Time travel is a bitch my friends.   And while there is a very special place in my heart for the subsection of Sci-Fi that involves time travel, I can’t disregard the common stupidity thread that links many of them.   The problem increases when Hollywood turns a successful movie into franchise that they draw out endlessly.

Here is something I find myself doing all the time.  I try to fill in all the holes that are left in a movie when they are not expressed in the movie.  That way i can bridge these holes with my own imagination and fix the stupidity.  But when you make sequal after sequel it reduces the effectiveness.  With a fourth movie on it’s way we still don’t have answers to the obvious stupidity of the first 3, and the producers are too busy beating a dead terminator to care.

Give me your clothes, your boots, and your ability to disregard major plot points.

In terminator a robot is sent back into the past to kill the mother of a future human rebel leader.  The humans in turn send back to stop the robot.

Now left alone this movie is great, because I can assume that time travel is a very limited option.  Perhaps the robots need some kind of rare ore that makes time travel possible.  Maybe the process is lost and only a few one-charge time machines are left in the world.  It easily explains why only one was sent by the robots, and one human was sent by the humans.

Then they made a sequel. This time the robots of the future sent a more advance robot to kill the future rebel leader when he was a child, while the future humans sent a more antiquated robot into the past to confront him.

Here is where the idea all breaks down, and where many ideas when serialized break down.  Why not try the same thing twice.  Hell a robot is just a computer with legs, and anyone who’s seen a recursive loop knows that computer try the same action over and over and over until stopped.

Why send 1 robot to the 1980s and another to the 1990s, when you can send just send both robots to the 1980s.  Regardless of how much time has past in the future, if you can send a robot to the past, even if 10 years goes by you should be able to send another robot to that past.  Hell it works for Deloreans.  Why not have 2 terminators hunting Sarah Conner?

So my imagination goes into overdrive again to explain this.  Maybe there is a limited travel distance.  Lets disregard the TV show which has time machines sending thousands of robots and humans zipping around all over the time line, or that it has the ability to send multiple people, or that a time machine is something you can built with various parts found in a radio shack. Lets focus on the big 3 movies (soon to be 4).  Assuming that there is a 50? year time return limit, and that if said hotly contested time travel commodity took 15 years to recharge before could send another robot back.

Okay, maybe we have wrapped up some of the bigger questions while closing our eyes and avoiding all the smaller plot holes.  But no, we have movie number 3.

In this one the robots send an even “more advance” robot, while the human send back the far less advanced original terminator once more.  Why the quotes around “more advanced” you ask?  Because in this movie the robot is a combination of a hard metal skeleton, and the malleable super metal exterior found on the robot from the second movie.  So the robots decided it was a good idea to send a robot into the past with a nucleus that can be more easily crushed or exploded than the guy they send in the second movie.  I’m sorry robots, but unless the humans have another 10 foot wide cauldron of liquid hot iron, you guys don’t have to worry about changing up the formula.

This may all become irrelevant with the upcoming movie.  Maybe they find a way to explain the stupidity, but most likely they will just glaze over it and focus on killing robots in the future.  It’s become a running gag in media that time travel is confusing.  Well yeah, it is, but only because if you sit down and think about it there are 100 different reasons why what just happened should not have worked.  I could probably go on and on about things that could have been done differently with the power of time travel.  The problem is that in the movie, the robots didn’t.  Why are these walking neural net processors not able to think about all the possible choices they have?

Oh and one last tidbit about this nude mechanic.  This silly explanation that non organic matter can’t be sent back unless its covered in an organic matter?  Why didn’t they just send people back in time with laser pistol stuffed watermelons?

7 Comments »

1. i already said something on terminator but… in the loop you are talking about the computer repeats the exact same process over and over untill it is forcivly stopped, paused, or ended.

   Comment by William — December 10, 2008 @ 9:44 pm

2. Or, instead of a robot, why didnt the humans just send back a note that read “Stop building robots, they eventually kill everything. Sincerely, the future.”

   Comment by Chompy — December 16, 2008 @ 9:13 am

3. “Here is where the idea all breaks down, and where many ideas when serialized break down. Why not try the same thing twice. Hell a robot is just a computer with legs, and anyone who’s seen a recursive loop knows that computer try the same action over and over and over until stopped.

   Why send 1 robot to the 1980s and another to the 1990s, when you can send just send both robots to the 1980s. Regardless of how much time has past in the future, if you can send a robot to the past, even if 10 years goes by you should be able to send another robot to that past. Hell it works for Deloreans. Why not have 2 terminators hunting Sarah Conner?”

   What about this:

   By defeating the first Terminator, they’ve changed the future (e.g. delayed Skynet’s sentience for a bit*). Now, assuming that the robots have only time machine in the future, and that the machine in question can fire a single round back to the past, they could only send one robot back in time, right?

   Here’s the problem, however. IF Arnie the robot fails to kill Sarah, the future where he’s actually made and sent back from the “one shot machine” becomes unaccessable from that timeline. Instead, there’s another “branch of time” where Skynet gets to send another robot back in time. If that’s the case, why doesn’t the Skynet send another robot (actually first – and ONLY one – for them in this timeline) to prevent conception or actual birth of John Connor? That way, there’d be a slim chance of having TWO robots back in time, at the same time.

   * with Arnie the bot destroyed, and his parts scattered for the taking, I’d imagine that there wouldn’t really be any delay. This would actually speed up the time of Skynet’s coming to life. That is to say:
   no Arnie back in time = slow, normal development of what will become Skynet
   Arnie back in time, getting killed, parts everywhere = tech boost for people creating Skynet

   Comment by Joe Chip — February 1, 2009 @ 3:49 am

4. yes but sending tech back in time becomes an infinite loop of instant tech upgrade.
   If you send advanced tech into the past and they learn from it, then the place from where the tech comes will become more advanced, meaning the tech sent back is more advanced, advancing the tech some more, which would continue infinitely.

   The one way this could feasibly exist is if catching up to tech from the future, in the past would take a bit longer each time and so the advancement of tech would become stable for that period of time. BUT, then someone a few weeks/years/whatever could send back some MORE tech and start the whole thing over again, if this continued we would reach the same problem, an infinite increase in technology levels. Theoretically this would lead to an impossible level of technology, so either technology levels can only rise so far, OR my mind has given up trying to think this through any further…

   good night

   Comment by Huggy Bear — June 30, 2009 @ 6:08 am

5. i think i was supposed to finish with: OR time travel has, once again, been proven logically fallacious.

   but most of my arguements are so fallacious anyway that my whole point s no more advanced than when I started.

   Comment by Huggy Bear — June 30, 2009 @ 6:10 am

6. Your blog is great!! I’m loving to read it!! I don’t have much to add to you comments on Terminator movies. I’ve already seen T4 and it was all the way you said: the major plot holes were just overlooked and the movie focus on the cool skeleton like robots. If those robots were not so cool, this movies would suck big time.

   Comment by Human — October 19, 2009 @ 5:56 pm

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   Comment by Shadbaltdaf — August 28, 2010 @ 1:58 am

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