my biggest pet peeve in tv specials or movies set in the universes of pre-existing tv series or straight-up movie sequels that deal with time travel or parallel universes is when they only focus on a certain subset of events or characters.
take, for example, the shrek franchise. in first movie, shrek saves fiona from the tower, falls in love with her, and defeats farquaad. in the second movie, shrek gets entangled in a plot set in motion by fairy godmother to put prince charming in power and ultimately disrupts it with his ragtag group of friends and acquaintances. in the third movie, shrek gets arthur in power against the wishes of prince charming.
in the fourth movie, shrek blows off all his character development of the past three movies. that part i’m semi-okay with. the problem i have is that after rumpelstiltskin makes the deal, shrek finds himself in a parallel universe in which he never existed, he never saved fiona, and rumpelstiltskin dethroned fiona’s parents because they wanted to break her curse. the plot wasn’t bad, and served as a decent way to officially end the series, but there’s just a little something they neglected to remember. three somethings to be partiuclar. FARQUAAD. FAIRY GODMOTHER. PRINCE CHARMING.
if shrek would have never existed, let’s go piece by piece and character by character. donkey would have gotten captured and sold into slavery. farquaad would have sent more knights to the castle because shrek would have never showed up to the tournament and kicked the knights’ asses to the tunes of ms joan jett, until prince charming showed up and either a) died, or b) saved fiona (and probably killed dragon). either way farquaad would still be a fairly large (*snickers*) influence on a sizeable portion of the land away from the kingdom of far far away. charming would have saved fiona (or died, which is unlikely seeing as charming is very skilled despite being kind of a douche), and thus negating her parents’ need to make a deal with rumpelstiltskin in the first place. fairy godmother would still be a player in far far away regardless of charming’s fate. nothing would have happened to arthur, which makes sense for him not to have done anything in 4, but since 3′s only redeeming feature was justin timberlake that doesn’t matter. the point is, without shrek, we’d have farquaad, fairy godmother, and /possibly/ charming and by extension /possibly/ fiona all getting in the way of rumpelstiltskin’s plot.
furthermore if we’re going by the basic principles of time travel, the rumpelstiltskin who signed the deal with shrek in the beginning would immediately cease to exist if shrek no longer existed, and shrek would enter a new universe in which he never existed. even IF farquaad, fairy godmother, and prince charming ALL didn’t have any relevance for some reason or another, the rumpelstiltskin in this new universe had everything going the exact same way up until the point where he made the deal with fiona’s parents and then gained a huge amount of power. this could apparently only happen in a universe in which shrek never existed, so how in the ONION LOVING FUCK did rumpelstiltskin recognize shrek from an alternate timeline, but NOT HIS TRUE LOVE FIONA??? or his best friend donkey, blah blah blah. sure, you can explain it all away by saying rumpelstiltskin is magical and has awareness of the different resonances of alternate dimensions and parallel universes, but even so, are you telling me that fairy godmother, who was a very successful businesswoman in the potion-brewing business, would have simply stood by and let rumple have the throne even though she was obsessed with giving it to her son charming? since she was fiona’s fairy godmother, WHY THE HELL DIDN’T SHE DO ANYTHING IN SHREK 4??? she didn’t even show up as a gddamn cameo appearance. what i wanted to see was a redemption arc for fairy godmother and prince charming, or at least alternate dimension versions of themselves? that would have made shrek 4 so much better in my eyes.
but let’s wander away from shrek to give a more comprehensive view on the subject that’s not clouded through meme-colored glasses.
in phineas and ferb: across the second dimension, the staple characters all meet their parallel universe selves. candace meets rebel!candace and she’s a completely different person because of the apocalypse brought on by their tyrannical dictator. we didn’t see stacy, which doesn’t matter, but what about vanessa. you’re telling me that evil!doofenshmirtz becomes ruler of the entire tri-state area and vanessa doesn’t want a slice of that pie? dark brooding teen doesn’t want any part of either a) helping an evil ruler or b) stopping an evil ruler because he’s, like, totes uncool to the max, man. [that’s how teenagers talk now, right?] surely vanessa, or even her mom, would have done or said something during the movie? really? you include pretty much every single other recurring character with major plot relevance and speaking parts (or clicking parts, in perry’s case), but not the daughter of the primary main antagonist? yeah sure, okay.
