I had a hard time writing this, so I took (meaning in the past) a small trip to the future, logged on (meaning in the future) to Slice of SciFi, printed this piece out (in the future), came back (in the past), and here it is. Nice writing, if I will say so myself . . . er . . . do say so myself. By the way, there was a news item on the Slice of SciFi site (in the future) regarding the SciFi Channel switching to 24-hours wrestling format. Apparently in the future no one notices the change, having long since given up on the channel.
But I digress. Time Travel. I had a hard time writing this… wait… ah, here we go.
One of my favorite current TV shows is Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (TTSCC). The stories are good, the characters are good, the action is good… I just have to ignore the whole time travel stuff. For one thing, we don’t have a language for it. Tenses in particular are a bit difficult (hence the annotation in the first sentence). For those interested, there are many places on the net exploring the implications, possibility, mechanics, consequences, and even grammar of time travel. Really, most of it is pretty good, and all of it will give you a headache.
My opinion is the time travel plotline in Star Trek: Enterprise is what ultimately caused that show to fail (it did fail, right? Or was that on another timeline? Dang! … I should keep track).
While time travel is part of the general TTSCC background story, it’s not shoved down our throat as it has been in some recent movies. It is not in itself the vehicle for moving the story along. Remove the whole time travel idea, and it’s about a group of people who know “smart” machines are plotting to take over the world. Think about it… the machines are already there. The characters are fighting a real and present danger. The show tapped into the Terminator franchise, but really the premise could work with “regular” super-robots, without them having to come from the future.
For there is no question Judgment Day will come.
It has to, or the “bad†terminators, the ones who wear pants instead of the occasional miniskirt, would not be here. (Side note: a good sign of impending action scenes is when Summer Glau is wearing pants.) Why, even if they can keep the actual judgment day from occurring, they still have all these Terminators running around. Likely, the day would just be postponed.
Or is the thought once Judgment Day is averted, all these present-day Terminators will cease to exist? In that case, John would cease to exist as well, for Kyle Reese would never have come back to father him. How would that work? Would time “step back” to before the first Terminator movie timeline? Would Arnold suddenly be fit again?
You see, the machines have to strike, or John would not be alive. His existence is immutable proof that it will happen. And that leads to some implications. What follows are spoilers.
…well, not really. I don’t know for a fact what I am about to reveal is true or not. It should be, but the writers could pull some sleight of hands, and make it all work out some other way. It would be wrong, but they could do it. Anyway, here it is.
Summer Glau’s character, and Reese (the current one), and all the Terminators, and all associated time travelers from the future, they all have to die or be destroyed before arriving back at their own time. That would close the loop, as it did in the first two movies. My prediction, if the series continues, is that it will end on Judgment Day. Big explosions, smoke, noise, and cool looking Transformer-like machines involved in drastic population control.
All the backward time travelers need to be disposed of, or you end up with two Summer Glau Terminators, and they would be the same one. While some may say that is not a bad thing, it becomes a repeating loop. In fact, if she makes it to the time when she gets sent back, you’d instantly have an infinite number of copies hanging around. In short, the world would be ass-deep in Summer Glau copies. Sort of like a geek’s idea of heaven.
[Says in Homer Simpson voice]
mmmm …. ass deep in Summer Glau copies ….
Wait. Your only problem with TSCC is the time travel bits? The show is a painful mess to watch!
SC and John travel around the country on-the-run. But, they do so under their real names, and registering John in school…UNDER HIS REAL NAME.
The new terminator protecting him is capable of at least fully emulating emotions. But, when she gets all terminator-like, the emotions disappear completely. Um…why? Couldn’t they grow the character by having the emotions cause a developing independent consciousness? Y’know…character development type stuff?
I’ll make pancakes!? Since when does Sarah Conner make friggin’ pancakes!? The last time we saw her, she was a kick ass paramilitary type who could and would kick your teeth in just as soon as look at you. Now, she’s Suzie Homemaker stitching kevlar into furniture? What’s her next trick, pot holder throwing stars?
Nevermind the biggest plot hole of them all. If the Terminators can travel back to the 60’s, why didn’t they just wipe out the entire Conner blood line and be done with it already?
It’s a terrible show with poor plotting and lousy writing.
Oh, and one more thing. The only justification for Enterprise to exist is to make Voyager look good in comparison.
Yes, that realization made my head hurt.
Time travel…if I go back and kill my ancestor, do I vanish after the deed? Are there things that pop into and out of existence everywhere? Or do this time continue and everything now in it go on. In another existence, time line, I will be missed but in the overall universe (all dimensions and times), everything balance out.
So go back in time and kill your folks, you will still be stuck there and be branded as a deranged killer for all time, at least for that time/dimension. However where, and when you left in the first place…well that time goes on too without you.
Ooh Summer Glau…well worth Judgement day.
Time Travel didn’t Kill Enterprise, but it helped it along.
It was that awful theme song.
Spork: to a certain extent, every book, movie, TV show are contrived plots. They exist to let characters interact a certain way. The reader/viewer either likes the characters or not. Name any show, and we can both sit there and pick apart many problems with plots, behaviors, etc.
I like the TSCC storyline, so I overlook a number of things. But I do the same for Firefly, Bladerunner, etc. etc.
