Interesting bit of dialogue in Season 2 of “12 Monkeys” between Katarina, the scientist who built the time machine that drives the plot, and Jennifer, who in spite of her schizophrenia, holds some of the answers to the plague that devastated the planet in 2015, and was responsible for releasing it in one timeline:
J: Cause and effect; chicken/egg; beginning/end; not so simple….A colony of ants in a line, hundreds, thousands. But one ant only knows of three — one in front, one behind, and itself. Until it steps out of line, then it sees everything. You’re looking wrong.
K: Looking at what wrong?
J: Time. You don’t know how it works…
Ah yes, stepping outside of Time is the first step in understanding it. I love the “ants in a line” analogy — only being capable of seeing in front and behind of itself. The main characters in the TV version of 12 Monkeys are going back in time before a plague in 2015 killed billions of people, intentionally breaking the timeline to stop the plague before it is/was released. Later in that season, Katerina says: “This is causality driven insane” and “Time is broken. Causality is in flux!”as she watches from her lab in 2044 as those breaks in the space/time continuum ripple into her timeline. One of the main characters is torn between stopping a plague that killed billions as he recognizes that the son he loves in 2044 will not be born if he assists in changing that timeline. Another TV series, “Timeless” did a great job of handing this. Upon returning from a timeline, those time travelers checked their news database to see if they interrupted that ol’ space-time continuum and changed anything. And an unintended change in the timeline is used as a plot point where the sister of one of the main characters vanishes due to an interruption.
But is this still working from a linear model — Time moving past to present to future, so changing the past to alter a known future outcome? What if it’s more of a Torus than a straight line?
Watching these shows in the light of my awakening to Time with a capital T made me recognize that the concept of Simultaneous Time wreaks havoc on Time Machine stories. It’s relatively simple, at least in terms of plot, for the protagonist to move backwards or forwards into a different incarnation. But visiting an earlier position in the same timeline? Problematic, since these shows use a time machine to send people back physically to different eras.
Bruce Goldberg and other practitioners advise that the origin of an issue is as likely to be in the future as in the past, which wouldn’t work in most Time Travel media. But I do appreciate it when writers struggle with the complications in these time travel scenarios, and both of these TV shows, “Timeless” and “12 Monkeys” navigate the curves in this track well. Here’s a list I consulted:
https://screenrant.com/best-movies-tv-shows-about-time-travel-ranked/
I highly recommend Arrival, but my personal fave is not on the list — 2004’s Primer:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390384/mediaviewer/rm3712158208/
Sometimes a low budget indie film can deal with this complicated subject better than a mega-bucks Hollywood film.
Any Time Travel/Timeline warping movie suggestions, email me at:
Torus