"March Has 32 Days"

As we approach the end of the month of March, we should pause to reflect upon the comic book story "March Has 32 Days" and its relation to ABC's "Lost." You can read this four page story here from Mystery Tales #40, published in April 1956, at a blog dedicated to this very issue of that comic series. It was featured prominently in "Cabin Fever," the eleventh episode of the fourth season of "Lost," some of which takes place in 1956. (You can learn more about this comic book's significance in the "Lost" universe here, and as per a commenter below, here). Enjoy. And remember how many days has March.

The Week That Was (1/13 - 1/18)

Above: Summer Glau as the new model Terminator.

"3 billion human lives ended on August 29th, 1997. The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Judgment Day. They lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against the machines. The computer which controlled the machines, Skynet, sent two Terminators back through time. Their mission: to destroy the leader of the human resistance, John Connor, my son. The first Terminator was programmed to strike at me in the year 1984, before John was born. It failed. The second was set to strike at John himself when he was still a child. As before, the resistance was able to send a lone warrior, a protector for John. It was just a question of which one of them would reach him first," Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), narrating past and future events from her vantage point in 1991, in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).

This past week saw the airing of the first two episodes of "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles," a television reboot of the franchise which saw its first cinematic installment in 1984, its second in 1991, and its third in 2003. The title character and protagonist, Sarah Connor (Lena Headey), scowls her way through the first two episodes, all the while attempting to protect her son, John (Thomas Dekker), the purported future leader of an underground resistance movement. A new, younger model Terminator (Summer Glau, of "Firefly" and "The 4400" and apparently now doomed to second rate television science fiction) arrives to protect John Conner from the plethora of other Terminators pursuing various related and unrelated missions in the past. Predictably, there are inconsistencies between the new series and the films which came before, although they appear to arise mostly from the writers' laziness.

In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), viewers learn that Sarah Connor died in 1997. In fact, according to Wikipedia, her fate is sealed as follows:

In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Sarah Connor is already dead, having succumbed to leukemia in 1997, after the events of Terminator 2, following a three year battle with the disease. She lived long enough to see the original 1997 "judgment day" pass without incident. Her ashes were spread at sea while a casket containing a cache of weapons was placed for John to find at a false grave site. The epitaph on her mausoleum niche reads: No fate but what we make.

Thus, according to the official Terminator continuity, Sarah Connor dies of natural causes in 1997. In the new television series, this detail is overlooked and even ignored. The narrative begins in 1999 - two years after the supposed death of Sarah Connor - yet she still lives.

Steanso, writing over at The Adventures of Steanso, liked the series and wrote :

I thought that The Sarah Connor Chronicles did a decent job of maintaining the overall feel and flow of the Terminator movies (the small handful of clunky, dumb lines on the show were delivered by Terminators, sadly, but that's also kind of in keeping with the movies), and I was glad to see that the producers didn't try to "lighten up" the mood of the overall Terminator storyline. Some people will undoubtedly have problems with the casting of Summer Glau as a cute, young, female Terminator (I have my reservations about this as well), but the focus seems to be primarily upon Lena Headey as Sarah Connor, and I thought that she carried off the role of the paranoid warrior/mommy pretty well.

In the original two Terminator films, Connor is played by Linda Hamilton, far more intense and intimidating than Headey has revealed herself to be playing the same character. As aforementioned, the character does not appeared in the third film. Hamilton is 17 years older than Headey, and it shows. In fact, Headey was born in 1973, making her 11 years old at the time of the events of the first film and 18 years old and the time of the second. Hamilton, however, was born in 1956, meaning she was in her late twenties at the time of the release of the first film and approximately 35 at the time of the second film. Although the actor playing a character need not be the same age as that character, Headey looks young enough to call into question the timeline of the entire franchise, all the more parlous when a film is about time. (There is some question about when Terminator 2 takes place, in 1991, the year of its release, or sometime later in the mid-1990s, as John Connor, born in 1984 or 1985 as per the events of the first film, is ten years old at the time of Terminator 2: Judgment Day.).

Behold the evolution of the Sarah Connor character:

Above: Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) and Sarah Connor (Linda Hamiltion) in 1984's The Terminator.

Above: Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Above: Sarah Connor (Lena Headey) in 2008's "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" (which is actually set in 1999 at first, then 2007 after a leap forward in time).

