Tomorrow's Worlds: The Unearthly History Of Science Fiction (2014) s01e04 Episode Script
Time
1 At its heart, science fiction draws on our most extravagant fantasies.
Imagine if we could journey to unknown galaxies.
Imagine if there was life on other planets.
But perhaps the greatest fantasy of all is one that, I think, at some level, we all share.
What if you could turn back the clock and relive your childhood? What if you could rewrite history and avoid all those mistakes? What if you could see what was coming, could see what was just around the corner? What if you could travel in time? - MAN: - I think it's just aa really .
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deep kind of humanthought, you know.
What if? What if? The story of time travel is a fantastic voyage.
We are going to plunge into the past and leap into the future, with a cast of intrepid time travellers and an array of extraordinary machines.
A small wooden box that opens up into extraordinary, magical, impossible places.
Yet for all its possibilities, time travel is fraught with danger, and writers and filmmakers have shown us nightmarish visions of the future The whole concept was, "The future is old.
" .
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and the dire consequences of meddling with the past.
If you change the past, the present becomes a logical impossibility.
Throughout the history of science fiction, from the Victorian novel to the Hollywood blockbuster, there has never been a more seductive idea, a greater source of wonder or a more formidable foe than time itself.
TICKING CHIMING Approaching the matter of time in science fiction is not a question of where to start, but when.
Our story begins in 1895, in the dancing firelight of an elegant dining room.
We find ourselves among a group of eminent Victorians, relaxing after dinner at the home of a well-known inventor.
And as the evening wears on, he begins to tell them about his extraordinary new contraption - a machine that can travel in time.
And so begins HG Wells's great novel, The Time Machine, one of the cornerstones of all science fiction.
Wells's description of his inventor's machine was actually pretty vague.
So when his great-grandson Simon Wells directed the story for the screen in 2002, he dressed it up with the latest Hollywood special effects.
But it was on the printed page that this tale of an explorer who travels thousands of years into the future first captured the imagination.
The Victorians were fascinated by discovery.
Their explorers had mapped the dark heart of Africa, their scientists had unlocked the secrets of evolution, and now their obsession with spiritualism was leading them towards the frontiers of the beyond.
So perhaps it was no surprise that they were captivated by the story of a pioneer striking out through uncharted territory not in space but in time.
"I gave it a last tap, "tried all the screws again, "put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, "and sat myself in the saddle.
"The laboratory got hazy and went dark.
"The night came like the turning out of a lamp, "and in another moment came tomorrow.
" He was the first to popularise it, the first to make a glorious great time-machiney thing.
It's like this ultimate horsey, bicycley thing that you can climb on.
And around you, time is flickering and the nights and the days are following each other in a faster and faster turn, and now the seasons are moving.
Wells's time traveller leaps first thousands and then millions of years into the future.
And when he returns, his stories of strange creatures and a dying earth make an exotic accompaniment to his guests' brandy and cigars.
The Time Machine was, of course, written in the reign of Queen Victoria.
And to modern eyes, it seems very firmly rooted in a world of gentlemen's clubs, fob watches and extravagant whiskers.
But it was to prove enormously influential.
You see, Wells had discovered the formula for the ideal time travel story - a machine, a maverick and an extraordinary destination.
And almost 70 years later, this was to prove the blueprint for the most successful science fiction series in television history.
MUSIC: "Dr Who Theme" Have you ever thought what it's like to be wanderers in the fourth dimension? Have you? TARDIS CREAKS AND GROANS For me - and, I suspect, for millions of other people - this is science fiction's sacred ground.
This is the console of the very first TARDIS, probably the best-loved time machine in all science fiction.
You know, I always knew that I'd end up here eventually, although I have to say, I rather saw myself flying the TARDIS rather than just talking about it.
Of course, Doctor Who is now as firmly embedded in our popular culture as that other great phenomenon of the early 1960s, the music of the Beatles.
But it's easy to forget just how odd it must have seemed to those first viewers who tuned in on Saturday the 23rd of November, 1963 - the story of an irascible old man with an extraordinary secret, wandering through space and time in, of all things, a battered British police box.
Let me get this straight - a thing that looks like a police box standing in a junkyard, it can move anywhere in time and space? - Yes.
- Quite so.
- But it's ridiculous! Doctor Who was originally devised by the BBC's drama department as a family-friendly serial with an educational brief, using time travel to explain the greatest historical moments and the latest scientific theories, with the mysterious Doctor as a guide.
I was part of the plan.
I came to make sure of Robespierre's downfall.
What makes the Doctor unique as a time traveller, he's the only time traveller I can think of who LIVES in a time machine.
Other time travellers might pop into one occasionally or use one for a specific purpose.
The Doctor actually lives in one - it's his home.
So for him, all of time is happening at once.
He isn't travelling from one time to another.
He's aware that outside those doors, every moment in history is simultaneously available.
BUZZING Now, see for yourself.
- IAN: - It's not true! The Doctor's earliest escapades take in not only the French Revolution but also the Crusades and, in his very first adventure, a tribe of cavemen.
But the series really owes its appeal to the enigmatic character of the Doctor himself, the eternal wanderer, as played by a host of actors.
MUSIC: "Dr Who Theme" Originally planned as a TV trip around the O-level syllabus, the series rapidly evolved into something infinitely more exciting - the death-defying adventures of a time traveller who was much more charismatic than HG Wells's original.
I'm the Doctor.
I'm a Time Lord.
I'm from the planet Gallifrey, in the constellation of Kasterborous.
I am 903 years old, and I'm the man who's going to save your lives and all six billion people on the planet below.
UPLIFTING MUSIC You got a problem with that? - No.
- In that case .
.
allons-y! What reeled me in was this idea of this hero whowho wasn't a superman.
He wasn't a kind of jock, he wasn't the strongest man in the room.
He was slightly anarchic, he washe was just cleverer than everyone else, and yet he wore that genius rather lightly and rather anarchically.
And I think that's part of what makes him so appealing - that he's not an authority figure at all and yet he has authority over everyone because .
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because of his intellect, because of his brilliance.
I could summon the armada and take this world by force.
Well, yeah, you could, yeah.
You could do that.
Of course you could.
But why? HUMMING AND PULSING Crucially, though - and rather ironically - the series is effectively time-proofed, because just when you think the central character is running out of steam, in comes a new actor to give the show a shot in the arm.
DRAMATIC MUSIC HE SCREAMS CRASHING HE BREATHES HEAVILY Legs! I've still got legs! - HE KISSES - Good.
And so it is that everybody has his or her own Doctor.
Mine, I suppose, is good old Peter Davison.
I did see some Tom Baker episodes, but, quite honestly, I found him much scarier than the monsters.
Excuse me.
- SHE GASPS LOUDLY - Ah, it's you again.
