A Brief History of Time Travel, Part I

In conclusion, while the actions of time travelers may influence the course of history, it's impossible for them to actually change anything. Anything they do in the past will have always been that way.

Since the reactions to my last post generally fell somewhere between "What the fuck is wrong with you" and "MY EYES! ZE GOGGLES DO NOTHING," I figured that this would be a good time to scale back on squick-inducing slash fiction and do a good old-fashioned nerd rant.

I have been known, on occasion, to get rather heated about things that don't actually matter to anyone else (some of you may remember a post from way back in October in which I said some very mean things about the Midwest). One of those things is the theory of time travel.

Now, it's not the physical impossibility of time travel that bothers me (I can deal with Lovecraftian horrors and superheroes that can breathe in space, so clearly I'm not married to realism here); it's the fact that so many people don't fucking understand how time travel would work, if it were possible. Movies and books and video games are full of bad time travel theory, and it never ceases to piss me off.

Here are several offenders, in no particular order:

The Terminator movies. Going back in time to kill someone doesn't fucking work. If John Connor never grows up, the Terminators have no reason to be sent after him. The very fact that the machines want to kill him basically makes him immortal until he becomes the leader of the resistance. There's no real paradox at work, though--the machines are apparently just morons, right? Well, it depends on whether or not you view Terminator 3 as canon (The Sarah Connor Chronicles doesn't seem to, which earns the show major points in my book). In T3, the Terminatrix tracks down a couple other leaders of the future resistance and shoots them in the face, thereby ensuring that they never become important enough to merit being marked for death in the future. Because they're already dead. This steps out of the realm of "bad planning" and becomes a full-on temporal paradox--and, sadly, it's not even close to being the worst part of the movie.

Back to the Future. You cannot undo your own existence. It just doesn't work. If you did manage to keep your parents from ever getting married, however, you and your siblings wouldn't slowly fade out of existence one by one: you never would have existed in the first place, making it impossible for you to prevent your parents from getting together at all. Boom. Paradox. Whether or not Marty McFly macks on his own mom, the very fact that he exists at all means that his parents still bone and they still produce him (despite his best efforts to fuck everything up like a massive jackass). He's gonna have to do something about that Oedipus complex, though.

Kate and Leopold. Soooo the man who invented the elevator is in danger of not having invented the elevator anymore because he's been whisked to the 21st century and has fallen in love with Meg Ryan for some reason. In another case of the bullshit "slow-onset time paradox" thing that movies seem to be fond of, this problem in the time stream manifests itself by making an elevator disappear. And then Liev Schreiber falls down the empty elevator shaft.

Now, I'm willing to ignore the massive improbability of his survival, mostly because there's a much larger problem at hand. For a moment, let's assume that this whole "changing the past means changing the future" thing actually works: if the past were changed so that the elevator was never invented, the skyline of New York City would be drastically different because everyone would have to use the stairs. The buildings would all be a hell of a lot shorter--and you know what they wouldn't have at all? Elevator shafts. Because elevators never existed at all, so no one would be stupid enough to build places to put them. Gahhhhhhhh.

Kate and Leopold, I know you're just a romantic comedy that's using time travel as an excuse to put Hugh Jackman in period costume so he can be charming and completely heterosexual and talk about La Bohème, but that doesn't excuse you from making any goddamn sense whatsoever.

Superman and Superman II. You know, I guess the creators of the Superman movies deserve some credit: most of the movies on this list at least came up with some sort of flimsy pseudo-scientific explanation for time travel, but the people behind Superman were clearly too busy drinking Everclear and snorting cocaine off naked strippers and generally not giving a fuck to come up with any sort of coherent explanation. I'm pretty sure the movie's pre-production meetings went something like this:

Important Guy: "Superman needs to travel back in time? Okay, here's what we'll have him do. He flies around the Earth really fast and makes it spin the other way."
Intern: "But what does that have to do with time travel? Wouldn't reversing the Earth's rotation just kill everything on the planet?"
Important Guy: "Jimmy, you need to loosen up. Put your face in that mound of cocaine."
Intern: "With gusto, sir!"

Also, when Superman reverses time, he only goes back to save Lois Lane. The thousands of other people he saved from the falling rocks and tidal waves and shit? Apparently not worth saving a second time. But the best part is this: as if the plot device weren't retarded enough the first time around, he does the exact same thing in the sequel, but on a much larger scale. Superman travels back to the events of the first movie to prevent the stray missile from ever freeing the rogue Kryptonians, thereby making it so that none of the events of Superman II ever actually happened. That's right: Kal-El actually retconned his own movie out of existence.

Congratulations, Superman creative team, you have achieved the fail singularity.