Time Travel in Movies and Television Series

[BAYLOR]

Yes. A made for TV movie. It was ok.

In 1976 Irwin Allen did a made for tv film Time Travelers. In this story a plague is ravaging modern day America and according to the history books a s similar outbreak of this plague in the late 19th century was contained and cured by a Doctor in Chicago in 1871. Unfortunately , they don't have records because both Doctor and his records perished in the great Chivago fire of 1971. So what they do is send two doctors back in time , before the fire happened, to find out how he cured that outbreak so that cure the outbreak in the modern world. They successfully travel back but , complications arise. They land in the wrong place in the city and with 2 days before the fire . When they do locate the doctor and talk to him , theyquickly find out that the has no idea why his patients are recovering from this plague . This was intended as a pilot for a never made tv show. It was quite good .

 

[BAYLOR]

Star Trek did time travel in a few episodes.

 

[Graymalkin]

Weren't they gangsters one time?

 

[BAYLOR]

Weren't they gangsters one time?

Your thinking of the episode A Piece of the Action . That was not a time travel episode .

 

[Graymalkin]

Boo. Was it one of those planets reconstructed from their memories?
Which episode was it where they worked with another agent from the future and they stopped a missile?

 

[BAYLOR]

Boo. Was it one of those planets reconstructed from their memories?
Which episode was it where they worked with another agent from the future and they stopped a missile?

Assignment Earth which costarred Robert Lansing as agent alien trained Gary Seven and Earthborn Terrie Gar as Roberta Lincoln . This episode was originally intended to be pilot for a spinoff show which never happened.

 

[Anthoney]

City on the Edge of Forever. Considered by many to be the best episode of TOS. Yesterdays Enterprise on TNG was great. I also liked Shattered which is a Voyager episode.

 

[Vince W]

Trials and Tribble-ations was a great episode for Deep Space Nine.

 

[BAYLOR]

Trials and Tribble-ations was a great episode for Deep Space Nine.

That episode was one the funniest trek episodes of all time !

 

[Vladd67]

I have a massive problem with the concept of time travel both in fiction and in actuality.

It's the practical aspects that people forget, but lets pretend it is possible.

Here I am sat at my PC and wooosh back I go lets say 5 seconds.

Unfortunately in that time the Earth has rotated (1000mph) moved around the sun (67000mph) and the sun has nipped round the galactic centre at an estimated 200 Km/sec. We can ignore the galactic expansion/position change due to the expanding ever changing Universe stuff, lets not over complicate things. So when I arrive back in the past I'll probably live for about 5 seconds while I enjoy breathing the vacuum of space. In my last moments I can take in the view of the tiny blue dot, the Earth, speeding on it's way, whilst laughing it's polar cap off at my plight.

The alternative is that I've somehow managed to reverse "everything" in time. By everything I mean the whole Universe. That's quite some energy requirement from a 13 Amp plug.

Or I've managed to combine my time travel with the corrections required to arrive at my past self's position safely. However, if that's the case I'll be arriving there now and there's going to be an awful lot of bone crunching and blood splatter.

Lest we forget, this is true for me and for everything else, even a little old electron/photon/neutrino and the rest. Send them back in time and you won't be able to observe them, cos they'll not be there.

No use saying you sent them back and now their back and look, it's in a different position, because that position is way out of the observers field of view.

In this sense, Doc Who gets it right with the old TARDIS idea. And a Black hole for a power source at least tips it's hat to the energy required. However, one black hole a Universe shift does not make. All those other black holes are surely going to object to being bossed around by a little blue box.

So Time travel - ruins any plot for me.

The idea of traveling in time but not Space was used in the Strontium Dog stories in Star Lord and then 2000AD. The hero, a mutant bounty hunter had many exotic weapons, one such weapon was a ‘time’ bomb. When the victim was caught in the bombs blast they were transported in time a minute or so which resulted in them reappearing in space as the planet had moved on, they then died in the freezing vacuum of space.

 

[Al Jackson]

I have a massive problem with the concept of time travel both in fiction and in actuality.

It's the practical aspects that people forget, but lets pretend it is possible.

Here I am sat at my PC and wooosh back I go lets say 5 seconds.

