"Back There" Twilight Zone

I have recenly watched a Twilight Zone episode, "Back There". In the episode, a man, Corrigen, is playing cards with some friends of his, discussing time travel and wondering if they could change major events in history. Corrigen leaves the table, and accidently runs into William, a servant. They both apologize to one another and the man leaves the house. Then next thing you know, he has travelled back in time, without a machine. He goes to his home to find that the date was April 14, 1865, the day Lincon died. He tried to warn someone, but he ended up in jail. A man came and took Corrigen with him. The other man told him that he helps with people who are mentally ill. The other man offers a drink to Corrigen, and later Corrigen realizes that his drink had a drug that made Corrigen not able to walk and warn people. The other man gives Corrigen his hanky, and locks him in the room. The hanky has the intials JWB, John Wilkes Booth. Corrigen passes out. A man comes in and finds Corrigen and Corrigen wakes up and the man tells Corrigen that he believes him and that they need more people protecting the president. As soon as they were going to do that, they hear from the street someone screaming about Lincon being shot. It was too late. Corrigen then walks around town and travels back to the present. He runs into another servent and asks where William is. The servent says that he knows no one with the name of William on the servent team. Corrigen goes back to the table with his friends and they ask why he is back so soon. He becomes confused but shakes it off. One of  the men says something about another man with the name of William and Ta Da! there is William with fancy clothes and such. William explains how his great grandfather went around town trying to tell people that Lincon was gonna die. No one where he got the info, but he became very famous in the police world making him very rich. William has inherited his money, and is now rich and not a servent. THE END. This episode shows that people cannot change big events, like Lincon getting shot, but people can change little things, like William. I have noticed that this occurs a lot in time travel. This episode also shows that you do not need a time machine to go back. We mostly think of time travel with a time machine and Corrigen went back in time without a machine and came back perfectly fine. So if we wanted time travel to happen right now, would we need a time machine or just us? Come back ASAP for more fun with time travel!

"A Kind of Stopwatch" Twilight Zone

Watching "A Kind of Stopwatch", I did not think it was time travel; it was more of pausing time. The basic plot line of this Twilight Zone episode was that a man got a stopwatch from a stranger at a bar, and whenever he clicks the button on it, it pauses time. It seems like fun at first, but then he drops and breaks the watch when the world was on pause, making the world forever paused and he is the only thing that is not paused. Uh oh. If he the only person moving, how would he survive? Would the plants still grow so that he can grow his own food so that he can survive? Would he  go crazy (I am assuming he would because I know that I would)? Hmmmm. This episode shows us that if we think that time is a fun thing to manipulate, that things can go wrong when we have too much fun, and if we misuse it. Misusing anything always turns bad anyway, so why misuse it in the first place? Because it makes a good movie, book, and/or television show. And that is how the world works, misusing things for fun and ending up with bad results, just like the Twilight Zone episode. If the dude did not think that he could do whatever he pleased, the world would never have stopped. It is as easy as it sounds. If the guy would just listen to my advice, the world would never have been paused. Until next time!

"The Skull" Short Story

I have just read "The Skull" by Phillip K. Dick. I really enjoyed this story almost as much as “The Sound of Thunder”. The main character, Conger, is given a chance to get out of jail if he agrees to go back in time and kill a man who would later change the world. Conger agrees to the job and is sent back to 1960 in the U.S. All he has to identify the man is his skull, hence the name of the short story. Conger goes around a small town and gets strange looks from the residents, because no one recognizes him and they question why he is there in their small town. On the day that he is supposed to kill the man with the skull he has, he realizes that the skull he has is his own, because he will change the world because he is a time traveler. The last line of the story goes like “Smiling, Conger awaited a death foreordained.” I think that is a great way to end the story. It is an ambiguous ending, but it isn't at the same time. This theme in time travel seems to occur a lot along with going to the past and changing one thing and going back to the present and things being messed so they go back and fix what they changed the first time so everything in the present goes back to normal. What I mean by this theme is going back and finding out that you do something that makes the future the way it is. I have noticed that most of the time travel entertainment pieces don't have ambiguous endings. And if they do, they aren't like "OMG what is gonna happen?". It's more of the "I can totally guess what would happen next." thing. Come back soon!

