So my long standing soap box against (alleged) “science fiction” and time travel has been begging for me to stand upon it yet again… and I’ve got two rants early this morning:

The first is The Tomorrow War, the Chris Pratt movie that has been picked up by Amazon to be released 2 July. The teaser trailer just came out a few days ago, and Amazon is really pushing it (via IMDB and elsewhere.)

Apparently there is a debate among the fandom industry as to why the producers decided to sell it to Amazon instead of releasing it to theaters (as originally intended.) Some blame the pandemic (which did delay it), others blame Pratt’s social image (he goes to a large and famous evangelical church and that made some twitter blowback over LGBTQ issues), etc. Other commentators say the producers moved it to Amazon simply because there is not enough buzz.

My suspicion is that it is simply not that good and the producers know it will flop at the theaters so they took the largest amount of money up front.

My more directed criticism, as a wanna-be art critic, is that The Tomorrow War is just another war-lust movie for war-addicted Americans. Americans love to believe that they are the saviors (intentional word choice) of the world, and the method of salvation is warfare.

Anyway, the premise of the story is that aliens (it’s always aliens) attack Earth in 2051, so human time travelers come to 2021 from 2051 to recruit help in fighting the war.

Time travel in the service of glorifying war.

The problem with the premise, as others have pointed out, is if people in 2051 can time travel (back and apparently forward), why recruit soldiers from 2021 to just take them back to 2051 to die, when you could come back to 2021 (or any date) and simply warn the Earth to start preparing?

Well, if that was done then one wouldn’t have ammo-sexual scenes with Chris Pratt shooting off his gun.

The trailer did not attract me to want to watch the show when it comes out. I’m also betting that it will get mixed reviews at best.

My other gut reaction is that this is yet another time-travelers-come-back-to-save-the-future show. We’ve had so many of these now the past few years, mostly on failed TV series.

There is always a problem with time-travel stories. The writers almost to a person can’t seem to handle paradoxes and time loops etc. I’ve seen very few shows which have made serious attempts at tackling these problems.

And this brings up The Orville.

As a show I watched season 1, it was ok but not really my thing. The incel trekkies who lamented ST:D because of its “wokeness” gravitated to The Orville, which I thought ironic given The Orville is more proactively progressive than even ST:D.

Regardless of all of that, since season 1 left me a bit unmoved I didn’t watch season 2, until Hulu recently gave me another freebie month (they send me an offer-I-can’t-refuse about once a year). Having just finished watching the last two episodes of season 2, my time-travel soap box begged for my standing upon it.

Short discussion: The Orville ends season 2 by resolving a time-travel problem they created… but the writers didn’t work through the logic. What they ended up doing (though this is not part of the show but my extrapolation of their events) is putting the cast of The Orville into an infinite loop, though I am sure that when season 3 finally comes around all that will be ignored.

The fundamental problem at which all of these kinds of stories fail: writers don’t want the past to be the past. This was a particularly bad problem in Timeless , but the Orville suffers from it too.

When the writers pull a character from the past and put them with the character in the present, the past is already done. That is, simply the event of pulling a person from the past sets up consequences that have already happened. Now, this is the basis of the Orville season 2 story, wherein changing the past creates a different present. The writer’s problem in the Orville though is that they send the character back into their past again (from which they were pulled), and wipe her memory so she will stick to her original actions (and not the altered actions which are problematic.)

The plot hole here is that the writers don’t address what caused the problem to begin with: the pulling of the character from the past. So the event of pulling her from the past will re-occur, which means the whole story (problematic changes in the course of history) happens again. And then they will send her back again… and then the event of pulling her forward will happen again… and again… and again.

This is the problem of loops in time travel. If one doesn’t want to change the present, and that present includes pulling someone from the past (and this pulling changes the present), then leaving the present alone means the person will be pulled from the past… and so on.

These kind of problems are why time travel should be forbidden for stories. Any writer who wants to write a time travel story has to be especially well disciplined. And most writers (for scripts or short stories) don’t have such discipline.