Major Bill Allison flies the experimental X-80 into the year 2024 where a plague has turned most humans into subhuman mutants and the rest are mostly deaf, dumb, and sterile. Once there, the leaders of an underground citadel (not to be confused with the ITTDB Citadel) have plans for him to marry the beautiful telepathic (and possibly non-sterile) Princess Trirene, and thereby re-populate the world. But together with Trirene and a small group of scientists, he devises a plan to return to his own time and prevent the plague from ever occurring.

The flight to the future is explained by scientific gibberish that contains a high concentration of mumbo jumbo, but the gist of it is that the speed of Allison’s plane (around 10,000 mph) added to the rotational speed of the Earth plus the speed of the Earth’s orbit around the sun plus the speed of the Solar System around the center of the galaxy plus maybe another speed or two, managed to bring his total speed close to that of light, which brought him to the future. Apparently, reversing his plane’s path is all that’s needed to return him to the past (ideally with Trirene beside him).

A self-defeating act paradox is set up nicely (if Alison stops the plague, then the citadel in the, future won’t be there to send him back to stop the plague), but the issue is never explicitly discussed and the ending of the film is inconclusive on the matter. Nevertheless, I commend the film for being the first to raise the issue of time travel paradoxes, albeit in the background.

On his way home on the train, Jonathan Hughes meets Jonathan Hughes + 20 years and receives a warning that his marriage to a lovely young bride will end in murder.

Typical skateboarding teenager Marty McFly meets Doc Brown for the first test of his DeLorean time machine, but when Libyan terrorists strike, things go awry, Marty and the DeLorean end up in 1955 where his parents are teens, and the Doc of 1955 must now send Marty back to the future.

Cheryl Ladd plays Louise Baltimore opposite Kris Kristopherson’s Bill Smith in this movie adaptation of Varley’s novel (1983), although on-screen credit is given only to his earlier short story “Air Raid” (1977).

A faithful adaptation of Bradbury’s 1980 story of a man who returns to his warn his younger self about the future course of his marriage.

Somewhat self-absorbed 16-year-old Anna Green manages to fall for the first time traveler she ever meets, not realizing that he’s a time traveler or that he’s hoping his mission to 1995 will be a short-term affair.

Charlie may be at a playground, but this is no laughing matter. People have disappeared.

Time travel is implied right from the first episode of the CW’s rendition of The Flash where a newspaper from the future is seen in the closing scene. The rest of the first season builds a fine time-travel arc that includes a nefarious time traveler from the far future, a classic grandfather paradox with a twist (sadly not examined), a do-over day for the Flash (which Harrison Wells calls “temporal reversion”), and a final episode that sees the Flash travel back to his childhood (as well as a hint that Rip Hunter himself will soon appear on the CW scene).

Same pandemic backstory as the movie, similar names for the characters, no Bruce Willis, and a mishmash of time-travel tropes along with tuneless minor-key chords in place of actual tension and slowly spoken clichéd dialogue in place of actual plot. Random discussions of fate brush shoulders with an admixture of possible time travel models from narrative time (when a wound sprouts on old JC’s shoulder while watching young JC get shot), to skeleton timelines (JC thinks that his timeline will vanish if he succeeds), to a fascination with a single static timeline (you’ll see it in Chechnya) and time itself has an agenda. Primarily, we’d say that the story follows narrative time from Cole’s point of view.

By the end of the first season, one principal character has seemingly been trapped in the 2043, and Cole is stuck in 2015, having just gone against fate in a major way, but with a third principal character poised to spread the virus via a jet plane.

P.S. Whatever you do, whether in narrative time or elsewhen, don’t bring up this adaptation as dinnertime conversation with Terry Gilliam (but do watch it if you can set aside angst over a lack of a consistent model and just go with Cole’s flow).

After Barry aborts his mission to the past in Season 1 in order to prevent his own present from being erased, he finds that his travel has caused even bigger problems! Yep, a rift has been a-opened to a parallel world with an alternate Flash and an evil speedster and—it would seem—more time travelin’ and another attempt to save his mom and dad!

While on medical leave for his mental health, police detective Darius Lafaux is called back in to investigate a case that turns into multiple murders of men who look exactly like himself.

When time travel agent Kin Stewart finds himself rapidly losing his memory and stranded in 1996, he writes a journal of his life in the future and proceeds to break every rule in the book by creating a new life and family in his new present . . . until a retriever shows up in 2014.

Hanna Ginsberg—a young Jewish violinist in Germany during the rise of Hitler—awakens in a field in 1946 with no memory of the past decade.

Alas, Sean Carroll doesn’t pull any punches in his realistic assessment of the kinds of time travel that are or may be possible under the laws of physics as we know them in our universe. Or, as Professor Carroll himself puts it: “. . . podcasting isn’t for the squeamish.” In my layman’s understand of his most excellent explication, time travel aficionados have two physical phenomena on which to hang their Hat Things:

1. Time Dilation: Under the laws of Einstein’s special relativity, a fast traveler who leaves the Earth, zooming around for a while at near light speed before returning, will experience less passage of time than those who stay in the more-or-less fixed reference frame of Earth. How cool is that? Yes, you can travel as far into the future as you like, so long as you have a means of zooming up to a high enough speed and returning. (And according to general relativity, time dilation also occurs inside a high gravitational field, although I didn’t notice a discussion of this sort of time dilation in the podcast.)
2. Closed Timelike Curves: The second hope for time travelers are certain distributions of matter that (according to Einstein’s equations of general relativity) result in directed paths through spacetime in which a traveler along the path is always moving forward through time—and yet completing a full circuit of the path returns the traveler to the starting point in both space and time. That’s the good news. The bad news is that such paths, called closed timelike curves, might only be possible in the presense of infinitely long rotating cylinders or other physical conditions that may be impossible to engineer.

Up in the ITTDB Citadel, many of us found ourselves in a disquieted state at this point in Professor Carroll’s podcast (roughly the two-hour mark). Some went to bed early in a kind of daze; others decided it was time for a long walk through the lonely ice paths that surround the Citdel. But for those with the fortitude to keep their ears glued to the pod, there was a great reward. Carroll had already waded through the swift, waist-high currents of causality, predeterminism, free will, the A Theory of Time, the B Theory of time, and more. But now he was ready to dive into deep, uncharted waters. Yes, now he was ready to leave known physics behind, to talk about branching time that went beyond the Everettian Many Worlds of Schrödinger’s equation, and to consider what kind of a world would be needed to allow stories such as Back to the Future and Looper to consistently hold together. With this in mind, he devices a four-pronged theory that concludes with what he calls Narrative Time. For me, narrative time shares some features with the time model of Asimov’s The End of Eternity (a model that we call Hypertime in our story-tagging system), but it goes far beyond that.

Suffice it to say that when all the Librarians up in the Citadel woke from their sleeps and returned from their treks, we had a celebration that was strident enough to raise Lazurus Long himself from the dead (if he is dead, that is).

As we all know, when the world’s formost surgeon, Doctor Strange, lost the use of his hands in a car wreck, it prompted him to search out mystic treatments and eventually become the Master of the Mystic Arts. But what if he had lost something else in that wreck?

Despite having relativistic time dilation, actual time travel, and a nice treatment of various time travel tropes, the story of Buzz Lightyear (the movie character) who was the basis for Buzz Lightyear (the toy) fell far short of infinity in terms of plot and fun.

After stopping the JFK-induced apocalypse in Season 2, the six Umbrella siblings return to 2019 where they no longer exist and their still-living father has founded The Sparrow Academy in their stead.