The Doctors, among themselves, are actually quite different.
This has been, really, why Doctor Who has lasted.
That simple idea of regeneration, that he changes into a different version of himself is why Doctor Who has stuck around for so long - because every so often, we get a new star and the show is built around a new star performance, tailored to that era, tailored to that moment in television.
And although the Doctor's altered his appearance over the years, one thing has remained defiantly, gloriously unchanged.
Ever since its first appearance in a black-and-white scrapyard in 1963, the TARDIS has been the most thrilling time machine in all science fiction.
The name, by the way, stands for "Time And Relative Dimension In Space".
And when that blue box appears on your screen, you just know you're in for a treat.
Here we are then! London.
Earth! It's a brilliant invention, because I think one of the things that makes Doctor Who kind of sing is this juxtaposition of the banal with the extraordinary.
And for whatever reason, that original team decided that the TARDIS should be a police box - you know, because it was an easy prop to get in and out of small sets, because it was something that could be flat-packed, as it still is today There's not much room.
We'd be a bit intimate.
- DOOR CREAKS - Take a look.
We've got used to the idea the TARDIS is bigger on the inside, but it is still the most wonderful, magical idea, that inside this smallish, shabby blue box is this technological wonder.
No, no, no.
But it's just a box! But it's huge! How does it do that? That is one of the all-time magical ideas.
It's all of Narnia in one box.
OK.
OK.
Where are we? Whoa! What is happening?! We are leaving the universe! - How can you leave the universe?! - With enormous difficulty.
Right now, I'm burning up TARDIS rooms to give us some welly! The set, it's amazing.
It's like the home base of the whole TV show.
It kind ofit feels living and breathing in its own way.
- SHE SCREAMS - Oh! And also, with the TARDIS, acting is the best, when you have to pretend that it's going through the time vortex, and you throw yourself around.
We'd do that and I was like, "I can't believe this is my job.
" SHE LAUGHS TARDIS CREAKS AND GROANS Um, I always think the TARDIS is the Doctor's greatest love.
MAGICAL MUSIC Look at you pair.
It's always you and her, isn't it? Long after the rest of us have gone.
A boy and his box off to see the universe.
Well, you say that as if it's a bad thing.
But, honestly, it's the best thing there is.
Like HG Wells's traveller, the Doctor roams across eternity, driven by his insatiable curiosity.
But some time travellers have preferred to stay rather closer to home.
Indeed, the film that brought time travel to small-town America had its origins in a moment of pure high-school nostalgia.
- MAN: - I was visiting my parents in the summer of 1980, and I discovered in the basement my father's high school yearbook.
And I'm thumbing through it and I discover that my father was the president of his graduating class.
And I was amazed.
I didn't know this.
And I'm looking at this picture of my father - very straitlaced guy - and then I'm thinking about the president of MY graduating class, who was a jerk! And I'm thinking, "Gee, if I had gone to high school with my dad, "would I have been friends with him?" And, boom.
In that instant, Back To The Future was born - the story of teenager Marty McFly, mad professor Doc Brown and a very distinctive time machine.
MUSIC: "The Power Of Love" by Huey Lewis and the News By the standards of HG Wells's gentleman inventor, let alone a charismatic Time Lord, Marty McFly makes a very implausible time traveller.
Indeed, his journey begins completely by accident, as he jumps into a DeLorean, takes it up to 88 and finds himself catapulted back to the 1950s.
And therein lies the magic of the film, because Marty isn't a swashbuckling adventurer exploring the far future.
He's a bewildered young man lost in the day before yesterday.
Marty's fate now rests in the hands of Doc Brown, the eccentric inventor who channels Einstein and Edison in a harebrained scheme to get Marty home.
Next Saturday night, we're sending you back to the future! Doc Brown, that's what it's all about.
I mean, he's constantly thinking of new things, trying out new stuff.
He's relentless.
There's never a moment when it's not in crisis mode.
Every moment is a crisis - "Marty, do this!" "Marty, do that!" "Why don't?" You know Cos at any moment, um, there's going to be a calamity.
Designing a suitable time machine for the accident-prone Doc Brown presented the director, Robert Zemeckis, with something of a challenge.
- GALE: - The original iteration of the time machine was a cross between a refrigerator and a telephone booth, and Bob Zemeckis said, "You know, wouldn't it be better "if the whole thing was just built into a car? "Then it would be mobile.
" And the John DeLorean trial was recently in the news and he said, "Let's use a DeLorean.
" I first saw Back To The Future when I was ten years old and, to be honest, the appeal of the DeLorean was rather lost on me.
But now that I've been in it, I've rather changed my mind.
I still don't really know what a flux capacitor does, but it's hard not to fall in love with the DeLorean's Heath Robinson charm.
There have been plenty of slicker time machines, but there's never been one that was cooler.
Are you telling me that you built a time machine HE PANTS .
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out of a DeLorean? The way I see it, if you're going to build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?! Where Back To The Future goes beyond HG Wells's blueprint is in its examination of the possible consequences of time travel.
By setting foot in the past, Marty McFly is in danger of rewriting his own present - a conundrum known as the "grandfather paradox".
The grandfather paradox is when you go backwards in time, meet your grandparents before you're born, and then you kill them.
But if you just killed your grandparents before you're born, then how can you be born to go backwards in time to meet your grandparents before you were born? That's the paradox.
You change the past so that the present becomes a logical impossibility.
But Marty's problems are amorous rather than murderous, because when his mother falls in love with him instead of his father, the future of the McFly family begins to disappear.
Just as I thought! This proves my theory! Look at your brother! His head's gone! It's like it's like he's been erased.
One of the devices that we used in Back To The Future is the disappearing photograph, and we came up with that because it was a great visual device for the audience to know that time was running out.
Erased from existence! Narratively, it makes absolutely perfect sense.
You get it.
You see it and just Everything that would take, like, you know, 20 minutes to sit there with a blackboard and explain in terms of time lines, you instantly get.
"OK, he's mucking up his parents coming together.
"He's losing the future.
It's disappearing.
" Logically, it makes no sense at all.
Why would the Polaroid start vanishing, piece by? Why would his arm start fading away? Why would he still have the Polaroid? But the narrative logic just completely steamrolls the draconian logic, and it completely works.
The idea that a time traveller's actions in the past might have grave implications for the future has become a modern science fiction staple.
But one of its most elegant examples appeared as early as 1952, in Ray Bradbury's short story A Sound Of Thunder.
A Sound Of Thunder is set in the future, when big-game hunters can pay to go back in time and try to bag the ultimate prize - a Tyrannosaurus rex.
The only condition is that they must stay on a floating path.
They can't touch so much as one blade of grass.
But then, one day, a careless hunter accidentally steps on a prehistoric butterfly - a tiny, even trivial mistake, but one that has devastating consequences.
