As fans of the show learned earlier this week, Season Five of Lost looks like it's going to build upon past seasons' occasional forays into time travel (which had usually involved Desmond) by thrusting several of the main characters squarely into the time-lost fray. What interests - and, to some degree, worries - me about this development is the so far unanswered question, What kind of time travel exists in the world of Lost?
While far from an expert on the topic, I do have a fair bit of passion toward this particular science fiction device. I love well-done time travel stories, and conversely tend to throw my hands up in disgust when I encounter the other kind. Because I have nothing better to do at the moment, here are my thoughts on what separates the two.
1. Consistency
I can buy just about any application of time travel, as long as it's internally consistent. By far, the most common place where writers go awry when trying to tell stories in which people travel to the past is in their treatment of what effect those travelers have by their actions in the past. There are several archetypes here, including:
A. Many divergent timelines - If you were to go back to 1920 and kill Adolf Hitler before he came to power in Germany, you'd create an alternate world in which World War II never happened (or, at least, happened without Hitler) and which would have a very different history, from the 1920s forward, than the one with which we're all familiar . However, this would in fact be a physically different world - a parallel one! - and not the one that you left behind when you traveled back in time. That original world would continue, unchanged, just as you left it. You might or might not ever be able to get back to your own timeline (depending on the rules set out by the writer) but regardless, it wouldn't really matter to anyone but you and perhaps your loved ones as the only impact on that reality would be that you disappeared at a certain point (today) and possibly were never seen again. Comic book publishers have put this framework to great use over the years, including an entire Marvel Comics series, entitled What If?, that focused on divergent points like "What if Uncle Ben hadn't been killed?" and "What if Captain America hadn't been found in Avengers # 4?"
B. One alterable timeline - In this sort of a story, the scenario above (kill Hitler in 1920) would obviously affect the one and only version of history that exists, essentially re-writing it (1920 onward) as a result of your actions. You'd expect that there would be huge changes from what we all know of the past 90 years, with the extent of the alterations being limited only to the author's imagination (more on this later). This is sometimes referred to as "the butterfly effect" (not to be confused with the Chaos Theory version by the same name, which relates to effects spreading out across the planet without the benefit of time travel). The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode entitled "Yesterday's Enterprise" is one of many, many examples of this category's rich potential.
C. One immutable past - If this is the rule under which the story operates, then no matter how hard you try, you just won't be able to kill Hitler in 1920. Maybe you just keep missing him every time you think that you've located him; perhaps you're intangible, invisible and inaudible when you arrive in the past; or it could simply transpire that you think that you've killed him only to discover, upon returning to the present, that you only wounded him and he'd always suffered a grievous injury in 1920 and you simply fulfilled destiny's calling by delivering him the motivation for hating Jews or Negroes. No matter the means, the end is the same: history can't be changed. The Terry Gilliam film, 12 Monkeys, presents this view of time travel in a highly-entertaining and satisfying manner.
D. You can't get there from here - As a less interesting variation on C, time travel to the past is simply impossible, and so your plan of killing Hitler in 1920 never gets off the ground. Instead, you settle for traveling to the future and hilarity ensues.
There may be others, but I think that the majority of stories I've read, watched or written have tended to fall into one of those four categories above. Where traveling to the future is concerned, though, there are often different rules applied. I'd say that that's true for the very natural reason that most people would consider the past to be more "durable" than the not-yet-written future. In most cases, trips forward in time tend to have an "anything goes" sort of feel to them, although in terms of consistency there's usually two main types:
E. The one true future - As with C and D above, the notion here is that there's one and only one future (already written in stone by Destiny's hand, as it were, even if we haven't experienced it yet), and so when you get there, you're seeing what will happen. This approach works best, in my opinion, if you also mandate no backward traveling through time (D, above), as that prevents anyone from taking what they've learned (in "the future") and going back in time to take advantage of it ("Must buy GreenTech stock now!") or try to prevent it ("We can still avoid the environmental disaster that we saw there if we act fast enough in 2009!"). Otherwise, you're really arguing against your own premise of the future being already decided. Although it's been years since I last read it, I believe that the granddaddy of all time travel stories, The Time Traveler by H. G. Welles, operated within this set of rules.
F. A possible future - More common in the literature, I think, is the setup where what you discover in the future may happen, but the jury's still out. This allows for all kinds of cautionary tales, including Ebenezer Scrooge learning his lesson on Christmas Eve and thereby avoiding the premature death of Tiny Tim, etc.
As you can see, lots of different rules are possible; all I demand is consistency within each story!
2. Imaginative Application
As with most science fiction mechanisms, while the concept of time travel is pretty cool all on its own, it's really what the writer does with it that determines how entertained the audience is by the results. Hand-in-hand with internal consistency, in my mind, is the requirement that time travel be applied in an imaginative manner. To see what I mean, consider the following two hypothetical outlines for our ever-reliable "Travel to 1920 and kill Hitler" scenario:
G. Straightforward approach - The hero discovers a time machine that his mentor, Dr Tempus Fugit, had been working on before his untimely death. Fugit lives just long enough to explain the operation of the machine to his protege, who then realizes that he can use it to go back in time and kill a young Hitler and thereby save millions of Holocaust victims. The hero follows through on this plan, only to return to 2009 and discover that the world has changed: it's now unbearably overpopulated and dying of starvation. Realizing that he shouldn't have messed with history, he travels back in time once again, and kills his younger self just moments before the fateful meeting with Hitler. He returns to 2009 (finding it back to the way he remembered it) and destroys the time machine before anyone else can repeat his folly.
