Temporal Insanity

By Wolfen Moondaughter
August 1, 2006

There's no common plot that will turn me off an episode of even my most favorite Sci-Fi series more than something dealing with timelines, be it alternate timelines or traveling forwards or backwards in time. Granted, nothing is absolute, so there are a few instances of writers handling it well, I concede. But most of the time? I really wish they'd pick one timeline and stay in it. I hated the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation for that very reason. And I had actually liked the Lost In Space movie up until the time bubble scenario!

Yes, I know, it's called "Science Fiction" for a reason, and I can understand the sentiment that one should be able to do anything in the genre. And I can usually suspend my disbelief to accept things that are even more unlikely than time travel. But, for me, in order for a story to be truly successful, it needs to follow its own internal set of logic, as well as offer some sort of reason why the laws of physics can broken, even if it's something like a magical medallion (I swallow Fantasy more easily than Sci-Fi) or a quirk of genetics (and since I know a thing or two about genetics, that's a bit harder to do with me). Maybe there's some evidence that time isn’t quite linear, but that is still how we perceive it. Even with a time-travel story, we see time like a piece of string that just happens to be doubling back on itself (maybe even through itself), or many stands that are interwoven — we still see it as a line or series of lines. Except that, since most time-travel stories seem to choose to ignore logic, the string that's being twisted by time-travel often becomes frayed and tangled to the point where I can’t stand to look at it anymore.

The most common issue I have with time-travel plots involving the past is this: the very fact that the event in question needed someone who technically doesn’t exist yet in order to happen. To my mind, that's putting the cart before the horse — you can't expect to go anywhere if you do that, just like you can’t expect time to go forward if you're waiting for someone from the future to make it move when they aren’t there yet. Even if you say, well, time goes forward one way until that person exists, and they make it go forward another way, there's a serious flaw there: The way time went forward the first time culminates in the reason why that person went back. If the why of their going back changes, they might not go back at all, and then time snaps back to what it was. Then they end up needing to go back again. There is very little chance of avoiding a time loop and making history flicker back and forth between the two possibilities for the rest of eternity.

For example, in Back to the Future, Marty started to "fade" as the probability of his parents getting together (and therefore his being born) got less and less likely. (Let's ignore the fact that it would make a lot more sense for him to simply cease to exist in a single moment rather than fading like that. I can forgive it for a sense of drama; I don’t like it, but I can accept it for the sake of story.) But if his parents didn’t get together, and he was never born, then he wasn't there to go back in time and screw up the chances of his parents getting together in the first place! Yes, I know, I'm supposed to just relax and not think about those things. Except once the notion occurs to you that something's wrong, it's really hard to ignore, like a giant purple elephant sitting at the corner of your vision.

There is, of course, a viable solution to that, one that any of you who saw the recent Science of Stargate: SG-1 special would know about, if you didn’t already think about it beforehand (funny that that special came on in July, just after I started planning this rant, and it covered pretty much everything I wanted to rant about). This solution, of course, is the notion of infinite mirror dimensions, the concept being that for every decision we make, there is a sort of split, one dimension reflecting one decision, and the other dimension reflecting the other. So if you change your past, you get shunted into the new timeline, which isn’t really your timeline at all, so there's no "But now why did I go back in the first place?" issues.

Okay, yes, for all we know, the notion of alternate realities may be the truth of how our existence really works (that would explain why events frequently turn out to be different than the way I remember them, 'ey?). And I confess that there's unlimited story potential there, but as a writer, I hate that concept. Where's the culpability? If every possible result of every choice we make still exists in another timeline, if we will always, in essence, choose both, how does anything we do still matter? Oh, he killed someone? Oh well, we know then that in another timeline he didn't, so it's no big deal? Every good choice we make means we also made a bad one? And if we "change" things for ourselves, but in essence are really just swapping timelines, what happens to the people we leave behind in our original, problematic timeline?

