“Time Travel.
How many times have I ranted about this?
Let’s do it. For real. And never again.
Time travel, for the most part, is a very uninteresting device as used in fiction. There are lots of great examples of ways in which time travel has been used really well. I know. Don’t tell me about them. The problem isn’t that time travel NEVER works, it’s that it has a low batting average, and I can tell you why.
For the most part, time travel is used one of three ways.
1. You go back in time and have to be very careful not to change anything lest the future be altered.
The best, most concise version that explains this is from a Simpsons episode where Homer travels back in time briefly, then returns to the present, only to find the present has been altered by small changes he made in the past (“I wish I wish I hadn’t killed that fish”). He then continuously goes to the past, tries to not touch anything, and then ends up in ever-stranger alternate versions of the present. Until he goes apeshit, resulting in a finely-animated jurassic rampage:
I think the problem here should be pretty obvious. Why would you tell a story where the character’s main motivation is to NOT DO ANYTHING? Seriously, you set out to tell a story about someone who decides that they should make every effort to make absolutely no effort, passing unnoticed and having zero impact in order to preserve the future? That’s not a story, that’s my survival method in the workplace.
In these stories, the character inevitably ends up making changes. Or possibly not. But the decision is always heavy-hearted, which is weird because I always think, “I don’t know. Maybe my life would be a little better if things were a little different. Or, for all I know, I smash this bug and the Holocaust never happened.” I know what’s happened historically, for the most part, and I give human history a solid 5 out of a possible 10. It would totally suck if I did something and then the only difference in the future was that Beetlejuice never got made, but maybe I alter the future and Beetlejuice’s sequel, Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian, actually got made. And maybe it was even better than the original!
Version 2: The future is unchangeable, and any time travel is fulfilling the existing future.
This is how the original Terminator works. Kyle Reese goes back in time to protect John Connor, but then it turns out that he’s John Connor’s father, which implies that this is how things were meant to happen and the future is not changeable.
This is also a very boring way to deal with time travel. Because it’s not really time travel, is it? If this is how things work, then there’s really no difference made by time traveling. You’re just fulfilling a predestined sort of situation. When you look at the original Terminator, it’s a cool movie, but by the time you get to the end, you reach the conclusion that the events of Terminator were inevitable. Sarah Connor is basically invincible because otherwise, the entire time travel narrative falls apart.
Things get kind of fucked up in the Terminator timeline. It seems like they keep sending robots to the past to accomplish this one goal, but then the future remains unchanged. Or, perhaps there is a version of this that brings us to option 3…
Version 3: Every action creates an alternate future, but the “original” future remains intact.
This is another possibility, and it’s actually the most philosophically plausible, to me. Because, dig this, if I travel to the past and alter the future, wouldn’t MY memories of the future then cease to exist? If I change the future such that NERF was never a thing, I would have never seen a NERF gun and would not have any memories of them.
But if I change A future, not necessarily MY future, then it would stand to reason that I could still remember something that would not happen in the timeline I currently occupy. I’ve traveled to a different timeline at this point, but my timeline still remains intact.
This also addresses the problem I have with “meeting yourself in the past.” This can’t happen in the version where time is a loop, like in the Terminator example above. If that did happen, I would remember meeting myself. But also, and this could be totally off-base, but I think that would be cloning myself in addition to traveling through time. Or maybe it implies that the way time works, there’s a me that existed five seconds ago, and each moment that follows, a new me is created and continues the legacy of the me from the last moment that I grew out of. Thinking in terms of the Law of Conservation of Mass, wouldn’t having two of me physically in a timeline violate the concept that mass cannot be created?
Okay, okay. Let’s stop trying to disprove this shit and talk about why the stories stink.
If every change I make creates an alternate world, I guess that’s fine, but what would I, as a character, possibly do with that information? If there were infinite universes, some very close to our own, what would I do if I knew that to be absolutely true?
Me? I would do absolutely nothing. Indiana Jones? I guess he would travel to different universes and hunt their treasures while also teaching their freshman intro to Archaeology classes.
Which is exactly why this doesn’t matter. Characters would do the same shit they’re doing now, just in different settings.
Again, this can work as a story, but it usually doesn’t. Lot of bad Silver Surfer runs out there, and that dude has access to a vast universe of possibility. Star Trek episodes? Sometimes awesome, but I’d argue that they’re rarely awesome simply because the characters discover a strange world and that’s the end of it.
That’s the summary of the three ways in which I see time travel used quite often. Edge of Tomorrow, The Forever War, Futurama, How To Live Safely In A Science Fiction Universe, lots of things have told good stories with time travel. But lots and lots take one of the three routes above, and we get it.
I consider time travel to be like the courtroom scene in a sitcom, or the montage in a sports movie. They can totally work, but at this stage of the game, you have to really think about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and whether time travel is really the way to go.”