Future Day: Anatomy of a Hoax

This awesome hoax gives me a perfect opportunity to geek out, so I will jump right on top of it.

#1 - This shot floating around the internet is a hoax



#2 - In Back to the Future II, Marty goes to 2015. That's right, in the first one, he goes 30 years back; in the second, 30 years forward. They even discuss this later.

#3 - This screen shot doesn't even come from Part II. Pay close attention to PRESENT TIME and LAST TIME DEPARTED. Notice how one is only 2 minutes ahead of the other. This comes from the scene in Part I right after Doc Brown sends Einstein 2 minutes ahead in time.

#4 - What's that you say? Maybe July 6, 2010 is somehow referenced in Part 1. WRONG. As soon as I saw this, I popped in my roommate's DVD and checked it. Doc Brown inputs

July 4, 1776 - The signing of the Declaration of Independence
December 25, 0000 - The birth of Christ
November 5, 1955 - The night Doc Brown slipped on the toilet and invented time travel

There you go, debunked. Sorry to burst your bubbles. See you in 2015.

Awful Time Travel TV: Lana Lang Dies Then Doesn’t Die

[originally written for overtimecomedy.com on 9/21/07]

Part 5 of 5

This is it, folks. This is the reason I started this series in the first place. This is the TV time travel travesty to end all TV time travel travesties. The run up to the 100th episode of Smallville was an exciting time for fans of the show. We had been disinterested for a while, but they hit hard that Clark was finally going to tell Lana the truth, that he’s really a super powered alien from Krypton. The writers gave him no choice, he had to tell her. The writers, however, didn’t want to deal with the consequences.

So he tells her, and as a result she dies, so Clark goes to the Fortress of Solitude and gets Jor-El to reverse time to he can bring her back and not tell her. This pissed me off to no end. Time travel isn’t just a cheat you can use to write yourself out of a corner. Fuck you, guys, for taking a beloved story telling device and lazily use it to save your asses. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. I don’t even know what that means, but you can’t do it. No Green Arrow or Martian Manhunter or Aquaman’s going to make up for this one. You’re all dead to me, Smallville writers.

Awful Time Travel TV: The Evil Leaper

[originally written for overtimecomedy.com on 9/21/07]

Part 4 of 5

The basic premise of Quantum Leap was simple, Sam Beckett is the smartest man alive, so he builds a time machine to go back and fix things with his superior intellect. Then came the time travel gimmick to end all time travel gimmicks. They undermined the entire concept of the show by introducing the Evil Leaper. Really?

It’s somehow not enough that Sam’s charged with fixing every bad thing to happen ever. Now he has to face-off against some chick who’s equally as smart, but built a time machine just to fuck with people. Sam is no longer the smartest guy in the world, he’s just another dude with a time machine. Quantum Leap was a fully formed, 3-dimensional world, but the Evil Leaper was just flatly evil. She might as well have been a pirate or a witch or a pirate-witch for all the depth they gave her. Thank you, Quantum Leap writers, for ruining the best time travel show of all time. (Dr. Who fans, keep your disdain to yourselves)

Awful Time Travel TV: H.G. Wells on Lois and Clark

[originally written for overtimecomedy.com on 9/20/07]

Part 3 of 5

An alien pretending to be a human while he saves the city from villains and woos a beautiful reporter, totally believable. H.G. Wells showing up in a time machine chasing the evil time traveler Tempis, that just crosses the line. In the Superman movie, Christopher Reeve reverses time by reversing the rotation of the Earth and somehow that made sense. Dean Cain rollicking through the ages with his buddy H.G., that’s just pushing it. Come on Lois and Clark writers, try to have standards.

Awful Time Travel TV: Every Moment of Star Trek: Voyager

[originally written for overtimecomedy.com on 9/18/07]

Part 2 of 5

When it comes to time travel storytelling, Star Trek nailed it. Kirk has to let Joan Collins die so she won’t help Hitler. Picard gets ripped through time to save the universe from “anti-time” and tie the series together in a nice, neat package (and make me cry on a few occasions). The two best Star Trek movies were all about time travel. Even DS9 managed a good time travel two-parter by re-casting Sisko as the 21st Century’s MLK.

Then came Voyager. No kidding, like the third episode was a time travel story. Lost in Space managed the exact same premise as Voyager without resorting to cheap time travel every week. It got to the point where Janeway and her crew weren’t even impressed with time travel anymore. A traveler would appear from the future, and they were all like, eh, old news.

Then came the season finale. Basically, they ripped off themselves by copying an episode they had done earlier that season. You heard me, not just an episode from several seasons ago that they figured no one would remember, they repeated the exact same premise from just a few months earlier. I guess they figured no one was watching anyway. And they were right.

Awful Time Travel TV: SG-1 in the 1960's

[originally written for overtimecomedy.com on 9/17/07]

Part 1 of 5

In the Stargate world, there are wormholes secretly sliding through the galaxy, but apparently when one slingshots around the sun, uncontrolled time travel happens. What exactly is it about slingshotting around the sun that automatically leads to time travel?

Okay so, SG-1 is in the ‘60s. You may ask why, but the answer has a lot to do with seeing Teal’c in tie-die, driving a VW bus. Frankly the whole episode was just annoying. To make matters worse, they keep referencing this in later episodes. Seriously guys, just let it go.