The Working File

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
Burnt Norton, of Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot.

While waiting for that other story about killer robots to come back for its last half-season, I’ve been watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on Fox.

I enjoy it, but I’m not sure what I think about the series’ treatment of time travel.  Lots and lots of spoilers below, and since I don’t try to give all of the necessary background to explain what is going on, all of it makes probably no sense unless you have seen most everything — at least the movies.

Some Background
Most people are familiar with the grandfather paradox in time travel theory and fiction.  Simply put, its posits that somebody goes back in time and kills his or her grandfather before he sires the time-traveler’s mother or father.  That would theoretically prevent the time-traveler from being born, which would in turn prevent the time traveler from going back in time and killing the grandfather, which would mean the time-traveler would be born and be able to kill the grandfather, etc.
The Terminator series, starting with the first movie, has played with this paradox and similar ideas, without ever directly taking a position on how they are resolved.

The First Movie

The first Terminator movie featured an inversion of the grandfather paradox.  Skynet sends a Terminator killer robot, in the form of Arnold Schwarzenegger, back in time to the 1984 to kill John Connor’s mother, Sarah Connor, before she gives birth to John, or is even pregnant with him.  The John Connor of the future sends back one of his most trusted associates to protect Sarah from the Terminator. That associate, Kyle Reese, ends up becoming John’s father.  So, if Skynet hadn’t sent back the Terminator to kill Sarah, then John would have never sent back his friend Kyle, and John would never be born. So John’s conception — his very existence — only takes place because he already exists in the future.  The movie never takes a position on how this paradox resolves itself, and it doesn’t have to.  Most viewers recognize the paradox, but just accept it.  The story line also suggests, at least indirectly, that any attempt to alter the past in order to affect the future will fail.  This issue keeps coming up in later movies and in the television series.1

T2: The Second Movie

Released seven years after the first movie, Terminator 2: Judgment Day inadvertently introduced a new concept to the series’ conception of time travel: that time in the future moves parallel to time in the present.  Here is what happened: for various reasons the second movie is set 10-11 years after the first movie — when John Connor is 10 years old.  But when the writers took advantage of advanced CGI (due to the 7 years of real world time passage) to introduce the T1000 liquid metal terminator played by Robert Patrick, they chose to explain that development by stating that time had passed in the future as well, so that this was a new model not available when the original movie took place, that is, when the two time travelers of that movie left the future.
Of course, there should be no reason for the future time-travelers to choose to go back to a date in time equidistant from their first effort, but apparently they did so.  I always wondered why the machines didn’t send the T1000 back, again, to 1984 to try to kill Sarah, again, befoe John was born.  He could team up with the original Terminator.  As a movie, I understand that would be hard to pull off, and perhaps less compelling, but I was disappointed that the movie never tried to address that issue.

Beyond that, the movie’s interaction with time travel, and the relation between Time Present and Time Future, is directed mostly on the ability of those in the present to change the future.  For most of us, our ability to do so is taken for granted.  But for characters in the Terminator universe, who know the future, their ability to alter that future and avoid Skynet’s genocide is uncertain.  Nonetheless, it becomes Sarah Connor’s obsession and the primary focus of the movie.

First, we, and the characters learn that the remnants of the original Terminator from the first movie become the building blocks for the technological advances that make terminators and Skynet possible.  This parallels the inverted grandfather paradox of the first movie, and in this instance we learn that Skynet and terminors make their own existence possible through time travel, just as John Connor did.   Then, Sarah, John, and the good Terminator destroy all physical manifestations of that technology, and they maneuver the key scientist responsible — Dr. Miles Dyson — into committing heroic suicide.  Finally, the good Terminator allows himself to be destroyed so that he does not leave behind anything that could be used to advance the creation of Skynet or killer robots like himself.

Of course, the only way out of the paradox is to posit that, at some point in the cycle, humanity invented the necessary technology on its own without any help from the future.  Destroying the technology that traveled in time merely eliminates a shortcut.  But the characters never seem to consider this, and the movie ends with the implicit conclusion that the future holocaust has been averted successfully.

