about him or Wade so long as Kim and Ron are gone. So she gathers her legion of henchmen, attack drones, and obedience collars, starts storming the world one city at a time... and wins.

Of course, pockets of resistance form over the next twenty years, with the most prominent being led by the friends and family of our fallen heroes. Rufus and Wade use the former's DNA to "breed" a small army of hyper-intelligent semi-clones to boost the resistance's numbers, and between that, their location near the Supreme One's headquarters, and the resistance members' various skills and gadgets, they actually stand a fighting chance... Except that every attack on Shego's fortress is thwarted after a seemingly unnatural degree of anticipation on her end. As it happens, Shego has gotten into the habit of going back in time to warn herself before every attack against her, letting her retroactively prepare.

The resistance eventually figures out that time travel is involved in the Supreme One's wild successes (not that she's doing much to keep it a secret), and Wade gets to work on devising a counter. The result is the chrono-manipulators, though nobody realizes they work differently (some might say better) than the Tempus Simia. Since the resistance isn't clear on exactly how Shego used the Tempus Simia to take over, they decide to start by going back twenty years to rescue Kim and Ron and recruiting them to stop the original villain team's mucking around in the past. So starts timeline B, and again, most of what we see in the special.

The thing is, a key aspect of the Tempus Simia is stability. It "wants" the timestream to stay the same, even as the chrono-manipulators "want" to change it. So the timestream starts shifting around a little, but keeps the same broad strokes. New time portal gives everyone around the preschool a wave of disorienting deja-vu? The preschool attendants are distracted just long enough for the toddler-ified villains to slip in before class starts, but their extra bullying time doesn't change what happens at recess (though it does change the class picture). Killigan and Monkey Fist get antsy and shoot down Drakken's plan B? The Tempus Simia slaps together a new time loop in which Monkey Fist steals a guardian statue that would have been shortly destroyed anyway, so the only "change" is that it disappears into the timestream to be lasered later rather than getting swept away by a flood or something (and meanwhile, preteen Kim and Ron succeed in their mission and survive the statue's attack). Kim and Ron start time-travelling and eventually head into the future? They would have died around that time anyway, so now they just disappear into the timestream to the same basic result. Rufus also disappears into the timestream? The resistance somehow manages to get ahold of DNA he left behind and start making clones anyway.

Then things really get weird when the Tempus Simia breaks. Its whole stability thing means that the universe is safe from implosion... but that kind of damage also has the effect of erasing the Tempus Simia from history entirely. Ironically, it's the only way for it to change the past -- time is rewritten so that the creation of the Tempus Simia was abandoned at the last moment, and any loops caused by its use are erased as well. The time stream manages to keep itself in shape by once again smoothing over the time-loop changes so that the broad outcome is still the same: that guardian statue goes back to getting destroyed in a flood, someone who had helped Shego found her bank does the founding personally, Kim befriends Ron and finds her inner fire after dealing with a different bully in preschool, and so on. This "smoothing over" gets weaker as the timeline approaches the point where the Tempus Simia was grabbed by the baddies, though, and by the time it reaches Ron moving away, the bank his mom works at just doesn't have any reason to send her and her family to Norway. And so the future is saved, and we finally reach timeline C.

But the Tempus Simia has one last trick up its metaphorical sleeve: just as it "wants" to keep the timeline stable, so too does it "want" to exist. This may not have even been the first time it was destroyed and rebuilt, not that anyone would know with the overwritten timelines. And so, a paltry few years after the end of the Supreme One's reign and the last point in time in which its previous iteration existed, a Monkey Fist who is feeling very displaced in time gets the idea that "time" may just be the answer to his woes...

Have been wanting to make this for the longest time 😭💖 tried out new brushes 🥺💖 very happy with the outcome

Do you think Kim and Ron would have been friends if not for the villains' meddling in A Sitch in Time?

ohhhhhhh temporal paradox, my favorite!

the question is, are Kim and Ron only friends because of the villains' meddling as we saw it? or were they already friends and what we saw was just another possible timeline and outcome?

Ron states that he and Kim met "right after nap time" and then the photo changes before his eyes, showing an alternate timeline with the insertion of the villains. so, the easy conclusion is yes, yes they were friends already. and the villains' meddling wasn't able to STOP their becoming friends. we don't get to know the original circumstances of how they met right after nap time, just what happened with the villains.

which leads us into more nebulous territory, the question of destiny. are Kim and Ron fated to meet no matter what? there is no answer there, of course, but i think we'd all like to think yes.

logically, even if the villains ruined that day, Kim and Ron would still meet because they are in the same preschool class. and logically whatever personality traits drew them together that day, would draw them together on another. the villains would have had to play a longer game to prevent them from meeting there.

not too much to dissect here, but temporal paradox and causality is a fave puzzle of mine to explore. thanks for the ask!

This moment is just

She knows what's in store for them, she KNOWS

Was "A sitch in time" supposed to air first in season 2? Because in it Ron mentions the two of them doing Latin, and as evidenced in "Blush" Kim and Ron were said to go to Latin class.

One weird thing though is that in the beginning they would have all the same classes, yet in "The Truth Hurts" Ron is clearly in a class without Kim. I'ma just headcanon it that when Shego altered the past,she made Kim and Ron have all the same classes to add to the sting of separation .

i rewatched the first two parts of kim possible 'a sitch' in time' and forgot how much i used to rewatch this. i had the dvd an everyfin.

anyway, i assume tom kane bless him was no longer available to play monkey fist more in the later episodes, because this two parter pretty much soldifies that under shego, he is the second most clever or evil(?) genius villain type. the whole thing was HIS idea. and it WORKED.

hoenstly. an iconic duo.

A Sitch in Time was such an EVENT. You really had to be there.