Glargh. Time travel. Any typical TV story involving time travel makes my brain hurt -- but it especially bugs me when time travel is introduced as an INCIDENTAL technology, brought up every now and then. Like, "Assignment: Earth" (thank you, internet!) -- an episode from the Original Series that I watched in the past few months with Gwendel, and I was boggled about how the episode just starts with Kirk casually mentioning that the Enterprise has gone back in time for research purposes. No great big ordeal, no "we only have 1 in 100 chance of surviving this!" or whatever -- just: Boom. "Here we are in the past, folks! Moving on with our story...."
Or, in the movies, all you need is a Klingon bird of prey and a star to whip around, and then you're off to save the whales (and while you're at it, introduce a chicken-and-egg paradox by selling some technologies from the future and then arguing, "Well, who's to say he wasn't the one who INVENTED it?"). And I actually enjoyed that movie, by the way. But once you introduce the possibility of targeted time travel (even if there's some nominal risk involved), it becomes a sort of "elephant in the room" when the heroes are struggling with some disaster. Why can't they just go back and fix things? What stops them? What is the justification for NOT doing it more often? And, if it's simply that our heroes are too PRINCIPLED to do such things, what is going to stop the various other races who are just as technologically advanced -- but who are decidedly LESS principled on such matters -- from doing it first? How in the world could a war between Klingons and the Federation persist for any appreciable amount of time, when all it takes is one or more crazy starship captains to whip around the nearest sun to go back and do any number of things to alter history to one's favor?
If time travel is this accidental, uncontrolled thing (temporal anomaly of the week, anybody?), I can deal with it to a certain point. But ... temporal cold war? It seems that the only way one couldn't bring that to a swift (very swift!) end would be due to a complete failure of imagination, or some major retcons to the "Star Trek canon" about how time travel works.
And, yes, I could just say, "It's ONLY A TV SHOW!" But when I cross that line, I just cease to care, and that doesn't give me much incentive to keep watching. And, besides, it's much more fun to just grouse about stuff. :)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2014-06-26 12:21 pm (UTC)Or, in the movies, all you need is a Klingon bird of prey and a star to whip around, and then you're off to save the whales (and while you're at it, introduce a chicken-and-egg paradox by selling some technologies from the future and then arguing, "Well, who's to say he wasn't the one who INVENTED it?"). And I actually enjoyed that movie, by the way. But once you introduce the possibility of targeted time travel (even if there's some nominal risk involved), it becomes a sort of "elephant in the room" when the heroes are struggling with some disaster. Why can't they just go back and fix things? What stops them? What is the justification for NOT doing it more often? And, if it's simply that our heroes are too PRINCIPLED to do such things, what is going to stop the various other races who are just as technologically advanced -- but who are decidedly LESS principled on such matters -- from doing it first? How in the world could a war between Klingons and the Federation persist for any appreciable amount of time, when all it takes is one or more crazy starship captains to whip around the nearest sun to go back and do any number of things to alter history to one's favor?
If time travel is this accidental, uncontrolled thing (temporal anomaly of the week, anybody?), I can deal with it to a certain point. But ... temporal cold war? It seems that the only way one couldn't bring that to a swift (very swift!) end would be due to a complete failure of imagination, or some major retcons to the "Star Trek canon" about how time travel works.
And, yes, I could just say, "It's ONLY A TV SHOW!" But when I cross that line, I just cease to care, and that doesn't give me much incentive to keep watching. And, besides, it's much more fun to just grouse about stuff. :)