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Time travel: the story with a thousand faces
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Content
TIME TRAVEL: THE STORY WITH A THOUSAND FACES
Allyson Gronowitz
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM – THE ARTS)
May 2016
1
Acknowledgments
I am endlessly grateful to Diane Winston, David Ulin and René Bruckner for their guidance in
shaping this work. Many thanks go out to Vince Gonzalez and Henry Jenkins as well for their
vital help along the way, and to Sasha Anawalt for always being there.
2
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ………………………………………………………………………………...1
Abstract …………………………………………………………………………………………...3
Time Travel: The Story with a Thousand Faces ………………………………………………….4
Time Itself …………………………………………………………………………….......8
Regret ……………………………………………………………………………………13
Nostalgia …………………………………………………………………………….......19
Mirror Image ………………………………………………………...…………………..22
Romance ………………………………………………………………………………...25
Alternate Histories ………………………………………………………………………28
Time Travelers are Storytellers ………………………………………………………....31
References ………………………………………………………………………………………34
3
Abstract
Time travel has long been considered a science fiction staple, but its universal appeal
transcends any one genre. The fiftieth anniversary of Star Trek and the continued reinvention of
sci-fi classics like Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys demonstrate that the time travel story continues to
flourish. From Chris Marker’s iconic 1962 short film La Jete
́ e to more recent television
phenomena such as Lost, Fringe and Doctor Who, this thesis presents an argument for time
travel as the paragon of storytelling.
4
Time Travel: The Story with a Thousand Faces
Half a century ago, Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek declared space “the final frontier.” Now, as
the beloved sci-fi series gears up for a reboot, the final frontier is just about visible on the
horizon: NASA expects to send astronauts to Mars by 2030, while SpaceX intends to colonize
the Red Planet in this lifetime. Certainly, space travel is still a burgeoning field of real-world
scientific study, and the stars still beckon us upward in fiction as well. But there is another
dimension of the cosmos that science has yet to crack open, a concept of exploration that rose in
popularity with Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and ensnared our cultural imagination for
many years to come: time travel.
When Einstein published his theory of relativity at the dawn of the twentieth century, he
shattered previously held notions about the complex nature of our physical world. Of course,
time travel stories existed well before Einstein, as in, most famously, H.G. Wells’s 1895 novel
The Time Machine. But Einstein’s notions about temporal dilation galvanized the creative
community to delve more deeply into the moral, physical, and psychological implications of
traveling through time, setting the stage for a century of time machines, time ships, time turners,
TARDISes and more.
As time travel fiction branched out toward film and television in the mid-twentieth century,
certain science fiction touchstones emerged. Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek contains nearly as
much time travel as space travel (indeed, the two are often one and the same), and is responsible
for exploring several different iterations of the time travel trope over the course of its five
5
television series and 12 films. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the original series, a
milestone celebrated with the announcement of the upcoming addition to the Star Trek canon in
the form of a 2017 series airing on CBS, from showrunner Bryan Fuller.
Another time travel classic is currently undergoing a renaissance: Terry Gilliam’s 1995 cult film
12 Monkeys, starring Bruce Willis as a time traveler intent on preventing the outbreak of a virus
that devastates humanity. The tech-noir film is known for its bleak consideration of fate and free
will. But it also has earned its place in cinematic history as a remake of the French New Wave
classic, Chris Marker’s La Jetée, which itself was an homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece,
Vertigo. Last year, 12 Monkeys made the leap to television, and the Syfy series— developed by
Terry Matalas and Travis Fickett— kicked off its second season in April.
These are only two examples of Hollywood’s time travel fascination, which is making itself right
at home on the small screen. Legends of Tomorrow, featuring a ragtag group of misfits chasing
an immortal villain across time, began its run on the CW in late January. 11.23.63, Hulu’s
adaptation of Stephen King’s JFK-themed time travel novel, debuted on Presidents Day, and
Starz joined the fray with Outlander, based on Diana Gabaldon’s best-selling book series, which
is entering its sophomore season. Further down the pipeline, Netflix is developing a post-
apocalyptic time travel thriller called ARQ starring Robbie Amell (The Flash) and Rachael
Taylor (Marvel’s Jessica Jones), and NBC announced a time traveling action drama from
Supernatural creator Eric Kripke and The Shield creator Shawn Ryan. Not to be outdone, Fox
has ordered a time travel comedy from Phil Lord and Chris Miller of The Lego Movie fame,
while ABC picked up Time After Time featuring Freddie Stroma as H. G. Wells.
6
This trend highlights a truth universally acknowledged by legions of science fiction fans: All the
best stories are time travel stories. The evidence has presented itself on television screens for
decades, hearkening back to the most memorable episodes of sci-fi classics, many of which
utilize time travel to tell their tales. Who could explain the beauty of Lost without referencing
Season Four’s “The Constant”? How would Fringe have ended if it weren’t for the popularity of
the Season Two episode “White Tulip”? What catapults “The City on the Edge of Forever” to the
top of nearly every Star Trek list? And is there a Doctor Who fan who hasn’t tried to indoctrinate
someone by making them watch “Blink”?
Stories involving time travel resonate on a multiplicity of levels, and for a multiplicity of
audiences. Some time travel tales illuminate the meaning of personal choices and identity, as
time-based emotions like hope and regret (one looking forward, the other looking back) are
thrown into sharp relief for characters that can fast-forward and rewind their own stories. Time
travel allows for the wrangling of personal and macro histories, whether you wish to ponder the
implications of killing Hitler or to explore a life in which you had attended a different college.