H. Show some creativity - Same initial premise as G, but when he gets to 1920, the hero instead finds himself becoming friendly with Hitler. He can see some of the rough edges that will eventually turn the man into the monster he later becomes, but he also sees the sources of those missteps in the life that the young man has lived and is living. He begins to exert influence over the German through his own actions and attitudes, and sees a change in the other that clearly places him on a different path than the one history had recorded. Without Hitler's strong presence to rally them out of their post-WWI poverty and despair, Germany falls more deeply into ruination and is shortly thereafter invaded by Russia. When the hero escapes the invaders by using his machine to return to 2009, he finds that the U.S.S.R. won a very different 2nd World War in the late 1950s and is now the only superpower in the world. However, his time machine no longer exists (Dr Fugit was never born, thanks to the changed history) and he has no choice but to acclimate to the new reality in which he finds himself. Eventually he runs into the granddaughter of Adolf Hitler, who grew up hearing tales of the hero from her father and his father, and the two fall in love.
Now, neither of those are the outline for an award-winning story (probably), but the first is a sort of paint-by-numbers tale whereas the second veers off in some directions that might not be obvious right from the get-go. Time travel is too often the first variety for my tastes, where you can pretty much predict what's going to happen from the premise itself. I much prefer the second type! (The first outline also has the problem of hero instance # 2 killing hero instance # 1 - his slightly younger self - in the past, which would prevent # 1 from living long enough to become # 2! So much for internal consistency!)
3. Ramifications
I very quickly lose interest in any time travel story when it becomes apparent that the writer didn't really think through the ramifications of whatever operating rules he or she put in place. For example, wouldn't anyone who found himself in possession of a working time machine immediately use it for selfish reasons? Sure, it makes for a great story to have him go back to 1920 and kill Hitler (kill the cheerleader, save the world!) but isn't it more likely that he'd go back and gather up artifacts that he could sell for a fortune in his own time? Hell, I'd be faster than a speeding bullet in buying up brand new, near-mint copies of Action Comics # 1, back in 1938, if I had a time machine!
Thinking back to Consistency, imagine a story set in a B-type universe (one alterable timeline) where travelers go around killing people (in the past) and yet nothing significant seems to change in terms of history except that those people are now dead. Is that really believable? Let's dig into that a bit and see what we unearth.
I had a discussion about this with a friend once, after we watched the film, The Butterfly Effect (the one with Ashton Kutcher in it, in case there have been more than one). That movie purported to deal with this very notion of "change one thing in the past, and your present will change" (which I applaud) but it seemed to treat each change as some sort of isolated bullet through time whose effect was always very limited. If you save your girlfriend's life 10 years ago (instead of allowing her to die, as originally happened), then you open up the possibility that she's still alive now but has turned out very different than you expected (so far, so good). This is clearly a B-type setup. What bugged me about the film was that it never explored the idea that so much more would almost certainly have also changed: if you think of all the people who would've interacted with that girl over the past 10 years (who, according to the original history, would have been doing something else at that time in their lives), and then everyone who interacted differently with them, and so on, and so on, you get ripple effects that should have huge ramifications.
In the Ray Bradbury short story, "A Sound of Thunder" (one of the origins for the "butterfly effect" expression, I believe), something as trivial as killing a butterfly back in the time of dinosaurs changes the modern world significantly. If that sort of thing makes sense to you (as it does to me), then saving (or taking) a human life in the past should have major consequences, in the form of ripples, for the present.
Which, finally, brings us back to Lost. Several of the castaways are traveling through past eras on the island, and have already interacted with past residents, up to and including killing some. So how does time travel work on Lost? Did all of those events in fact already happen, such that the travelers are just fulfilling their destinies (and is that why "Destiny Calls" is the subtitle for the season)? Or are they re-writing history by their actions, in which case we should see an altered "present" when they return to it? Or are the writers eschewing internal consistency for the sake of mindless entertainment, damning those of us who want to really immerse ourselves in the work to spend our time pointing out all of the places where they're breaking the rules? I imagine that we'll know the answer by the end of this season (and maybe before).
And yes, I just thought (and wrote) more about time travel in the past couple of hours than most people will probably do in their lifetime. Go figure!
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5 comments:
Re: A Sound of Thunder, so I struggle with this concept...kill say a Monarch butterfly of which there are thousand flitting around, then how could that ripple? Kill an XX brand new first of it's kind butterfly then I buy the ripple. So Aston saving another dumb blonde....hmmmm. Would she really have rippled history in the 10 or 20 years? Would it really matter if I'd never been born? Certainly matters if Einstein, or Obama isn't born but for the most of us, over a short romantic comedy movie premise of 10 to 50 years, I don't think it matters, so I'm buying the movie premise.
