Timey-Wimey Ball: Difference between revisions

** The sequel fic ''[[Rich's Comix Blog|Forever Janette]]'' intentionally invokes the Timey-Wimey Ball by subverting the show's use of [[San Dimas Time]]—by letting the Fifth Doctor meet the Master from the Seventh Doctor's time. It doesn't say how this is possible, other than a passing mention that the two Time Lords are "off-phase" from a common Gallifreyan synchronicity.

 

* The whole messy issue of [[Time Travel]] is [[lampshade]]d in ''[[Austin Powers|Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me]]'' when, after Austin starts to get bewildered by all the possible paradoxes his traveling into [[The Sixties]] involves, Basil jumps in with "I suggest you don't worry about that sort of thing and just enjoy yourself", and then turns pointedly [[Breaking the Fourth Wall|toward the camera]] and remarks "[[MST3K Mantra|and that goes for you all as well]]". Much self-contradictory timey-wimeyness ensues since, as Mike Myers puts it in his DVD comments, "our theory of [[Time Travel]] is that [[Time Travel]] works [[Rule of Funny|however we need it to work]] for each particular scene's joke."

* ''[[Back to The Future]]'' has different things happening to the hero as the past is changed. Read the timeline for the trilogy at [http://backtothefuture.wikia.com/wiki/Back_to_the_Future_timeline this page] if you have any questions about how it works. There isn't a single concern here that isn't covered there one way or another.

** Though one persistent law of [[Time Travel]] is that things can only [[Time Travel]] is they are ''made of meat'' (so people, but not the organic fibers of clothing), ''wrapped in meat'' (i.e., Cyborg Terminators), ''can do a reasonably good imitation of meat'' (i.e., "Liquid Metal" Terminators) or sneak in when nobody's looking (Cromartie's head). Which is to say, the mechanism here appears to be exactly analogous to airport security. The jury still is out on what would happen if you tried to bring a Ham and Fusion Grenade Sandwich with you.

** This actually gets answered in the comic book continuity. A group of skinned-up Terminators gets sent back, but bring along an extremely fat human they captured because he's ''literally'' a meat bag. [[Wall of Weapons|Full of guns]]. Whom the others have to kill to open.

* In [[The Film of the Book|2002 film version of]] ''[[The Time Machine]]'', the Time Traveler discovers that he cannot change the past since it would create a [[Temporal Paradox]]. Then he {{spoiler|goes even further into the future only to see the Morlocks victorious over the Eloi and afterward returns to the year 802701 to successfully defeat the Morlocks}}.

* ''[[Ben 10: Race Against Time]]'' includes a bit of this. [[Big Bad|Eon]] seeks to use the Hands Of Armageddon to bring his [[Dying Race]] to Earth to repopulate, but traveling through time so much has weakened him to the point where he's unable to use the Hands. His plan is to use the Omnitrix to turn Ben into himself (a second Eon), so that ''he'' can activate the device and end the reign of humans on Earth. The movie is pretty vague about how it works, but at first glance, it seems as though Eon may actually ''be'' Ben, corrupted by himself in his own past.

** On top of that, when Eon succeeds in implanting himself in the Omnitrix, he declares that "two cannot exist at once", disappearing into a different point in the time stream.

* ''[[Primer]]'' uses an [[wikipedia:File:Time Travel Method-2.svg|interesting]] time travel method that begins to make sense.

** There were explanations - that the changes come in waves, changing things in fits and starts, not all as a whole. As for having to travel further back, that's easy to explain. Think of it as trying to get into a house, but the front door has something pressed against it stopping you from opening it. What do you do? Go in through the back door and then walk through the house to the front door to remove the blockage. Simples!