Many time travel enthusiasts merely enjoy the tantalizing allure of brain-busting cosmological
paradoxes. (If you want to keep a time travel nerd busy for days, ask them to disentangle the plot
of Looper, Primer or X-Men: Days of Future Past.) And when it comes to love— that
prototypical “tale as old as time”— time travel is uniquely able to magnify the theme of a star-
crossed relationship.
7
In 1990, Stephen Hawking— our latter-day Einstein— scoffed at the notion of time travel and
famously declared: “If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?” But he has
since softened his view on the subject matter, and the debates he has fueled within the scientific
community have whetted the public’s appetite for time travel over recent decades. In fact, time
travel has become such a prevalent subject that everyone seems to be attempting to drag it into
their own corner. Kip Thorne, the scientist who consulted on Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar,
famously hurled down the gauntlet as time travel stories rose in prominence at the turn of the
century. “Physicists have realized,” he declared, “that the nature of time is too important an issue
to be left solely in the hands of science fiction writers” (Kaku 2009, 222).
Fortunately for us, science fiction writers are more than up to the task.
8
Time Itself
The concept of time is, in many ways, the feature that lends gravitas to every story ever told. The
ticking of the clock follows us wherever— and whenever— we go. We consider time wistfully
when looking to the past; anxiously or excitedly when anticipating the future; even contentedly,
when meditating on a continuous present. Time is what makes life meaningful; memories across
time are what make us, us.
Time defies all description and definition. Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku notes that time is
“not possible” because “the past is gone, the future does not exist, and the present exists only for
an instant” (217). As such, we are forced to resort to metaphor to explain time— and,
interestingly enough, most (if not all) of these phrases normally refer to objects in space: time
flies, time flows, time crawls. Time moves, tautologically, in respect to itself.
But is time travel possible? Einstein’s theory of relativity proposed that time is a relative
concept, inspiring the proliferation of the term “spacetime.” This, in turn, yielded a neat idea: If
we can travel in space, and space shares similar properties with time, what’s to say we can’t
travel in time?
Thanks to the theory of relativity, certain types of “time travel” are already a fait accompli. Time
moves ever so slightly faster at the center of Earth’s gravitational pull, so astronauts in orbit far
above Earth’s surface age more slowly than terrestrial-bound humans. Because of this time
dilation effect, astronaut Sergei Krikalev, who spent 803 days, 9 hours, and 39 minutes in space,
9
technically traveled 0.02 seconds into his own future over the course of his space travel. And in
2014, physicists successfully simulated photons traveling through time while experimenting with
the intersection of Einstein’s cosmological theory of stars and planets and the nanoscopic world
of quantum mechanics.
The most promising time travel theory piggybacks on what Einstein proposed more than a
century ago, positing that the hypothetical existence of wormholes could serve as a bridge not
only through space, but through time as well. The aforementioned Kip Thorne was one of the
first to devote serious research to the practical connection between wormholes and time travel.
Nowadays, most physicists concede that they have yet to discover a physical law that explicitly
prohibits traveling in time— so it’s not impossible per se, merely very, very improbable.
In fiction, however, most time travel stories follow one of two tracks: the “closed causal loop”
method and the “multiverse” method. In the causal loop story, the time traveler brings about the
future that always was. (Though tidy at first glance, causal loop time travel falls prey to the
“predestination paradox,” a conundrum pointing out that a loop, by definition, can have no
beginning or end, making causal loop time travel seem logically incomprehensible.) The prime
example of this iteration is Chris Marker’s 1962 short film La Jetée, which directly inspired 12
Monkeys (1995) and also serves as a genetic antecedent to James Cameron’s The Terminator
(1984). La Jetée, shot almost entirely in black-and-white photographs, tells the tale of a man
from post-apocalyptic Paris who travels back to a traumatic memory from his childhood and
discovers that he was an integral part of that moment all along. (Of course, he falls in love along
the way, too.) Causal loop stories can be viewed as descendants of the age-old trope of
10
foreknowledge, which hearkens all the way back to Greek myths and prophecies in the Hebrew
Bible.
Marc Guggenheim, executive producer of the CW’s Legends of Tomorrow, invokes the myth of
Oedipus to illustrate the key tension in causal loop time travel tales: “The lesson of Oedipus is,
how do you know that having knowledge of the future and attempting to change the future isn't
the very thing that brings about the future you are trying to prevent?”
By treating events in time as immutable, causal loop time travel stories propose that fate reigns
supreme. La Jetée and Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys apply this theory of time travel to tragic effect,
while in Terminator, our heroes emerge triumphant. Regardless of the outcome, the condition of
causal loop stories— that everything must play out as it already did, or will— seems troubling,
removing human agency from the equation altogether and leading to a grim sort of fatalism.
Which is why the 12 Monkeys television series has adopted a more flexible view of the
intersection of time travel and fate. “In the film, you cannot change time,” Executive Producer
Terry Matalas explains. “In the television show, you can. In that way, it can't help but explore
fate and hope in an exciting way. The ability to change your reality for the better through time
travel is in itself a hopeful idea.”
