Wrong Time Travel Savvy: Difference between revisions
quote cleanup
(→Western Animation: clean up) |
(quote cleanup) |
||
(3 intermediate revisions by one other user not shown) | |||
Line 1:
{{trope}}
{{quote|'''Martha Jones:''' But are we safe? I mean, can we move around and stuff?
'''The Doctor:''' Of course we can. Why not?
'''Martha Jones:''' It's like [[You Watch Too Much X|in those films]]: [[Butterfly of Doom|If you step on a butterfly, you change the future of the human race.]]
'''The Doctor:''' Then, don't step on any butterflies. [[Comically Missing the Point|What have butterflies ever done to you?]]|''[[
A key element in a lot of stories with [[Time Travel]] is the character's knowledge, or lack thereof, of [[Temporal Mutability|how time travel works]]. Is the world [[You Already Changed the Past|deterministic]]? Is time [[Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act|hard to change]], or [[Butterfly of Doom|way too easy]]? Is there [[Our Time Travel Is Different|something else weird going on]]? Will a [[Temporal Paradox]] destroy the universe, create an alternate one, or do you just risk being [[Stable Time Loop|very confused]]? Of course, if the series itself [[Timey-Wimey Ball|keeps changing the rules]] it's up to the writer at the time whether or not you are wrong.
Line 19:
* One interpretation of ''[[Terminator Salvation]]'' (and the whole series) is that the characters are tragically wrong about the whole "no fate" thing.
** That doesn't fit with ''[[The Sarah Connor Chronicles]]'' (though [[Canon
** Arguably, in ''The Terminator'', Kyle and Skynet erroneously believe history can be changed. Then ''Terminator 2'' retcons it so that they're right.
* In the [[Star Trek (
* ''[[
* The main characters of ''[[Primer]]'' start out by taking elaborate precautions to avoid changing the timeline too much. By the end of the movie, they've realized that they're in a branching universe-type situation where they can totally ignore these precautions. [[Time Travel Tense Trouble|By then, they've already spun the timeline wildly out of control]].
Line 29:
* [[Larry Niven]]'s ''Get A Horse'' (and the other stories in the same series) features time travel based on the premise that, since time travel is impossible, if you travel back in time you actually enter a fantasy world. Thus, when the hero goes back in time to bring back a horse, he finds a unicorn. When he goes back to bring back a whale, he finds Moby Dick, and so on. No one in the series ever figures out that they aren't visiting the past, but rather are visiting fiction.
** Svetz, the hero of the Larry Niven time travel series, also finds a werewolf when he is after a dog, and finds a Roc chick when going after an ostrich.
** In ''Rainbow Mars'', the pattern continues, as the ancient Mars the characters visit contains elements from fictional Marses created by [[Edgar Rice Burroughs]], [[Ray Bradbury]], [[
* Alfred Bester's ''The Men Who Murdered Mohammed'' plays around with this. A scientist attempts to erase his wife out of existence after he finds her cheating on him. He whips up a time machine, and goes back in time to kill her grandfather. {{spoiler|The catch? It doesn't work. So, he works bigger, rampaging through time, killing more and more famous people (hence the title, as even when he murders the founder of a major world religion nothing changes) with absolutely no effect on the present until, finally, he meets a fellow time traveler who explains that the past he's killing is his own, and he's unhinged himself from reality because of his actions}}.
* ''The Time Ships'' by [[Stephen Baxter]] is a sequel to [[
* In [[
* [[Connie Willis]]' works, particularly [[To Say Nothing of the Dog]] and [[Blackout]]. The protagonists spend a lot of time worrying about [[The Butterfly Effect]] and have a fairly well-developed theory of [[Rubber Band History]]... but in every case it seems to work out as [[You Already Changed the Past]].
Line 41:
** Faraday attempts to change the past, and apparently manages it once with Desmond, and Desmond apparently does change the past a few times...but both of them just coincidentally manage to have 'swiss cheese memories', the existence of which can be linked to their time travel, so smart money said [[You Already Changed the Past|they already changed the past]] the whole time, and the way causality protects itself on Lost is to simply make people remember things wrong, or not at all, if the memories would cause a paradox.
* In ''[[Life On Mars]]'' and ''[[Ashes to Ashes]]'', both protagonists [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong|attempt to change history]], but fail despite their best efforts, leading them to draw the conclusion that the past cannot be changed. They also meet close relations and have close encounters with, but deliberately avoid actually meeting themselves. Then suddenly in series 2 of [[Ashes to Ashes|A2A]] it all goes to hell when the [[Big Bad]] {{spoiler|shoots his younger self in the face and frames Alex for the murder}}. [[Never the Selves Shall Meet]] [[Subverted Trope|indeed]].
* In the [[Stargate SG
== Webcomics ==
* Subverted in ''[[
* Appears briefly in ''[[
== Western Animation ==
* ''[[
* Dinobot in ''[[
* In the episode "Paraducks", Gosalyn advises [[Darkwing Duck]] to not interfere when they get sent back in time to his childhood. Back to the present, and the city's held in the grip of a crime lord. Turns out they were in the middle of a [[Stable Time Loop]] instead..
|