Curate, connect, and discover
The thing i both love and hate about michael’s sacrifice was how simultaneously inevitable and preventable it was.
With the info gertrude had, she thought she had to sacrifice someone to save the world. She doubtless thought michael’s blind trust in her was necessary for the plan to work. From her perspective, her actions make sense and couldn’t have happened any other way.
And yet. And yet. It would have failed anyway, whether michael was there or not. Michael could have lived a long and happy life (or at least not been fed to an eldritch horror) and the world would not have ended.
His death is pointless. He died for nothing. And yet there was no path by which he could have survived without changing fundamental aspects of the timeline. Preventable, yet inevitable.