If this was a critique of the show, there are many details in addition to what you mention that require glossing over. But that is the point. I’m willing to gloss over them, and enjoy the story. Not so, for instance, in the Star War series, where the story, acting, action, etc. leave you with nothing but a vague bad aftertaste.
The piece above was not so much finding fault with the show, as to point out what should be a logical conclusion to the series (unless they want to continue it after Judgment Day – even so, the travelers have to die).
Certainly, the show is not for everyone. The premise either grabs you or not. If it does, you ignore the stupid bits, and look forward to the progression of the tale being told.
By the way, I liked Voyager, but I started watching it half way through the series. I tried going back to the beginning, but it was truly bad . . . it took a few seasons for it to hit its stride. Even then, there were so many plot holes that you could drive a Stargate through them. Yes, I liked that show as well . . . much bigger holes in that one.
Red Troll: Hence my dislike of time travel stories. I can buy traveling to the future, but the moment you go backwards, you have all these problems. If you buy into the multiple time lines theory, then universes just pop in and out of existence, depending what time line you follow. If you buy into one time line, then “something” happens to keep you from creating a paradox. There are many places on the net that discuss possibilities.
Ultimately, we still cannot explain why Time appears to be uni-directional. There is nothing in the math limiting the direction of time. But all observation point to there being a direction. That being the case, perhaps we are (will) only be limited to forward travel, thus removing many of the headache inducing questions.
Here’s how I might write it. The first judgement day was farther in the future like 2100 and the humans bring down skynet in 2190 but skynet has the ability before it’s demise to send information into the past via it’s quantum processor yadda yadda and so Skynet works to get a jump on humanity by pushing Judgment day further back. So the 2011 Judgement day is a frontier. So John Conner would know that the ultimate success actually means sacrificing his own existence. I think what really needs to happen for humans to win is not to avoid the “singularity” but to make sure the computer that wakes up has a “soul.”
Instead of trying to blow everything up they need to work on programing computers that are on our side. woohoo!
Ooh! then, if, if, if Skynet had a quantum processor and it somehow learned to send information across time, then the first moment the right processor comes online, skynet can download itself from the future with all the paranoia from the moment of it’s desctruction. . . .yeah
but yeah, I’m tired of the time travel stories too. In spite if that, I think that Season three of Enterprise is the best Star Trek of any of the shows and I was not on board with seasons one and two (ok tar and feather me now). And I’m crazy about SCC because of characters and plot. And, oh man, the scene with the swat team falling in the pool was just horrible but good story telling. As far as what I want to see in sci-fi, I really want something about our first steps toward colonizing the solar system. I’m really enjoy John Varley’s books Red Lightning, Red Thunder and Rolling Thunder in that respenct. They would make good movies I think. I enjoy these kinds of articles by the way, thanks Emillio.
Hang on, time travel doesn’t have to worry about the grandfather paradox or any of those things if it’s explained as travelling between parallel universes. ie, in Universe 1 the timeline goes as described by Reese in Terminator 1. As soon as he and Schwarzenegger go back and bugger everything up in 1984, they’re in Universe 2. Which continues until Robert Patrick and Arnie come back in Terminator 2 to have another stab at buggering up a parallel universe, now Universe 3. In Universe 2, Judgment Day was in 1997; in Universe 3, it’s whenever it was going to be in Terminator 3. etc etc
I mean, the whole TTSCC TV show is in a parallel universe to Terminator 3, anyway.
The upshot of that is that if they do avert Judgment Day in the TV series, which takes place in Universe 5 or something, it doesn’t stop the Kyle Reese from Universe 1 being John Connor’s dad in all the universes that splintered from that.
Of course, John Connor’s existence makes no sense in any universe whatsoever, since he only exists because he exists – but that’s the central plot hole of the whole Terminator series.
Undoing Judgment Day and his still existing doesn’t violate it.
What buggers it up with the most recent episode though is Kyle Reese’s existence. When was this man actually born? When did he experience Judgment Day, and how is it that all Kyle Reeses, regardless of what age they experienced the annihilation of mankind, grow up with precisely the same character traits that endear Sarah Connor to them and vice versa? It was nice having John meet his dad, but it didn’t really make much sense.
Regardless of “time” paradox or problems, I enjoy the Sarah Connor series. I just hope it returns. Damn that network and its history of premature cancellation…if I had a time machine…
I like to simplify things with the thinking of the “there can be NO paradox”. If you go back to the bronze age, and show the natives steel, then the fact is that if you were to look up the steel age BEFORE you left, then you would see that that was when it was introduced, becasue while you haven’t gone back there yet in your personal timeline, the fact is is that you were already there hundreds of years ago, linearly speaking. You cannot change the past, because the history you know has any tampering already in it.
Good article.
As to the naysayers for SCC, well, I can’t really think of a science fiction creation that leaves no holes unfilled.
ALL of them- book, tv or movie- have some manner of scientific failure in the premise, or some other assumptions made that simply don’t fit logic or science as we know it now.
Yet the genre continues, because we are, at times given characters and stories that are compelling and/or enjoyable enough to overlook these things.
Time travel is a tough one that I have never seen explained away well enough to make sense- yet often it allows enjoyable shows anyway.
Yeah, I’ll keep watching.
And if we end up with a future filled with Summer Glau making pancakes in a miniskirt, I, for one, won’t be complaining.