Back Fo(u)r the Future: the Four Rationales of Time Travel

Great Scott! If my calculations are correct, it's Back to the Future Day! And you know what that means: when we get this baby up to eighty-eight miles per hour, you're going to see some serious … discussion about the different types of time travel?!

That line isn't in the script … (source)

More to the point, depictions of time travel in fiction can be classified into four types. These classifications are based on the purpose and volition of the traveler and/or their associates. More broadly, instances of time travel could be classified into "intentional" vs. "unintentional," but what's the fun in that? (Also, you run the risk of painting with too broad a brush—there is some utility in digging one layer deeper.) The four categories are as follows:

1. Influence
2. Surveillance
3. Concomitance
4. Coincidence

It's important to note that these four types aren't necessarily mutually exclusive within the same work, or even the same time-traveler's motives—for example, in Superhero Black Hole, the main character at one point travels to the ancient Roman era in an attempt to save his skin (Concomitance) so he can survive long enough to stop the antagonist in the future (Influence).

Let's take a look at each one, with examples from media you may (or may not) be familiar with. For the purposes of this article, "time travel" encompasses only those instances where someone or something is actually displaced from its origin in time. Simply flinging a message into the future or past doesn't count unless it's on a physical medium.

Also, beware of unmarked spoilers.

Influence

This is probably the most common motive in fiction, and it even has some near-examples in reality—preventing his father's death was the impetus sparking Ron Mallett's research into the physics of time travel. "Influence" here refers to time travel intentionally undertaken by the traveler with the goal of affecting or effecting history. This can include anything from making sure history unfolds as it should to desiring to live out one's life in peace in another century to bringing about world domination.

Back to the Future

Judging by the green graph behind him, that DeLorean either has one tricked-out subwoofer or one seriously leaky plutonium reservoir (source).

It qualifies, but not how you might think: the Influence factor isn't in Marty ending up in 1955—that's Concomitance—but in him getting back to 1985. Marty wants to return the flow of events to how it was, in the sense that he belongs in the '80s. (For why he ended up thirty years in the past, see below.)

Star Trek

Your greenhouse gas emissions are without honor! (source)

Oh, boy. So, so much time travel happens in Star Trek. The crew of the original series went back to the '70s in Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home to teach us, in a roundabout way, proper wildlife conservation practices. The Next Generation had "Firstborn" (S7E21), where future!Alexander basically tries to turn past!Alexander into John McClane. Deep Space Nine had "Trials and Tribble-ations" (S5E6), in which a Klingon with a bat'leth to grind hijacks the Orb of Time and tries to blow up Captain Kirk. Voyager had "Relativity" (S5E23), in which Temporal Investigations tries to stop someone from blowing up Voyager (interestingly, the culprit had also traveled through time in order to plant the thing, and basically manages to stop himself).

The Terminator

He isn't Todd the T-1000, but he still scares me (source).

We see both the "affect" and "effect" senses in James Cameron's franchise-igniting sci-fi flick. John CENA!!!! Connor is the leader of the Resistance, fighting against Skynet and its robotic army. Skynet has managed to figure out how to make a time machine work and has hit upon the simple idea of killing Connor's mother and preventing his birth in the first place. (Who cares about the Butterfly Effect, anyway? Not Skynet, apparently.) That's how Ahnold finds himself in '80s-era Los Angeles. Kyle Reese, meanwhile, is sent back to stop the T-800 and keep the timeline intact—in more ways than one.

Continuum

Liber8 aw8s their f8 (source).

The plot of this Canadian sci-fi series is set in motion when a terrorist cell, "Liber8," escapes a legal sentence to go back in time sixty-five years or so. Their plans involve blowing up a building and radicalizing a newborn. Not only do they succeed, but interestingly enough, they also end up killing off one major character's ancestor. Despite the fact that he's from the future, he still apparently survives.

Surveillance

"Surveillance" refers to an agent instigating time travel for purposes of observation. The agent can intend either to document events at the desired point in time as they happen, or they can simply test whether their methods for time travel actually work in the first place. Like Influence, the agent intends to make the trip; unlike it, they don't want to disturb. It's like window-shopping through the ages.

Back to the Future

One less minute to wait for the season premiere of Game of Thrones (source).

Doc Brown had to test the DeLorean somehow, after all. Einstein, being a dog, can't himself choose to run the DeLorean, but he's under the auspices of the good Doctor, and that counts for our purposes.