However, not everyone views the notion of set-in-stone fate with despair. “I think that form of
storytelling is really interesting too,” says Lost co-creator and writer Damon Lindelof. “There are
certain inevitabilities that are fixed, either by some higher power or just by the biosystems of life.
11
They are unalterable, and even in a world where time travel exists, you can't change them. The
fun of telling those stories is watching people try anyway.”
For Lindelof, having characters grapple with their place in the universe ultimately leads to a
cathartic journey. “There's a tragedy in that the initial mission was a failure, but along the way
the character learns something that gives them a victory on a more intimate or personal level,” he
says. “You start from a place of: I need more control, I need to control the people around me, I
need to control my own destiny. But as life goes on you begin to learn that there are some things
that you have no control over. You have to let go, and there is a certain freedom and evolution in
accepting your own place in the world and the power that you have over it. So, even the failure
can be transformed into a victory.”
This Zen-like acceptance of fate calls to mind the message of Star Trek’s Kobayashi Maru trial
(first depicted in 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan), designed to test a Starfleet cadet’s
character by presenting a no-win scenario. Captain James T. Kirk infamously re-engineered the
test in order to beat it, declaring that he doesn’t believe in no-win situations. Importantly, though,
Kirk doesn’t necessarily beat the test; rather, he tweaks the conditions as a means of creating a
different outcome more to this liking.
This second time travel track, the “multiverse” or “many worlds” theory, suggests that when time
traveling in a multiverse story, the time traveler creates an alternate timeline based on the
different choices she makes. This theory has gained traction recently thanks to the expanding
fields of multiverse physics and cosmology. It is also particularly appealing because it dodges
the predestination paradox inherent in causal loop time travel without sacrificing free will.
12
In the 2009 Star Trek film, for example, a Romulan named Nero opens up a time portal to find
Mr. Spock but ends up wreaking havoc and causing the death of Jim Kirk’s father. Rather than
“re-writing” the timeline of the original Star Trek television series and wrangling with the
accompanying paradoxes (not to mention the fan outcry), the film branches into an alternate
universe and plays out the story of Captain Kirk with different initial conditions (specifically,
Kirk growing up without a father).
Causal loop and multiverse stories approach the thorny problem of free will from opposing
directions. In the former, our predetermined actions are out of our hands, while in the latter, our
choices literalize worlds of possibility. Both, however, provide a framework with which to
interrogate questions that have plagued humanity since the dawn of time itself: Are we like gods,
creators and destroyers of worlds, or are we humble cogs in the larger machine of the cosmos?
Time travel allows for an exploration of both.
13
Regret
The causal loop time travel method can propel some of the most cathartic storylines despite— or
perhaps because of— its fatalism. These stories parallel the constraints of real life. In the original
film version of 12 Monkeys, Bruce Willis’s character cannot prevent the outbreak of the virus,
even by traveling back in time. The fact that one event is in “the future” and the other event is in
“the past” is irrelevant to the events’ immutability.
But still, we wonder.
“People are always interested by the road not taken,” says Guggenheim. “Time travel provides a
very clear, concrete narrative framework to explore those issues.” In a time travel story,
characters’ choices are imbued with an extra layer of significance because that “road not taken”
can actually be fleshed out onscreen or on the page. When time travelers come face-to-face with
their regrets, the wish fulfillment fantasy of altering past mistakes becomes a reality. Meanwhile,
the experience of overcoming these regrets takes center stage as well, forcing characters to quite
literally confront their past.
The Twilight Zone was particularly keen on this theme. In the Season One episode “Walking
Distance,” forlorn businessman Martin Sloane inadvertently travels back in time to his childhood
town. What begins as a traditional nostalgia trip morphs into something deeper, because for
Sloane, looking back has suddenly become going back. With the aid of a bit of time travel, Sloan
taps into one of the most basic human desires. He seeks to vanquish regret by physically going
back and fixing things, changing a current reality by modifying the past.
14
An almost identical Season One episode of The Twilight Zone was adapted from Harlan Ellison’s
short story, “One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty.” Like “Walking Distance,” “One Life”
features a discontented, middle-aged man who is unwittingly transported back in time to his
childhood home. In “Walking Distance,” Sloan attempts to reconcile the gap between the happy
boy he once was and the resentful man he is now. But in “One Life,” Gus Rosenthal knows
exactly what made him so embittered, and he resolves to protect his younger self from bullies
and to serve as the father figure his younger self never had.
Regret is a complex emotion, one that drives character development in all kinds of time travel
stories. But when characters believe they can alter outcomes by changing the past, they often end
up causing unintended— and frequently worse— consequences. Taken from this angle, Lindelof
views many time travel stories as cautionary tales. “Look, regrets are good!” he explains.
“Mistakes are good— you're supposed to make them. You learn from them. You can't go back
and rectify them; all you can do is learn not make them again.”
Lindelof believes that all great science fiction stories are cut from the same thematic cloth as
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. That message, he says, is: Just because we can, doesn’t mean we
should. “Good time travel storytelling usually starts with someone having the best of intentions,
in terms of traveling into the past and fixing something that has gone wrong,” says Lindelof.
“But then, very often, you come to the realization at the end that you should not have tampered
with it.”
