Tommy is dead. Lenny is in a locked down psyche ward. Kayleigh is a drug-addicted prostitute. Butterfly Effect's hero Evan Treborn could hardly think the world worse. Oh, it's better for him, back to being a successful psychology major; but his friends matter to him, and somehow it's his fault everything has gotten so bad for them. It wasn't quite this bad before.
It all happened at that mailbox. That's where Lenny lost it; that's where the crew started to disintegrate. If he can prevent the horror there, he can make all their lives better. He returns a second time to become himself at that moment.
This is the second time Evan returned to the same moment in the past a second time. We discussed the problems with that last time, and since again he did this as an observer in the previous history the same answer that applied there applies again. There is a way to make it make sense, even if that way doesn't make much sense.
He has some vague idea that he is going to prevent a tragedy. He does not know exactly how. However, as the woman and her child start approaching the mailbox he steps from his hiding place and starts trying to get there first.
Tommy decides that Evan is being stupid--and rightly, too. He sees the best way to prevent the tragedy which Evan has seen but Tommy can only imagine: he runs past the mailbox and tackles the woman and her baby, just as the explosion hits.
Evan has certainly changed the future. His roommate in college is Lenny, who is a great, well-adjusted guy who is dating Kayleigh. Tommy is on campus preaching the gospel to anyone who will hear, and helping people in every way he can. His friends have wonderful lives, and they don't seem to mind at all that they have to do so much to help him, Evan, who has lost both forearms and the ability to walk.
He attempts to kill himself, but Tommy saves him and encourages him that he can't give up. His friends really care about him, but having landed in this version of the future without the past seven years of surviving and adjusting to his circumstance, he is not at all grateful for any of it.
Perhaps he would have left the world thus, but he found someone else who was hurt by this latest change in the world. Evan's mother is dying of cancer, apparently brought on by the increased smoking and other effects of the stress following his accident. So he at least tells himself that he is not doing this because it hurts so much to see Kayleigh in love with Lenny, or because he cannot stand to be the one who suffers while his friends are all freed from their pains. He is doing this to save her from the cancer, he says, as he plans yet another trip to the past.
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