"It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, "a small thing that could upset balances "and knock down a line of small dominoes "and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, "all down the years, across time.
"Eckels's mind whirled.
"'It couldn't change things.
"'Killing one butterfly couldn't be that important! Could it?'" A Sound Of Thunder is the idea that if we go back into the past, even the smallest alteration in the past might have vast ramifications when you come back to your own time.
In other words, that history has a sensitive dependence on initial conditions, which is a phrase out of chaos theory that was only introduced to the public years after Bradbury wrote his story.
Ray Bradbury's ingenious little story has become associated with the idea of "the butterfly effect", the concept that if a butterfly beats its wings in Brazil, it can set off a tornado in Texas.
Scientists and weather forecasters still argue about its validity, but for science fiction writers, it has become an irresistible and often enormously enjoyable narrative trick.
Of all the films that have played with these ideas of time, chance and destiny, none has had more sheer fun than Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure - the story of two hapless high-school dimwits whose fate depends on their ability to finish their history homework.
- BOTH: - Not bad! Greetings, my excellent friends.
Do you know when the Mongols ruled China? Well .
.
perhaps we could can ask them.
Asking Genghis Khan to help you with your homework probably sounds like high school silliness.
But I suppose we all have our own fantasies about meeting people from the past.
I quite fancy having dinner with Oliver Cromwell, and then drinks with Cleopatra.
But in Bill and Ted's case, everybody from Billy the Kid to the philosopher Socrates - or "So-crates" as they call him - ends up being dragged into one of science fiction's less glamorous time machines.
When we first conceived of Bill & Ted, it was Bill and Ted bumming around time in a van.
And it was originally, even before it was called Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, a rough draft was Bill & Ted's Time Van.
Then Back To The Future came out and there was the DeLorean, so we had to change the car.
So the director, Steve Herek, said, "What if we made it a phone booth?" And we went, "OK.
" Unlike the TARDIS, Bill and Ted's phone booth was very much smaller on the inside - both as a time machine and as a working prop.
From a production standpoint, it was a complete nightmare.
I mean, you know, it's like I mean, Reeves and I, I think we called it "the deathbox".
BOTH SCREAM This was not the height of sort of the CGI era.
You know what I mean? So this booth was upended, it was welded to a hydraulic.
It was like something out of a KISS concert.
When the phone booth finally dumps everyone in San Dimas, California, the scene is set for an unlikely culture clash.
The assorted historical bigwigs are completely out of their depth in '80s America and before long, they find themselves thrown into jail.
- SOLOMON: - We had no way to get the guys out of jail, so we're trying to come up with all sorts of ways to do it and, finally, we just said, "Well, what if they time travel, but not in the scene?" Ted, good thinking, dude! After the report, we'll time travel back to two days ago, steal your dad's keys and leave them here! Where?! I don't know.
How about behind that sign? That way, when we get here now, they'll be waiting for us.
- See? - Whoa, yeah! It was a time travel scene that had no time travel.
It was just the conceptual you know, the idea of time travel.
And to me, that was the most fun, actually - coming up with those kind of conundrums.
The way that they played with time, I thought was brilliant.
I mean, it was really brilliant.
There's a lot of really cool, subtle ideas in there, that areyou know, that are profound, if you kind of break them apart.
But all through that lens of, you know, two imbeciles.
HE LAUGHS BUZZING AND WHIRRING Gentlemen .
.
we are history.
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure might seem like a knockabout teen comedy, but its take on Ronald Reagan's America had a gently satirical edge.
We get all these characters from all over the world.
And what do we do? We bring them to a mall.
And so history's greatest minds are offered a glimpse of humanity's evolution - from classical Athens to a California shopping mall.
TICKING But while Bill & Ted's cultural satire was pretty mild, time travel stories have long been a vehicle for sharp social criticism, projecting our own political and cultural anxieties into the far future.
Today we think of The Time Machine as a classic work of science fiction.
But to readers in the 1890s, it felt more like a book of political satire.
You see, Wells was an early and very committed socialist and he was effectively using the time travel story as a way of exploring some of the fears of his fellow Victorians as well as imagining what a future Britain might look like if it continued on its current course.
In Wells's vision, the class divide becomes so profound that humanity splits into two distinct species - Eloi and Morlocks.
"Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, "man had thrust his brother man out of the ease and the sunshine.
"And now that brother was coming backchanged.
" So it is that in the book, the effete, decadent Eloi are effectively the successors of the upper classes, whereas the bestial, subterranean Morlocks are the descendants of industrial Britain's great unwashed.
Wells's provocative take on the haves and have-nots is set some 800,000 years in the future - an awfully long way from the age of gaslight and horsepower.
But as the march of progress continued, the future seemed closer than ever.
And when, in 1924, the Austrian film director Fritz Lang first set eyes on the skyscrapers of New York, it inspired him to make one of science fiction's greatest films - Metropolis.
DRAMATIC MUSIC Metropolis was the first full-length science-fiction film.
It's set in a future city ruled by rich industrialists from their skyscrapers, while the workers toil miserably underground.
Even the elderly HG Wells found it a bit heavy-handed.
It was, he said, in his New York Times review, the silliest film he'd ever seen.
But the city of the future has intrigued science fiction writers ever since, and the shadow of Metropolis's class conflict has never quite gone away.
In '60s and '70s Britain, the future was now, at least, according to the architects and planners who were turning our cities into high-rise utopias.
But many science fiction writers had a rather stronger sense of scepticism, as well as a much greater grasp of reality.
They knew that today's dreams are often tomorrow's nightmares.
And nobody dissected all this more acutely than Britain's dystopian laureate, JG Ballard.
People have accused me, and accused most science fiction writers, of being rather pessimistic because they're always warning of dangers ahead.
But I think, if you, you know .
.
a sign painter who putspaints a sign saying, "Dangerous bends ahead, slow down," isn't a pessimist.
I mean, he's merely giving an accurate warning of, you know You don't think you're writing, "Dangerous bends ahead, speed up"? That's a Yes.
Of course I am, actually, in some ofin some of my books.
In 1975, Ballard set his sights on the concrete tower blocks so beloved of Britain's optimistic architects.
High Rise imagines a future block isolated from the outside world.
Here, the residents are organised according to their social standing, from bottom to top.
But as the power cuts and petty grievances escalate into violence, class divisions turn into class war.
If you'd been reading High Rise in the mid-'70s, perhaps by candlelight during an unscheduled power cut, you might well have wondered just how far off Ballard's dystopian future really was.
Writers like Ballard conjured haunting, even chilling images in their readers' minds.
But the defining vision of the city of the future came from the cinema, in British director Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi noir, Blade Runner.
Scott's portrait of Los Angeles in 2019 owes much to the skyscrapers and airships of Metropolis.
