Introduction
Nothing has caused more trouble in the world of speculative
fiction than time travel. Well, prophecy is also a pretty
big culprit, but in many ways the one is merely a subset of
the other, so I’ll let my original pronouncement stand.Now, time travel as depicted on, say, Futurama, in which Fry is cryogenically frozen for a thousand years, or in Demolition Man, when John Spartan and Murder Death Killer Simon Phoenix awake from cryoprison in a future with no crime, cause me no grief. I am likewise untroubled by the concept as used in Flight of the Navigator or Orson Scott Card’s Ender series, where the vagaries of Einsteinian physics mean that anyone travelling faster than the speed of light ages but little while the universe around them marches on apace. Hell, all of those are basically just reboots of Rip Van Winkle, and I always loved that particular folk tale. I also don’t really mind those wrong-righting Groundhog Day-style reliving of vital incidents stories -- your Early Editions, Tru Callings, and Day Breaks, etc. I mean, they don’t really make sense, but neither do they offend my sensibilities.
But actual time travel? Of the kind in The Time
Machine or Back to the Future, where someone
builds a contraption that somehow, through the most blatant
of technobabbling, manages to overcome the laws of the
universe in order to physically transport a person -- or
ephemerally transport a person’s consciousness, as seen in
Quantum Leap and the like -- to another point along
the linear spectrum? No. At the risk of being like one of
those naysayers who said we’d have no use for telephones, or
that no one in their right mind would ever need more than
640k of RAM… absurd!As a kid, the concept of time travel did not bother me as profoundly as it does today. I loved Doctor Who and the Australian TV series The Girl From Tomorrow; one of the favorite movies of my youth was -- and is -- The Philadelphia Experiment, along with My Science Project and Time Bandits; I devoured such novels as Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, and I completely adored Kapatoo by Ben Steed. (If you’ve never read it, find it on eBay now!)
But you know the single piece of genre storytelling that ruined it all for me?
The Terminator.
Yes. The Terminator.
I mean, what the fuck is going on in that chronology?
I have covered my disgust of the wacky time travelly
shenanigans of the first two films in that series
here in this month's oh-so-topical Movie Marathon section,
but to sum up: nothing that happens in those movies is even
remotely possible. I don't mean they're scientifically
impossible, in the way that we don't have the technology to
send hot naked people through space and time just yet. What
I mean is, each of those movies (and the subsequent TV show)
present their own unique quandaries when it comes to the
application of a little thing I like to call (because I
learned it in Grade 3 Science), Cause and Effect. To wit: if
the cause of the future Apocalypse is the invention of
Skynet, then we must ensure Skynet is not invented in the
present. But if we ensure Skynet is never invented, then how
can anyone come back in time from the future to tell us to
stop Skynet from being invented, since it's the invention of
Skynet that leads to the ability to travel in time?
And that is only the very tip of the neural net where
Terminator tomfoolery is concerned. As the
aforementioned rant--er, review pointedly asks: if
sending the Terminator back in time led to the development
of the technology on which Skynet was based, and then Skynet
then went ahead and made the Terminator on which it was
based... who the hell created the Skynet technology to begin
with? Pixies?And how was John Connor conceived? How?
You know what? I’m not even going to go into Terminator
3: Rise of the Machines, Terminator: Salvation or
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. ‘Cause frankly
I’m cross enough about this damned convoluted set of
circumstances already. Although I will quote Sheldon, from The Big Bang Theory: "Assuming all the good Terminators were originally evil Terminators created by Skynet but then reprogrammed by John Connor, why would Skynet, an artificial computer intelligence, bother to create a petite, hot, 17-year old killer robot?" ("The Loobenfield Decay", 01.10)
But… The Terminator universe is cool!
Oh, I’m not saying that I don’t love all the Terminator stuff. Of course I do! The original is a poignant and delectable love story, T2 is pure rollicking action fun, and while Rise of the Machines isn’t exactly a series highlight, I think Salvation has been grossly maligned by the viewing public. The Sarah Connor Chronicles, meanwhile, was an awesome show, and I miss it still.
But in order for me to appreciate the Terminator universe, I have to ignore a lot. It’s not just suspension of disbelief -- which I, as a lifelong genre fan, have made an art form; it is an almost ruthless suppression of all that I know to be remotely rational. In order to enjoy The Terminator, and dozens of movies and TV series and books like it, I have to disregard, or at times even celebrate, the fact that it is thoroughly nonsensical. I have to smother my intellect to the point of ruthless, tin-pot-African-dictator-silencing-opposition-style annihilation, or the mother of all migraines will stop me dead in my tracks.
