Also, NOT using
the panel discussions of the most recent World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin,
Ireland in August 2019 (to which I be unable to go (until I retire from education)),
I would jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF
DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. But not today. This explanation
is reserved for when I dash “off topic”, sometimes reviewing movies, sometimes
reviewing books, and other times taking up the spirit of a blog an old friend of
mine used to keep called THE RANTING ROOM…
Time Travel Movies
are undeniably my favorite genre of movie – ranging from obvious one’s like the
archetypical BACK TO THE FUTURE franchise to the eerie soft time travel
mainstream movie, “The Lake House” (ranked “Rotten” by Rotten Tomatoes because
regular people didn’t understand it or accept the premise, and in Wikipedia is defined
as a “romantic drama”, probably to keep the genre safe!)
While I’d love to
review them all, I’m going to focus on three, all of them multiple episodes but
part of a seamless whole. I’ll start with the one-sentence-blurb from Imdb:
BACK TO THE FUTURE
– “The trilogy is about a teenager named Marty McFly who is able to travel in
time. This is due to the invention of an automobile time machine made by
scientist Dr. Emmett L. Brown. Living in 1985, Marty McFly travels to future
2015 and also to past 1955 and 1885. During these times he has several
adventures in his home town Hill Valley in California.” (Simple English
Wikipedia) Well THAT plays down what happened! My synopsis? Marty
(more-or-less accidentally) and using Doc’s time machine, screws up the
timeline by creating successful parents, then wrecks it again making nuclear
waste and Mafia rule in his home town of Hill Valley, CA the norm. He’s unintentionally
murdered his dad, and got Doc put into an insane asylum. Trying to fix THAT, Doc
himself then screws up a timeline and Marty helps Doc find a wife and ends up
almost back where he started from, though his gf now knows about time travel as
well, but it doesn’t matter because the time machine’s scrap. (The body count
in these movies is unexpectedly large: three Libyans (I); his dad, future 2
kids, and any number of other people who have died as Biff established BiffCo…(II);
Doc, Mad Dog Tannen (III – who will obviously hang), but Doc doesn’t die and
the formerly dead Clara Clayton is now alive…so 3 + 3 + 1 = 7.
Also, Marty never
meets the “new him” who was shaped by the events he and Doc changed. He’s still
the old Marty who remembers Biff bullying his dad and (possibly) raping – which
is implied but never stated – that lead up to his trips into the future of 2015
and the past 1885. Who is Marty in the altered timeline?
STAR TREK: The
Next Generation deals with the personality-changing results of this kind of
time meddling in “Tapestry”. Jean Luc Picard, legendary and archetypical captain
of the USS Enterprises both D and E finds himself a lieutenant of average skill,
average personality, and most notably, an individual who was never interested
in taking a single risk, always playing it safe when Q gives Picard a chance to
change one event he regretted. He ends up unraveling the tapestry of his life.
STAR TREK: Voyager,
“Year of Hell”, a “alien” scientist, fiddling with a machine that can alter the
timeline in order to make the empire he lives in even greater than it is –
imagine Hari Seldon in Asimov’s Empire able to instantly alter time so that he
can achieve his goal of an eternally stable, galaxy-spanning Empire! He
inadvertently erases his beloved wife and spends two centuries making carefully
calculated changes to get her back – to no avail. Voyager’s sacrificial plunge
into the ship as a last resort resets the original timeline, returning his
wife.
I looked at the
effect of altering a timeline we actually seem to be approaching in STAR TREK:
Deep Space Nine’s episode, “Past Tense” in which the poor and indigent in San
Francisco are herded into Sanctuary Districts that leads to the Bell Riots – https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2019/02/possibly-irritating-essays.html.
So, my question
however, is, “Why do these stories touch something deep in you?” or more
simply, “Why do I like these?”
