Time Trek

Posted on January 7, 2016 by Neil Shyminsky

Writing for The Establishment, The Hooded Utilitarian’s own Noah Berlatsky recently penned a devastating critique of one of the special snowflakes of science fiction: Star Trek’s “The City on the Edge of Forever” (1967). Even if you’re not a trekkie, or didn’t watch The Original Series (TOS), you’re familiar with the trope that the plot relies on. Berlatsky tersely characterize the episode as “an elaborate exercise in justifying violence and would-you-kill-baby-Hitler ethics.” That is, in order to save the present, someone who did something evil must die in the past. To the extent that Trek offers a twist on that trope, it’s that the person who must die, Edith Keeler, is actually good.

That amplifies the emotional stakes, sure, though at the cost of the plot and drama, since we know this story can only have one possible ending. And that ambivalence – in Kirk, in the audience – does nothing to undermine the self-evident logic of the trope: the ends of time-travel will justify even the most otherwise unconscionable means.

It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. The “kill baby Hitler” trope, also known here on the interwebs as the “Set Right What Once Went Wrong” trope (SRWOWW), is ubiquitous among science fiction serials. (So much so that the 80s saw both a TV series and film franchise about this exact plot-device: Quantum Leap and Back to the Future, respectively.) So, too, are variations on it, most of which fall into one of the following categories – exercises in hubris where the results actually make things worse, fixed time loop universes where change is either impossible or semi-fixed, ironic iterations where the would-be assassins actually cause the event they’re trying to stop,and scenarios where the effects of any changes remain unknown or unknowable. To touch just the tip of the iceberg.

What allows Kirk and Spock to act with moral certainty, despite the seeming immorality of the individual act itself, is a feature that’s unique to science fiction and time-travel stories more generally: perfect knowledge of the past and its relationship to the future, of cause and effect.

[I write “unique” because this is not the same as the claim that we have access to perfect foresight and knowledge of what will happen in the future. Even when the Bush administration claimed to know that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that he would use against his enemies – which he didn’t and thus wouldn’t, as it turned out – they could never be absolutely certain. And this is why the trope is particularly insidious and the distinction between the fictional and the real is particularly important: when we invoke the logic of SRWOWW – we know this thing will happen and so we must do this other thing to prevent it – in real life, we erase that difference. We start to believe that we, like Spock, have access to perfect knowledge and awareness of the future. Spoiler: we don’t.]

This perfect knowledge? It’s artistically and politically irresponsible. It also saps the story of a great deal of tension. It’s just pain lazy. But it should be remarkably easy to fix.

Imagine if, rather than perfect knowledge of 1) the event that would change history, and 2) its effects in the future, Kirk and Spock only knew one of these things? Or perhaps neither? If Kirk and Spock know that Keeler should – from their perspective, anyway – have died but can’t know whether the world will be better or worse for it, their decision becomes considerably harder. In fact, it problematizes the kneejerk use of the modal “should”. Even if she died in their past, why does it follow that must die in this one? And could the world, in fact, be a better place for her presence?

Likewise, if they know that the future has changed in some significant way but can only guess at the cause of that change, their mission becomes a detective story that possibly reaches no concrete conclusions, only descending into a far more ambiguous morality tale if and when they figure it out. If and when they think they’ve figured it out, that is. Knowing that they can’t be certain, how confident must they be in order to justify the murder of an innocent person? And for that matter, must she die?

This got me thinking: given the love for this episode, we might assume that Star Trek would follow its formula and logic in the future. But did they? And if they didn’t, did they manage to improve on it? What follows are some reflections on what I deem to be the most creative and thoughtful exercises in time-travel logic and ethics from each of The Next Generation (TNG), Deep Space Nine (DS9), and Voyager (VOY). And the first post-TOS time-travel story, for what will be some obvious reasons.

