So I went to see Men in Black 3 with my mum last night. It's kind of a family thing as we've always watched these films together since the first one came out when I was little. Anyway, I enjoyed the film quite a lot. It was good fun, the pace was kept up all the way through and I swear Josh Brolin is some reincarnation of Tommy Lee Jones (can you have a reincarnation if you're not dead? Probably not.). There was humour in the right parts and enough touching scenes for Will Smith to show that he can make himself cry like a real actor. All of these things I appreciated. Apart from the time travel.
I have always been a little skeptical of films and shows when they start using time travel. Men in Black films are not particularly known for their complicated and intricate plots so when I saw that time travel was going to be a major plot point, I was concerned to say the least. Because time travel takes a lot of explanation and exhibition. There are rules that need to be discussed, some sort of technology that needs to be explained yadda yadda yadda. It all gets a little tiresome. But it all started off well in MIB 3, the idea was simple enough - beware of spoilers from now on by the way - Boris the Animal went back in time and killed K before he could arrest the earlier version of Boris. So J has to go back and stop future Boris from killing past K. Ok, maybe not so simple but it seems like that in the film. And this is where things start going a little... wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey. The more I think about it the more annoyed I get with the plot. I know I probably shouldn't think too deeply about such a film but I say if you're going to use time travel try and do it in some sort of logical way. The main point that really got me ranting (much to my poor mum's annoyance) was a point in the final couple of scenes where J uses the time jump device to jump back 30 seconds in order to outsmart Boris and win a fight. A simple enough - and well-used - trick you might say. Well, yes, BUT in the scene, J jumps back with Boris and they find themselves in exactly the same positions as they were 30 seconds before except J now knows what Boris is going to do so he can beat him. But he's in the same body, as is Boris. Yet earlier in the film it's been shown that when one time jumps they don't re-inhabit their own body, they appear as a separate entity. So how can J just rewind time and re-inhabit his own body? The rules have already been set earlier in the film and this is a giant flout of those rules.
I probably didn't explain that very well but I doubt that I'm the only one who has noticed this. There were other issues, like why doesn't J remember K's face during his life after he meets him on the beach as a boy? Why doesn't Boris just use his own time-jump device to jump back again before he's killed? NONE OF THESE THINGS ARE EXPLAINED! And a child would notice them.
But this was really just an example I wanted to use. For me, there are very few programs or films that 'do' time travel well. There tend to be holes in the logic in just about every plot that you look at. The example that really comes to mind is SG-1's 'Moebius' episodes at the end of season 8. At the end of those episodes, it appeared that we had 3 different timelines. Do the original team end up dying back in Egypt 3000 years ago? Or is the team that we see at the end of the two episodes the one that continues in the show? If we go by the fact that they have the ZPM then it must be. But isn't that rather sad that we've lost the original team in Egypt somewhere? In their timeline at least. There were so many questions surrounding those episodes that we never got answers to. I get that they were a bit of fun and we got to see the actors stretching their legs a bit but I wouldn't be much of a nerd if I didn't ask these questions would I?
As writers seem to have less fear about using time travel is it necessary for them to set out the general rules that they're going to use with the time travel technology? Does the person using it go back or forwards in time as an entire entity or do they simply re-inhabit their own body? Obviously if they're going far enough back they can't inhabit their own body. But what then? Are there moral issues involved when you're changing someone else's reality? This was broached in Stargate: Continuum and it wasn't something I'd really considered before, but was interesting nonetheless. We obviously have the comical side of it as we see in Back to the Future with Marty and his mum. There was a nice little nod to that film in MIB 3 by the way.
I think as people become more stringent about what they expect from shows, writers are going to have to become more intelligent about using time travel and the set of rules they use with it. I realise that the exhibition and explanation of these rules wouldn't make for captivating viewing but I think they're necessary for a satisfying experience. You want to come away from seeing something saying "that was really clever" not "why did he do that?" or "he could have just done that instead".
I will give it the writers of MIB 3, there were a couple of lovely touches, such as the alien "Griffin" who could see all the possible timelines and their outcomes at once. He was a wonderful character and a really interesting addition to the story.
In future (no pun intended), I would love to see a well-thought out story that makes it clear what is and isn't possible with time-travel in that universe. But I think I might have to put my money where my mouth is when it comes to this. So... I will attempt to write a short(ish) fic for SG-1 that includes an element of time travel and see just how difficult it is to do and to do right. I will keep you posted. This could take a while...
