Determinism, free will, and meeting copies of oneself. How would that go?

The existence of free will has long been one of the great “bread and butter” philosophical questions.  Like any popular philosophical issue, it has been wrangled for centuries, if not longer, and still remains open ended.  Not surprisingly, it’s also an extremely popular plot device in literature and film, and one which rarely disappoints.  Oddly enough, one of my favorite “films” which explores this question is the wildly popular web machinima Red vs. Blue.  Over a period of the time in the series spanning about 10 episodes (not included here to avoid cluttering), the character Pvt. Leonard Church attempts to use time travel to rectify an accident involving a nuclear warhead.  His attempts to do this not only fail, but actually make the accident possible in the first place.  As such, the plot takes on a very deterministic point of view, not unlike a Greek tragedy (albeit in a much funnier way).

This is complicated further by the fact that each time the bomb goes off, it creates a temporal displacement.  Whoever is ‘in front’ of the bomb is sent hundreds of years into the future, while those standing ‘behind’ it (i.e. Church) get sent to the distant past.  Since Church is continually ending up in the past, and he keeps trying over again to fix things, he gets duplicated repeatedly.  Consequently for Church, eternal return takes over, with a slightly newer more experienced version of himself created each time.  This leads to one of the most confusing yet hilarious ‘meetings’ I’ve yet seen in a film.  This encounter is shown in the episode I’ve embedded here (warning: strong language abounds, and sorry about the ads).

Over the course of his repeated encounters with himself, Church finally realizes that planned attempts to change the course of events have done nothing productive so finally he gives up.  This new approach concludes with him arriving in the future with the rest of the team, just in time to save them from a similar bomb incident there (or then, if you prefer).  With his misadventures through time behind him, Church finishes by giving the team a very quick lesson in Stoicism.