This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Mr Etaoin Shrdlu: Removed the Confusing Multiple Negatives pothole on the page quote, because there's only 2 negatives - hardly confusing to those with IQs in the high double digits or above.
Desertopa: I have to object to San Dimas Time being referred to as the only Time Travel trope that makes less sense than this. Stable Time Loop might seem weird to us, but it's actually supported by current theories, and there is nothing in current models to suggest that a chicken and egg scenario can't actually happen in real life.
Washington 213 Stable Time Loop doesn't make sense because if it turned out that you caused what you prevented, why not just go back and do it again? Then you have a Timey-Wimey Ball, whichmakes even less sense. Well, San Dimas Time isn't the only one that makes less sense, but it comes damn close.
Desertopa If you went back and did it again, you'd just end up making further contributions that you didn't realize were necessary last time, leading to the same results. This would necessarily continue until you took the hint and gave up. Besides, current models predict that time travel to the past actually can occur, but only with such extreme difficulty that it is unlikely that such a situation would ever arise. A Stable Time Loop might be accomplished by sending electrons back in time, but humans are pretty much out of the question.
Dark Sasami: In El Hazard The Magnificent World the main character and company is sent to El Hazard by Ifurita. They meet her in El Hazard, but as an enemy who doesn't remember them. After a Face Heel Turn, Ifurita rescues everyone from a time-space distortion weapon, and realizes that she must be caught in it in order to go back in time in order to start everything.
Isn't that a Heel–Face Turn? I'm double-checking before I change it, because I never watched the TV series, and using pro wrestling terms is not natural to me.
Susan Davis: Yes, that's a Heel–Face Turn. She started as a "heel," and ended as a "face." A Face–Heel Turn is the other way around.
Citizen: Regarding the reference to the "terminatrix" reprogramming Skynet, wasn't Skynet already up to no good from the very beginning (aka the global computer virus it was later turned on to fix)? And while I'm here, I hate it when this (bootstrap paradox) happens. >_<
Boobah: It could be worse. Sometimes it's a bootstrap paradox that gets fixed after the protagonists realize it's a bootstrap. And then after all the excitement, you get a "present" that shows how if they hadn't gone back in time to cause the problem they never would have had any reason to come near the problem. God, I hate Star Trek Voyager.
Medinoc: I have doubts about Twelve Monkeys. There indeed is a Stable Time Loop in Cole's past and memories, I don't think it is the structure of the film itself: IIRC, the whole virus incident is not caused by the time travel...
Inyssius: I don't see how the Prince of Persia example is a Stable Time Loop. I haven't played the second or third games, but the first one doesn't have a single Stable Time Loop; your Time Dagger is essentially overwriting in nature.
Redneck Rocker: I can't believe anybody hasn't mentioned the Planet of the Apes movies. If you watch them in order, I think you'll understand.
Kilyle: I've had on the back burner for a while a story in which two characters (call them Kyle and Amy) undergo a bit of temporal rearrangement that founds their love. At the start of the story, Kyle is a villain and Amy a hero (part of a team). Later on, Kyle does a Heel–Face Turn and then travels to the future to be part of a team of former villains undergoing a type of rehab. He returns to shortly thereafter. In the future, Amy, who already loved him, managed to slowly open his heart, and he fell in love with her and married her. So when he travels to the past, he's in love with her, but she still thinks of him as a villain who can't be trusted. His patient love wins her over so that she falls in love with him, which is the foundation for her later winning him over. So what started the love? I adore this storyline.
I feel like Continuum should be mentioned here somewhere. Admittedly it's a tabletop RPG in the D&D sense, not the usual scope of this wiki...however, all the play involves the time traveler characters making sure time loops work out okay. http://www.aetherco.com/continuum
Listen 2 Reason
Some mention might want to be made of that subspecies of time loop, the "closed timelike curve" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_timelike_curve
Nerdorama: Cut:
- Why hasn't anyone mentioned the Futurama movie, Bender's Big Score? The whole movie is about time-traveling and the repercussions!
Wasn't this subtly mentioned in one of the Star Trek movies? Sort of? In Star Trek present, Mc Coy gives Kirk a pair of reading glasses as a present. Then they travel to the past. Kirk sells off the glasses in order to get cash...thus suggestion the glasses never had a true origin, they just existed in a looop.
Scroll down half a page.
Blork: Removed this
- The South Park two-parter episode "Go, God, Go" played with this trope in some different ways. In what can be seen as a breath of fresh air, when Cartman uses a phone with time-traveling properties to accidentally change the past, it actually changes the future subtly (the styles of dress are suddenly different, architecture has changed, and the robotic dog has turned into a robotic cat). Nobody notices this, however, since the change happens 500 years in the past, so to them, nothing changed at all.
Because the whole point is that the time travel was changing the past, at no point is anything resembling a loop created.
Does this count? http://www.starslip.com/2008/08/07/thanks-heinlein/
- So, because of quantum, even if you replay the exact same starting outcome, the results will always be different. You know what that means? Stable time loops can't exist forever. Instead, more and more improbable circumstances will pop up until *something* gives and the loop is no longer workable. It may take four lifetimes of the universe, but eventually nobody's going to go back, and the time loop is over. [1]
Removed the following:
- The Justice League episode "The Once and Future Thing" subverted this. At one point Batman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern head to a Bad Future version of the Batman Beyond universe in order to keep space-time from crashing to a broken, screeching halt. Future Bruce Wane, now an arthritic cripple who's mentoring a boy named Terry Mc Ginnis to be the new Batman, meets current Bruce Wane along with Wonder Woman and Green Lantern. After Terry remarks that everything will be okay because young Batman survived to become old Bruce Wane, old Bruce responds calmly, "Flawless logic. Except that I have no memory of meeting my past self."
Given that "The Savage Time" had already demonstrated that time travel was not of this variety, Terry's reference is more of a Lampshade hanging than a subversion.
