Time Month - Editorial - The wrong type of paradox?

It's Time Month

And it's time to look at a thorny issue with time travel, Paradoxes. Does a paradox in itself spoil the plot? Not usually but when a movie is careful with its time travel rules, it's often quite jarring to see them disregard them. I'm going to looking at examples across the board, not necessarily just things I've reviewed and see where they stack up. Spoilers ahead folks

So, let's look at a classic, the Back to the Future movies.

The story of Marty McFly and Doc Brown is a classic staple of the time travel story, but it's not immune to the issues of time paradoxes, particularly the first movie. In said movie, the duo travel back to 1955 and hijinks ensue, said hijinks ultimately result in the 1985 they return to to be different and they're the only ones who remember the alternate timeline. But some of the changes would likely alter the circumstances that caused Marty to want to travel back in the first place. The second movie introduces more concepts around alternate timelines, this allows it to dance around the paradox of changing the past and branching realities, especially since they're not the ones responsible for the changing the past on this occasion, those lessons blend into the third movie as Marty takes lessons from the version of 2015 he visited to avoid making mistakes which doomed his future.

Alternate timelines are explored often in comics. But here I'm here to talk about the X-men. Days of Future past is one of their most famous and has been adapted onto both big screen and television. The version used in Wolverine and the X-men is probably the most problematic. Charles Xavier wakes up in a hellish future and somehow uses cerebro to contact the X-men in the past, trying to piece together what happened in order to help them stop it. The problem is once they do and the timeline changes, Charles still remembers what happened in a timeline he isn't in any more. The movie version by and large avoids this problem. Wolverine is sent back to warn the X-men, particularly Charles and Magneto and when his mission his complete his mind comes into his body in the new timeline in his relative present.

Johnny and the Bomb, and I'm talking about the  TV mini-series based on the novel, makes no mention of alternate timelines and suffers from a very common temporal paradox. A group of kids go back in time to WWII and end up unintentionally making changes, so when they return to the present Johnny finds he doesn't exist. They return back to undo the changes they've made. The issue is now the timeline they go back to is the correct, what motivation did he have. Again, this is easily explained away by the concept of alternate time-lines, but since no such explanation is given in the story, it's certainly a paradox. Justice League's The Savage Time suffers the same problem, although with superheros involved alternate timelines is not uncommon.

Some stories see time-lines as linear. Everything that happened as a result of time travel already happened. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban subtly hinted at all the actions Harry and Hermione would bring about once they travel back in time in the scenes that preceded it. Jak II uses a similar gimmick. Jak was born in the future with Samos. To keep Jak safe, he and Samos travel back in time, ultimately re-opening the portal and unleashing what made the city unsafe in the first place. It's also similar to how things worked out in Predestination (see my previous review).

It's surprising how few Doctor Who episode use the TARDIS' ability to travel in time and space as a storytelling gimmick as opposed to a device to get you from one location to another. I suppose the most famous example of the Doctor actually using the TARDIS as part of the story is Pyramids of Mars, where Tom Baker's Doctor shows Sarah Jane the future if the villain Sutek isn't stopped. It's not much of a future. More modern examples include The Runaway Bride, where it's shown how the Raknos embedded itself in the Earth's core and the beginning of the Earth's creation.

Blink is a great example of a bootstrap paradox, where information appears to have no external origin. The Doctor reads out a script which helps out our temporary protagonists, that script was written by one of said protagonists based on what was read out to them. Before the Flood in series 9 decides to explain the bootstrap paradox before showing us how things worked out.

There are many examples of Time Travel stories from the great to the obscure and beyond. I've not mentioned Terminator, Samurai Jack, The Flash/Legends of Tomorrow, Bill and Ted, Ben 10, Power Rangers or even Looper, all of which include elements of time travel. But to come back to the ultimate question. Is there a wrong type of paradox.

Nearly all versions of Time Travel stories have some type of logical break, born out of the need to keep the story interesting and unpredictable. I'm usually, as demonstrated in a couple of these examples more open to it if concepts like alternate timelines are mentioned. I'm more open to bootstrap or pre-destination paradoxes than I am to the temporal paradoxes without that key mention of alternate realities. That said, that doesn't mean films that don't are bad by default. It's only one element of a story, if the rest is good, this shouldn't drag it down too much.

So, what have we learned today?

Absolutely nothing!

So, see you in the next review!

Images used in this review are from Back to the Future, X-men: Days of Future Past, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Doctor Who and Johnny and the Bomb and are used subject to fair use.