Okay peeps, let’s talk about this. Seriously.

I know there are a shit ton (that’s a technical term) of people out there that ADORE time travel. Stories. Books. Movies. Television shows. Whatever they can get their hands on. They eat up time travel in all forms. I’m not one of those people. I watch/read a few time travels In Spite of them being time travel based. Two to be exact. I watch/read Outlander, cause Jamie Fraser and The Flash, cause I was already watching Arrow – which is awesome, by the way. I ♥♥♥♥ Arrow.

Time travel is dangerous. We’ve seen Barry Allen cause ripple effects to the point that people are dead/alive when they weren’t before. Where the gender of a particular person is different than it was in the timeline previously. Every decision we make creates something entirely new, presenting others with decisions that they were not faced with in previous incarnations. Also, can we just talk for a moment about how The Flash’s identity and his secret lair is the worst kept secret in the history of the world. Everybody on Earth 1, hell, everyone on all the Earths knows where The Flash hangs his damned suit. People just walk in there like there’s no security at all. #WorstSecretEVER

The question then becomes, is time circular, linear, or neither? If you change something in one time line, does the original time line still exist or does it vanish? This is the problem I run into with Terminator 2.

Let’s refresh…

 

Okay. If all the hardware and the chip is destroyed, that damned kid should disappear. There’s no reason for the dude to go back in time and no way for Sarah Conner to get knocked up.

Where Terminator is concerned, Ross likes to argue that the future is inevitable and no amount of destruction of the Terminator would alter the course. Skynet was going to happen, no matter what. BULLSHIT. I call bullshit. You can’t argue that point and then watch The Flash and expect the exact opposite to occur. I get that Barry Allen is a superhero and we expect our superheros to persevere against all odds, but JFC, come on. We are talking about the fundamentals of the space-time continuum here.

I also understand that there is no small amount of suspended disbelief here, because – time travel. But this is not something that can be explained away with magic. #Magic

I like to throw that argument up to Ross all the time because there is no counter argument to magic.

I also understand that I’ve completely left Outlander out of this discussion and that’s not an accident. There is quite a bit of suspended disbelief in that one – independent of the time travel aspect of it. Christ-on-crutches, Jamie Fraser fights a bear with his bare hands in the middle of precolonial North Carolina in his mid-fifties and WINS! HE. WINS. Just let that one sink in for a moment. There are a few more instances that require your willingness to just believe. Clare and Jamie are on two different ships in the middle of the Caribbean (not close, by the way). Both get shipwrecked and find each other in the middle of the FUCKING ocean. Nope. Just no. Doesn’t matter though. #JamieFraserLove

There were plenty of half-naked pics of Sam Heughan out there and they’re worth a peek but this is just as good. I swear. It might be better. #KiltLove

We’ve gotten off topic from my epic time travel rant. Anyway, I won’t read time travel. It just pisses me off. An example is  The Time Traveler’s Wife. I’m not going to include a synopsis. You can find that at the link above. Long story short, this guy keeps going back to visit his wife through her life beginning when she was five. He keeps telling her how much she’s going to love him. This is, of course, super creepy and really a little stalkerish. Anyway, by the time I finished this book, I was pissed. I couldn’t tell if she actually loved him or if she’d been conditioned to believe she did. There was a bit of Stolkholm syndrome or brainwashing going on there. I’m not even sure which at this point.

So, this is my basic issue. Time travel creates more problems than it solves. More questions. More circular paradox possibilities. And, just downright confusion. So, in conclusion, I live by the statement that time travel is stupid.

You may disagree. I know plenty of people who do. Ross is one of them. Time travel has caused more than one lively debate in my house. I’m sure it will cause more in the future.