The Week That Was (12/17 - 12/21)

The Week That Was - Time Travel Edition: True chronological snobs can now pay $220 for a replica of the flux capacitor from Back to the Future, a device which might have come in handy earlier this month for Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day (more about which here, here, and here). On a similar note, Wednesday of this past week saw the airing of the thirteenth and final episode of NBC's "Journeyman," the time travel drama starring Kevin McKidd as a San Francisco newspaper reporter who inexplicably travels backwards in time to assist those in need. Although I voiced some initial concerns about the series at the time of its premiere, "Journeyman" actually improved over the course of its run and developed somewhat of an interesting mythology. Though the narrative took some early missteps, and its theory of time travel was hardly consistent, it had potential, and thus, it is a shame that it has now been forever consigned to the ether by the network. There are those that say the network would never have aired all thirteen episodes had they not been desperate for original programming during the Writers Guild Strike (which still continues as of this blog entry). That, coupled with the premature termination of the awful second second from "Heroes" from the airwaves, is perhaps one of the few good things to be prompted by the strike and its aftermath.

Timeline (2003)

"The way I see it, we've got what, we've got 650 years of knowledge on these guys. If we put our heads together, there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to get out of here and home in 20 minutes," Chris Johnston (Paul Walker), noting the advantages of being a citizen of 2003 trapped in the year 1357, in the 2003 film, Timeline, based upon the 1999 novel of the same name by Michael Crichton. How's that for chronological snobbery? Would that time travel were possible; cinema-goers could travel back to 2003 and prevent the production of the uninspiring time travel movie, Timeline, based upon Crichton's novel but mostly cinematic cliches.

Above: Chris (Paul Walker) and Kate (Frances O'Connor) prepare to go to 1357.

The film's plot is relatively straightforward. Archaeologists working a dig at Castlegard, France make a curious discovery in a medieval monastery. In a room no one has visited in six centuries, they find a modern bifocal lens and a written plea for help from the dig's leader, the missing Professor E. A. Johnston (Billy Connolly), apparently trapped in the year 1357. To investigate, Johnston's team, comprised of his son Chris and archaeologists Kate Ericson (Frances O'Connor), Andre Marek (Gerard Butler), François Dontelle (Rossif Sutherland) and physicist Josh Stern (Ethan Embry), travels to the headquarters of ITC, the company has been funding their project. Thereupon, ITC officials admit that they inadvertently discovered a wormhole which can transport people directly to Castlegard in 1357. Professor Johnston chose to venture back to the past and has remained there long enough to lose his ability to return.

So, of course, his team opts to travel back to the past to retrieve him and return him to 2003.

What makes a proper time travel movie worth its salt is the presence of anachronisms, or depending on the nature of the story, parachronisms. Directed by Richard Donner, with a script by Jeff Maguire and George Nolfi, the film simply cannot capitalize upon its premise. Upon traveling back in time six centuries, the characters refuse to take meaningful advantage of their anachronistic knowledge and skills; they make but a few amusing remarks about what they observe in the past. So busy are they being chased by villains that the movie becomes just another a tired formulaic action picture which just so happens to feature time travelers.

One of several weak attempts at past/present misunderstandings is an exchange played for romantic comedy; Marek, after rescuing a Frenchwoman named Claire (the lovely Anna Friel, currently playing a twee sweetie on TV's "Pushing Daisies"), has the following conversation:

Marek: Are you, uh... married?
Lady Claire: No. We've been fighting the English since before I was born. There's no time for marriage.
Marek: Of course. Are you, uh... with... anyone?
Lady Claire: Am I with anyone?
Marek: Yeah.
Lady Claire: I'm with you.
Marek: I know, I know. What I mean is, is there, is there someone, is there someone... that you see?
Lady Claire: Do I see?
Marek: Yeah.
Lady Claire: [Looks around] Uh, nobody... It is possible they are hiding on the shore or... in the woods. They could be anywhere.
Marek: We're speaking the same language, but you don't understand a word I'm saying, do you?
Lady Claire: No.

Lady Claire (Anna Friel) endures the past, as we all must.

Most irksome, the theory of time travel set forth in Timeline is inherently inconsistent. On the one hand, the narrative suggests that the past cannot be changed, i.e. what is history will always be history and any interlopers from the future may only set in motion events which already occurred. In one early scene, Erickson, working in the present day, uncovers an apparently intentionally damaged mural in the ruins of the monastery and inquires what sort of a person could have perpetrated such wanton destruction. Later, in 1357, as she attempts to uncover a secret tunnel from the monastery to a nearby castle, Erickson learns that it was she herself, this time in the distant past, who destroyed the mural in the climax of battle, bringing about her own observation centuries later. In another early scene, Marek, in the present, uncovers an unusual sarcophagus which, among other things, features a carving of an occupant, who apparently lost an ear at some point during his life. Later, after being hurled into the past, Marek loses an ear in a melee and realizes that it is his destiny to remain in the past and later occupy the stone coffin. ("It's me, it's me!" he exclaims upon losing his ear.). Upon returning to the future, Marek's friends find the inscription on the sarcophagus, which confirms that it was indeed that of him.