First, I realized
that these are different from Alternate History. MAN IN THE HIGH TOWER looks at
“What would the world be like if Hitler had won?” In a recent issue of ANALOG
Science Fiction and Fact, “Bonehunter” posits a present where the dinosaurs
hadn’t gone extinct. AVENGERS End Game seeks to rescue half the lifeforms in
the Universe from oblivion. These are stories that deal with huge issues and vast
populations, and while there might be repercussions for individuals, the focus
is on All Time. I love these stories, too, but they aren’t my favorites.
In a Time Alteration
story like Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman’s “Kate and Leopold”, the grand sweep of
history is beside the point.
The point is
making individual characters happy.
During the
landmark, paradigm changing Eleventh Series of the long-running BBC series, Dr.
Who, The Doctor and her Companions find themselves in 1955 Montgomery, Alabama.
In a (slightly) judgmental episode, filmed in Cape Town, South Africa, the English
save American History by keeping the time-traveling mass-murder, Krasko from keep
Rosa Parks from sparking the Civil Rights movement that continues today. While
it seems like it’s an attempt at an Alternate History story, it’s far more a
Time Alteration story – Krasko is a racist and wants “his side” to win. He identified
Rosa Parks’ influence as a critical event.
In the Disney
animated film, “Meet the Robinsons”, Lewis The Orphan wants to find his real
family and rejoin them. Inventing a time machine, his sole focus is to change
time to give him a family. The villain in the story, The Man With The Bowler
Hat is just as intent on changing history, though in his case, it was a self-inflicted
wound. While the future DOES change when The Man With The Bowler Hat – who has
been a pawn of the evil artificial intelligence robot, Doris – steal a time
machine, the intent of the story is to make Lewis happy…clearly a Time
Alteration story.
So, coming back to
my question, “Why do I like these?”
The answer on
reflection, is simple, there are events in my past that I’d like to change! For
example, I was a pretty sickly little kid, so when I was seven, my parents
agreed with the doctor and I had a tonsillectomy. In 1964, this was a pretty
standard operation, “In the United States, the number of tonsillectomies has
actually declined significantly and progressively since the 1970s. The
frequency with which tonsillectomy is performed varies from region to region. 30
years ago (1978), approximately 90% of tonsillectomies in children were done
for recurrent infection; now it is about 20% for infection and 80% for
obstructive sleep problems (OSA)…Extensive data shows the negative effects of
OSA in children on behavior, school performance, and bed-wetting. Improvement
for such behaviors following tonsillectomy is very well documented. Tonsillectomy
for recurrent tonsillitis is effective at significantly reducing the number and
severity of sore throats in children who are severely affected. There is also
anecdotal evidence that some children’s
quality of life is transformed by the surgery. This may be caused by a
combination of factors that include the tendency of the frequency of recurrent
sore throats to resolve over time and the elimination of a source of infection
and of obstructive symptoms.”
So, in my
experience, once my tonsils were removed, I started eating. Constantly. I
became blimp. BUT WHY? I remember being “abandoned”
in the hospital overnight by my parents. I had no idea WHY. Then someone came
in, shoved something up my butt, and then I woke up with a horribly sore throat,
and spent the next several days eating ice cream and drinking 7 Up. The rest,
as they say, is history. I have struggled with my weight since then. What if I
had gone back, cured my “tonsillitis” with a current-day drug? Would I still struggle
with my weight? Would I have my self-confidence? Would I be a published science
fiction writer? I don’t know. But, I’d like to have seen the results.
Also, being able
to change other events in my childhood and teenage years WOULD have made me a
different person. A better person? No idea. So, the idea of playing with Time
Alteration is fascinating; I’m even exploring my own feelings regarding my
inability to “change people” in a series of stories I’m working on.
I know it’s not
going to happen, but at least I have some idea why I like these things!
Resource: My other
Favorite Time Alteration stories: “Men In Black III”, “Arrival”, STAR TREK: The
Voyage Home, STAR TREK: The Original Series “City on the Edge of Forever”, STAR
TREK: Enterprise “Carbon Creek”, TIME TUNNEL, and finally QUANTUM LEAP.
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