But it also blended the industrial northeast of his boyhood with the bustling alleys of Hong Kong.
Somewhere in this vast, infernal city lurks a group of rogue androids known as replicants - and they are being hunted down by a blade runner, a detective who specialises in unmasking the androids hidden in the shadows.
Basically, the noir side of the sets, right, werewere Ridley going .
.
"It looks too new.
"Can you do something to it? Take a sledgehammer to it.
" - MAN: - So, I read the script and got the definite idea that it was sort of a crappy world.
So, I thought, "Well, I can do that.
"You know, I'm a designer.
"I can manufacture a dystopian world.
" HAUER: It's a vision where not everything works very well.
But we know that.
Why would the future be different from now? Half the things we make don't work or are nonsense.
It's a mess, you know? Life's a mess.
- MAN: - It wasn't a brand-new idea.
Even Star Wars got some of it in.
Things were old and beat up in some places.
But Ridley caught that sense of "The future is already old.
" The name we came up was, uh"retro-deco".
And the other one was "trash chic".
Blade Runner's unforgettable look made it THE benchmark for all visions of the future.
But Ridley Scott's liberal use of the rain machine also helped to hide the stage trickery used to make Syd Mead's vehicles look realistic.
When the Spinner lifts off in the rain, the reason he had rain is because it comes down vertically and it helped to hide the wires holding the prop up.
The film's real achievement lies in the way it conjures a credible, three-dimensional world, complete with its own futuristic way of dressing and talking.
Indeed, the actor Edward James Olmos even devised a whole new language for his character, Gaff.
When I walked in there, I talked gibberish.
I justyou know, I just put a bunch of sounds together of different languages.
HE SPEAKS GIBBERISH "What?" Of course, nobody understood me.
In this scene, Olmos uses his invented language to identify Detective Deckard as a former blade runner.
Lofaszt! Nehogy mar! Te vagy a blade, blade runner.
" - He say you blade runner.
- Tell him I'm eating.
But the chef's translation doesn't quite capture the jumble of European and Asian obscenities that Olmos had strung together.
I say, "Lofaszt! Nehogy mar! Te vagy a blade runner!" And, uh, which means, "Oh, big horse dick, you are the Blade Runner.
" The people who knew the languages would just roll on the ground and fall out.
They couldn't believe that somebody had said that, you know? With its melting pot of languages, its teeming streets and post-industrial architecture, Blade Runner has to come to define science fiction's dystopian vision of the future.
It was based on a novel, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, first published in 1968 by the Californian maverick Philip K.
Dick.
"I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ "and I experimented, "and I finally found a setting for despair.
"So I put it on my schedule for twice a month.
"I think that's a reasonable amount of time "to feel hopeless about everything.
" Philip K.
Dick was one of science fiction's genuine greats.
Reading his books often feels like a hallucinogenic experience - rather like being thrust into the future after downing a bucket of LSD.
But perhaps that's hardly surprising, because Philip K.
Dick was immersed in the psychedelic counter-culture of late '60s San Francisco.
He claimed to have had visions of life in ancient Rome and even to have been possessed by the spirit of the prophet Elijah.
And he believed that he was getting messages from outer space.
Philip K.
Dick was a marvellous science-fiction writer.
He had an uncanny intuition for turning contemporary America and the global situation in the '60s and '70s into science fiction metaphors, where he uses the ordinary devices of science fiction, like robots, time travel, aliens, telekinetic powers and the like, all jumbled together in a mash that doesn't make logical sense and feels sort of like a dream, and yet it seems to capture the way life felt both in the 1960s and even now.
Philip K.
Dick's work endures because his unsettling, paranoid vision of the future still feels remarkably prophetic.
He was writing about state surveillance, virtual reality and the dangers of technology not just years but decades ago.
His tomorrow often feels uncannily like our today.
For all Philip K.
Dick's eccentricity, his themes of obsession, surveillance and mistrust were rooted in the political realities of his '60s heyday.
This was the era of the Cold War, an age haunted by the fear of nuclear Armageddon.
And the shadow of the bomb hangs over perhaps the most extraordinary time travel film of all, made in 1962 and composed almost entirely of still photos - La Jetee.
- FILM'S NARRATOR: - The human race was doomed.
Space was off-limits.
The only link with survival passed through time - a loophole in time - and then maybe it would be possible to reach food, medicine, energy.
This was the purpose of the experiment - to throw emissaries into time, to call past and future to the rescue of the present.
The brainchild of a reclusive French artist, Chris Marker, La Jetee tells the story of a prisoner from a post-apocalyptic future who's sent back in time to save mankind.
WOMAN: The world's been destroyed and the time traveller's being sent back to essentially restart everything.
It's one of the most amazing things in time travel or, for that matter, cinema, because, of course, it's done entirely in still images, and it has this circularity and this power that it derives from its minimalism.
La Jetee might have remained a brilliant curiosity of French new wave cinema had it not been for the scriptwriters David and Janet Peoples, who adapted its doom-laden time travel narrative for Hollywood.
They called the new film Twelve Monkeys.
We started to talk about what it would be like to do the movie from the point of view of one of those guys you meet on the street who tells you the world's coming to an end and all of this stuff.
And looking at him, you think that's absurd and everything, But what if you were in his shoes? He knows the world's coming to an end.
He's seen the facts and is persuaded of it and has the reality to deal with it.
Like La Jetee, Twelve Monkeys focuses on a survivor from an apocalyptic future.
Bruce Willis plays James Cole, sent back in time to find the source of a virus that ravaged mankind in 1996.
That is if anyone will believe him.
This is October, right? April.
What year is this? What year do you think it is? - 1996.
- That's the future, James.
Do you think you're living in the future? 1996 is the past.
David and I both had worked, as very young people, in state institutions, not completely different from the one that is in Twelve Monkeys, and it was often very difficult to tell who was sane and who was insane.
Our main character could have come from the future or he could have simply invented this construct that allowed him to survive.
Although James Cole knows the fate of humanity, his own is less certain.
The film shows him being haunted by a recurring nightmare from his childhood in which he sees a man being chased and shot down in an airport - a strange, unsettling scene borrowed directly from La Jetee.
The idea of the man seeing his own death is a powerful dramatic trick that came from La Jetee.
FILM'S NARRATOR: He ran towards her.
And when he recognised the man who had trailed him since the camp, he knew there was no way out of time.
And he knew that this haunting moment he had been granted to see as a child was the moment of his own death.
One reason writers and filmmakers love the subject of time travel is because this allows them to explore some pretty heavy themes within an eminently crowd-pleasing format.
Where else, after all, would you find Bruce Willis channelling French existential angst about a child having a premonition of his own death? But then, Bruce Willis is a bit of a time-travel veteran.