 

* [[Harry Harrison]]'s ''[[The Stainless Steel Rat]] Saves the World'' features two overlapping timelines (one of which only has a temporary existence) ''and'' a loop. The lead character travels back in time to stop the Special Corps being removed from history, and manages to disrupt the enemy's plan. He then follows them further back in time, landing in an alternate history where Napoleon conquered Britain. He messes up the controls on the enemy time machine, and (after being rescued shortly before the alternate history disappears) follows them forward (but still long before his own time). He finds the villains (after a ''long'' time for them—so long they've forgotten everything except that he's the Enemy), but is unable to stop them; they travel back in time, and he's only saved by a time machine—allowing him to return to his own time—which he then sends back with the instructions for what he just did. {{spoiler|Finally, he's told not to worry that he didn't stop the villains; they've just traveled to the first place he met them, where they will then travel back and create an alternate history where Napoleon conquered Britain, before...}}

* In ''A Tale Of Time City'' by [[Diana Wynne Jones]], the titular city exists outside of the flow of history on the rest of the world. From this vantage point, the citizens see that history works like weather patterns—it shifts back and forth with minute details thanks to the butterfly effect and time loops. Basically, a more detailed explanation of the Timey-Wimey Ball, where shifts in the time travel theories are explained away as the changing "weather patterns" of time. For instance, on one day in Time City the inhabitants may observe that [[World War II]] begins in 1939, but on another day they may notice that it has changed to 1938. Perhaps time in the book is two-dimensional, with Time City time orthogonal to time everywhere else. {{spoiler|Except it turns out that the history of Time City can shift back and forth too...}}

{{quote|'''Lu-Tze:''' For a perfectly logical chain of reasons, Vimes ended back in time even ''looking'' rather like Keel! Eyepatch ''and'' scar! Is that [[Theory of Narrative Causality|Narrative Causality]], or [[Stable Time Loop|Historical Imperative]], or Just Plain Weird?}}

** Which is why if you try to place the times and events of some books, they take place a couple years before a different book, and at the same time, hundreds of years before the ''immediate sequel'' of that different book.

* James P. Hogan had a solution in ''Thrice Upon a Time''. The prospective time traveler induces a grandfather paradox. The universe doesn't abhor it or disallow it or anything, but simply plays out the umpteen zillion iterations of the events in question. A leads to B leads to Not-A leads to Not-B leads to A leads to B... It should go on forever, but on each run-through, quantum randomness causes things to be very, very slightly different (an atom decays or not, a pair of colliding air particle zig instead of zag) totally regardless of anything the time traveler does. Normally they won't make any difference whatsoever, but after a few million or trillion iterations, the randomness happens to align in such a way that it breaks the paradox (i.e., kills his wife in a new way) and lets the timeline continue past it. What we the audience see is merely the "final cut" version of history, the one that didn't get stuck in an endless loop.

 

* ''[[Black Hole High]]'': "Fate": When Vaughn, having traveled back in time to meet his mother, steals her hair clip as a memento, [[For Want of a Nail|all of history is rewritten]] so that his parents never meet, his father becomes a familyless loser instead of creating the wormhole, and Professor Z doesn't get a scholarship from his company to go to college. Which is all well and good. What no one attempts to explain is why, in this new history, Josie never attended Blake Holsey High (Though later events suggest that her presence there may have been engineered to keep her close to the wormhole).

** To complicate matters further, it eventually turns out that both Vaughn's mother and Josie's father are [[Time Travel|time travelers]], so without Pearson's wormhole (the basis for [[Time Travel]]), Josie shouldn't exist either.

** Despite the times {{spoiler|Barnabas is released from his coffin when he travels back to 1897, and then to 1840}}, he still has a history with the Collins family in the present era.

** The fact that {{spoiler|Quentin, Tad, and Desmond Collins survived in 1840, thanks to Barnabas and Julia, changing the line of inheritance}}, does not seem to have any impact on the Collins family in the present day.

