Time travel's journey into the mainstream took longer than you might have expected.
Now, the concept of characters getting displaced in time is actually way older than the first official time machine.
There are plenty of fairy tales about people going to sleep somewhere unusual and waking up hundreds of years in the future.
And on top of that, Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" from 1843
features Scrooge getting bounced around his past and future by a series of increasingly menacing ghosts.
But, broadly speaking, time travel in its modern form was codified in 1895, when H.G. Wells published "The Time Machine,"
a story about a genius inventor who builds a machine that allows him to travel forwards or backwards in time,
and uses it to explore a disturbing future Earth full of cannibalism and other fun stuff.
After that story established the concept, time travel and time machines started showing up in a wide array of science-fiction literature,
but it was mostly used as a way for stories to explore either future what-if scenarios
or the existential ramifications of time travel itself.
The next big jump in the development of time travel as a literary concept came with Doctor Who when it premiered in 1963,
initially pitched as an endutainment show that would use the Doctor's time machine to explore famous moments in history.
Obviously, that didn't last long, and the show quickly moved in more fantastical directions
with the resident time machine facilitating wacky alien adventures all across time and space.
But despite its mainstream appeal nowadays, Doctor Who was firmly in the "Weird Nerd" end of the spectrum back in the day,
and time travel was still fairly far removed from the mainstream audience,
until the mid-80's, when Terminator and Back to the Future came out back-to-back.
Terminator uses time travel as the premise for an inciting incident, wherein a killer robot and a rebel soldier
both travel back in time to respectively try to murder and protect the mother of the future rebel leader,
while Back to the Future actually centers the plot around the mechanics and potential consequences of time travel.
Both movies were met with mainstream success, and consequently, they brought time plots into the mainstream too.
After that, time travel started showing up in a lot more contexts.
Now it's practically a trope in and of itself that a kid-friendly cartoon show will have at least one episode
where the main cast travels either forwards or backwards in time.
We'll get to stuff about that later.
Now, time travel as a concept is fairly simple but incredibly broad,
and time travel stories come in a lot of different flavors,
but in general, they're initially defined by how risky time travel is.
Most time travel stories lie on a spectrum:
one end of the spectrum is "time is completely static."
In these stories, time can't be changed no matter what;
if you do travel back in time, no matter what you do, the present will be unaffected
because whatever you do is what always happened.
This is how they handled time travel via Time Turners in Harry Potter.
The other end is the polar opposite, where time is frighteningly malleable
and everything you do in the past can and will have catastrophic lasting consequences.
(Like, how they're handling the CW Flash.)
There's a commonly-used comfy middle ground where some stuff can be changed,
but big events are fixed and can't easily be messed with without catastrophic consequences.
Doctor Who usually plays around in this zone because it's the least restrictive option.
On the far ends, either nothing your characters do matters,
or everything is so ridiculously fragile that if they do anything crazy their timeline falls apart.
Now even when restricted to a single point on that spectrum,
time travel is still a really broad concept.
It covers the full space of stories involving exploring the past or future,
stories centered on trying to change the past or future,
alternate/ lost timelines,
temporal paradoxes, and basically everything under the umbrella of moving forwards, backwards, or sideways in time.
But time travel is also a pain for writers--
it's very easy for a story to fall apart if the time travel component isn't handled very carefully
or if it isn't handwaved convincingly enough.
Let's look at the first Terminator movie for a second.
There are two time travelling characters with two different motivations:
the Terminator was sent by evil, worldspanning A.I. Skynet, which is motivated by self-preservation.
Its greatest enemy is John Connor, so it sends the Terminator back in time
to try and prevent John from ever being born by killing his mother, Sarah Connor.
John Connor, meanwhile, sends his friend Kyle Reese back in time to protect Sarah from the Terminator,
but the situation is complicated by the fact that
Kyle Reese ends up sleeping with Sarah,
and, well... (*cue timey wimey plot twist*)
...turns out he's John's father,
and future!John obviously knew this (awkward).
So, if the Terminator had never been sent back to prevent John from being born,
Kyle wouldn't have been sent back,
he wouldn't have been there to sleep with Sarah,
and John would never have been born.