15
On the CW show The Flash, speedster Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) has the power to run so fast
that he travels through time, and he capitalizes on this ability in the Season One finale, “Fast
Enough,” to jump back to the night his mother was murdered. Before Barry embarks on the
journey, his father (John Wesley Shipp, who played Barry Allen in the CBS iteration of The
Flash in 1990) tries to talk him out of it. “Things happen the way they do,” Henry Allen says.
“We may not know why at the time, but there must always be a reason. Now, I believe that.”
Henry praises the person Barry has become despite— or because of— this tragedy in his past,
and warns him of unforeseen consequences.
Barry does, of course, go back in time, and it is only the appearance of another time traveling
Flash that prevents him from interfering with the events of his past. Upon Barry’s return to the
present, the season’s antagonist is thunderstruck by Barry’s non-action. “You could have had
everything you ever wanted!” he says. Barry, realizing the man he has become and the lives he
has impacted along the way, says simply: “I already do.”
One particular episode of Fringe, Fox’s science fiction drama from the braintrust of J. J. Abrams,
Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, also centered on a defining tragedy in a character’s past,
implementing time travel to elevate the subtle drama of Walter Bishop’s quest to atone for his
biggest regret. In the episode “White Tulip,” Alistair Peck (guest star Peter Weller) is a bereaved
scientist who is intent on traveling back in time to save his fiancée from a car accident. Peck and
his fiancée, Arlette, had argued before splitting up for the day; as a result, Peck wasn’t with her
in the car when she was killed. Regret mingles with grief, and Peck decides that he can save her
16
life if he alters the outcome of their argument. “If I'd have simply done what she asked me,” he
explains to Walter, “I know it wouldn't have happened.”
Peck acts on his regret by looking backwards, by literally regressing into his past, and his tale
ends in tragedy. Walter, on the other hand, learns how to use his regret to move forward, to
accept what is already done while striking out on the path to repentance.
If this sounds like a religious journey, it should. Indeed, one of Fringe’s storytelling strengths—
like that of its older brother, Lost, another J. J. Abrams creation— was its exploration of the man
of science / man of faith divide. Time travel bridges this gap by using a science fiction trope to
probe the minefield of spiritual and moral responsibility. In a secular sense, time travel serves as
a prayer for forgiveness: While the religious person humbly petitions God to wipe away her sins,
the time traveler hubristically plays God, erasing the sins herself.
“You can use hubris in the religious construct in which it's actually intended, which is ‘defying
God,’” Lindelof says. “But then, on a sort of a meta level, God created you in order to defy him,
and knows that you’re going to attempt to do so, and is going to try to teach you a lesson in the
process: that destiny is fundamentally unalterable.”
This is the point that Walter tries to make in his climactic conversation with Alistair Peck, as
Walter spins his tale of regret. He tells Peck about how he, too, was compelled by his grief over a
lost loved one to bend the laws of time and space in order to assuage his anguish. After failing to
prevent the death of his sick son, Peter, Walter kidnapped an alternate universe version of his son
17
and raised him as his own. Since then, he says, “not a day has passed without me feeling the
burden of that act.”
Walter is searching for a sign of forgiveness: a white tulip. “If God can forgive me for my acts,”
he says, “then maybe... it's in the realm of possibility that my son, possibly, may be able to
forgive me too.”
Peck’s time travel story also highlights Walter’s ordinary movement through time as he grapples
with painful consequences that Peck, by time traveling, attempts to re-write. The episode is
neatly framed by the image of Walter composing a letter to Peter as an explanation of the latter’s
murky past and of Walter’s wrongdoing; in the opening scene, Walter pockets the letter as he is
called away to investigate the deaths caused by Peck’s time jumps. But the final scene takes
place in a universe in which Alistair Peck successfully traveled to the past without causing any
destruction in Walter’s present. Therefore, in this re-written timeline, Walter never receives a
phone call summoning him to a crime scene, and he never meets Peck. Instead, he finishes the
letter… and tosses it into the crackling fire. Immediately afterwards, he receives a letter in the
mail to replace the one he just burned. In the envelope is a single, white tulip.
The audience knows that Peck sent this tulip before he jumped to the past and disappeared from
this timeline. But this timeline’s Walter has never told another soul about his search for a sign of
forgiveness. We can imagine that in his mind, the tulip was sent by God. This final image
provides “The White Tulip” with the visceral punch that makes the episode so memorable— in
18
fact, the episode’s popularity among fans inspired the writers to end off the entire series with a
parallel scene involving a white tulip sent from a time traveling Walter.
Peck plays God by tampering with time, then inhabits a God-like role by delivering the white
tulip to Walter. If we invoke St. Augustine’s description of God as a being “outside of time,”
then the time traveler essentially occupies the same realm as a divinity. In other words: Time
travelers see your creation myth, Mary Shelley, and raise you all of time and space. Time travel
is in many ways the ultimate superpower— and because of that, it can very easily be abused.
On BBC’s time-and-space traveling epic, Doctor Who, the Doctor himself exposes this
connection. When the Doctor’s traveling companion, Rose (Billie Piper) insists on using his
TARDIS to go back and save her father in the 2006 episode “Father’s Day,” he scoffs: “I should
have known. It’s not about showing you the universe, it never is. It’s about the universe doing
something for you.”
Fringe, however, traces Walter’s journey away from the hubris that compelled him to tear the
very fabric of the universe for personal gain. Humbled by his regrets, Walter makes things right
in the present— in a regular, human way— rather than by time traveling to the past.