The Time Machine (2002)

No Whammies, no Whammies… (source)

In a nice example of the mutual compatibility of time travel types, Dr. Hartdegen's initial reasons for traveling into the future are to conduct research—he wants to see if humanity ever learned if changing the past is even possible, but can't wait like everybody else. He wasn't intending to actually alter the course of the future because of his travels there. All he wanted to do was learn if he could save his fiancée's life. (That would be Influence, but would have involved travel to the past to actively prevent her death.)

A Sound of Thunder

The description text for this image in Google Images read "An error occurred." This is an accurate summation of just about everything about this movie (source).

I almost don't want to dignify this film with discussion, but it was one of the first examples that came to mind. The upshot is that there's a company that basically offers prehistoric safaris. You're not supposed to do anything except watch—there's even a pathway that gets generated so that you don't step on anything. Naturally, some idiot messes this up it doesn't go according to plan.

Primer

Randall Munroe comes about as close as anybody ever has to accurately summarizing the plot (source).

Oh, boy. Shane Carruth's Primer is a real rat king of a movie, and some hold it to be the best time-travel movie of all time. The film ends up as a multi-car pileup of gambits and agendas, but the core reason for Abe and Aaron traveling through time in the first place is Surveillance—they want to see if the box actually works. The two Abes at the self-storage place pretty much confirmed that for Aaron … the first time around.

Concomitance

As Baron Mordu said, "The bill comes due." A concomitant event occurs as a consequence of some other action. Here, the actual act of traveling through time is not usually considered a "consequence" for our purposes (otherwise every instance would qualify); instead, "concomitance" refers to the motivation behind the time travel. Someone who researches and participates in time travel because he wants to does not travel because of concomitance, but a criminal forced by his captors to serve as a guinea pig for a new time-travel method does. It's kind of surprising how rare this motive is.

Back to the Future

Am I the only one who doesn't think the future as presented in Back to the Future Part II was all that great aside from hoverboards and self-velcroing Nikes? (source)

A bit of an odd example because it takes place due to actions Marty McFly hasn't performed yet, but the reason that Doc Brown takes Marty to 2015 at the end of the film (and in the first part of Back to the Future, Part II) is ultimately because Marty stupidly gets involved in a street race, breaks his hand, can't play the guitar anymore, and turns into a worn-out, underachieving shell of a man who isn't there to help his kid stay out of trouble. Perhaps stretching it a bit, but hey, I've got to tie this into the franchise somehow.

Star Trek

Overall, the double-Picard shots in this episode were extremely well-done (source).

Probably the clearest example of Concomitance for the Trek franchise is The Next Generation S2E13, "Time Squared." The Enterprise runs across a shuttlecraft tumbling in space. It turns out to be one of theirs, and Captain Picard is in it. Except, Captain Picard is on the bridge, and the El-Baz is sitting right next to itself in the shuttle bay. It turns out that this is future!Picard, who tried to escape the Negative Space Wedgie of the week, only for it to destroy the future!Enterprise and fling him back six hours so he could try again. Present!Picard shoots him with a phaser, the dead body and shuttlecraft vanish, the Negative Space Wedgie is satisfied, and Picard is left to grapple with whether he just committed suicide or murder. (Incidentally, per Deep Space Nine, you could probably charge him with the latter.)

Samurai Jack

Aku's not staring so much in fear of Jack's attack as he is in awe of his hair (source).

From Jack's perspective, at least, the raison d'être for the series is due to Concomitance. His initial temporal displacement is a direct consequence of his challenging Aku. Jack himself didn't want to end up in the future. Note that, on the flipside, Aku's motivation was Influence—getting rid of Jack let him move forward with his plans.

Looper

"My name is ASAC Schrader, and—wait, wrong franchise" (source).

The gist of Looper is that really bad dudes from the future send people back in time for really bad dudes in the present to kill. (Hard to prove a murder if there's no body, right?) Why these victims are sent back in time isn't always known, but part of the contract with these hitmen involves having themselves sent back. Basically, past!guy kills future!guy in the past—a result of his prior actions.

Coincidence

Stuff happens in general. Sometimes, stuff happens to people. With respect to time travel, "coincidence" considers both accidents and happenstance, and is basically an umbrella term for any time travel where the traveler did not initiate the travel of his own volition and where said travel did not result directly from his actions. "Coincidence" may not be the best name, but it rhymes and doesn't imply that the traveler had anything to do with it.

Back to the Future

I'd be remiss if I didn't find a way to work this in (source).