TNG – Yesterday’s Enterprise (3×15)

The Next Generation’s first time-travel episode, originally pitched with “The City on the Edge of Forever” in mind as its inspiration, is probably the series’ – if not all of post-TOS Trek’s – most infamous and best-loved time-travel story. It’s been cited by Roberto Orci as an inspiration for the rebooted Star Trek and repeatedly voted one of, if not the best, episodes of TNG. People like it, is what I’m saying.

“Yesterday’s Enterprise” has a pretty simple premise, but one that’s surprisingly hard to explain. The previous iteration of the Enterprise, from 22 years in the past, ends up in the present when it passes through a rift in space-time. As a result, the present immediately changes – the Federation is at war with the Klingons, and they’re losing. Only Guinan knows that something has changed, and even though she can’t explain why, she must convince Picard to send the Enterprise of the past to their deaths in the past.

Our first example of SRWOWW in TNG, and it provides a small twist on the model provided by “Edge of Forever.” Do we know of both the specific event that will “fix” the timeline and the effect that it’ll produce? We do, yes, because we’ve been watching the show for 3 years and we know this isn’t right. That much is pretty straightforward.

But the characters? They don’t. Sure, Guinan has some awareness that something is wrong, and that skirts uncomfortably close to a reading of the regular timeline as a timeline of destiny. But Guinan can’t explain why and the decision becomes simply a calculated risk. Maybe the Enterprise C can make a bigger difference in the past than the present. Maybe the C will survive the battle in the past. Maybe it’s even worth sacrificing the Enterprise D, given the way the war with the Klingons is going. Maybe.

I’m stretching, though. We know what Picard needs to do, and we know what’ll happen if he does it. That’s a sort of dramatic irony, I suppose, but not as different from “Edge of Forever” as it first seemed.

TNG – Tapestry (6×15)

There were plenty of episodes with time-travellers, time-loops, and temporal anomalies between “Yesterday’s Enterprise” and “Tapestry”, but none where the crew was forced into any serious ethical dilemmas. “Tapestry” begins with Picard’s ostensible death, the captain having been shot in the chest and, as a result, his artificial heart exploded. Q gives Picard the chance to re-live and change the past, thus avoiding the bar-fight that damages his fight and saving his life in the present.

Things don’t work out the way Picard hopes, though. It turns out that the fight was a defining moment of his life – the loose thread that unravels the tapestry of the episode’s title – and so the pacifist Picard leads a totally undistinguished life. Dejected and disgusted with himself, Picard tells Q that he would prefer to die as the man he was, rather than live out his life as a timid and unremarkable astrophysicist.

Like “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, “Tapestry” offers a small twist on the SRWOWW model – Picard knows what must be done, but he doesn’t know what it will change. That the alternative life is unbearably dull is a surprise, but Picard doesn’t hesitate to reverse his decision. As it turns out, of course, he didn’t actually die.

It’s an easy choice, from a story-telling and audience perspective, for Picard to restore the universe as we know it. We know this to be the correct timeline, the real one. The one where Picard doesn’t fight? Simply put, it’s wrong. And given how Picard stipulated to Q that nothing could change except for his own life, it doesn’t just feel wrong – it feels artificial.

But should it have been an easy decision? The resolution leaves me with an uneasy feeling. Picard decides that living an average life is, essentially, not worth living. He chooses death and a short but exceptional life over, well, something more like our own lives. Is being unexceptional really so bad? It would seem so, yes.

DS9 – Visionary (3×17)

This isn’t DS9’s first time-travel story – that title belongs to “Past Tense” (3×11/12), a social justice story where the time-travel element is set-dressing, rather than central to the conceit. But “Visionary” is probably Star Trek’s most fascinating and thoughtful time-travel episode, though the actual time-travel that’s involved is rather modest by comparison to the other stories in this list.