19
Nostalgia
Traveling to one’s past is not necessarily a doomed venture. Even without the benefit of physical
time travel, looking back with fondness recalls the pleasure of nostalgia— a word that’s been
thrown around a lot recently thanks in large part to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, in which J. J.
Abrams effectively invites audiences on a collective trip to 1977. Nowadays, you’d be hard-
pressed to find a franchise or beloved film that has not been summoned from the catacombs of
pop culture history for an inevitable “reboot”; Gilmore Girls, Twin Peaks, MacGyver, and Xena:
The Warrior Princess are only a smattering of fan favorites set to return to a small screen near
you. Though the sheer volume of reboots may feel excessive, the psychological appeal makes
sense. As often as we look back with regret, we also hearken back to happier, simpler times from
our childhoods, times that recall certain film and television franchises of yore.
Matalas and fellow Executive Producer Travis Fickett embraced this idea with the 12 Monkeys
television series. “Nostalgia is an incredible way to connect to the audience,” Matalas says.
“[It’s] a way to use the goodwill the audience has for the Gilliam film or a particular time period
to garner an emotional response and connection to our characters.”
One of the most high profile iterations of the reboot effect is Star Trek, which is undergoing
separate renaissances in the cinema and on television. When it comes to Star Trek, nostalgia has
been at play even within the narratives of the original universe, and more often than not, the
writers used time travel to explore this theme.
20
In “Trials and Tribble-ations,” a fifth season episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine written by
Ron Moore (now executive producer of Outlander) and René Echevarria, the DS9 crew travels
back in time to prevent the assassination of Captain Kirk by a rogue Klingon. The weapon of
choice? A booby-trapped tribble.
The assassination plot allows the DS9 writers, in 1996, to insert their crew into the cherished
Original Series episode from 1967, “The Trouble with Tribbles,” for a fun little romp of
nostalgic mayhem. In “Trials and Tribble-ations,” Captain Sisko (Avery Brooks) and members
of his crew get to live out every Star Trek fan’s dream: stepping aboard the USS Enterprise and
meeting the inimitable Captain Kirk.
The episode is notable for its tongue-in-cheek approach to time travel, starting off with a visit
from the sassy Department of Temporal Investigations. The two agents interrogate Captain Sisko
and reveal that they hate predestination paradoxes, time loops and jokes. “Trials and Tribble-
ations,” of course, indulges in a bit of all three.
For all of its humor, “Trials and Tribble-ations” sets up a pretty airtight time travel story in the
vein of the causal loop model: The Deep Space Nine crew successfully conserves the original
timeline from “The Trouble with Tribbles” in which Captain Kirk is not, in fact, assassinated.
The 2009 Star Trek film reboot by J. J. Abrams also takes a dip in the nostalgia pool. In the film,
an elderly Spock (Leonard Nimoy, reprising his iconic role) convinces a young Kirk (Chris Pine)
that they can change the course of events by remedying a mistake made by Spock 129 years in
21
the future. Kirk— brash, idealistic, impetuous— takes this older Spock (dubbed “Spock Prime”)
at his word and rushes into action.
What Spock Prime doesn’t let on is that our Kirk is already living out an alternate history. In the
“prime” timeline, Spock’s failure to prevent the destruction of the planet Romulus catapults him
and Nero (Eric Bana), the Romulan villain of this film, through a black hole to another universe,
whereupon Nero attacks a Starfleet ship captained by our Kirk’s father, killing him on the day of
Kirk’s birth. Thus, Abrams’s franchise is not rewriting decades of original Star Trek history, but
branching off into a different timeline altogether. It’s a neat bit of time travel trickery, allowing
Trekkies to savor this new iteration while the original series lives on in a parallel universe.
22
Mirror Image
The rebooted Star Trek film explores another quirk of time travel: the possibility of meeting
oneself. Curiously, the encounter with a past or future version of the self has become
inexplicably taboo in time travel stories. Back to the Future toys with this idea quite a bit. Marty
McFly’s girlfriend-turned-wife faints upon looking herself in the eye in Back to the Future Part
II, while Doc Brown sidesteps the conundrum by avoiding eye-contact with his past self
altogether.
Meeting oneself in a time travel narrative introduces all sorts of mind-bending possibilities and
impossibilities, the latter of which is probably what sends logicians (and the Department of
Temporal Paradoxes) into a tizzy. On a thematic level, the narrative opportunity is equally as
enticing: You can self-censure, self-congratulate, and gain much-needed self-insight.
Late author David Foster Wallace poignantly expressed that we are all, at the end of the day,
“uniquely, completely, imperially alone.” We are irrevocably trapped within our own minds—
we are our own worst enemy and our own best friend. Which is why a physical encounter with
another version of the self can be so terrifying— or so fulfilling. David Wittenberg, author of
Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative, explains that this science fiction trope allows
for a (re)negotiation of one’s personal origins, since “any story at all in which identity over time
becomes questionable” is, in essence, “any story of a self” (2013, 78).
23
We anguish over who we are versus who we were while wondering about who we will be. The
problem of identity over time is one that has enthralled philosophers for centuries, and perhaps it
is within the power of science fiction storytellers to provide a semblance of an answer. As
Wittenberg writes: “Selves are stories— time travel stories.”