However, the film contradicts itself when it decides that history can indeed be changed. Much ado is made of a battle between the French and the English, who are holding a French fortress at Castlegard on the very day the time travelers arrive. Apparently, as history originally recorded the battle, the English were overpowering the French until the English made the fatal mistake of killing Lady Claire and hanging her body from atop the fortress. This act, according to dialogue-as-exposition at the film's beginning, galvanized the French forces and ultimately resulted in the French victory and the destruction of the fortress. However, as the film progresses, Lady Claire's originally fate is forestalled by Marek, who saves her life and therefore changes history. Marek remains in the past, marries Lady Claire, has children with her, and their undying affection ends up as the art carving on the aforementioned sarcophagus. (Is a sarcophagus the best way to symbolize undying affection?) Yet the sarcophagus remains as it was at the beginning of the film, in the timeline in which Lady Claire died during the battle.

All of the evidence of their romp into the past was present in the archaeological record at the beginning of the film and before their trek, which nicely implies fate and that time travel is proof of predestination. However, the initial historical accounts of the battle cannot be reconciled with what actually occurs at the film's climax. Pick a theory, Timeline, and stick with it.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)

Released in 2003, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines lacks the solemnity of its immediate prequel, almost certainly due to the absence of James Cameron, director of the first two films. Coming twelve years after the smart and tightly paced Terminator 2: Judgment Day, T3 is a clunky action adventure picture which, like most modern sequels, worships at the altar of familiarity and attempts to remake certain sequences from its predecessors. Thus, the stakes are ostensibly higher, the body count is increased, and the villain's powers far greater.

Cameron dismissed this sequel upon its arrival in theatres. This was perhaps disingenuous of him, since his first major success as a director was making a sequel to another director's sci-fi action film. (Cameron took Ridley Scott's psychological suspense thriller Alien and produced its action-packed adventure sequel, Aliens.) Directed by Jonathan Mostow, with a script by John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris, the film's biggest sin, though, is not its new director but its many internal inconsistencies in the theory of time travel which governs the narrative.

In the film, viewers meet an older John Connor (played by then-child actor Edward Furlong in T2 by Edward Furlong, but now by Nick Stahl, later of HBO's "Carnivale"), yet the reintroduction of the machines from the future into his life is largely derivative of T2. Just as before, the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) arrives from the future, as does a newer-model liquid metal Terminator. This time, the new Terminator comes in the form of the T-X, played by the beautiful but untalented Kristanna Loken (several years before her stint on Showtime's "The L Word" and Sci Fi's unwatchable "Painkiller Jane"). Again, just as before, the T-800 is sent back to protect, while the T-X shares the same mission as T2's more advanced T-1000 (Robert Patrick): kill John Connor at any cost so as to prevent him from leading a future rebellion against Skynet's machine army. (The T-X is also programmed to terminate other young adults who are to become Connor's underlings in the future war .). Again, just as before, a chase ensures, during which the newer model pursues its victims in a large truck while the beleaguered T-800 follows and fights from a motorcycle. Sound familiar?

In his original review, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott summed up the film as follows:

For all the hype and the inevitable (and most likely short-term) box office bonanza, ''Terminator 3'' is essentially a B movie, content to be loud, dumb and obvious, and to leave the Great Ideas to bona fide public intellectuals like Keanu Reeves and the Hulk. Mr. Schwarzenegger, whose main contribution to American culture has been inspiring wicked parodies on ''Saturday Night Live'' and ''The Simpsons,'' acts (if you can call it that) with his usual leaden whimsy, manifesting the gift for uttering hard-to-forget, meaningless catchphrases that is most likely the wellspring of his blossoming reported desire to seek elective office in California.

Particularly irksome is the cameo of Earl Boen, who played a Dr. Silberman, a psychologist, in T1 who, by the first sequel, would become the sinister Ratchedesque chief of the mental institution in which Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) was confined. Boen's appearance is played for light self-referential comedy, the last refuge of a tired sequel's screenwriter.

By the film's end, Connor realizes that despite the world's apparent rescue from Judgment Day which came in T2, he is fated after all to survive an apocalypse and lead the fight against the machines, who were only delayed by the events in the last film. In sum, the film eschews the proper tone of a film about the quest to prevent a near-certain dystopian future, despite the fact that T2 maintained that feel with ease and aplomb.