Radiation poisoning keeps sending Chief O’Brien several hours into the future. While at first just peculiar, this turns out to be very fortuitous, since it allows him to prevent both his own death and the destruction of the station. The plot is an elaborate detective story, with the crew of DS9 trying to figure out why O’Brien is shifting in time and how to stop it (and then restart it) even as they use his knowledge of the future to change it. In an added wrinkle, their actions to change the past also shifts the goalposts, as O’Brien’s time jumps reveal an altered but no less problematic future.

In a unique twist on SRWOWW, given that every other iteration to this point saw reality restored to what it once was, the iteration of O’Brien that we’ve been following this whole time dies from radiation poisoning in his final jump to the future. Knowing that he won’t survive the return trip to the past, this O’Brien sends his alternate-future-self – who is likely to otherwise die in a Romulan attack on the station – back to prevent his own timeline from being formed. In doing so, he’ll both replace and erase the “original” O’Brien, who remains in the about-to-be-erased future. It’s a mouthful to explain, but trust me: this is mad, disconcerting, and moving stuff.

In the final act, after Doctor Bashir alone has realized that the wrong O’Brien came back, this “new” O’Brien confesses that he feels like he’s living another man’s life. Bashir disagrees, arguing that he’s the same man but with just a few extra memories. It’s a subtly unsettling resolution. But why should it be? Bashir’s technically right, but doesn’t O’Brien’s point simply feel somehow more valid? It’s ultimately a very small detail, but it’s one that lingers.

VOY – Relativity (5×24)

The Voyager crew dabbled in time-travel almost immediately, considering a trip 20 years into the past in the entirely unconvincing “Eye of the Needle” (1×07). It didn’t get much better from there, unfortunately, though it would get much, much more confusing.

Relativity is a mess, both with respect to plot and time-travel logic. It seems to be using DS9’s “Visionary” as a model – Seven is being moved in and out of the timestream in order to save Voyager from a sort of time-bomb of unknown origin. These same travels are gradually killing her, somehow, but this is really the least confusing detail in the story. The surprise reveal of the villain, a future version of the same 29th Century timeship captain, Braxton, that sends Seven on this mission in the first place, is more baffling than it is alarming.

The episode does do something brand new, by adding the bizarre new concept to “reintegration” to the Star Trek universe. Rather than wiping a timeline completely so that, for instance, Braxton or Seven don’t simply forget certain events but have literally never lived them, we’re told that these versions who have now never existed and exist only outside the timestream will be reintegrated with their current selves. They’ll be combined with the person who properly belongs to the new/restored timeline. This other version of the character, once blissfully unaware, will be combined with and/or remember what the out-of-timeline character has done. Why? How? Huh? It’s an unnecessary and silly detail, and it also cheapens earlier episodes like “Visionary”, which discomfort our assumptions of belonging to a place and time, and even our own sense of uniqueness, without completing obliterating them.

“Relativity” is also a bit too self-conscious and precious. The villainous future future captain is making his second appearance on VOY, which also happens to be the second episode where he’s gone mad and declares Janeway his mortal enemy. There are also numerous, half-joking references to Janeway and the ship’s repeated travels through time and changes to the timestream. Time-travel, like encounters with the Borg, is getting awfully familiar and gimmicky at this point in VOY’s tenure, and the creators know it.

By the time the finale of VOY, “Endgame” (7×25), rolled around, time-travel in this series had become both ubiquitous and virtually meaningless. The finale appeared to follow no coherent set of time-travel rules, and knowledge of the future was seemingly employed entirely as a vehicle to tie-up every loose end and make Voyager’s win over a previously unbeatable enemy seem somehow possible. Fittingly, I suppose, in VOY’s finale a future Admiral Janeway traveled back in that episode to kill her own Baby Hitler – the Borg Queen. No questions or ethical dilemmas, here. And not even the over-rated gravitas of “Edge of Forever”. If Star Trek did learn anything from that episode, they also soon forgot it.

