Time Travel: Solved

2 August 2010 | Filed Under Plotholes 


Say what now?

Time travel is one of my pet peeves. Not when it’s used, but when it’s used incorrectly.

That’s right. You can do time travel wrong.

I like to think of the dilemma as different schools:

  • The “Back to the Future” school’s time travel is where the main character goes back in time and his very presence, let alone his actions, change the future for better or worse. Example: Marty’s parents go from lame and wimpy to cool and confident.
  • The “Animorphs” (a.k.a. the “Harry Potter”) school’s time travel is where the main character who went back in time had already gone back in time. Their presence doesn’t change the future, it makes the future what it is. Example: the Animorphs caused the destruction of the dinosaurs.

Guess which one I think is right? (Hint: it’s the one that has Harry Potter.)

But what gives me the right to act superior and call one of these theories wrong? How about the fact that the first one plain doesn’t make sense. Let’s see what happens when we apply the first school to the Animorphs’ situation.

Okay, so they go back in time to the Cretaceous period. Obviously, their actions change the course events should have taken, since they weren’t there the first time around. One of those actions involves changing a comet’s trajectory so that it hits Earth. That means the first time around the comet would have kept going past Earth, and the dinosaurs weren’t killed to make way for the Human Age…

So somehow, humans who aren’t supposed to exist managed to go back in time to change events so humans could exist.

I’m sorry, but wtf.

It makes way more sense to think that yes, the Animorphs were there the first time around.

Ironically, you can do the whole “went back in time and changed the future” thing and not annoy me by being epically awesome. Case in point: the new Star Trek movie. Of course, they got bonus points because that was their solution for not being restricted to canon.

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