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Timey-Wimey Ball: Difference between revisions
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** 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.
** The theory they use is that only living tissue can travel back in time. A deleted scene from the second film (or was it from the book){{verify}} indicates that the T1000 traveled back in a sack of living flesh and cut its way free before killing the cop. One inconsistency is a scene originally in the script for the first film indicates that Kyle Reese's partner who travels back with him gets fused into a fire escape and instantly killed. Although as this
* 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.
* The film version of ''[[A Sound of Thunder]]'' (if not [[A Sound of Thunder|the book]]) uses hilariously inconsistent rules of time travel (and those rules don't make much sense ''before'' they start breaking them). It's a crucial plot point that the characters keep returning to the exact same point in time, but never run into previous versions of themselves (no explanation for that is given) ... until the time they do (no explanation for that either). Plants smash through the walls of a building because the past was changed in such a way as to cause plants to grow larger and more aggressively (no explanation is given as to why someone decided to build the building in the spot where, in the new timeline, a giant tree has been growing for ages - not to mention why the tree that's always been there smashes through the floor while people watch instead of just appearing as it if had always been there). At one point, the characters are unable to travel back to the point in time they want to reach because there's a time disturbance between the present and their destination in the past; the solution? Travel back to an ''even earlier'' point and then go forward (if you guessed that no explanation is given as to why the time disturbance is somehow not blocking that too, you've been paying attention).
** 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!
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* 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...}}
* [[Terry Pratchett]]'s ''[[Discworld]]'' novels:
** The History Monks are originally presented in ''[[Small Gods]]'' as ensuring everything happens [[Because Destiny Says So|the way it's supposed to]] (although, even then, the monk Lu-Tze decides to [[Screw Destiny]]). In ''[[Thief of Time]]'', it's revealed that, following various alterations to the Disc's temporal dimensions, the "true history" barely exists, and their main job is to prevent the Timey-Wimey Ball from imploding. And in ''[[Night Watch (Discworld)|Night Watch]]'', when Vimes travels thirty years into the past to become [[My Own Grampa|his own mentor]], even the monks aren't sure what's happening.
{{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.
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