(This
is as far as I go for now. Nineteenth time’s the charm. I hear Wolverine is
time-traveling in an upcoming summer movie.
I’ll have to check that out.)
This
is just a little beef I have. Forgive
me.
In
a story, when a timeline is altered and time travel is used to fix the problem,
there are some plot devices creators have to decide upon. There are two types of stories that come to
mind. First, there is a problem in the
present day, and the time travelers go back in time to change the future, or in
one case, retrieve something from the past to fix the problem. Or there is the other side of that, where an
antagonist has gone back in time to change the present and the protagonist must
travel back to stop him.
The
latter issue presents the most problems.
In Men In Black 3, Agent J
witnesses the world without Agent K after a villain goes back in time and kills
him. The world is overrun by an alien
invasion and to stop it from happening, J goes back in time. It is the thrust of the movie and a surprisingly
fun one at that. The most memorable scene
happens when J jumps off the Chrysler building with the time travel device in
his hand, and he can see the events slingshot all the way back to creation and
back the to the 1960’s in one minute.
But
here is where we all notice story snags.
If someone goes back in time and alters the events of the future, what
would that be like to an observer? J
experiences a ‘temporal fracture’, because he is the only one who remembers the
previous timeline, and a life with K. In
any kind of time travel thinking, J would be just like everyone else. The timeline would be altered and no one
would be suspicious of anything, including our hero. The simple act of going back in time somehow
destroys an entire reality. This is the
basis of single string time travel. It’s
just as nutty as a loop, but for different reasons. It’s a movie and there has to be someone who
witnesses the change in reality. We need Will Smith to save the day, so his
reality is given a pass so he can go back and stop the creepy alien guy played
by Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords.
The
same issue occurs in Star Trek: First
Contact. While being pursued by
Picard and crew, the Borg have gone back in time through a vortex to the time
where Earth first established contact with other worlds. The Enterprise sees an Earth ruled by the
Borg for centuries, then they follow them back in time to keep the whole thing
from happening. We need it to work out
this way in the story, so we have a movie to watch. But if the Borg went back in time and changed
the future, there would be no Enterprise, Picard or anything else. The reality should extend to all Earthlings
and earth ships, not just the ones that happened to be on the planet that day. But
the Enterprise is unscathed by the change, even though the entire Earth fell
victim to the Borg, and they travel back in time to save the world.
In other Star Trek lore, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is more of the other variety. Earth is in danger of a weird floating cigar
that is altering the oceans and atmosphere and is submitting whale noise. Whales are extinct, so they go back to the
1980’s to snag a couple of whales to bring them back to talk some sense into
the alien craft. This is my favorite
original crew Star Trek movie because it is such a kooky premise and it is
pretty funny for a bunch of old stiffs wandering around San Francisco trying to
fit in. The time travel premise was a
bit cleaner. Two whales taken from an aquarium and brought to the future would
scantly change any timelines, and the Enterprise crew was not affected by the
whale peaking alien craft in their own time.
They were not trying to rectify some alteration to a timeline, just
averting a natural disaster.
This
is where the time travel of story and the physics of a possible time travel
event collide. We can still accept artistic
license because time travel is theoretical and art has no boundaries. We need heroes to take us on a journey, but
if the journey negated the hero from existing in the first place, where is the
damn story?
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