I'm not sure that I should have to work so hard at not thinking about stuff in order to enjoy what is ostensibly entertainment.
Another problem I have with the whole notion of time travel is that, while it may occasionally make for great amusement and diversion, not only does it rarely make any sense whatsoever, but it even more rarely leads to anything good for its victims, or for us. Other science fiction tropes, like Alien Invasion or Evil Empire or even Humans Are Awesome, bring with them many different metaphorical and allegorical spins; they can be used to highlight the human condition, our failings and our virtues, for our long-term betterment as a whole. What’s the best that time travel, as a concept, has given us? That if you don’t study for your History final, you’ll become a rock star?
My learned colleague would have it that, as long as time travel movies -- and by extension, we must infer, TV shows and novels -- manage to avoid pretty much all of the plot devicing that makes a time travel movie what it is, then they'll all be awesome. He claims that if there is no deus ex machina allowed, no complete erasure of everyone's memories permitted, and absolutely no paradoxes (ontological, grandfather, causality loops, what have you) even contemplated, then, hooray, he's fixed a whole subgenre of Science Fiction and Fantasy!
The thing is... that is never going to happen. We are not
dealing, here, with some utopian vision of the future in
which every filmmaker and TV showrunner and author and comic
editor will somehow get together and pledge allegiance to
Will Cashin's Rules of Fictional Time Travel. There is
no glorious, halcyon Bill and Ted-esque era of enlightenment
coming in which we'll all be excellent to each other, party
on dudes, and avoid discommoding our fellow geeks with
convoluted and disingenuous time travel-related posturing. I'm not saying it wouldn't be nice. I'm just
saying it is so unlikely as to be almost as improbable as
actual time travel itself.Meanwhile, this limited view he takes of the trope kind of wins my argument for me: if one needs to rigidly police this conceit's application throughout the multiplicity of creative endeavor before one can be properly content with it's function, then clearly the time travel principal isn't quite as "perfect" a match for fiction as some claim.
Essentially we're being told by my opposite number in this showdown that the whole Time Travel idea in fiction's kind of a fixer upper. I'm saying it's a fixer upper! Indeed, that's pretty much the whole point of my being on this side of this debate.
Ergo, I win.
And yet, we all still lose, because until we find away to establish those time travel rules as inviolable, we'll still have to put up with yet more profoundly headache-inducing, gut-twisting, fist-shakingly irksome and inconsistent head-scratchers like these...
THE TOP 13 TIME TRAVEL OFFENDERS
1. The Terminator universe
Obviously.
2. Star Trek
I’m talking here about all those bizarre paradoxical outings (none of which made a lick of sense),
where the centuries-old head of Data (Brent Spiner) is found
in San Francisco which leads to Data’s head being left
centuries earlier in San Francisco (“Time’s Arrow”,
05.26/06.01); or a tear in the subspace continuum is
caused by an investigation into a tear in the subspace
continuum (“All Good Things...”, 07.25). DS9 had
a bunch of bizarre (though, in the case of “Trials and
Tribble-ations” [05.06], wondrous) time travel oddities… and
how could we forget Captain Janeway’s batshit crazy decision
to go back in time and alter a convenient and selfish
fraction of the past in Star Trek: Voyager’s series
finale? (If only we could!) Don’t even get me started on the
whole Xindi thing on Star Trek: Enterprise, and as
for the Department of Temporal Investigations… I hate
those guys.Meanwhile, four of the eleven Star Trek movies harness wacky time travel premises (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Star Trek: Generations, Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek 2009), and while all were fun -- and often funny -- it does feel like lazy storytelling.
3. “—All You Zombies—” by Robert Heinlein
Talk about your paradoxes! How’s this for a hell of a one?
Girl gets seduced by a man who impregnates her.
During the delivery of their child it is discovered that the
mother was essentially hermaphroditic, and to save her life her male
side is made dominant. She grows older and bitter, living as a man
before eventually going back in time, meeting up with her
young female self and enjoying the whole tawdry hookup scene
from the guy side of things. So, she has sex with herself in
the past… which is what causes her to become a man and be
able to have sex with herself. Oh, also, the kid they have?