The Future Will Be Televised

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

Last week I suggested that a TV show about time travel didn’t have to be completely stupid. This week I want to suggest that it could also be entertaining. Here’s a script treatment for a pilot to such a would-be non-completely-stupid yet-potentially-entertaining series. Interested TV producers should mail stacks of 1960s-era $100 bills to my home address.

“Remote Control”

Zoom slowly out from historical footage of President Kennedy’s May 25, 1961 Address to Congress: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space.”

2015:

Remy is the granddaughter of two scientists who worked for NASA in the early years of the space race. Both died before she was born, so she is surprised to receive a visit from Connor, a lawyer executing her grandmother’s secret will. To receive the money left to her, Remy has to fulfill one obligation: exhume her grandmother’s coffin and store it in her house for one year.

1961:

Lora, Remy’s grandmother, is leading a small group of politicians and military officers into an airport hanger, promising them that what they are about to see will change everything.

In a second location, scientists lean over a control board in hectic preparation. They include Art, the handsome if good-humoredly arrogant team leader, and Tom, a comparative wall-flower. (Either could be Remy’s future grandfather.)

Lora throws open the door to the hangar to reveal: an anti-climatically empty hanger. Or almost empty. She directs the men to a line of folding chairs situated in front of small crate, drops her purse, and picks up a phone hanging from a pillar: “We’re ready.”

Art is on the other end, and the control room bursts into activity.

In the hangar, all eyes are on the crate. The moment intensifies until . . . the crate is still just sitting there. The observers are getting impatient. Lora snaps at Art.

Tom just solved the problem–they’re connected.

Lora looks at the crate: still nothing. She’s about to speak when she hears a crash through the phone and then jerks around as the crate crashes open a second later. A very non-anthropomorphic robot breaks out: it rolls on multiple wheels, extends an array of praying mantis-like arms, and swivels a camera eye at the startled observers.

The control panel’s central video screen shows the observers as the scientists control the robot’s movements. Tom mumbles something about theatrics: there won’t be any crates to smash on the moon. Art agrees, but politicians like a good show; that’s why he put Lora on the main stage.

Lora introduces LURC-er 1, a remote controlled robot designed for lunar exploration. The president has promised the world America will be on the moon by the end of the decade—which is impossible. How do you build a life-sustaining environment strong enough to withstand outer space and then make it lightweight enough to be rocketed out of the Earth’s gravity while still carrying enough food, water, and oxygen to keep even one human being alive? This will not happen in our lifetime’s or even our grandchildren’s lifetimes. But rocketing a robot to the moon is comparatively simple. LURC-er 1 rolls forward.

2015:

Remy and Connor watch as the coffin is dug up. When they open it, both are relieved to find not a desiccated corpse but a male mannequin dressed in a 60s-era business suit.

It and the coffin are trucked to Remy’s house and left in her empty garage. Connor says he will have to check in occasionally to confirm that the coffin remains in the house. The terms of the will are vague on this point, and he’s hinting that he might like to stop by more often than legally required. There’s some definite mutual attraction here.

1961:

Lora bounds into the control with the news: the observers were impressed, and project funding is guaranteed. Applause and celebration—including a lingering hug from Art. Tom looks away: “We still haven’t figured out the time delay.” This draws Lora’s attention away from Art. She could have sworn she heard the crate shattering through the control room speakers before it shattered in the hangar—but of course that’s impossible, and she laughs it off. Tom looks shocked. He mumbles something and starts poking at the controls. Art ignores him and draws Lora to an adjourning room where once alone they kiss.

2015:

Remy is woken by a faint noise downstairs. She finds her phone, preps it to dial 911, and arranges her keys in her other fist so they protrude as weapons. She turns on lights as she investigates the house, but finds nothing. Before giving up and going back upstairs, she checks the door to the garage: it’s unlocked. She opens it and hits the light but nothing has changed; the coffin is still sitting in the middle of the empty garage. She almost leaves but then walks to the coffin. She opens the lid: the mannequin is gone.

