Problems with Time Travel

I've recently started watching the show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I really enjoy it, and it has me thinking again about the things I love, and hate, about the Terminator series of movies. Most of it has to do with time travel.

So the premise of the original Terminator was that John Connor, the future leader of the human resistance against the Machines, has sent a soldier back in time (to the 1980's) to protect his mother Sarah from a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), sent back in time to murder Sarah Connor and prevent John from ever being born. The soldier (Kyle Reese is the character's name, if I remember right) does manage to protect Sarah from the Terminator, though he dies in the process. Just as important is the fact that he also fathers John Connor with Sarah during his time protecting her. So the future John Connor guaranteed his own existence not only by protecting his mother and maintaining his own safe arrival into the world, but also by providing himself with a father. (I don't remember if he knew, in the original movie, that Kyle Reese was his father.)

The original Terminator on its own stands alone very well. In fact you could say that the Machines made a big mistake by sending a Terminator back in time. Skynet must not have realized that you cannot change the past. By taking steps to change it, you only end up guaranteeing that it will happen just as you remember it. The same goes for the future, as Oedipus learned so painfully and so well. "Fate" is just the progress of time, and it is set in stone. Even those who don't recognize the providence of God typically have some notion of fate, and the idea that you can change fate is just a cheap fantasy that the original Terminator avoids. By sending the Terminator into the past, Skynet set in motion the chain of events that would lead to the birth of its arch-enemy! If Skynet had never interfered with the past, John Connor would never have arisen to oppose it. But of course Skynet had to do what it did, because the Terminator was a part of the past all along, and the past cannot be changed.

This beautiful arrangement is totally disrupted in the second movie, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. In this sequel, John and Sarah Connor, together with a reprogrammed Terminator, manage to keep Skynet from ever destroying the world in the first place. That's very nice, and I like to think that the nuclear holocaust of 1999 just never happened. Who would want it to happen? But by doing that, doesn't anyone realize that they've kept John Connor from ever being conceived? If Skynet never arises, then it never sends the first Terminator back in time to prevent John's conception, and if the first Terminator never goes back, then the future John Connor never sends his own father back, and so he's never conceived. John's existence depends upon the future playing out just as it always has.

Then there's Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, which I hated at first because Judgment Day turns out never to have been averted, just "put off" for a time. Now the inevitability of Judgment Day no longer bothers me--in fact I see it as a necessity--but what's all this about the future being "put off" temporarily? That's even worse. And yet again we have more Terminators being sent back in time to mess with the past.

Now we have this show, which I enjoy and find deeply interesting, but it brings with it all the same problems. It eschews the simplicity of the first movie and now we have virtually countless time-travelers messing with the past. It seems that in nearly every episode, someone or something has come here from the future to change his/its own present. If it's really possible to change the past, then there will be absolutely no end to this cycle. Skynet can always send more Terminators back, and the resistance can always send people and re-programmed Terminators to foil them.

I'm interested to see what happens with the new Christian Bale movie, Terminator Salvation. It seems that the future that John Connor faces is quite different from what his mother had told him about. How can that be? I guess we'll find out.

So in general, I get very frustrated with movies and stories that have people traveling back through time and changing the past. Frequency does the same thing. If Jim Caviezel's character has changed his family past, why doesn't he remember things differently? How can he remember a time when his parents were dead if he's changed the past such that it never happened? Time travel adventures depend upon the protagonist existing outside the normal progress of time. He alone remains unaffected by the changes he makes, and that only in certain respects.

There are two stories I've read/watched that handle time-travel well, though, as far as I'm concerned. One is the movie Twelve Monkeys (too depressing to be enjoyable for me), in which Bruce Willis's character as a child witnesses his own death as an adult--the grown-up Bruce Willis travels back in time to fail in foiling a terrorist plot that spreads a deadly virus world-wide, and his actions tend inevitably toward the scene that he remembers in his dreams. He manages to change nothing in the past, but the past depends upon his interference to progress in the way that it always has. The other story is the third Harry Potter installment, The Prisoner of Azkaban, in which Harry and Hermione travel back in time thinking that they will "change" things, but end up doing things that their past selves had already witnessed. And strangely (and interestingly), their actions are essential to make the present what it always had been, and the present turns out to have been happier all along than they'd realized. Delightful.

So I'd like to see more stories that recognize the past as totally unchangeable. The present and future depend upon it. I'd like to see a protagonist who influences the past with confidence, because he knows that whatever he does will result in the present that he already knows.