He returned to the genre in the 2012 film Looper, which was something of a psychotherapist's fantasy - a dreamlike story in which the hero discovers that his chief adversary is actually his own younger self.
This time, Bruce Willis plays Joe, a hit man at the end of his career who's been sent back in time to be killed - a process known as "closing the loop".
- HE FIRES WEAPON - Aagh! But after surviving the first attempt on his life, Joe proves a reluctant victim, leading to a memorable showdown in a diner with his assassin - the younger version of himself, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
I can't let you walk away from this diner alive.
This is my life now.
I earned it.
You had yours already.
So why don't you do what old men do, and die? - JOHNSON: - When I first came up with the idea for Looper, I could have very well framed the notion of old man, young man having it out as a father-son conversation.
In some waysin many ways, that conversation in the diner IS a father-son conversation.
It's, "I'm not going to turn into you.
" But you take it into the science-fiction realm, suddenly you have time travel involved, he's come back, and he's literally saying to him, "I'm not going to turn into you," there becomes something where we've seen that conversation a thousand times on film and we've probably had that conversation in our lives, but, suddenly, it's in this new context and you have to .
.
your ears perk up and you have to lean forward and process it on a different level.
So, do you know what's going to happen? You've done all this already, as me? I don't want to talk about time-travel shit.
Cos if we start talking about it, then we're going to be here all day talking about it and making diagrams with straws.
Time travel doesn't make sense.
Time travel is never going to make sense.
You can really muck yourself up if you start actually thinking, "I'm going to be the guy who gets time travel right.
" I think you have to let go of that very early and just say, you know, "I have a story "that I think is worth, uh worth telling.
" In a final time-bending twist, Joe's younger self realises that the only way to take control of events may be to end his own life.
Looper's ending plays very cleverly on a basic human desire - our yearning to be in control of our own destiny.
Indeed, from Looper's futuristic criminals to HG Wells's inventor and Doctor Who's Time Lord, time travel stories often have the same basic premise - that through the power of science, we can make time do our bidding.
Alas, in reality, time is the one thing that none of us can ever escape.
We are all, of course, time travellers, moving inexorably forward one day at a time, whether we like it or not.
But what if, one day, the clock stopped, leaving us stuck in a single moment doomed to repeat ourselves for all eternity? OK, campers, rise and shine.
Groundhog Day is the story of disgruntled weatherman Phil Connors, played with sardonic relish by Bill Murray, who's fated to relive the same day again and again and again.
Honestly, the whole point of it, to me, was, "What if a person lived longer than one lifetime?" Any movie can show a person living one lifetime, and do they? What if they're still they're 70, 75, 80 years old and they're still acting like a teenage adolescent? They never got it, they never outgrew it, they never got beyond it? And so I was saying, "Oh, OK.
For some people, it's like that.
"But what if they had another lifetime and another one after that? "If a person could actually live that long, "would they change, "or are they condemned to be who they are no matter what?" What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered? That about sums it up for me.
For a very funny film, Groundhog Day offers a surprisingly bleak look into the darkest corners of the human soul.
To break free of the cycle, Phil Connors is driven to a succession of violent suicide attempts - crashing a truck, electrocuting himself in the bath, even jumping from a tower.
And yet, each time, he's miraculously resurrected to begin the day again.
This is perhaps the ultimate nightmare - a time loop in which it seems nothing ever changes.
But very gradually, something does begin to change - Phil Connors himself.
JANET PEOPLES: It was both a morality tale and a romance.
And sometimes when a film uses any device over and over again, you get tired.
But each time, they just did it so that it was better and better, as our guy learns his lesson, finally.
MUSIC: "I Got You, Babe" by Sonny and Cher At last, Phil learns to live out his Groundhog Day differently, more considerately.
Only then does he escape the time trap and no longer wakes up alone.
Before it's earned, our money's always spent - RADIO ANNOUNCER: - Oh, please, not again.
- ANNOUNCER 2: - That is a great song! - No, it's not.
- Don't listen to this man, he - RADIO SWITCHES OFF - SHE GROANS - Mmm! It's too early.
One of the takeaways for people is just a realisation that this first day that he experienced, that was so awful, that was so terrible, that was the worst day of his life ever, was the same day that he experienced at the end, the same day that it was presented to him that turned out to be one of the best days of his life, and the only thing that changed was him.
Groundhog Day is basically a modern morality tale, and it clearly owes a lot to that supremely sentimental Victorian time-travel fable A Christmas Carol, because at heart, Bill Murray's weatherman is essentially an updated version of Dickens's Ebenezer Scrooge - a world-class killjoy dragged around past, present and future until he changes his ways.
The idea of a character who finds himself at the mercy of time and obliged to make a difference inspired one of television's quirkiest and most entertaining forays into time travel - the American series Quantum Leap.
MAN: It all started when a time travel experiment I was conducting went a little ca-ca.
A cult favourite on BBC Two in the early '90s, the series follows the adventures of Dr Sam Beckett, the brains behind a secret government time-travel project.
My character, Sam Beckett, invented this ability to travel in time.
Because funding is being cut short - something everybody can relate to - he's forced to jump into the machine before it was really tested, and can't get home again.
- AS SAM: - Anyway, here I am, bouncing around in time, putting things right that once went wrong - a sort of time-travelling Lone Ranger with Al as my Tonto, and I don't even need a mask.
Oh, boy.
Due to a glitch in the Quantum Leap time machine, Sam becomes lost in the recent past, destined to keep leaping into different moments in time and into the bodies of different characters - the ideal way to give audiences a new surprise every week.
I would plug in a hairdryer and cause the blackout that's hit the east coast back in 1960whenever that was.
In a restaurant, somebody's choking, and Sam takes and does the Heimlich manoeuvre, and then somebody says .
.
"Lucky he was around, Dr Heimlich.
" You know? MUSIC: "The Times They Are A-Changin'" by Bob Dylan Oh, the times, they are a-changin' What sets Quantum Leap apart is that Sam, its time traveller, actually inhabits the body of another person in another era.
So, Sam isn't just wandering around another time.
He actually becomes another person.
And in each episode, he has to correct a mistake or an injustice before he can move on from the time in which he's trapped.
Sometimes Sam's journeys are excursions into pure nostalgia - for example, when he saves the life of a '50s test pilot or when he wins a baseball game in the 1960s.
But the writers soon realised that they could use the concept to explore the moral fault lines of modern America.
- BAKULA: - There was an episode where I was pregnant.
Now, all of a sudden, though, I'm in the body of a cadet who may or may not be gay, and there, in the premise of that episode, you have social issues.
Sam even discovered what it was like to be black in the Deep South of the 1950s.
There's gotta be some mistake.
- MAN: - Biggest mistake you'll ever make, boy.