Stories like The Twilight Zone’s “Walking Distance” and “One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty”
provide an example of a self-directed trip down memory lane, as Martin Sloane and Gus
Rosenthal are forced to confront who they are by interrogating who they once were. Thus, time
travel allows for a meaningful construction of personal narrative.
In the 2009 Star Trek movie, Spock Prime does end up encountering his younger, alternate
universe counterpart, and he takes the opportunity to offer himself some sage advice. For old-
school Trekkies, the scene allows for a delightful passing of the torch from the “old” Spock,
Nimoy, to the “new” Spock, played by Zachary Quinto. In the film, Spock Prime waxes
nostalgic over a friendship with Captain Kirk that would come to define them both, alluding to
the fact that for young Spock, all that is yet to come. When Spock asks how Spock Prime
convinced Kirk not to reveal Spock Prime’s existence to him, Spock Prime’s eyes twinkle as he
mocks the “meeting of the selves” paradox fear: “He inferred that a universe-ending paradoxes
would ensue should he break his promise.” Spock dismisses it as a “gamble,” but Spock Prime
corrects him, calling it instead “an act of faith.”
Faith is a prevalent theme in time travel stories— ironic, since time travel can be so easily
correlated with God-like omniscience and omnipotence. But knowledge of a future does not
24
paint a complete picture, making faith and hope even more necessary for these stories. Faith and
hope are the future-oriented counterparts to the past-oriented themes of forgiveness and
repentance, which Walter Bishop pursued so fervently in Fringe.
Faith and hope are integral to 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past, a time travel movie so
convoluted that the title alone is enough to spasm the brain. But even amidst all the mind-bendy,
timeline-trippy, franchise-rewriting time travel, the climax hinges on Charles Xavier’s faith in
his childhood friend, Raven (Jennifer Lawrence).
Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) and an assortment of X-Men have sent the consciousness of the ageless
Wolverine (equally ageless Hugh Jackman) to his younger body with the mission of preventing
the Key Event that ruined everything— Raven shooting the antagonist, Bolivar Trask (Peter
Dinklage). They’ve orchestrated events and torn through time and space in order to stop her, but
instead of taking that final step, Charles (James McAvoy) relinquishes his mind-control power
and says simply: “I have faith in you, Raven.” Time travel can only take one so far— human
action and emotion are necessary to carry out the rest.
Mirroring Star Trek’s Spock-meets-Spock torch-passing, Days of Future Past invokes a
particularly moving— and plot-relevant— encounter between the older Professor X (Patrick
Stewart) and the younger, disillusioned Charles. Professor X gives his past self a moving pep
talk, concluding with: “Charles, we need you to hope again.” Hope, Professor X says, is “the
most human power” we have.
25
Romance
Of course, any discussion of popular time travel stories would be lacking without a nod to what
may be the most popular genre of time travel narrative: romance. “White Tulip” features a
romance plot that fuels Alistair Peck’s desire to reunite with his dead fiancée. Audrey
Niffenegger’s best-selling 2003 novel The Time Traveler’s Wife set the bar for 21st-century time
travel romances, and indeed, the 2006 Doctor Who episode “The Girl in the Fireplace,” penned
by current Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat, was directly inspired by Niffenegger’s tale of
love and loss.
Nearly every story ever told hinges on the theme of love, and time travel stories are no
exception. “At the end of the day, time travel is just a plot device— it’s never really about time
travel, it's about the characters and their relationships,” Lindelof says. “So, even the best time
travel stories, like The Terminator or Back to the Future— two very different kinds of time
travel stories— are really about the same thing.”
Back to the Future, that madcap adventure of Oedipal hijinks and science fiction shenanigans,
grounds its tale in a twist on the typical love story— to fix his future, Marty needs to get his
parents to fall in love in the past— and is propelled by the none-too-subtle Huey Lewis and the
News hit “The Power of Love.” Stripped down to its bare-bones narrative, The Terminator is
about Kyle Reese traveling back in time and falling in love with Sarah Connor, Skynet be
damned.
26
The TV show Lost, for all its metaphysical mysteries, is perhaps remembered most fondly for the
romance between Desmond Hume (Henry Ian Cusick) and Penny Widmore (Sonya Walger), a
love story that reaches its pinnacle in the season four episode “The Constant.” Lindelof and his
Lost co-writers spent close to a month crafting “The Constant,” an episode they knew would be
key to the entire show because it distilled the overall Lost narrative down to the fate of a single
relationship.
As in X-Men: Days of Future Past— and, Lindelof says, inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five— “The Constant” uses the time travel method that moves only a person’s
consciousness through time. As Desmond involuntarily toggles between his past self in 1996 and
his present self in 2004, he is told that he needs to find a “constant” in both timelines in order to
tether his consciousness to the present. That constant turns out to be Penny, the woman he left
behind in order to sail around the world, and the source of his biggest regret.
The time travel in this episode enables Desmond to exorcise this regret by expressing his love for
Penny at a time when the stakes could not be higher, as his own health deteriorates and the fate
of his fellow castaways hangs in the balance. Having witnessed their fall-out in previous seasons,
we find Desmond’s climactic reconnection with Penny enormously fulfilling on an emotional
level. And in terms of the structure of the show, their relationship is what eventually enables
Penny to provide rescue for the survivors of Oceanic flight 815.