And this is from a good example that broadly holds together!
In the canon of the first two movies,
Skynet and future!John Connor clearly think they're in a time-travel paradigm where the future can be changed,
but the events of the plot demonstrate that they're actually on the far end of the time travel bellcurve
where time travel always results in stable time loops.
Hell, by the end of the first movie
Skynet is officially on track to be responsible for its own creation!
They don't maintain this paradigm in any of the sequels after Terminator 2;
they all involve explicitly changing key events in the timeline,
and we'll get to that in more detail later.
Stuff like this is why most authors are afraid to be creative with time travel;
it's easy to create a scenario that falls apart if you look at it too closely.
So, while time travel stories can be very creative,
the time travel plot component is usually pretty well-trodden.
Now, this isn't bad, but it isn't good either.
Being uncreative and safe is morally neutral.
We'll take apart some more creative examples in a bit.
First, let's talk about some of the pre-fad time plots that see major use nowadays.
One of these plots has these two variants that are structurally identical--
It's either: "We went to the future and everything sucked!"
or: "Someone changed the past, and now the present sucks!"
In both cases, the aim of the story becomes
"Go back in time and fix whatever caused that timeline to suck."
This is usually a fairly short storyline on the order of an episode or two
in an otherwise not-time-travel-ey plot,
but some stories butt convention and make this the main plot.
(Lookin' at you, Samurai Jack).
The time travel component of these stories is usually very simple and comparatively low-risk;
since the future is already messed up, it's less of a threat
that your heroes might ruin the future by changing it somehow.
In most of these stories, the main goal is to fix whatever ruined the future / present,
but the actually hard goal is getting back to the past in order to fix it in the first place.
Maybe the time machine's busted,
or the time portal's got a time limit,
or Aku the Shapeshifting Master of Darkness keeps breaking your portals, or whatever.
This basically gives the author the opportunity to maximize the amount of time your hero spends running around in the what-if scenario
where the writer has almost total creative freedom.
A related version of this trope is:
"Our hero tries to fix something in the present by going back in time and changing something
and then returns to the present to find that everything is ruined
and they have to go back again to fix whatever they broke in the past."
This almost always initially takes the form of the hero trying to prevent someone they care about from dying,
only to find that saving their life somehow ruined everything for everybody.
The most famous example of this is the Flashpoint storyline,
wherein in an attempt to save his mom from being murdered when he was a kid,
the Flash goes back in time and saves her,
but returns to a present that's way worse than it really has any right to be.
The Amazons and Atlantians are at war,
Bruce Wayne died as a kid and his parents became a very brutal version of Batman and the Joker,
Superman's been locked in a government facility his entire life,
and basically everything sucks.
Similar in execution but different in explanation is the "slipping sideways in time" plot line,
where your hero ends up in an alternate timeline, usually a bad one, and has to find their way back somehow.
In this case, the stakes are actually lower;
since this is an alternate timeline, our hero has no stake in fixing it.
And in fact it's usually not really... practical to fix,
since while in the "bad future" plot line usually all you have to do is prevent one key event that wrecks the future,
an alternate timeline can be ruined for all sorts of reasons.
The other big time travel sub-trope is basically "time travel tourism,"
where our heroes have ready access to a time machine to some variety and use it to hop around and see different eras.
These storylines tend to fall on the lower consequence end of the spectrum;
Having a casual conversation with Charlemagne the Great isn't gonna butterfly-effect you into never being born in this version,
in part because time travel tourism is usually used in comedy or edutainment
rather than dramatic object lessons on the dangers of playing God.
Then again, Doctor Who falls into this category,
but pretty much every season finale is based around some ridiculous time-destroying subplot taking over the universe
and needing to be technobabbled into submission, so it's not exactly a strict tonal definition.
There's a highly specific version of time travel that doesn't necessarily, really count...
...as time travel, but broadly fills the same purpose.
Somehow, your hero's conciousness has been transported back in time, and they're inhabiting the body of someone from that era,
frequently an ancestor, but not always.
If you're Wolverine, you get to just... stay as yourself.
