Over the last several months, I’ve been covering the time travel trope in science fiction movies. Its modern manifestation began with H.G. Wells’s novella, The Time Machine (1895) and the film interpretations it later inspired, along with the botched Terminator franchise. In this series of articles, I would like to explore the concept of time travel itself in more detail. My goal is to show what does and doesn’t work when it comes to time travel and why. How can a writer use the trope skillfully and what should the writer avoid.
Why do viewers accept a story premise?
I believe that the suspension of disbelief, which is one way to measure the quality of a story, is driven by stakes, that is, why the audience should care. This is also sometimes called the story question.
Image Credit: Olivier Le Moal – Stakes are manifested by clarity. I’ve recently been reconsidering my position on stakes. I am entertaining the idea that clarity is really the prime criterion for a believable story. It may even be what makes a story good or bad.
In my experience — especially while writing these Sci-Fi Saturday reviews — I’ve come to realize that plot holes always sprout in ambiguity. Usually, the writer has ignored something. He or she wants a visual or a particular outcome or a message and rushes to get to that point, leaving various matters unaddressed.
This is why plot holes are legion in propaganda pieces. One of the best ways to identify veiled propaganda is by pinpointing a random uptick in plot holes in an otherwise coherent series or isolated story. The studio or government or whatever sponsor is more concerned with the message than with continuity. Thus the work as a whole suffers.
Time travel technology as either soft or hard magic
Technology in science fiction serves the same function as soft and hard magic systems in fantasy. A soft magic system is one whose rules are vague. It can add an element of mystery to a story, suggesting a bigger world — think Merlin — or it can be a means of rescue for the story characters. So, let’s say that, instead of a time machine, we have a wizard who teleports people through time. The stakes involve getting to the wizard, in the same way that the protagonist would want to get to a time machine.
(The Time Machine, 1960)
We typically see this soft magic approach in plots where the protagonist has traveled into the future and needs to return to the past. The stakes (the story question) become whether the protagonist can return to the wizard or the time machine. How either operates is not important because the story question isn’t focused on the wizard or the machine so much as it is focused on the protagonist finding whichever one is needed.
In a hard magic system, by contrast, there are definite rules. The system works in a particular way, and understanding those rules is critical to the plot—think Harry Potter. The mechanics of the magic itself affect the story. Not every detail has to be fleshed out, but the ones that are fleshed out drive the plot. For example, a character must say the right word at the right time; otherwise, the big bag will say another word at the wrong time and crush the protagonist with an anvil.
An example of a hard magic-like system in science fiction can be found in the Matrix franchise. A definite rule of this technology, operating as a magic system, is this: a person who dies in the Matrix dies in real life. This shifts the focus of the story.
Neo doesn’t just need to reach the telephone to escape the Matrix; he must reach it before Agent Smith kills him. If Agent Smith kills him in the Matrix, Neo will die in real life. Hard magic systems add variables, which increases the intensity of the stakes, or the number of story questions. The audience must watch the protagonist solve not one problem but two: reach the phone, beat the agent.
What goes wrong in time travel stories
A key way things go wrong is that the writers try to conflate soft and hard magic systems. So, let’s return to the example of the Matrix. In the last film, Neo and Trinity are resurrected. The film never explains how this is done and tries to treat the mechanics of this robotic resurrection as a soft magic system. But this resurrection conflicts with the Matrix as a film, because the Matrix — which was created by the robots — is a hard magic system. The stakes are tied to the rules, and one rule in particular: the person who dies in the matrix, dies in real life.
Now, the audience is forced to conclude that the rules are lies. We can no longer trust what we are being told about the rules of the system, the rules that both the protagonist and the antagonist are using to accomplish their goals. To that extent, we disengage from the story because the information is unreliable.
A technological wizard could show up at any point and raise the protagonist back to life. So, why should the audience care? The stakes are gone. The story question no longer matters. The god in the machine can come in and reset the board any time it likes.
Resurrections in stories are not always bad
Game of Thrones for example, for all its problems, handled the resurrection of Jon Snow correctly by keeping the rules and natures of the gods in that universe vague. It was no guarantee that Jon would be resurrected a second time. For all the audience knew, the gods might’ve resurrected Jon just for giggles. Maybe he was an important figure in the plan; maybe they just wanted to watch him die again. No one knows.
A writer can handle a resurrection either by keeping things vague (soft) or add additional rules to explain why it can’t be repeated. For example, a writer might create a spell that enables a true love’s kiss to bring back a dead loved one once. After that, all bets are off.
But because the Matrix writers had an ironclad rule about how characters died in that world and spent so much time setting up the nature of the machines in previous films, this sudden resurrection brought everything into question. The film conflated the rules of the soft and hard systems. Therefore, the stakes of the last film were destroyed, the story question no longer mattered, and the suspension of disbelief was broken.
This brings us to how the soft and hard magic system rules were broken when it comes to time travel narratives in the Terminator franchise. I’ll talk about that next Saturday.