The great internal inconsistency of T3 is its message on the concept of fate. Time travel films boil down to a single question: Are the time travelers from the future fulfilling their destiny to bring about the present from which they came, or are they interlopers in the past whose very addition into the time stream risks altering the future? In 1991's T2, viewers are led to believe that Skynet - the vast evil machine conspiracy - assumes control of the world's computers and mostly eradicates humanity sometime in 1997. The T-1000 is sent back in time by the machines to kill future resistance leader John Conner, and while the T-800 is sent back to protect him. Nevertheless, it is the future Terminator technology that allows Cyberdyne, a technology company in 1991, to develop what would become Skynet, thereby bringing about the very Judgment Day they were sent back in time to forestall. The grim future never would have - or could have - occurred but for the Terminators traveling backward in time. Thus, by doing so, the machines from the future are merely playing their assigned role by fate.

The characters in T3, particularly the T-800, acknowledge that Judgment Day had been postponed, perhaps averted altogether. Obviously, since T3 is set in 2003 and Judgment Day did not occur as allegedly fated in 1997, the future appears to be unwritten and can be changed by meddlers from another time. But since it was the very presence of the Terminators in the past which caused the events which would lead to Judgment Day, the film contradicts itself by suggesting that the time travelers from the future can prevent - or even just postpone - the only future which would have allowed them to be sent back to the past.

There were similar observation upon the release of T2. On November 12, 1991, Jesper Petersen, cross posting in the rec.arts.sf.movies and rec.arts.sf.science Usenet newsgroups, identified - correctly - the theory of time travel should have dictated the events of T2:

In the end of T2, we are supposed to believe that the future has changed, that there will never be a Sky-Net, and that everything has a happy ending. I say no. I think, that Sarah's idea about 'No Fate', that nothing is pre-determined is wrong.

If the terminator succeeds in preventing John Connor from being born, there will never be any time travelling, hence the need in the future for sending back Terminators will not exist.

This will eliminate the possibility for Sky-Net to be build [sic], because all the basic work for Sky-Net, was based on the first Terminator.

My idea is this: The future is set. There's no way to alter it. By trying to change the past, you only secure the future. You cannot change the past, by travelling back in time, simply because the future has already happened.

The idea is proven by the fact, that it was the first attempt to change the past, that actually became the basis for Sky-Net (the remaining chip). So by trying to change the past, people trying to do so, only secure it.

On July 25, 1991, Brad Templeton, cross-posting in both the rec.arts.movies and rec.arts.sf-lovers Usenet newsgroups, identified the different theories of consistent time travel:

There are two primary schools of consistent time travel. In consistent time travel, when everything settles down, there are no discontinuities, except for the exit and entry paths of time travel itself.

Note that all methods of time travel, except the deterministic style, involve at least two time dimensions. Normal time, as experienced by us, and t', the dimension in which time travel takes place. Ie. there was a t' before you went back in time and changed reality and a t' after you did this.

Some of the consistent theories:

a) Deterministic -- all follows a set plan. You went back in time and you always did and always will. While back in time (or in the present) you follow the path of destiny, it can't be changed. In theory a discontinuity is consistent with this time of time travel, but then you have an inconsistent universe.

b) Change your own past, change your present (with possible delay)

b1) If you make a change that causes a discontinuity/paradox, you vanish and your travel is undone, or you simply can't make such changes (fate conspires to stop you)

b2) You can make such changes (such as killing your grandpa) but they take a while to be propagated forward, so you have a chance to undo them. If you don't, poof.

b3) You can make such changes, erasing the world you came from, but you continue to exist because you're back in time. I consider this an inconsistent scheme because it leaves you there as a causeless discontinuity.

c) Change the past, create an alternate time-track

You don't change the world you came from, you create another one, possibly barring you from returning to your original, possibly not. Both (or many) continue on. In one SF story, you created an alternate world for yourself only by going back in time, the rest of the universe ticked on. (The protagonist faded away to a ghost)

d) Cause and effect abandoned

This is inconsistent TT. There's a lot of it, although much of the classic TT, such as "by his boot straps" is actually deterministic TT.

...

Terminator 2 is of type B3, an inconsistent type. Skynet created itself, a Skynet created Terminator helped destroy Cyberdyne.

(Emphasis added).

Templeton, by the way, is known for founding ClariNet Communications Corp., starting the newsgroup rec.humor.funny, and suing Janet Reno over the Communications Decency Act. In 1992, he wrote "No Award," a short story featuring his own personal theory of consistent time travel (to which he alluded in an unquoted portion of the above 1991 Usenet post).

T3's film's climax, as well as a subplot involving John Connor's relationship with veterinarian Kate Brewster (Claire Danes), suggests that fate cannot be overcome and the inevitable can be delayed but not defeated. But it can't be both ways: either the future is unwritten or it is not. Future history merely being postponed is a weak middle ground. Accordingly, the film remains not just a mediocre action flick but also inconsistent in its theory of time travel.