Unfortunately in that time the Earth has rotated (1000mph) moved around the sun (67000mph) and the sun has nipped round the galactic centre at an estimated 200 Km/sec. We can ignore the galactic expansion/position change due to the expanding ever changing Universe stuff, lets not over complicate things. So when I arrive back in the past I'll probably live for about 5 seconds while I enjoy breathing the vacuum of space. In my last moments I can take in the view of the tiny blue dot, the Earth, speeding on it's way, whilst laughing it's polar cap off at my plight.

The alternative is that I've somehow managed to reverse "everything" in time. By everything I mean the whole Universe. That's quite some energy requirement from a 13 Amp plug.

Or I've managed to combine my time travel with the corrections required to arrive at my past self's position safely. However, if that's the case I'll be arriving there now and there's going to be an awful lot of bone crunching and blood splatter.

Lest we forget, this is true for me and for everything else, even a little old electron/photon/neutrino and the rest. Send them back in time and you won't be able to observe them, cos they'll not be there.

No use saying you sent them back and now their back and look, it's in a different position, because that position is way out of the observers field of view.

Good points. Basically a Time Travel 'machine' is at least Kardashev Level II technology. Classical General Relativistic physics does seem to allow travel into the past , not the future , if I remember correctly. But the technology is just way out of bounds of any current thinking.
I have always marveled that H G Wells had such a BIG THINK! in 1895. There are some earlier uses of time travel in fiction but it was Wells who framed it in an 'engineering' , sort of, context. It is an amazing extrapolation.
The 1960 movie is still the best realization of Well's Time Machine.
If one looks at the Wikipedia article on time travel , there are some varieties there that have been used in science fiction prose but not in the film or tv story form. Even then not all the physics framed thinking has ever been used in fiction.
One thing if a time machine was constructed it would have to have 'compensators' for all the effects you mention. On problem here is that Classical Chaos theory tells us there is a horizon of predictability , no quantum mechanics invoked. One thing is if one could go 10 million yeas in the past you had better do it in a space ship, because even if you stay in the Earth's orbit about the sun you will probably be somewhere behind of ahead of the Earth in orbit.

 

[BAYLOR]

City on the Edge of Forever. Considered by many to be the best episode of TOS. Yesterdays Enterprise on TNG was great. I also liked Shattered which is a Voyager episode.

Yesterdays Enterprise is my favorite of those three.

 

[JimC]

"Predestination was an excellent film. Recommended by a friend, I'd never heard of it. A very well done movie".

It and Destination Moon are the only two of Robert's movies that are worth watching.
I'd lke to see Orphans of the Sky or Waldo optioned.

 

[Rodders]

I’m currently binge watching the newer Doctor Who and enjoying them very much. It makes me want to go back to watch the older ones.

Star Trek did a lot of time travel with varying degrees of success. My favourite was ST: DS9’s The Visitor. Sisko is out of phase with the universe and is tethered to Jake somehow. He appears to Jake every few years. A very dramatic end. TNG’s Time’s Arrow I remember being quite clever too.

 

[Faith Lehane]

One of my favorite episodes of "Angel" was "Time Bomb" (Season 5, Ep 19). They handled the space part of space-time by having Illyria confined to the Wolfram & Hart building, but giving her increasing influence and power to change reality. It's a neat twist on time-looping, in that she doesn't know she's doing it.

Thanks, Vladd, for the phrase that reminded me of it.

Also, due to Ben Edlund's brilliant writing, it works as a stand-alone ep.

Vaguely relevant: Marsters gave clues to his body double's presence in an interview, saying that if his feet were on the ground, it was James, but if he left the ground, it was his double.

 

[Dave]

I don't think many films or TV have managed to do time travel without ignoring the huge plot holes which result from the paradoxes created from travelling back in time. I like time travel stories so I'm happy to watch them and just have a small moan about it later. It is however, Fantasy, not Science Fiction.

As for the Earth moving in space, then the book, Timescape, by Gregory Benford, covers that.

it feels like scientists are struggling every bit as much as the writers to make sense of TT without twisting the definition of 'time' into something unrecognisable and resorting to interdimensional bla bla squared.

Forward time travel is entirely possible due to the effects of Special Relativity and objects with velocities close to the speed of light, but maybe you mean String Theory - in which the Universe might have 13 or more dimensions, but we only experience 4 dimensions (with Time being the 4th).