Ain't that right, Toad? For Sam, and perhaps for the show's producers, time travel offers an opportunity to redress the injustices of the past and even to rewrite history with a happy ending.
The exception, though, was a story inspired by a real-life encounter between the writer, Donald Bellisario, a former marine, and one of the most notorious figures in American history.
BELLISARIO: I went into the supply shed and sitting cross-legged on the floor behind the counter was a man.
And he was reading Pravda.
Now, this is 1959, January.
You're a marine, you're not reading Pravda HE LAUGHS .
.
in 1959, January.
And I asked him why he was reading it and what he was getting out of it.
And he starts spouting all this communist propaganda.
And he and I almost got into a fight over it.
I had another guy grab me and say, "Hey, hey, hey.
"Come on.
" And he said to me, "We ignore him.
He's harmless.
" I'll never forget that.
"We ignore him.
He's harmless.
" That "harmless" man was Lee Harvey Oswald, and Bellisario's chance encounter inspired an episode plunging Sam into the chaos of the Kennedy assassination - a historic tragedy that even Sam can't correct.
But the story ends with a twist.
Sam's mission was actually to save Jackie from the assassin's bullet.
- RADIO ANNOUNCER: - The President's wife, Jackie Kennedy, was not hurt.
- She walked into the hospital - Thanks, Al.
Time travel stories such as Quantum Leap have tended to focus on the voyager's destination and his adventures once he gets there.
But by the end of the 20th century, writers were beginning to explore the emotional consequences, not just for the traveller but for those closest to him.
And in 2003, this became the premise for an unashamedly tear-drenched best-seller, The Time Traveler's Wife.
This is the intimate story of the relationship between an artist, Clare, and Henry, a librarian who's afflicted with an extraordinary illness that he can't control.
"Suddenly, you are intensely nauseated and then you are gone.
"You are throwing up in some suburban geraniums "or a wooden sidewalk in Oak Park, Illinois circa 1903, "or a tennis court on a fine autumn day in the 1950s.
" "You are standing, naked as a jaybird, "up to your ankles in ice water in a ditch.
" I imagined time travel as a very stressful thing.
Um, the diseases that I had in mind were epilepsy and schizophrenia, both of which take a strong toll physically.
It did seem as though something so extreme as a shift through time, a bodily shift, would not be comfortable.
It would have to be wrenching andand unnatural.
At the time that I was thinking about all this, this was 1997, and the race to decode the human genome was very much on, and it was in the news all the time.
And I thought, "Yeah, that's it.
It's a genetic disease.
" Henry's illness is called chrono-impairment, a rare genetic disorder that can quite suddenly, without warning, whisk him through time.
What seemed so fresh about The Time Traveler's Wife, at least to its fans, is that it takes a classic science fiction conceit and invests it with a much deeper human resonance.
So, we experience Henry's fear and confusion as, again and again, time chews him up and spits him out.
And we share Clare's yearning and rage at his sudden and prolonged absences.
This is time travel as a story of love and loss, as pure human melodrama.
I had this very strong visual notion about this old woman in a room, with a cup of tea, waiting for somebody.
And I immediately thought, "Yeah, that's what this is about.
"It's about all that time that a time traveller's wife would spend "waiting and wondering where her time traveller might be.
" TICKING Even Britain's favourite time traveller hasn't been able to escape the emotional consequences of an eternity wandering up and down the time vortex.
Once upon a time, being a companion in Doctor Who meant screaming, wearing a mini-skirt and asking, "What's happening, Doctor?" But when the series was revived in 2005, the writers were very keen to show the Doctor and his friends grappling not just with the Daleks, but with the most terrifying foe of all - relationships.
That hand of yours still gives me the creeps.
And as in The Time Traveler's Wife Come with me.
.
.
it's the Doctor's relationship with his human companions that reveals the heavy price a time traveller might have to pay for his remarkable gift.
- How many of us have there been travelling with you? - Does it matter? Yeah, it does, if I'm just the latest in a long line.
As opposed to what? I thought you and me were Well, I obviously got it wrong.
He can have these very intense relationships with his companions, uhand yet, he will always outlive them.
I've been to the year five billion, right, but this - no, this is really seeing the future.
You just leave us behind.
Is that what you're going to do to me? So, he can have these relationships that give him solace and comfort for a while, but ultimately, he will always be wandering alone through eternity.
I don't age.
I regenerate.
But humans decay.
You wither and you die.
Imagine watching that happen to someone that you What, Doctor? You can spend the rest of your life with me.
But I can't spend the rest of mine with you.
I have to live on.
Alone.
Well, the essence of Doctor Who is, in some ways, kind of tragic, because the Doctor will always have companions, the Doctor will always find these wonderful strays and bring them onto the TARDIS or try and build up some life with them, and he always knows that, um, they'll die.
They're like pets.
The only constant is the boy and the big blue box.
And so the Doctor is left to wander alone, his endless journey a reminder of the emotional price we all pay as we move through time.
Ever since HG Wells's gentleman inventor first cranked up his time machine, science fiction has offered us a glorious array of bizarre contraptions and bewildering paradoxes.
Aagh! Time travel has allowed writers to ask nostalgically, "What might have been?" and rather more chillingly, "What might lie ahead?" And for me, time travel is the most beguiling and the most poignant science fiction concept of them all.
Just imagine if you could go back to the day of your birth, to the moment your parents first met.
Imagine you could be there at your great-grandparents' wedding day or the first Christmas or the last days of Rome.
Imagine that all it took was to press this button.
You would, wouldn't you? CREAKING AND WHIRRING
Imagine if we could journey to unknown galaxies.
Imagine if there was life on other planets.
But perhaps the greatest fantasy of all is one that, I think, at some level, we all share.
What if you could turn back the clock and relive your childhood? What if you could rewrite history and avoid all those mistakes? What if you could see what was coming, could see what was just around the corner? What if you could travel in time? - MAN: - I think it's just aa really .
.
deep kind of humanthought, you know.
What if? What if? The story of time travel is a fantastic voyage.
We are going to plunge into the past and leap into the future, with a cast of intrepid time travellers and an array of extraordinary machines.
A small wooden box that opens up into extraordinary, magical, impossible places.
Yet for all its possibilities, time travel is fraught with danger, and writers and filmmakers have shown us nightmarish visions of the future The whole concept was, "The future is old.
" .
.
and the dire consequences of meddling with the past.
If you change the past, the present becomes a logical impossibility.
Throughout the history of science fiction, from the Victorian novel to the Hollywood blockbuster, there has never been a more seductive idea, a greater source of wonder or a more formidable foe than time itself.
TICKING CHIMING Approaching the matter of time in science fiction is not a question of where to start, but when.
Our story begins in 1895, in the dancing firelight of an elegant dining room.