Then there's the whole traveling forward to see the future. Wouldn’t doing that mean anything up until the moment you travel to is then set in stone, and becomes unavoidable destiny? That they are, in fact, the present? Or else the future should be like a hologram, an insubstantial moment that you might be able to see but can’t interact with, because, really, how can you go to something that hasn't been built yet? This again feels like putting the cart before the horse. I know when I write a story that I may have an end in mind, but I still have to write the path to it — and the end never turns out exactly as I originally envisioned it. So if you skip ahead to your future, then what? You try to avoid some things that might make it turn out badly, but what if it's the act of knowing that caused them to happen in the first place? Because if you're in your future, doesn’t it mean you already went to the future and went back, and the future that you're in is the one you already knew about?

So yeah, on the whole, I'd avoid future-travel as much as past-travel or even present-but-sideways-dimensional travel. Still, because I believe that, if you're going to complain about something you should offer suggestions on how to put it right, here are a few shows that, at least once in a while, do "do it right"; shows that Sci-Fi writers who insist on dabbling in time-related stories could stand to take a cue from ....

Regarding traveling to the alternate/parallel dimension, Sliders offered an interesting twist: the characters wanted to get back to their own dimension, regardless of its flaws, while sometimes fighting to resist the temptation of dimensions that were better than their own. In other words, it took the aforementioned plot-issue I had and made the answering of it central to the story, as opposed to using the ability to hop dimensions to solve another problem entirely.

Stargate SG-1 had an interesting twist on the notion of the choices we make splintering into other dimensions; they had an episode where the SG-1 crews of many other realities entered into "our" crew's dimension because of a problem with the Stargates. In that episode, each crew accepted their reality and wanted nothing more than to get back to it — and for a reality that was suffering from a disease that our reality's team had already cured, our reality handed them the antidote. Another team turned out to have created the whole problem in order to take something from our reality and bring it back to their own. Instead of the story being about going to a better reality, each reality tried to better its own existence through the aid of another — they were trying to fix the problem in multiple realities and give 'em all a happier ending.

Also, there was nothing to suggest, in either series, that these alternate dimensions had anything to do with one another, aside from having the same people in them — they didn’t (necessarily) splinter off from the same root dimension, so their decisions still seem to have meaning. It's kind of like playing the same game multiple times, with the adventure being a bit different each time, as opposed to the notion of splintering realities. In other words, some dimensions could theoretically, have turned out exactly the same, and others completely different, but it would have nothing to do with who the characters were. Let's say you have a Daniel Jackson from two dimensions: they could be as similar or as different as you and I, with the fact that they have the same genetic makeup having no more bearing on that comparison than two kids from a school wearing the same uniform. These people could be from another planet instead of another dimension, for all the difference it makes.

And then, of course, there's the epitome of time-travel in Sci-Fi: Doctor Who. First of all, the Doctor travels "sideways" as often as forwards or backwards; that is to say, he travels to alien worlds, or dimensions, and even travels around Earth in the same time periods over and over, so the show doesn’t deal exclusively with time. Secondly, the Doctor is a Gallifreyan, and as such, is conveniently immune to time paradox. So instead of there being infinite realities, there seems to be one reality — but he retains the memory of the previous versions and is unchanged himself when the timeline changes. Rather like he's a weaver and time is his frame, the lives of the rest of the people being his yarn. He's viewing it all from the outside, but it doesn't mean he doesn’t care about the outcome — he's deeply invested, really. This immunity seems to extend to anyone traveling with him in the TARDIS, to at least some degree, and nicely addresses my need for a reasonable explanation of how the laws of physics can be broken within that storyverse. And thirdly, particularly in the new series, he acts as more of an observer, doing his best to keep his action from interfering with the ultimate course of things. He won't go back to actively change something, even if it's to save the life of someone he cares about. He has a moral code involving the responsible use of time travel. Moreover, when he does affect something on a larger scale, it has repercussions that we see later.

Which is not to say that these three shows don’t still have issues now and then in regards to the use of "time and relative dimensions in space", but in general, they have been far more successful in avoiding my pet peeves on the topic. So to the rest of the Sci-Fi writers out there, I beg you to avoid succumbing to the temptation of temporally-related plots unless it's actually the core of your story from the get-go, because to be frank, few of you can manage it with any real satisfaction, and end up just spoiling an otherwise great series.

And really, don't your characters have enough "snags" in their lives without you purposefully pulling on the thread that could unravel their entire existence?