“By the time ‘The Constant’ aired, the Desmond and Penny love story was repositioned as the
essential love story of the entire series,” Lindelof says. “At the heart of everything, long before
27
flight 815 crashed on that island, this love story powers the meta-narrative of Lost. It wasn't just
an episode that was a fun little excursion from the main storytelling, it really plugged into and
essentially rewrote and reframed the entire narrative of the series.”
“The Constant” resonates so strongly because it is, at its heart, a love story, and one between two
characters in whom audiences have been invested since their introduction. Buoyed by an
impeccably strong storyline leading up to Desmond and Penny’s phone call, that scene is one
that truly earns its emotional payoff. And as far as Desmond is concerned, there is a supreme
sense of catharsis because he has finally gotten what he needs: a reconciliation with a lost love.
“This show is about loss,” Lindelof says, “and these two people have found each other again.
There’s also this hopeful aspect to the way the episode ends, that even though Desmond ends up
back on the island where he started, there's a fundamental level of fulfillment that he
accomplished his mission.”
28
Alternate Histories
We often wish that events had unfolded differently, not just in our own lives but also for the
human race at large. In Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys and its television adaptation, this theme is
dramatized to the extreme, as scientists seek to reverse the downfall of humanity by preventing
the outbreak of the virus that started it all. On Legends of Tomorrow as well, Time Master Rip
Hunter and his crew work to prevent the rise of the villainous Vandal Savage, who is responsible
for the destruction of our species. Quantum Leap (1989-93) adopted a similar conceit of
changing history for the better, as Scott Bakula’s Dr. Sam Beckett jumps back in time to right
historical wrongs.
By contrast, the original series of Star Trek mostly clung to the purity of the original timeline at
all costs, and the historical and personal stakes are most fully realized in the critically acclaimed,
fan-favorite episode, “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Originally penned by Harlan Ellison
(also the author of the original “One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty”), the episode is a love
story wrapped up in an alternate history narrative, as Kirk and Spock travel back to Depression-
era New York to prevent Dr. McCoy from cataclysmically altering their timeline.
Spock deduces that a drug-addled McCoy accidentally changed the course of history by saving
the life of Edith Keeler, a pacifist who would gain national attention and delay the United States’
entry into World War II, allowing the triumph of the Third Reich. (Amazon’s new series The
Man in the High Castle, based on the novel by Philip K. Dick, gives us a glimpse at such a
universe.) As with the scientists in 12 Monkeys, Spock in “The City on the Edge of Forever”
29
manages to pinpoint a single event as the source of the divergent historical paths. Based on his
findings, Spock logically concludes that Edith Keeler must die in order to preserve the original
timeline that McCoy unknowingly disrupted.
“The City on the Edge of Forever” is significant on a larger scale for its exploration of morality.
Is the life of one good-hearted woman worth the lives of untold millions? Even if Kirk hadn’t
fallen in love with Edith while waiting for the arrival of McCoy, the decision to let her die is an
impossibly difficult one. As in many time travel stories, the meaning of one’s choices is made
explicitly clear through the exploration of a counterfactual reality. But the episode resonates on a
very personal level as well. Captain Kirk, always so confident and cocksure, is finally humbled
by a true no-win scenario, a lesson he overlooked by cheating on the Kobayashi Maru trial. This
is no mere Starfleet Academy test— he can’t hack his way out of the laws of time.
We non-time travelers cannot see or experience alternate histories— we can only strive to find
meaning in what has already occurred, haphazardly linking cause and effect and tracing hazy
“what if?”s in the sands of time. The human mind craves meaning, and time travel allows for a
particularly acute degree of meaning-making by breathing life into counterfactual realities.
In this vein, some of the best time travel stories don’t involve any actual time travel at all. Marc
Guggenheim mentioned the Oedipus myth. Another example is Frank Capra’s 1946 classic It’s a
Wonderful Life (a sort of inverse “City on the Edge of Forever” tale), about a man who has
decided to end his own life until an angel shows him how different the world would be without
him. Lindelof mentions Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which, though it draws on the
30
spirit realm, also provides the lead character with a healthy dose of cosmic perspective, spurring
a profound personality change. Clearly, there’s more to time travel than simply traveling through
time.
31
Time Travelers are Storytellers
Time travel-themed narratives feel like perfect gems of storytelling. In a sense, as David
Wittenberg argues in his book, stories themselves are time machines. “All narratives do
something like ‘travel’ through time or construct ‘alternate’ worlds,” Wittenberg writes (1).
Narrative is a mechanism for constructing an arrangement of stories; even “true” stories must be
meticulously and purposefully assembled, and the order is not necessarily chronological.
If there was ever a time travel story that apotheosizes storytelling— as well as nearly every other
time travel-centric theme— it’s the 2007 Doctor Who episode “Blink,” a Steven Moffat script
and another one for the top of the “favorites” list (high praise for a show with 35 cumulative
seasons worth of material, to be sure). “Blink” sees the Doctor trapped in 1969 sans time
machine, so he leaves clues for a young woman named Sally Sparrow (played by the as-of-yet
unknown Carey Mulligan) to help him retrieve his TARDIS from the Weeping Angels. Why he
chooses Sally does not become clear until the end, when she encounters the Doctor on the run
towards one thing or from another (“Well, four things and a lizard”) and hands him a folder
containing everything he needs to know to help her help him: a conversation transcript, a letter
from her friend Kathy, and a picture of a Weeping Angel.