1961:

At night, Art is walking Lora to her car where they say goodnight with another kiss. Once inside she realizes she doesn’t have her keys—which are in her purse.

Lora enters the hangar where she left her purse earlier. She finds it and then hears a noise from one of the darkened areas. She notices that the folding chairs and broken crate haven’t moved—but the robot is gone. She explores and soon comes face to camera-eye with LURCer 1. It reaches a claw slowly toward her. She wants to smile, but can’t: “Art? Is that you?” The robot shakes its camera head “No.”

2015:

Connor wakes up to his phone ringing. It’s Remy explaining that the mannequin is gone and accusing him of playing some kind of game with her. Connor swears he knows nothing.

Remy hangs up angry. She is standing in her kitchen now when she hears something loud from upstairs. She dials 911 and reports an intruder in her house. She grabs her keys again and shouts warning that the police are coming as she walks upstairs. She sees a figure in a darkened corner. She throws on a light ready to punch, but it’s just the lifeless mannequin posed in a standing position. She approaches it cautiously. It remains frozen. She leans closer until her face is inches from it. A tense pause. Nothing happens.

1961:

The next morning, Lora, Tom and Art are back to work in the control room. Lora asks who was operating with LURCer last night, but they both deny it, and the panel recorded no activity. Tom is smiling though. He sits at the controls, saying he thinks he’s figured out the time delay. He activates LURCer and the screen shows the folding chairs and broken crate in the hangar. Why is it so dark? And where is everyone? Art is on the phone to the crew stationed in the hangar.

In the hangar, the crew is positioning the dormant LURCer; the crate and chairs are gone.

Art thinks Tom must have rolled the robot into the wrong area of the hangar somehow, but exploring reveals nothing. Lora’s face changes as she recognizes what is happening. She tells Tom to turn around—to turn LURCer around. When he does, Lora is looking back at them through the video screen. Are they watching a tape? The panel registers a live feed. Lora leans closer to the panel and speaks in sync with her lips moving silently on the screen: “Art? Is that you?” Tom looks at her, then operates LURCer: her image moves left and right as he shakes the camera “No.”

2015:

A police officer has finished taking Remy’s statement as two others report that the house and grounds are clear. Connor arrives, upset and apologizing. He explains that he is only following directives sent to him by an anonymous client. The police offer to remove the mannequin, but discover it’s surprisingly heavy. It topples rigidly onto its back on the upstairs landing. Remy tells them to leave it, and the officer assures her they will be patrolling all night and to call for any reason. Remy throws Connor out too, but first he gives her an envelope: the first payment, pre-sealed by the employer. She rips it open and stacks of $100 bills spill out. Remy watches at the window as Connor and the last police car pull away. She’s holding the bills and notices that they look unused but the design is wrong; they’re from the 1960s. A hand grabs her arm. She spins as a speaker behind the mannequin’s motionless lips says, “Remy, it’s me.”

1961:

Lora, Tom and Art are alone in the hangar with LURCer. Art has sent everyone else home. He checks that the door is locked, before Tom explains. The “delay” was due to the system he invented to synchronize signals between the control room and LURCer. It was just supposed to solve a technical issue, but the adjustment he made this morning proves that the signals traveled back and forth from a point in the past. He just invented time travel.

Although Tom has overthrown all of physics, Art points out that the technology has no practical application. They built LURCer two months ago, and so that’s as far back as they can send signals. Lora disagrees. Can’t the signals move forward in time? Isn’t that how she heard the crate break? The signals were traveling one second into the future. Why not send them further? How far is the range? It would only be possible if LURCer is maintained in the future too, either by their future selves or someone else. They leave the hangar, ready to find out.