* ''[[The Girl From Tomorrow]]'' has a very large one: Tulista travels back through time and retrieves Silverthorn. Taking him out of the timeline should screw with the future, but doesn't, thanks to one very [[Delayed Ripple Effect]]. Silverthorn then takes Alana back to 1990, and their presence in the timeline again fails to interfere with the future properly. It's only after Alana takes them both back to the year 3000 that people begin to notice the [[Delayed Ripple Effect]], despite the fact that if anything, it should have interfered with two time periods. They then attempt to resolve this by returning Silverthorn and Jenny to their respective time periods, only to have the capsule somehow U-turn and return to 2500, meaning there are (briefly) duplicates of Alana and Lorien. This is further compounded when Silverthorn builds a [[Portal to the Past]] to get some nuclear bombs. {{spoiler|This is only resolved when Petey resets the Portal to send Silverthorn and Draco to 70,000,000 BC.}}

** Given what Petey says at the end of the series and the events during Tomorrow's End, it looks {{spoiler|like the entire series is actually a [[Stable Time Loop]]}}

*** This one isn't all that hard as far as paradoxes go. During the Battle of Khitomer, the Enterprise-C made a [[Heroic Sacrifice]] against the Romulans attacking the Klingon outpost. This selfless act by a Federation ship on behalf of the Klingon Empire eventually led to a peace treaty between the Klingons and the Federation. However, during the battle, a massive explosion caused a [[Negative Space Wedgie]] to form, sending the Enterprise-C to the present. But without the Enterprise-C's presence at the battle, the peace treaty would have never formed, so once the Enterprise-C arrives in the present, the present almost immediately becomes a [[Bad Future]] where the Federation and Klingon Empire have been at war for decades. The Enterprise-D helps repair the -C enough to send it back through so it can be destroyed as it should have. But Tasha Yar, who in the [[Bad Future]] survived when she died in the "normal" timeline, volunteers to go back with the -C after being told by Guinan that she would not live when things go back to normal. So the Enterprise-C goes back to the Battle of Khitomer and is destroyed, but the results of the battle are changed just enough that captives are taken by the Romulans, including Tasha. So all in all, a bit more difficult to follow, but not all that hard to understand.

** ''[[Star Trek (film)|Star Trek]]'' is even more disturbing: since it erased the later series from continuity, every time cast from the later series traveled back in time is a huge paradox on its own. Mostly ''First Contact'', since if Enterprise is still [[Canon]], its events ''have'' happened, which is quite a [[Mind Screw]]...

* While each ''[[Terminator]]'' movie managed to be internally consistent, ''[[The Sarah Connor Chronicles]]'' combined the continuities of the first two movies and then added some of its own time travel plotlines. Predictably, it's getting a little weird. The episode "Complications" is particularly troublesome. It introduces a new stable time loop and strongly implies that Derek and Jesse don't come from the same version of the future.

** Later in the series, there's so much timeline alteration going on the human time travelers start using the ever-shifting date of Judgment Day to determine which timeline they came from.

{{quote|'''Lister:''' Hey, it hasn't happened, has it? It has "will have going to have happened" happened, but it hasn't actually ''happened'' happened yet, [[Funetik Aksent|hactually.]]

'''Rimmer:''' Poppycock! [[Time Travel Tense Trouble|It will be happened; it shall be going to be happening; it will be was an event that could will have been taken place in the future.]] Simple as that. Your bucket's been kicked, baby. }}

* ''[[Supernatural (TV series)|Supernatural]]'': "In The Beginning," established that while time travelers can make small changes, they will ultimately lead to the same result because destiny cannot be changed. This is ultimately proven true when Dean's attempt to protect his family from the Yellow-Eyed Demon ends up causing his mother to make the deal with him that eventually kills her. "My Heart Will Go On" blatantly contradicts this by having an angel go back in time and stop the Titanic from ever sinking, preventing anyone on board from dying and leading to hundreds of their descendants who originally never existed appearing in the present. "Frontierland" circles back to no major changes, but it's a little unclear whether Sam and Dean's actions are a [[Stable Time Loop]] or [[You Already Changed the Past]].

 

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Time Travel Tropes]]

[[Category:Consistency]]

[[Category:This Index Is Not an Example]]