We can cut him some slack, maybe, because when Evan Treborn was trying to escape from the prison in which he was confined for killing Tommy, he had a very limited supply of journals and a very short time in which to use them. He probably was not certain what he was going to do when he chose to return to a time moments before Tommy killed his dog, but he probably hoped that if he could save the dog he could keep Tommy out of juvenile detention and maybe make things all right for him. This was also the first time Evan visited a moment in his past which had not been connected to a blackout.
It was a good idea, on some level, but it failed to account for Lenny's problem with Tommy stemming from that mailbox explosion. Evan gave Lenny a piece of junk with sharp points and edges so that Lenny could cut open the bag and free the dog; he knew that in the original history Lenny had tried but been unable to do so. That was the plan; but plan A became plan B, as Evan faced Tommy (reliving these events for the second time, but this time taking control of them). He would persuade Tommy to release the dog. Tommy had been badly abused by his father, but Evan knew how much Tommy loved his sister, and Tommy would never leave Kayleigh alone in that house. It was working. Tommy was relenting.
Then Lenny stabbed him.
Lenny had never been completely right after the mailbox incident, and was much worse after the dog incineration. This time he was very much destroyed. Evan leaps back to the future, finds himself back in the dorm with his punk-styled roommate. This time, though, he is rushed to the hospital. He is bleeding from several facial orifices, and has suffered damage to the memory portions of his brain, as if he had rewritten too much too fast.
It is not clear what he rewrote, but apparently he knows that Lenny is in lockdown here. He lifts the doctor's access card and pays his friend a visit. Lenny is very upset; he knows that Evan expected something to happen, and so blames him.
Evan makes another trip here. It is temporally inconsequential--that is, although it creates a new history, it is indistinguishable from the previous history. He visits the moment when he blacked out while visiting his father. He tries to ask his father pointed questions, and his father is now persuaded that the power is dangerous and only makes things worse. They argue, and his father attacks him. That is not much different from the original history. Although we do not know what either said in that history, we know that Jason Treborn recognized the danger that his son was, and tried to kill him. It is much the same.
Then back in the present Evan goes to see Kayleigh, but somehow he does not know that she was not at the restaurant when he visited her there before her suicide. Getting a lead from her father, he finds her. Her life is much worse now as a drug-abusing prostitute. He takes her to dinner and tells her the whole story; she is unpersuaded, particularly by the suggestion that she could ever have been happy as a sorority girl.
He decides he has to change this. He has to fix what happened at the mailbox. That is where he goes next, but we have to make a stop along the way.
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