T3: Rise of the Machines

I’m not a big fan of this installment in the series, and I’m not alone in that assessment.  One thing I disliked is that it essentially undermined the point of the first movie.  I understand that sequels usually have to undo some of the victory achieved in their predecessors in order to create conflict and a story, but I really resent it when they are heavy handed in doing so, nd fully undermine their predecessor.  In this case, T3 basically takes the position that you CANNOT escae a future destiny based on your knowledge of what will happen.  As the movie unfolds, John Connor eventually discovers that all of his efforts to prevent Skynet’s creation and genocide were always futile.  He never had a chance, and the clues that seemed to lead him to Skynet’s core actually led him to a military bunker from which he has the ability to not only survive the genocide, but to become a leader of the resistance.  All of his efforts to prevent Skynet only put him in the position he always knew he was destined for.  Essentially, the entire point of the second movie was voided.  The only thing the characters in that movie achieved was to keep John alive — which was probably inevitable anyway.  The destruction of technology and the death of Miles Dyson were for nothing.

Television – Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
This series “solves” the problems created by T3 by creating an alternate reality in which T3 never happens.  It is all set up in the brilliant first episode, in which yet another killer robot is sent back to kill John, now in high school in the mid-90s, and yet another good Terminator is sent back to protect him.  The good Terminator directs the Connors to a bank safety deposit vault that was set up decades earlier with technology that could create a time machine.  They use it to propel themselves roughly 10 years into the future to the present day, and in doing so they avoid all of the events that take place or exist in the back story of the third movie, including Sarah’s death from cancer.  In addition, the time machine back story basically eliminates the whole parallel time passage that I indicated was inadvertently set up in T2.  Somebody went back to the 1960s to rent and fill the safety deposit box with the technology and their ability to do so indcates that future time travelers can go back to any point in time that they desire.  It also sets up the one thing that bothers me about the series, which is that our world, our “present” world — whenever that is — is apparently populated by multiple people and robots from the future.  Lots of ‘em.

At various times during the first and second season of the series, Sarah, John, and their good terminator run into the following people or robots from the future, some good and some bad, and some of uncertain motives:

• the Terminator sent back to kill John
• John’s uncle Derek
• John’s uncle’s girlfriend Jesse
• a T1000 liquid robot who seems to be working on creating Skynet through AI research
• a robot sent to kill people who become John’s associates and helpers in the future
• a future collaborator sent back partially as a reward and partially on a mission, which might be just to make sure his younger “present” self ends up in the prison where he survives the Judgment Day holocaust
• a robot sent to acquire raw materials to build more robots in the future
• a girl who secretly become’s John’s girlfriend for uncertain purposes (but we know she is working with the uncle’s girlfriend)

Plus, in the preview for next week’s episode, we are shown a picture of somebody from the 1920s who also is apparently a time traveler (unless the preview is a big fakeout, which is always possible).

There is a lot going on, as befits a series in contrast to shorter, self-contained movies.  The main characters are trying to save John, save other targets of Skynet, and prevent Skynet’s creation (if possible).  The motivations and goals of several characters are unclear.  Overall it is very satisfying, but the overpopulation of time travelers is starting to wear thin.  After so many failures, why do the people and robots of the future keep sending scarce resources back in time when it so obviously has little or no effect?  In particular, if Skynet exists, and knows it exists, why does it feel compelled to keep sending back agents to create itself?  It had to happen, and there’s no reason to lack confidence in that eventuality.
In last week’s episode, Complications, one possible answer was suggested.  Jesse captures the collaborator from the future who had/will torture Derek in the future.  It is a part of Derek’s past, but he has no memory of it.  This leads Derek and Jesse to contemplate that by coming back to the past they have already altered the future, such that — since they left at different times — Jesse effectively left from a future that was altered from the future that Derek left.  They didn’t really discuss, and the the show did not make clear, whether this means there are multiple universes and timelines running simultaneously, or whether Derek had altered a single future.  In fact, the show has not established whether this theory is accurate at all.

Despite these issues, or maybe because of them and the complexities hey generate, the show is pretty compelling, and I highly recommendt it.  In particular, if you were turned off by T3, the show is a very fresh start.