in gravity falls, which i’ve discussed previously, the time traveling bits don’t make a gosh darn lick of sense. i wrote a piece comparable in length to this one before so i’ll just sum it up here. dipper and mabel disagreed about whether to prevent wendy from dating robbie or to let mabel win waddles the pig. dipper asserted that his needs were more important and went forward a day to prove it. she was still upset about it. he went forward a week and she was still upset about it. he went forward a month and she had been overgrown by plants because she was still upset about it. then he went back to the point in the timeline’s divergence and let robbie ask wendy out so that mabel could win waddles. mabel then came running over to hug dipper and thank him for letting her keep the pig. even though when he returned to that point in the timeline, mabel had absolutely no idea that time travel existed. even if it was the mabel from the point in time where they went though the day and traveled back in time, they not only didn’t encounter their past selves because their past selves weren’t even there, but they also weren’t aware that they would fight that evening, or at least the evening of the final repeat where they began their fight and accidentally went back to the 1850s (and teleported spatially, apparently). there is no possible way that mabel would have been conscious that dipper had tampered with the timeline that she didn’t experience unless you apply some phlebotinum and say that people who have experienced time travel become cosmically aware of the resonances of alternate dimensions and parallel universes like my previously proposed postulation on rumpelstiltskin. that would explain why blendin, lolph, dundgren, time baby, and bill cipher in addition to our favorite twins could all tell what happened in timelines that did not happen to them. granted the episode’s codex said “not hg wells approved”, but since hg wells practically invented time travel in fiction (as far as i’m aware) and even then he fucked up his own works using the critical lens of myself, who has never written anything of note. wait, ignore that last part.
alice in wonderland: through the looking glass featured time existing as an actual character, a walking talking breathing(?) entity, and lots and lots of time travel (including the whole “you can’t change the past” bullshit that people either conveniently ignore or go way out of your way to prove). it’s the headline for the following time travel trope that i fucking hate because it’s the most recent, and the trope is traveling through time while under pressure because you’ll miss a deadline, and showing up to a place and realising “OH SHIT I NEED TO HURRY” instead of getting back in the time machine and thinking to yourself “HMM, LET ME JUST GO BACK IN TIME LIKE AN HOUR AND KEEP MYSELF FROM HAVING TO BEAT THE CLOCK BECAUSE I CONTROL THE FUCKING CLOCK.” now granted in alice it can be handwaved away because Time the character was in tune live with the time clock of the universe, so it can be assumed that the amount of time experienced by Time the character is the exact amount of time that has to pass before anybody associated with him can travel to the time clock of the universe. but what about bill & ted’s excellent adventure, in which the LITERAL EXACT SAME THING HAPPENS?
the wyld stallyns had to hurry up to get to the phone booth to get the historical figures to do the project and steal the keys in a set amount of time. wait, what? okay but why not go slightly backwards in time in order to give yourself more wiggle room? i mean, CLEARLY they threw the “you can’t meet your past self or else time will be completely wiped out, forward and backward” (thanks, cave johnson and also through the looking glass) thing considering bill and ted met bill and ted [and i’m assuming george carlin’s presence is the lampshade for this exact dissection] already, so clearly there’s no danger in destroying the space time continuum, so why the hell not just move slightly backwards in time so they don’t have to worry about getting there in time. at least in back to the future they had a reason for it, in that the delorean had to be powered in order to work, so the drama of doc brown plugging in the wire in time for marty to hit the wire at exactly 88 mph at the exact point in time that the lightning strikes the clock tower was REAL DRAMA that’s explained in-universe, instead of being manufactured drama that causes naysayers and fellow theorybusters to eyeroll their way through science fiction. “oh no we showed up and only have five minutes to take the macguffin to the thingamajig,” if you instinct is “let’s run fast” rather than “let’s get back in the time machine and go back a few minutes so we don’t have to rush”, then you fail time travel 101.