We find ourselves among a group of eminent Victorians, relaxing after dinner at the home of a well-known inventor.
And as the evening wears on, he begins to tell them about his extraordinary new contraption - a machine that can travel in time.
And so begins HG Wells's great novel, The Time Machine, one of the cornerstones of all science fiction.
Wells's description of his inventor's machine was actually pretty vague.
So when his great-grandson Simon Wells directed the story for the screen in 2002, he dressed it up with the latest Hollywood special effects.
But it was on the printed page that this tale of an explorer who travels thousands of years into the future first captured the imagination.
The Victorians were fascinated by discovery.
Their explorers had mapped the dark heart of Africa, their scientists had unlocked the secrets of evolution, and now their obsession with spiritualism was leading them towards the frontiers of the beyond.
So perhaps it was no surprise that they were captivated by the story of a pioneer striking out through uncharted territory not in space but in time.
"I gave it a last tap, "tried all the screws again, "put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, "and sat myself in the saddle.
"The laboratory got hazy and went dark.
"The night came like the turning out of a lamp, "and in another moment came tomorrow.
" He was the first to popularise it, the first to make a glorious great time-machiney thing.
It's like this ultimate horsey, bicycley thing that you can climb on.
And around you, time is flickering and the nights and the days are following each other in a faster and faster turn, and now the seasons are moving.
Wells's time traveller leaps first thousands and then millions of years into the future.
And when he returns, his stories of strange creatures and a dying earth make an exotic accompaniment to his guests' brandy and cigars.
The Time Machine was, of course, written in the reign of Queen Victoria.
And to modern eyes, it seems very firmly rooted in a world of gentlemen's clubs, fob watches and extravagant whiskers.
But it was to prove enormously influential.
You see, Wells had discovered the formula for the ideal time travel story - a machine, a maverick and an extraordinary destination.
And almost 70 years later, this was to prove the blueprint for the most successful science fiction series in television history.
MUSIC: "Dr Who Theme" Have you ever thought what it's like to be wanderers in the fourth dimension? Have you? TARDIS CREAKS AND GROANS For me - and, I suspect, for millions of other people - this is science fiction's sacred ground.
This is the console of the very first TARDIS, probably the best-loved time machine in all science fiction.
You know, I always knew that I'd end up here eventually, although I have to say, I rather saw myself flying the TARDIS rather than just talking about it.
Of course, Doctor Who is now as firmly embedded in our popular culture as that other great phenomenon of the early 1960s, the music of the Beatles.
But it's easy to forget just how odd it must have seemed to those first viewers who tuned in on Saturday the 23rd of November, 1963 - the story of an irascible old man with an extraordinary secret, wandering through space and time in, of all things, a battered British police box.
Let me get this straight - a thing that looks like a police box standing in a junkyard, it can move anywhere in time and space? - Yes.
- Quite so.
- But it's ridiculous! Doctor Who was originally devised by the BBC's drama department as a family-friendly serial with an educational brief, using time travel to explain the greatest historical moments and the latest scientific theories, with the mysterious Doctor as a guide.
I was part of the plan.
I came to make sure of Robespierre's downfall.
What makes the Doctor unique as a time traveller, he's the only time traveller I can think of who LIVES in a time machine.
Other time travellers might pop into one occasionally or use one for a specific purpose.
The Doctor actually lives in one - it's his home.
So for him, all of time is happening at once.
He isn't travelling from one time to another.
He's aware that outside those doors, every moment in history is simultaneously available.
BUZZING Now, see for yourself.
- IAN: - It's not true! The Doctor's earliest escapades take in not only the French Revolution but also the Crusades and, in his very first adventure, a tribe of cavemen.
But the series really owes its appeal to the enigmatic character of the Doctor himself, the eternal wanderer, as played by a host of actors.
MUSIC: "Dr Who Theme" Originally planned as a TV trip around the O-level syllabus, the series rapidly evolved into something infinitely more exciting - the death-defying adventures of a time traveller who was much more charismatic than HG Wells's original.
I'm the Doctor.
I'm a Time Lord.
I'm from the planet Gallifrey, in the constellation of Kasterborous.
I am 903 years old, and I'm the man who's going to save your lives and all six billion people on the planet below.
UPLIFTING MUSIC You got a problem with that? - No.
- In that case .
.
allons-y! What reeled me in was this idea of this hero whowho wasn't a superman.
He wasn't a kind of jock, he wasn't the strongest man in the room.
He was slightly anarchic, he washe was just cleverer than everyone else, and yet he wore that genius rather lightly and rather anarchically.
And I think that's part of what makes him so appealing - that he's not an authority figure at all and yet he has authority over everyone because .
.
because of his intellect, because of his brilliance.
I could summon the armada and take this world by force.
Well, yeah, you could, yeah.
You could do that.
Of course you could.
But why? HUMMING AND PULSING Crucially, though - and rather ironically - the series is effectively time-proofed, because just when you think the central character is running out of steam, in comes a new actor to give the show a shot in the arm.
DRAMATIC MUSIC HE SCREAMS CRASHING HE BREATHES HEAVILY Legs! I've still got legs! - HE KISSES - Good.
And so it is that everybody has his or her own Doctor.
Mine, I suppose, is good old Peter Davison.
I did see some Tom Baker episodes, but, quite honestly, I found him much scarier than the monsters.
Excuse me.
- SHE GASPS LOUDLY - Ah, it's you again.
The Doctors, among themselves, are actually quite different.
This has been, really, why Doctor Who has lasted.
That simple idea of regeneration, that he changes into a different version of himself is why Doctor Who has stuck around for so long - because every so often, we get a new star and the show is built around a new star performance, tailored to that era, tailored to that moment in television.
And although the Doctor's altered his appearance over the years, one thing has remained defiantly, gloriously unchanged.
Ever since its first appearance in a black-and-white scrapyard in 1963, the TARDIS has been the most thrilling time machine in all science fiction.
The name, by the way, stands for "Time And Relative Dimension In Space".
And when that blue box appears on your screen, you just know you're in for a treat.
Here we are then! London.
Earth! It's a brilliant invention, because I think one of the things that makes Doctor Who kind of sing is this juxtaposition of the banal with the extraordinary.
And for whatever reason, that original team decided that the TARDIS should be a police box - you know, because it was an easy prop to get in and out of small sets, because it was something that could be flat-packed, as it still is today There's not much room.
We'd be a bit intimate.
- DOOR CREAKS - Take a look.
We've got used to the idea the TARDIS is bigger on the inside, but it is still the most wonderful, magical idea, that inside this smallish, shabby blue box is this technological wonder.
No, no, no.
But it's just a box! But it's huge! How does it do that? That is one of the all-time magical ideas.
It's all of Narnia in one box.
OK.
OK.