While sometimes this plotline is used as a way for the character to alter the past somehow,
usually they have to make sure some event this person was central to plays out as it was actually supposed to
without this person inherently knowing everything that person did.
The inherent challenge of this scenario means this plot lends itself well to being used in tests of character.
Sometimes the hero has to do the right things or where they fail in some external mission,
but sometimes it's just a weird thing that happens in order to let the character and writer play around in a different setting.
And finally, there's a couple of very specific time plots that exist purely as fanservice.
The first of these is: "Hi, I'm a time traveling stranger and also your kid from the future,"
which usually exists to make the shippers lose their minds and for no other reason.
And then there's: "Through temporal shenanigans, the cast of this story has been flung forwards or backwards in time
in order to hang out with the cast of their prequel or sequel story,"
which is just a ton of fun for character crossover dynamics
that would be literally impossible by any other mechanism.
Now, a common thread through all these time plots is that storylines where someone travels to the past tend to be heavy on the risk of consequence,
but the stories about going to the future -- or to an alternate timeline -- tend to be almost totally risk-free and used for more creative fun.
There's a handful of self-explanatory reasons for that,
the most obvious being consequences propogate forward in time,
so messing with the past can affect your future, but messing with the future really can't,
and of course there's also the fact that we have a pretty concrete idea of how most of the recent past went
but the future could be pretty much anything,
so there's a lot more creative freedom playing around in the sandbox of the future than the well-documented river of the past.
But broadly, the future is safer and easier to write in than the past because the author has almost no restrictions.
So let's take a second to talk about the freedom of the What-If scenario.
At this point I've used the phrase "status quo" so much in these videos
I wouldn't be surprised if it got chosen as the trigger phrase for a sleeper agent assassin after my life,
but the fact is, authors create a status quo as they write their stories, but to a degree they're also restricted by it.
When you're filling in details and subplots on a story where you know where the characters have to end up,
there's only so far you can distort the status quo in the interim.
Characters you need usually can't die;
locations can't be seriously damaged or destroyed;
character arcs have to continue relatively uninterrupted;
the more of your story you build, the more limitations you put on yourself when if comes to filling in the gaps.
But there's nothing more liberating than the What-If scenario.
An alternate timeline or glimpse into the future works completely separately from any and all status quo.
Just take one of your characters, fling them into your What-If scenario,
and show off all the crazy ways their fellow main characters are totally different in this scenario.
Maybe some of them are dead; maybe some of them are evil;
maybe the comic relief characters have turned into hunky badass crime-fighters;
There's a reason why the concept of an alternate universe is so popular in fandom.
It's really fun to imagine familiar characters in unfamiliar contexts
and explore how their personalities and dynamics change to adjust.
Stories like this give the author the opportunity
to play around in the space of hypothetical futures and alternate universes
and distort their characters and story arcs as much as they want
without any lasting consequences for the main storyline.
Although, I wish people would stop using the altnernate Nazi dimension so much.
There are other altnerate histories, you know. Be creative.
Why can't we go to the world with all the blimps, for a change?
So, these are the main ways time travel shows up in stories that aren't about time travel.
Like, time travel happens,
but most of the story isn't directly related to the time travel.
In stories where time travel is central to the plot, things get complicated.
So, let's talk about the Terminator franchise.
Like I said before, and, like pretty much at least everyone alive today knows at least vaguely,
the central conflict of the Terminator franchise is grounded in two opposing forces
trying to either prevent or guarantee an apocalyptic A.I. awakening by means of time travel.
Skynet, the apocalyptic A.I. in question, keeps sending killer robots back in time
to kill John Connor or prevent him from being born.
John Connor keeps sending people and/or re-programmed killer robots back in time to stop them (Skynet's killer robots).
Like I said earlier, Terminator 1 and 2 have a pretty simple and concrete kind of time travel.
They think the future can be changed, but all evidence suggests
that the time travel works on a stable time loop system
and whatever the time traveler does is always what always happened anyway;
Kyle Reese is sent back in time by John Connor,
and in the process fathers John Connor.
That alone is pretty iron-clad evidence for the stable time-loop thing.
But none of the sequels follow this paradigm.