"Father's Day" Doctor Who Episode

I have recently watched the Doctor Who episode "Father's Day". Time travel plays a big part in the plot line of the episode. The Doctor and Rose go back to the day that Rose's dad dies. Before the car can hit her dad, Rose saves her dad. Saving her dad messed up the timeline of all time. Since that has happened, some creatures, called Reapers, have come and eat people. If they want the Reapers to go away, they must repair the timeline of all time. But before they can do that, the Doctor gets eaten by a Reaper. But before he is eaten, he tells Rose not to hold her past self, this would create a paradox. She holds herself anyway, thus making the Reapers come and eat the Doctor. Rose's dad realizes that he must die in order to make Time right. He goes and is hit by a car that was supposed to kill him in the first place. The car was stuck in that time because it needed to hit her dad in order to move on. Rose goes by his side and watches him die. This is very depressing but it makes the Reapers disappear and the timeline is restored. What I have noticed in all the time travel short stories, tv shows, and movies is that people go back in time and make one small change and the future ends up not how it was before. So the people go back and fix it making everything better in the past, present, and future. I wonder why this occurs often in time travel entertainment pieces. You could do a lot more than doing the same thing over and over in different movies, tv shows, etc. Why not trying to travel to the future and bring a person back? How would that affect the present? The future? Time travel is more than traveling back, so why not make movies about traveling to the future? They could be as equally good or maybe even better than the ones about traveling to the past. 'Til next post!

"Sound of Thunder" Short Story

The short story “Sound of Thunder” shows what can happen when time travel goes bad. The story is about a Time Travel Safari that goes back in time to when the dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. The safari goes back people are allowed to shoot and kill a dinosaur. The people who run the program are very careful that you don’t go back and screw up the timeline. They have made a path, and you can only walk on it because if you step and kill something in the past, it affects the whole future. They also go back before the safari to know which dinosaurs die and shoot a red paintball at it so when the safari comes; you know what you can shoot. One safari goes back and a man named Eckels goes on a safari hoping to kill a T-Rex. He sees a T-Rex and freaks out of the size of it. The two guides then go and shoot the dinosaur. Eckels accidently steps off the path and gets dirt on the bottom of his shoe. The guide Travis wanted to leave him with the dinosaurs because Eckels has stepped off the path and they don’t know if the future will change or not. Travis then orders Eckels to remove the bullets from the T-Rex because they cannot be left behind. The group then travels back to the future and finds that the future has changed, like the spellings of English words have changed. Eckels looks at his muddy boots and finds a crushed butterfly.  Eckels begs Travis to bring him back to the past so he can undo what he did. The next thing that happens is that Eckels closes his eyes and hears Travis shift his rifle, click the safety catch, and raise the weapon. The last words of the story are “There was a sound of thunder” This is an ambiguous ending because the reader isn’t sure if Travis kills Eckels or himself. This short story makes the reader think that would this really happen if humans tried to mess up the timeline of all time. Would we have the animals we know and love? Or would they have ever exsisted? What if we went back to the dinosaur age and humans were killed there? How would that affect the future? Blog post ya later! J

"All You Zombies" Short Story

The short story "All You Zombies" takes a while to get to the time travel piece of the story. But once it did, the science fiction elements came out. The thing that makes the story interesting is that the Bartender is the one who caused the Unmarried Mother’s problems. He is also the Unmarried Mother. The Bartender is basically everyone the story mentions. The title incorporates with the story because the Bartender is asking where all the copies of him come from.  All the copies are of him throughout time because he has travelled many times to the past and future. The basic plot line of the story is that a man walks into a bar, and tells the bartender about how he became a man. He started out as a girl named Jane. She was born and raised in an orphanage. No one knows who her parents are or where she came from. When she was seventeen, she fell in love with a stranger and he got her pregnant. After her C-Section, she found out that she has male parts along with her female parts and is turned into a man. She never got to see her baby because some man has stolen the baby. Jane becomes stenographer, and then a writer. That is how she got the name Unmarried Mother. The Bartender then shows her the time machine and how he was her/the young man/the baby etc. He then asks himself where did all you zombies come from because I know who I am. It then ends with him saying “I miss you dreadfully!” That is kind of an ambiguous ending because you aren’t really sure who he is talking to. The story was  confusing at first, but if you take time to think, reread, and discuss it with friends, it begins to make a little more sense. Until next time! ;D

Hey Followers!

Hello all my faithful followers! Welcome to my blog! I will be discussing what I read and watch about one of the great sci-fi themes, Time Travel! I hope you enjoy! Peace out! :D