Quote Originally Posted by Zalabim View Post
There is no flaw in the Deviants that you can correct. They are meant to kill any predator species that can harm your vaguely defined "desired type of intelligent life." It's an impossible problem. On Earth, humans are the desired kind of intelligent life and also the only species likely to wipe out humans. Therefore the Deviants will see them as valid targets. It's inevitable.
Except that the Deviants weren't attacking the desired intelligent species on the seeded planets due to some sort of whacky "they're attacking themselves, so we must protect them by killing them" sort of logic. They were doing it because their own genetic programming was flawed, and they were seeing any species that rose to the top of the food chain as being a valid target, and not carving out an exception for the one that they were specifically programmed *not* to kill.

This is not some insurmountable problem. If you could design/create the Deviants in the first place, and program them to kill apex predators, specifically to allow for the rise of a species with the specific desired attributes you are looking for, you should be able to design them such that they don't actually ever attack that species once it evolves and takes that spot. The fact that they didn't refrain from killing the desired species was a massive flaw in their design. It makes sense to create the Eternals to deal with this problem on the very first batch of planets that were seeded. But it makes zero sense to keep on releasing the same Deviants with the same flaw onto planet after planet, from that point onward.

If this had been a one-off thing, it would be fine. But the moment they introduced the whole "erased memories of doing this dozens or more times in the past on different worlds", the whole thing just falls apart logically for me.

There's a difference between suspending disbelief (Celestials exist, seed specific forms of life to create new celestials, create deviants to weed out apex predators that may prevent that desired form of life to evolve), and suspending common sense (I'm going to keep introducing the same problem into my work, over and over, for a few billion years, because the plot says so).

Quote Originally Posted by Zalabim View Post
You also kinda have to wait until there is a sufficiently intelligent species on the planet before you can design the Eternals for guiding that planet. It's not 100% necessary, but does heaps of work to move the process along.

Again though, if the only reason the Eternals are necessary in the first place, is to wipe out the Deviants once the desired species evolves, because they will otherwise wipe out that deisred species, then their purpose ceases to exist if you simply fix the Deviants in the first place. If we take your earlier statement that creating Eternals is an expense (even designing and empowering them would), why not save yourself this cost, spent over and over, and just not introduce the problem in the first place? Heck. Even if there had been some kind of mention that "occasionally, the Deviant programming breaks down and they do this sort of thing, so he creates a set of Eternals to deal with it", I might have accepted the premise a bit more. But the way it was presented, this was the exact route all planets followed, every single time, over and over.

I get how they got there. It was a writing trap. They needed the Eternals to discover "the truth" of what they were doing. Having them recover repressed memories of past lives on previous planets does this. But, by introducing that into the Eternal's past, it created another problem. One which they didn't seem to notice, much less address in the film.