In Terminator 3 and The Sarah Connor Chronicles,
judgement day has officially been pushed back by the actions of the protagonists;
and in the Sarah Connor Chronicles, Sarah and John get jumped forward in time to 2007,
when Sarah is supposed to have died of cancer in 2005.
And everything gets COMPLETELY messy with Genesis...
je-NEE-sus...
...je-NIE-sus...? (Umm...)
which, aside from being a generally bad movie overall, (IMO)
manages to rewrite the entire timeline of all of the movies
by having John Connor send a Terminator back to protect a young Sarah Connor
before Kyle Reese even arrives.
Now, while this is a fascinating premise for a Terminator what-if movie with a ton of potential,
it doesn't work with the system they've established.
Either time travel can change the past, or it can't.
In Terminator 1 and 2, it can't;
in every sequel, it can.
Not so coincidentally, Terminators 1 and 2 were written by James Cameron
while none of the sequels were.
But this brain-hurting happens because Terminator demonstrates
some iron-clad rules of time travel, and then subverts them.
This issue can be avoided either by sticking to the rules of the time travel system you've established,
or by keeping everything wibbly-wobbly enough that you can play fast and loose with the rules.
And if my choice of vernacular didn't make this obvious already,
let's talk about Doctor Who. (oh, brilliant!)
Now, my experience with the series pre-2005 reboot is fairly limited,
but the show has a time-honored tradition
(SN: and, by the way, at this point just assume that
every time joke I make in this script is intentional
and I'm fully aware they're happenin')... anyway,
time-honored tradition of the resident time machine basically being a deus-en-machina
and a tool for the writer to do pretty much whatever the plot requires it to.
This usually involves traveling to the wrong time,
getting damaged or disappearing and leaving people stranded in the wrong time,
accidentally moving sideways in time,
getting huffy and shutting down when it's needed,
occasionally getting used in villainous plots to blow up half the universe and/or kill the Doctor,
and sometimes just having a mind of its own for funsies.
Most of the show happens in creative set pieces scattered around space and time,
but sometimes the writer needs a reason for why the heroes don't just get the heck out of there the minute they land,
which is why "temperamental time machine" tends to be what they default to.
Sometimes it's broken, sometimes it's inaccessible,
sometimes it's just being a pain.
For a show about time travel, Doctor Who actually has very few iron-clad rules
about the exact mechanics of time travel and what is and isn't possible.
This is because instead of demonstrating the rules of time travel with concrete consequences,
the Doctor has a tendency to just tell people what they should and shouldn't do.
Broadly, "tell, don't show."
And in this case, it works because it keeps things vague.
The Doctor doesn't let people mess with fixed points in time,
but this isn't because they can't, it's because they shouldn't.
Several episodes show people breaking his rules one way or another,
but it also shows that this has terrible consequences.
It's not that changing key points in history isn't possible,
it's just a bad idea with a variety of bad results.
Basically, Doctor Who has only one rule: if it (the fixed point in time) happened onscreen already,
then changing how it happened will result in a paradox,
and paradoxes are BAD.
(But we'll probably fix it with the TARDIS somehow anyway.)
Keeping things loose is a mercy on the writer, since it lets them get creative with their storytelling
without directly contradicting anything inherent to the pre-existing worldbuilding.
The biggest difficulties writers encounter when handling time travel are at opposite ends of the bellcurve.
Either they play it too safe and the plot ends up being incredibly generic,
or they get too creative and wind up playing fast and loose with their own internal logic.
The first makes boring stories, the second makes confusing stories.
Striking that balance between rigid internal logic and creative execution isn't easy.
The other major problem time plots have trouble with
is the scale of the stakes involved.
Journeys to an apocalyptic future or an alternate present
frequently feel totally non-threatening, since they have no impact on the status quo,
while it can be very stressful for your audience to watch your hero casually gallivanting around in the past
with zero regard to consequence or butterfly effect.
Maybe it's just me, but I always get really tense whenever some errant protagonist
goes stomping around in their own past and the story pretends like this isn't a big deal.
Or worse, when the story tries to treat it like a big deal but the characters don't.
(take a moment to process, everyone.)
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