Marty didn't ask for the Libyans. It's not his fault that he got shot at. When he was getting shot at, his only thought was getting out of dodge. Unfortunately, in order to get out of dodge, he had to get into a heavily-modded DMC, and he ended up stranded in the '50s.

The Twilight Zone

Peter valiantly tries to change history (source).

In "Back There" (S2E13), Peter Corrigan ends up in 1865 following a discussion about whether one can influence events via time travel. He doesn't intend to get transported to the past, and while he does try to change it—and sort of does, if only in a way that ends up with one guy getting rich—he didn't set out to do any of that initially.

Heroes

Up high! Down low! Too slow—what the heck?! (source)

"Dual" (S3E13—what is it with all the episode thirteens in this post?) provides an instance of Coincidence for Hiro Nakamura, of all people. Hiro has been stranded in the past following his forcible depowering (how he got there is irrelevant for now). His brother Ando and their teammate Daphne manage to save the day for him thanks to some quick thinking. Hiro is returned and the status quo more-or-less restored when Ando augments Daphne's super-speed abilities so that she can travel faster than light.

Continuum

In the future, legibility will be sacrificed in favor of looking stereotypically futuristic (source).

Liber8's voyage into the past was discussed above, but Kiera Cameron ends up in 2012 by accident. Liber8 was supposed to Influence history; Cameron joining them wasn't intended by anyone involved. She just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time.

Were my calculations correct? Is this too heavy? Let me know in the DeLoreans!

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Anime You May Not Have Tried #1: 'Steins;Gate'

Genre: Sci-Fi/Drama    Episodes: 24    Rating: PG-13    Original Release: 2009

(Source)

Time travel has been a staple of science fiction ever since H. G. Wells wrote The Time Machine back in 1895, though even the most experienced writers struggle to use the plot device properly. This mechanism is often poorly used, as it remains a purely theoretical idea, leaving it up to the writer to define its limitations. Unfortunately, since most writers are writers first, this usually results in ill-defined rules that sacrifice coherence for drama and rarely remain logically consistent. Time travel is also a Pandora’s Box for fan theories: once introduced, it gets attached to every plot and character so that everyone is actually from the year 20XX trying to rescue their lover/assassinate the pope/stave off nuclear disaster/kill Hitler/save Harambe/whatever.

Given this, an anime adaptation of a Japanese visual novel should have the lowest probability of doing justice to something like time travel. Japan already has a proud history of sacrificing coherence for drama including, but not limited to, gender-flipping King Arthur and Nero as women for the purpose of romantic subplots (Fate Series), employing Lucifer as a part-time employee at McDonald's (The Devil Is a Part Timer), and anthropomorphizing the entire Japanese subway system (Miracle Train). Also, given visual novels’ penchant for harems and high levels of fan service, one could be forgiven for not expecting much from Steins;Gate. Thankfully, the show (for the most part) avoids these pitfalls to create an excellent narrative that easily stands as one of the best examples of the genre.

Steins;Gate is the tale of the members of Future Gadget Laboratory (actually just a small apartment) led by Okabe Rintaro, a self-declared mad scientist. He and his close friend Mayuri decide to attend a lecture on time travel where he discovers the dead body of scientific prodigy Makise Kurisu in a storage room in the building. Confused and alarmed, he returns to the building a few days later only to find Makise very much alive and well, with Okabe's friends having no memory of the prior events. Makise, being understandably bewildered by Okabe’s behavior, follows him and Mayuri back to the lab where, several days and much bickering, they discover that the old microwave in the apartment functions as a time machine, after they accidentally send a banana back in time. Naturally, they, along with resident hacker Daru, begin to work on improving the machine.

From left to right: Daru, Makise, Ruka, Faris, Suzuha, Moeka, Mayuri, Okabe

The plot is essentially divided into two parts, with the first twelve episodes introducing the main characters and developing them through what could probably be described as a slice-of-life comedy with some light sci-fi elements. The cast of characters and the overall story is fairly minimalist, focusing on the relationships between characters rather than on an epic plot. Admittedly, this leads to some slow pacing in the early going, as things take quite some time to set up. While this slow build up could be viewed as a negative, it is needed for the events of the second half to have impact. Thankfully, the characters feel human in their interactions, and even if the overall plot builds slow, individual scenes tend to be fast-paced with quick-witted humor.