If you imagine what a 2 dimensional being (basically an image/drawing) would feel when they realised there were actually 4 dimensions, then you can see that very strange things would be possible if we found we could manipulate more than our 4 dimensions. Just as we can walk around the back of a 2 dimensional picture and see it from behind, then something equally weird might be possible with the dimension of Time.

 

[paranoid marvin]

Hi Boneman

OK, didn't know there was a film.

I'll try and track it down in the usual outlets.

I liked the concept

(I don't know if the film explains the technology but I never got to it in the series if it's there)

I hate to say it, but the best time travel of recent years was the Time Turner in Potter's biography.

Magic is always good for the impossible. I've even considered it as a FTL transport method in my book, but as the rest is purely SF it's difficult to justify without a complete re-write.

The issue with the Time Turner is of course that if such magic exists why isn't it used in those tricky moments when people have just been killed.

Magic is the headless coachman riding through the whole of the Potter franchise.

I.E. If it's possible why would anything be impossible.

(OK, so I'm a miserable old g....)

This is pretty much my issue with time travel. As soon as you allow it in any story/tv show/film then it causes issues. This is especially problematic in a tv show or book series when future instalments have to live by the fact that time travel is possible.

So in several stories in Star Trek the crew choose to go back in time. This choosing is pretty important, because if it's an accident/quirk that can't be replicated then it at least gives a reason for not using it. But once they can choose to time travel, the question will always be that if something bad happens, why not go back in time and stop it?

I absolutely love the Chris Reeves Superman movies (esp II and III) but when Superman causes time to reverse (very sillily although quite spectacularly) - and with no adverse consequences - we have to ask why he doesn't do it every time?

Where there is choice in time travel, there must be consequences to choosing such an option that means that it isn't used. The quite amusing episode of DS9 with the time-travel investigators isn't really enough!

We don't have to believe in the reality of any book/tv show/movie, but it is important that they are consistent in the rules that they follow.

My favourite two time travel stories are King's 11/22/63 (although the tv series was awful) and (quite similar in many ways) Groundhog Day. Both use time travel understandable and consistent in how they are used.

As for is time possible? Well as far as we know, time is linear; this may or may not be true. But the simple fact is that no-one we know of has done so. Would not someone at some point in the next thousands of years have travelled back and done something about some of the bad things that have happened?

 

[Brian G Turner]

The way time and time travel was used in Baylon 5 was fantastic.

In short, time has already occurred, so if you go back in time, then you had always gone back in time and the universe had accounted for it - so you don't end up changing anything.

 

[BT Jones]

We are huge Doctor Who fans in our household so we have watched the 2nd coming several times now (about to start the peerless Peter Capaldi's final season for the second time). I love the show. That said, I have become very weary of the whole paradox plot device. They've used it too many times now. The whole 'it happened because it happened before' angle is just cheap and lazy. That's not to say it doesn't make great episodes (Blink, being the absolute zenith), but it can be rather tiresome to see someone be helped out of a hopeless situation by their future selves... just because THEY were helped out of THEIR version of events by ANOTHER future incarnation of themselves.

Ultimately, the core of it is whether there is an intriguing mystery, characters you care about and a critical event that is worth them risking everything to try and avert.

The way time and time travel was used in Baylon 5 was fantastic.

In short, time has already occurred, so if you go back in time, then you had always gone back in time and the universe had accounted for it - so you don't end up changing anything.

Yes, I agree, the whole Sinclar / Galen thing was good, but then B5 always had that level of integrity and care being a preconceived arc not just a series that keeps getting extended by a year because it's still popular, with no long-term plan.

Personally, I wouldn't go near time travel with a barge pole now. It feels rote. It's all been done and the minute you can magically undo something that's been done before (Superman 1, I'm looking at you) then you completely undermine all the emotional impact of the events that occurred. The only exception is perhaps parallel universes, such as Abrahms' Star Trek, which was a clever way to freshen an old franchise without tearing up everything that happened in the past and angering fans. Then again, Terminator Genyisis (and Dark Fate) prove that you still need stuffing to avoid ending up with a sunken carcass.

 

[Boneman]

A shout out for 'Somewhere in time' with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. It's a love story, and a fabulous take on those things that can't exist unless time travel has already happened before it happened.