2015:

Remy backs away from the mannequin. “What’s wrong?” it asks. She tells it take off its mask so she can see his face. “You know this isn’t a mask.” Remy flees as it moves toward her and then suddenly stops. “Oh,” it says and turns and vanishes into the kitchen. Remy waits, bewildered, then tentatively follows. She turns the corner to see it studying her wall calendar. It reads the date aloud and then looks at her. It says the date again. She nods. She flinches as it moves toward her again, but then it walks past her and heads upstairs. She follows it to her study where it is writing on a piece of paper at her desk. It seals the sheet into an envelope and hands it to her. “Hide this in one of your books.” It points at the wall of bookcases and then starts downstairs again. “What is it?”“The password. Have you called Connor yet?” “Password to what?” “I’m going back to the coffin now.” Remy leans over the banister as it descends. “Why do you want me to call Connor?” It pauses at the bottom. “And, Remy, remember.” It looks expressionlessly up at her. “Don’t trust me.” It vanishes around the corner.

1961:

Lora, Art and Tom sit at the control panel. They have no way to calibrate time distance, so Tom takes a guess—somewhere between a few seconds and a few millennia. To their shock, the signal is received. They’re connected. But the screen is black. Stranger, the new input doesn’t match their equipment—way more data than they can process. And the motor controls aren’t right either. They can’t get the wheels to engage properly. What has happened to LURCer?

2015:

Connor pulls up in front of Remy’s house and runs up the steps. She is waiting at the door: “Who are you working for?” He swears he doesn’t know and explains how his client handled everything through the mail. He never met or even spoke to anyone. Remy eventually accepts he’s telling the truth and starts to shut the door—when Connor asks if anything else happened. Did the intruder come back? Remy doesn’t answer, but clearly it has. He asks to come out, to stay somewhere else tonight, at a hotel—but then Remy opens the door and invites him. “You need to see this.”

1961:

They give up trying to work the motor controls. Did someone redesign LURCer? If so, at least the data they’re receiving will provide schematics for them to match the upgrade. The screen suddenly brightens as a lid lifts. Two faces look down at the camera. It’s Remy and Tom. “Who the hell are they?”

2015:

Remy and Tom hear noises as they approach the garage. As they enter, the coffin is jerking spastically, then stops. It jerks once more, then stops again. After a nervous moment, they open the lid and look down at the mannequin’s face.

1961:

Remy and Connor vanish as the screen goes dead. The signal has cut off.

In the hanger, LURCer comes alive and starts rolling outside.

They try reconnecting, but it’s as if the future LURCer is gone, or is being blocked, like a busy signal.

LURCer enters their building.

They continue trying controls and debating what just happened—when LURCer bursts into the control room. They step back. Who’s controlling it? It rolls toward them. Then stops. One of its arms extends to the floor and begins to scratch. Lora approaches—Art tries to hold her back—but she shrugs him off and kneels to study the scratches. They’re Morse code. “H-E-L-P.” One of the other arms has begun scratching and Tom reads it: “M-E.” Art reads the third arm: “K-I-L-L.” And Lora moves to read the fourth: “P-O-T-I-S.” What is Potis? Lora looks into the robot’s camera. “You want us to help you kill the President of the United States?” All the arms begin scratching again. They each read a letter: “Y” “E” “S.” They stand back as the arms keep scratching and scratching the same word over and over: YES YES YES YES YES

End on a slow zoom into historical footage of Kennedy’s Address to Congress: “Now it is time to take longer strides—time for a great new American enterprise—time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth.”

How to Fix Your Time Machine

Posted on March 5, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

Dear Syfy Channel,

As much as I’m enjoying your new 12 Monkeys series, it’s also really annoying. This is not entirely your fault. Time travel is typically a mess in films and TV shows. Why, for instance, does Cole’s time travel chair lean him backwards like an astronaut, and yet when he appears and disappears in the past, he’s in a standing position? And why does he not return to the same moment in time that he left? I realize the answer is story convenience—sometimes it’s fun to have things happen while he’s “gone”—but couldn’t the doctor spout some techno-babble explaining how the machine somehow locks the two time periods in sync? Otherwise the past is less a “when” and more like a “where,” a place that exists simultaneously with “now” and so moves forward at a parallel rate.