It is this central dynamic between Okabe and his fellow lab members that comes to define their interactions in these scenes. Each character reacts differently to the protagonist, such as lifelong friend Mayuri, who plays along with the more outrageous aspects of Okabe’s character, versus the colder Makise's frustrations and tsundere personality. Others like Faris embrace the ridiculousness of his character and add their own personalities to each encounter with him. The show is legitimately funny, as the writers clearly let the individual personalities bounce off each other rather than force events or scenes for the sake of moving the plot along.

Over time, the characters grow together and work to better understand the power of time travel that has been granted to them. As they do, the shadowy internet presence of John Titor (surprisingly based on a real world conspiracy theory) acts as a guide to explain the mechanics and implications of what they are doing. The butterfly effect is in full force here as the messages the characters send to their past selves end up having unintended consequences (and we'll just leave it at that). With the help of John Titor, the group begins to discover that they are not the only ones working on time travel, and others do not have as pure of intentions as they do. These actions build up to a climactic confrontation between the two groups that leads into the second half of the show (and is best left unspoiled).

The Tip of the Iceberg

If the first half of the show is a slice-of-life comedy, then the latter half is a series of emotional gut punches and twists wherein Okabe works to undo the damage done by the group’s actions. The show veers into much darker territory as Okabe single-handedly attempts to protect his fellow lab members from horrible fates. The true colors of the characters are revealed, as those who were given the opportunity to change part of the past must be willing to make sacrifices in order to protect those they care about. Issues such as depression, abuse, and death are touched upon and many of the scenes in the tail end of the series are simply heartbreaking. The show works by making you care about the people in the story and them putting them through hell in order to see what they are made of. By doing so, it creates characters that feel real and go past their initial, often stereotypical, portrayals.

"Relativity Theory... it's so romantic. But it's just so tragic too."

Of course, this could all be undone if the viewer’s suspension of disbelief were to waver. Thankfully, the show plays it smarter than most time travel stories and sets hard rules on what can and cannot be done. Rather than give the characters a full-fledged time machine, early efforts are constrained by hard limitations that slowly open up. The theories the show subscribes to limit physical transportation and, rather than create stable time loops, the world shifts to and from a "base" reality, which simplifies what the viewer is expected to keep track of. Furthermore, due to the minimalist nature of the show, the future that is trying to be avoided is only described in vague terms, which builds suspense while preventing the writers from having to predict the future. Steins;Gate plays by the rules it sets up and doesn’t break them for the sake of earning the characters an easy happy ending (though many times you wish it would).

This is all helped by the fact that the show has fairly high production values. Odd camera angles are used to create feelings of uncanniness when the plot demands it and both the animation and writing are well done. References to Martin Heidegger, Don Quixote, and Casablanca reside alongside more modern jokes about the internet and nerd culture. Both the sub and dub versions are of high quality with J. Michael Tatum’s performance as Okabe in the dub deserving a special mention, as he appears to channel his inner William Shatner into some fantastic lines. Alternatively, the moments of gratuitous English Okabe in the sub are worthy of all the YouTube remixes they’ve spawned. Either way, you can’t go wrong, and will probably never view Dr. Pepper the same way again.

You tell 'em, Okabe.

The story is also more willing to stray from some of the painful “WTF, Japan” aspects that plague visual novels. The fan service is almost nonexistent and even parodied for good effect. While the visual novel had multiple romances available to the player, the show smartly plays up one relationship, while keeping the other female characters as friends (and well-developed ones at that). The show also benefits from condensing roughly thirty-some hours of content in the game into twenty-five half-hour episodes. The show covers a lot of content per episode, and even if things are moving fairly slow from a macro perspective, there are a lot of scenes and dialogue going on in the micro side of things. This isn’t to say that there aren’t some “Dang it, Japan” moments, such as the maid cafés, periphery card game tournaments, and an annoyingly androgynous character, but compared to some shows, this is a great starting point for someone who hasn’t watched an anime before and is concerned that the weirdness might turn them off.

Steins;Gate is a show that is essentially built for its second half, and anyone who begins watching the show should at least get to the initial twist before deciding it's not their thing. While initially appearing to be a standard anime with a colorful cast of characters and snappy dialogue, it moves far past its original premise to deliver emotional moments that are difficult to find in other shows. Every aspect of the show, from its characters to its writing have depth to them, and like many time travel shows, rewatching it yields a number of Easter eggs that explain the characters' motivations and thoughts in the early goings. While maybe not the most innovative show in terms of plot, by the end, the show is far greater than the sum of its parts and is worth watching for anyone with even a passing interest in science fiction.

Have a show you want to suggest to me? Mention it in the comments below!

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