Love time travel concepts. I sure hope Lost doesn't jump the shark for you because they are using it so much.
Well, since we've had this discussion before, my lovely and talented wife, I doubt that anything I can say here is going to change your mind on this in the least. But I still have to try... ;-)
Let's take the "suppose Vicki had never been born" premise and see what sort of ripples that might cause, in comparison to the history that actually happened with you in it.
We can get the obvious stuff out of the way early: Your mother's life would naturally have been completely different from the point at which she became pregnant with you. Virtually every interaction she had with anyone else would necessarily have to change because her life would be on such a different path without the pregnancy and eventual baby, toddler, teen, etc. She wouldn't have benefited from any advice you gave her as you got older, nor any financial assistance. Similarly, any money she spent on you in your younger years would have gone elsewhere, and any time she spent with you would have been used in other ways.
By the same token, Tammy would never have been born (sorry, kid!) and therefore every single interaction she's ever had with anyone would be gone. Any classmate in school she helped understand a concept would either go without or have to find someone else to get that assistance from. Anyone whose life she brightened up (or darkened) would not have that influence on it. Therefore their lives would all be changed.
It goes without saying that my life would be drastically changed, from 1986 onward (with no Vicki in it). I'd presumably end up with some other woman (or women!), each of us influencing the other in ways completely different than how you and I have affected each other. I might end up a worse person, or a better person, but I'd inarguably end up different than I am now. I'd have made other choices along the way without your voice in the mix (and with someone else's in its place) and almost certainly wouldn't have ended up as Agile Manager, for example, in 2006. Therefore none of the people at work with whom I interacted would have had me around to advise, nag or amuse them. Since I was one of the most active people in promoting the movement to Agile, it's quite possible that that company would never have gone that route. That would have had a significant impact on roughly 200 people, just with that one small change.
So those are some of the apparent, first-order changes. But now think about how each of those changes radiates outward. Each person who's been affected goes on to "nudge" others slightly off the path that they're supposed to be on (according to our current history). Every job that you took on over your life ends up going to someone else, meaning that whatever job they were supposed to move into instead gets filled by someone else, and so on. Every car you ever bought... same thing. Every house you've ever lived in... same thing. Every single product you ever purchased gets bought by someone else.
Every good deed (or nasty turn) that you ever committed doesn't happen, and so every person or group of people who were supposed to benefit (or suffer) from your actions, don't. They subsequently behave differently, without that good or bad experience, and in turn affect those around them in a different manner than they were supposed to. (Imagine a good day versus a bad day, and how most of us tend to pass those feelings along as we bump into people.)
I think my belief in this view of how the universe works boils down to a strong respect for the power of cause and effect. I believe that it's an entirely causal universe that we live in, with every single outcome (regardless of whether or not it's considered important) having been determined by a nearly-infinite number of previous events that combined in a completely unique manner to bring it about. We'd all agree that Joe doesn't win the lottery unless he first buys a ticket. But he also doesn't win the lottery unless he has the money with which to buy the ticket, has lived a life that's provided him with reason to believe that it's a better use for his money than spending it on something else, has the opportunity to buy the ticket, buys that ticket instead of another one, has a lottery system in place at the time so that he can buy a ticket, and so on. If you change even one of those parameters, or any of the other, less obvious ones that I can't even think of, Joe doesn't win the lottery.
In other words, I see life as the biggest arrangement of dominoes that you could ever imagine (times infinity), all laid out in a precise pattern that none of us can see. As soon as you start randomly adding or removing pieces, the whole thing changes (not just the little part that you think you're affecting). One little tweak over here (killing a pre-historic butterfly that was supposed to survive that day so that it could keep another animal distracted just long enough that the second critter wouldn't prey on a third animal who would go on to give birth to a fourth animal who history recorded would kill a fifth animal who otherwise would have hunted and devoured an early ancestor of ours....) can absolutely cause huge and unpredictable changes over there (millions of years later, human society is entirely different than what we know it to be), even though we can't immediately see the reason why.
To me, that sort of complicated relationship between everything around us makes perfect sense, and always has.
I wonder what would happen if I went back in time to BEFORE I read all of this...and simply skipped it entirely....
LOL!
Very interesting discussion. I'm finding the use of time travel on Lost thus far to be overwhelming. Locke encounters Ethan, then Alpert while Sawyer et al are meeting the WWII men and Faraday is contacting past and futue Desmond ... it's making my head spin!
Re: Sound of Thunder and the interconnectedness of all things, it jives with a few concepts. One is that all things are inter-related, kinda like a cosmic Bacon-game or 6-degrees of separation.
The idea of karma is another way of expressing this - what you do affects your eternal soul. Going more science fiction-y, the principals of quantum mechanics, such as observability and quantum entanglement, suggest that matter on the most minute scales is dependent on everything around it.
Anyway, time travel is fun. You should check out the first Futurama movie, Bender's Big Score, as it has an excellent time travel theme. The writer/director David Cohen noted that he hates when time travel is done poorly so they worked everything out as much as possible.
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