Cole’s mission is also a variation on Back to the Future and so suffers from a range of Michael-J.-Fox-fading-from-the-family-photo problems. For instance, when he loops back to a moment he’s already visited and alters it so this time his past self is accidentally shot in the arm, why does he experience the injury simultaneously with his past self? And why does the injury then turn into a sutured scar? At what point in time was the wound bandaged? Is the current Cole now a different Cole, the Cole who was injured in the past, and so then was the previous not-shot-in-the-arm Cole erased? If so, the new Cole wouldn’t even know something had been altered, because in fact “his” timeline hasn’t been altered, and so he would remember and have anticipated being shot—in which case, wouldn’t he take some precaution “now” to avoid it happening “again.” His whole mission is about altering past events, so there are no cosmic taboos like the kind the writers of Doctor Who keep having to invent, those inexplicably “fixed” points in time that make the plot work at the expense of everything else.

I realize this sort of internal consistency is not the top priority when writing action-oriented entertainment. The top priority for writers of action-oriented entertainment is to be entertaining. There is no correlation between a well-tempered time machine and high ratings. Though I would not be surprised if TV and film producers imagine the correlation is inverse, that the more time writers spend tinkering with the nuts and bolts of their nerdy plot devices, the less entertaining the show will be. And to a certain degree this is true, since sinking all of your effort into any one story element at the expense of the billion other story elements needed to make a story good is a great way to make a story very bad. Though at the other end of the spectrum, a story that ignores too many of those reality-securing nuts and bolts is going to score pretty high on viewers’ This-Is-Stupid meter. So most time-travel tales bounce around the middle, cutting corners while keeping the majority of their viewers’ frontal lobes intact.

But how about a time-travel story that’s both entertaining and makes sense? I realize “makes sense” is an oxymoron when talking about the impossible, but all I’m asking for is the appearance of plausibility. If that sounds like a pointless constraint on the creative process, remember that writers thrive on constraints—or as Robert Frost put it: “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.” 12 Monkeys could use a few nets.

So here’s one example of a plausible time machine. Begin by taking the traveler out of time travel. Start simpler. Think of it first as a “time phone.” Your machine sends and receives signals from the future. This is where a TV producer hangs up, because a show about people talking on phones sounds really boring, but the constraints create new possibilities. What if the future end of the phone is a robot? And if this end of the phone isn’t a phone but a Wii, then instead of a cartoon in a 2-D landscape, your avatar is a remote control android physically interacting with people in the future.

That nuts-and-bolt net also manufactures some potential plot tensions. Since anyone can throw on video goggles and Wii gloves, anyone can “travel” in time—but to the folks in the other time destination, “anyone” always looks exactly the same. You can never know for sure who is remote controlling the android—the good guys or the bad guys. This is great news for Orphan Black actress Tatiana Maslany since who else could play so many parts within a part? But if Maslany is busy, I nominate Enver Gjokaj based on his brilliant stint on the not-so-brilliant Dollhouse (he’s pretty good on Agent Carter too.)

Meanwhile, the folks working the Wii, they first have to build the android before they can dial the future with the blind hope that they (or future generations depending on how far into the future you’re dialing) will have maintained it. Since the Wii controls can exist in the future too, future people can also dial backwards in time, beginning at the moment the android is first switched on. So while the inventors are visiting the unknown future, the unknown future is visiting them.

If that doesn’t give a team of writers material for a season or two, you can always throw in an apocalypse—a worldwide plague, a rise of the machines and/or apes, a dysfunctional family in need of an emotional reboot. Maybe Michael J. Fox can use Matrix technology to active an Arnold robot and prevent his parents from being zombified before he’s born so he can overthrow the Morlocks after he grows up to be Bruce Willis?

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: time travel

Time Trek

The Future Will Be Televised

How to Fix Your Time Machine