Yes, the predestination paradox is strong with this one, but that heightens rather than diminishes
the fun. Regardless of whether the original “author” of this story is Sally or the Doctor, the
significance of the episode is that it utilizes time travel to construct a story that deconstructs
storytelling— the characters themselves write the sequence of events, including the transcript of
32
a dialogue that the Doctor uses to communicate with Sally across time, and the “Easter Eggs” the
Doctor recorded and left for Sally to find on the 17 DVDs she owns.
The Weeping Angels, who are among Doctor Who’s most memorable and menacing villains, set
in motion the overarching plot (stealing back the TARDIS) while facilitating the smaller plots
that highlight the characters’ interactions with romance and regret. Weeping Angels are “the only
psychopaths in the universe to kill you nicely,” the Doctor explains. “They just zap you into the
past and let you live to death.” Infusing the Basilisk myth with a dose of quantum physics,
Weeping Angels don’t exist when they’re being observed— hence the Doctor’s now famous
imperative: Don’t. Blink.
The Angels are responsible for two romances in the episode, one triumphant and one tragic.
Sally’s friend Kathy is zapped back to 1920, where she falls in love with the first person she
meets, but Sally’s love interest is sent to 1969, negating the possibility of a relationship between
them. Some of the most devastating romances are the ones that never happened; as the famous
lament goes, better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. The Weeping Angels
embody this notion, consuming the potential energy of all the days you might have lived,
feasting on “all of your stolen moments.”
By the episode’s final scene, one major mystery remains: Where did the Doctor get all the
information about how to find Sally? Sally’s companion, Larry, tells her: “Some things you
never find out, and that’s okay.” But Sally is adamant that this story is not yet complete. Just
then, the Doctor hurries past and Sally realizes that she was the one who provided him with the
33
information all along. Larry’s line is a good life lesson, but this episode illustrates the conception
of time travel as wish fulfillment, allowing for— in fact, necessitating— closing the loop in
order to make sense of the narrative. For the temporally bound, time moves inexorably forward,
but the time traveler— like the storyteller— is in a unique position to actually act on hindsight,
thereby establishing a measure of control that the rest of us lack.
“Blink” is also responsible for a description of time that has become familiar to anyone with a
passing knowledge of time travel fiction. “People assume that time is a strict progression of
cause to effect,” says the Doctor, “but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's
more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff.”
Make sense? No, of course not. After all, this is time travel, a genre that celebrates logical,
linguistic, and physical paradoxes, and a topic that boggles the brightest minds in startlingly
disparate disciplines— from philosophy, to quantum physics, to ethics, to all genres of fiction, to
storytelling itself. Time travel stories are endlessly captivating because they dramatize our
deepest regrets and deepest desires, imprisoning us within the claustrophobic confines of fate or
imbuing us with the power to alter destiny. The possibilities are infinite, and all of time and
space awaits.
34
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Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Thomas F. Wilson. Universal Pictures, 1989. DVD.
Bellisario, Donald P., prod. "Quantum Leap." NBC.
Berlanti, Greg, Marc Guggenheim, Phil Klemmer, and Andrew Kreisberg, writers. "Legends of
Tomorrow." CW.
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Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. New York: HarperCollins Children's Books, 2009.
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Pitt. United States: Universal Pictures, 1995. Amazon Instant Video.
Interstellar. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Performed by Matthew McConaughey, Anne
Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Mackenzie Foy, Michael Caine. Paramount Pictures, 2014.
Film.
It's a Wonderful Life. Directed by Frank Capra. Performed by James Stewart, Donna Reed,
Lionel Barrymore. New York: RKO Radio Pictures, 1946. Amazon Instant Video.
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King, Stephen, writer. "11.22.63." Produced by Bridget Carpenter, J. J. Abrams, and Bryan Burk.
Hulu.
La Jete
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Kaku, Michio. Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers,
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Looper. Directed by Rian Johnson. Performed by Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Sony
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Primer. Directed by Shane Carruth. Performed by Shane Carruth, David Sullivan, Casey
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Spotnitz, Frank, and Ridley Scott, prods. "The Man in the High Castle." Amazon Studios.
Stanton, Gabrielle, and Andrew Kreisberg, writers. "Fast Enough." In The Flash. The CW.
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Saldana, Karl Urban, Leonard Nimoy. Paramount Pictures, 2009. Film.
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Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, Walter Koenig, George Takei, Nichelle
Nichols. Paramount Pictures, 1982. DVD.
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Sterling, Rod, writer. "Walking Distance." In The Twilight Zone, directed by Robert Stevens.
CBS. October 30, 1959.
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Biehn, Linda Hamilton. Orion Pictures, 1984. DVD.
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Wells, H. G. The Time Machine. 1895.
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University Press, 2013.
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
Time travel has long been considered a science fiction staple, but its universal appeal transcends any one genre. The fiftieth anniversary of Star Trek and the continued reinvention of sci-fi classics like Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys demonstrate that the time travel story continues to flourish. From Chris Marker’s iconic 1962 short film La Jetée to more recent television phenomena such as Lost, Fringe and Doctor Who, this thesis presents an argument for time travel as the paragon of storytelling.
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The not so invisible veil
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Gronowitz, Allyson
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Time travel: the story with a thousand faces
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Publication Date
04/12/2016
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