some honorable mentions of things i’ve seen that have time travel but didn’t fuck it up too much in my eyes or at least had some semblance of reedeeming qualities. lost was confusing as shit to a person who hasn’t seen seasons 4-6 in years but the time travel was less confusing than everything else. doctor who does time travel extremely well except for when it doesn’t, but when that happens moffat is there to spew science fiction jargon and at least some semblance of sense and reasoning behind why you can’t just timey-wimey it all away (#timesandwich). meet the robinsons did probably the best job with time travel i’ve ever encountered: it’s such a good movie. terminator had causal loops but who the hell cares, causal loops are fucking awesome plot devices. evil dead 3- i mean army of darkness is different because ash simply went back to put a book away to prevent a war from happening, then fucking up and reading it and saying the seal wrong, causing the war anyway, then fighting in the war. groundhog day was about a guy caught in a time loop, not official time travel itself. austin powers 2’s major time travel happened within a few minutes of itself, and was just austin fucking up, going back, and fixing it. superman was over the top and not actually serious, but did actually end up with kal’el saving the city and then also saving lois. donnie darko did a good job explaining itself in the director’s cut for us scrubs who don’t have the time to watch a movie 60 times before it makes complete sense. pokemon had several instances of time travel that actually make more sense the longer it’s been since they came out (most specifically the movie with celebi, and the episode in i think it was battle frontier where may and meowth went to the tree with the volbeat and illumise to get a couple together). the butterfly effect was a very good, accurate depiction of how time travel is very risky and you can very easily fuck it up if there are in-story reasons behind why you can’t go back in time multiple times to the same place, instead having to go back further and further before eventually realising you have to either cut ties with a person entirely to avoid a lifetime of pain, or… kill yourself as a fetus… anyway… the lake house fucked up because the keanu reeves who died in her arms was still keanu reeves, who did not- could not have existed in the same spot at the exact same time twice over, unless he asexually reproduced himself and his clone was the one who died, and to be honest that’s a movie i’d really rather see. minutemen despite being a disney movie actually had a time fuck up induced black hole resulting in them ultimately undoing everything they just did because friendship is more important than the universe’s imminent destruction. next wasn’t about travelling through time, but seeing into the future. click, idiocracy, futurama, are all comedies and therefore are allowed to be a little loose on theory (plus the fact that they’re “all a dream” but actually controlled by christopher walken, and going into the future which doesn’t cause any weird shit happening). night at the museum had it for a joke and a product placement name drop. chrono trigger is a classic. braid was different in that it wasn’t hopping through time, just making it go forward and backwards. life is strange, turns out nothing you did matters but that doesn’t matter because it’s an open ended story where all you change is potential futures, rather than the past.
for my final series utilising time travel… red vs blue. spoiler alert. church time travels around all over the place and ultimately is the reason why things fuck up as much as they do. when he ultimately completes the time loop (after he waits for a thousand years in the doom universe for presumably the thirtieth time) and arrives at the point in time where the several dozen previous church incarnations all tell him that everything he’s thought of, is thinking, or will be thinking has already been thought of by the previous incarnations of church who arrived, before the next church shows up. all of these churches are in the same spot without the universe imploding so clearly there’s no threat to the space time continuum [unless you consider that church is a SPOILER ALERT computer program, in which case you fridge logic yourself out of a plot hole]. no events are actually changed, because they were always fated to happen because they already happened (like harry potter and the prisoner of azkaban with harry repelling all the dementors because he realised that he had done it already), so it’s clearly a stable time loop until that point in time according to everybody else besides church.
does anybody else share my thoughts and opinions about time travel? anybody notice this trope happening in other series not mentioned here? does anybody disagree with what i had to say anywhere? i’d like to hear supporting or opposing statements on any points that i make or series i missed, so that i can either hopefully be less critical of time travel fiction in the future, or be even more cynical and judgmental about people doing things differently than i would in terms of time travel because i’m just that pedantic.