It’s them! Or, rather, it’s s/he! Just kill me now.
(Read it here, if you dare.)
4. Stargate SG-1
The episodes “1969” (02.21) and “2010” (04.16) both did the time travel thing pretty well, as such things go, but then the eighth season finale “Moebius, Parts 1 and 2” featured an addled time travel storyline in which the usually level headed Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping) allowed the timeline to be so altered that she and Jack (Richard Dean Anderson) had never met, and although the correct timeline was eventually restored, several versions of Carter and O’Neill, et al, found themselves stuck in Ancient Egypt, which perhaps only archaeologist Daniel Jackson (Michael Shanks) found satisfactory.
Additionally. the movie Stargate: Continuum had
evil -- but kind of hot -- System Lord Ba’al (Cliff Simon) travel back in time and
prevent the Stargate from being delivered to the US
Government, which meant the Stargate Program was never
created, which meant that the planet was an easy target for
conquest, and thereafter everyone dies except Cam Mitchell
(Ben Browder), who then successfully puts the past back in
order, and as a reward for this has live out a long life in
the Merchant Marine before TV. Sucks for him.(Yes, Atlantis and, more recently, Universe have done time travel, too, but the consequences weren’t nearly as dire.)
5. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
If anyone found anything remotely redeeming about the genetics-based time travel our hero endures in this novel (and its subsequent film), I’d love to hear about it. Oh, don’t misunderstand me, I get the subtext. I just find it exasperating.
6. Warlock (1989)
Dude, Satan is the one working the time travel
here. Satan! And he does it to bring an evil Salem
Witch Trials-era warlock into
the 20th-century in order to find out the name of God and
thus unmake the world. If that doesn’t give us all
some indication of just how dubious a practice this whole
flitting through time idea is, then I don’t know what will.
(Although Julian Sands, as the titular warlock, is pretty
great in this movie, as well as its sequels.)7. Fringe
Here we have the time traveling antics of the bald enigmas known as The Observers, one of whose interference caused Walter Bishop (John Noble) to tear the fabric of reality in order to save his alternate universe son's life, with dual world-endangering consequences. Damn time tourists! (And I thought Timescape's dilettantes were a bother.)
8. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (1993)
I’m pretty sure the flimsy time travel plot in this movie is
what killed the franchise. Hanging out in feudal Japan never
does anybody any good. (Unless you’re Mulan, I guess.) It
also features this exchange, a true series lowpoint:MICHAELANGELO: Who's trapped inside?
LEONARDO: Lord Norinaga!
DONATELLO: Lord Norinaga?
[He knocks his Bo into an actual bell]
DONATELLO: Name rings a bell.
Dreadful!
9. Paranormal Romance: Time Travel
Time travel is employed in a whole subgenre of romance writing in which modern gals find themselves married to Scottish Lairds of the 15th-century, and the like. Could anything be more tedious? (With apologies to our own Kate Nagy.)
10. The Lake House (2006)
I know it stars Keanu and the ever-delightful Sandra Bullock, and also that he saves her life in the end. I am even aware that I am chick, and therefore almost morally compelled to like this flick. But it has a time traveling mailbox in it! There is just no excuse for that.
11. Doctor Who
The so-called Time Lord’s voyages through time and space
have led to more unforeseeable dilemmas and disasters than
anyone with a time machine should really accept. (Indeed, there is
no other arena in which the law of unintended consequence
reigns as supreme as in time travel speculation). Also,
let’s just look at how vexing time travel is for the Doctor
and his Companions: the TARDIS is always breaking down,
there are all these pesky rules that have to be obeyed for
stupid reasons -- and yet they are constantly
violated anyway, as and when the script requires -- and
people they care about die left and right. If I were the
Doctor, I’d be very, very depressed all the (forgive the
pun) time.12. The House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier
Want to be thoroughly infuriated at the conscienceless waste
of your time by one you had been raised to regard as a
classic author? Read The House on the Strand, and
be as frustrated as I was with this pointless tale of
drug-induced time travel to 14th-century Cornwall in which
the alleged hero of the novel, the aptly-named Dick,
indulges in what amounts to stalkery voyeurism, loses his
family and his wits, and then comes to a maddeningly
ambiguous fate.13. Timecop (1994)
Folks, with this last, I rest my case.
--
Rachel Hyland
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