Where are we? Whoa! What is happening?! We are leaving the universe! - How can you leave the universe?! - With enormous difficulty.
Right now, I'm burning up TARDIS rooms to give us some welly! The set, it's amazing.
It's like the home base of the whole TV show.
It kind ofit feels living and breathing in its own way.
- SHE SCREAMS - Oh! And also, with the TARDIS, acting is the best, when you have to pretend that it's going through the time vortex, and you throw yourself around.
We'd do that and I was like, "I can't believe this is my job.
" SHE LAUGHS TARDIS CREAKS AND GROANS Um, I always think the TARDIS is the Doctor's greatest love.
MAGICAL MUSIC Look at you pair.
It's always you and her, isn't it? Long after the rest of us have gone.
A boy and his box off to see the universe.
Well, you say that as if it's a bad thing.
But, honestly, it's the best thing there is.
Like HG Wells's traveller, the Doctor roams across eternity, driven by his insatiable curiosity.
But some time travellers have preferred to stay rather closer to home.
Indeed, the film that brought time travel to small-town America had its origins in a moment of pure high-school nostalgia.
- MAN: - I was visiting my parents in the summer of 1980, and I discovered in the basement my father's high school yearbook.
And I'm thumbing through it and I discover that my father was the president of his graduating class.
And I was amazed.
I didn't know this.
And I'm looking at this picture of my father - very straitlaced guy - and then I'm thinking about the president of MY graduating class, who was a jerk! And I'm thinking, "Gee, if I had gone to high school with my dad, "would I have been friends with him?" And, boom.
In that instant, Back To The Future was born - the story of teenager Marty McFly, mad professor Doc Brown and a very distinctive time machine.
MUSIC: "The Power Of Love" by Huey Lewis and the News By the standards of HG Wells's gentleman inventor, let alone a charismatic Time Lord, Marty McFly makes a very implausible time traveller.
Indeed, his journey begins completely by accident, as he jumps into a DeLorean, takes it up to 88 and finds himself catapulted back to the 1950s.
And therein lies the magic of the film, because Marty isn't a swashbuckling adventurer exploring the far future.
He's a bewildered young man lost in the day before yesterday.
Marty's fate now rests in the hands of Doc Brown, the eccentric inventor who channels Einstein and Edison in a harebrained scheme to get Marty home.
Next Saturday night, we're sending you back to the future! Doc Brown, that's what it's all about.
I mean, he's constantly thinking of new things, trying out new stuff.
He's relentless.
There's never a moment when it's not in crisis mode.
Every moment is a crisis - "Marty, do this!" "Marty, do that!" "Why don't?" You know Cos at any moment, um, there's going to be a calamity.
Designing a suitable time machine for the accident-prone Doc Brown presented the director, Robert Zemeckis, with something of a challenge.
- GALE: - The original iteration of the time machine was a cross between a refrigerator and a telephone booth, and Bob Zemeckis said, "You know, wouldn't it be better "if the whole thing was just built into a car? "Then it would be mobile.
" And the John DeLorean trial was recently in the news and he said, "Let's use a DeLorean.
" I first saw Back To The Future when I was ten years old and, to be honest, the appeal of the DeLorean was rather lost on me.
But now that I've been in it, I've rather changed my mind.
I still don't really know what a flux capacitor does, but it's hard not to fall in love with the DeLorean's Heath Robinson charm.
There have been plenty of slicker time machines, but there's never been one that was cooler.
Are you telling me that you built a time machine HE PANTS .
.
out of a DeLorean? The way I see it, if you're going to build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?! Where Back To The Future goes beyond HG Wells's blueprint is in its examination of the possible consequences of time travel.
By setting foot in the past, Marty McFly is in danger of rewriting his own present - a conundrum known as the "grandfather paradox".
The grandfather paradox is when you go backwards in time, meet your grandparents before you're born, and then you kill them.
But if you just killed your grandparents before you're born, then how can you be born to go backwards in time to meet your grandparents before you were born? That's the paradox.
You change the past so that the present becomes a logical impossibility.
But Marty's problems are amorous rather than murderous, because when his mother falls in love with him instead of his father, the future of the McFly family begins to disappear.
Just as I thought! This proves my theory! Look at your brother! His head's gone! It's like it's like he's been erased.
One of the devices that we used in Back To The Future is the disappearing photograph, and we came up with that because it was a great visual device for the audience to know that time was running out.
Erased from existence! Narratively, it makes absolutely perfect sense.
You get it.
You see it and just Everything that would take, like, you know, 20 minutes to sit there with a blackboard and explain in terms of time lines, you instantly get.
"OK, he's mucking up his parents coming together.
"He's losing the future.
It's disappearing.
" Logically, it makes no sense at all.
Why would the Polaroid start vanishing, piece by? Why would his arm start fading away? Why would he still have the Polaroid? But the narrative logic just completely steamrolls the draconian logic, and it completely works.
The idea that a time traveller's actions in the past might have grave implications for the future has become a modern science fiction staple.
But one of its most elegant examples appeared as early as 1952, in Ray Bradbury's short story A Sound Of Thunder.
A Sound Of Thunder is set in the future, when big-game hunters can pay to go back in time and try to bag the ultimate prize - a Tyrannosaurus rex.
The only condition is that they must stay on a floating path.
They can't touch so much as one blade of grass.
But then, one day, a careless hunter accidentally steps on a prehistoric butterfly - a tiny, even trivial mistake, but one that has devastating consequences.
"It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, "a small thing that could upset balances "and knock down a line of small dominoes "and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, "all down the years, across time.
"Eckels's mind whirled.
"'It couldn't change things.
"'Killing one butterfly couldn't be that important! Could it?'" A Sound Of Thunder is the idea that if we go back into the past, even the smallest alteration in the past might have vast ramifications when you come back to your own time.
In other words, that history has a sensitive dependence on initial conditions, which is a phrase out of chaos theory that was only introduced to the public years after Bradbury wrote his story.
Ray Bradbury's ingenious little story has become associated with the idea of "the butterfly effect", the concept that if a butterfly beats its wings in Brazil, it can set off a tornado in Texas.
Scientists and weather forecasters still argue about its validity, but for science fiction writers, it has become an irresistible and often enormously enjoyable narrative trick.
Of all the films that have played with these ideas of time, chance and destiny, none has had more sheer fun than Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure - the story of two hapless high-school dimwits whose fate depends on their ability to finish their history homework.
- BOTH: - Not bad! Greetings, my excellent friends.
Do you know when the Mongols ruled China? Well .
.
perhaps we could can ask them.
Asking Genghis Khan to help you with your homework probably sounds like high school silliness.
But I suppose we all have our own fantasies about meeting people from the past.
I quite fancy having dinner with Oliver Cromwell, and then drinks with Cleopatra.
But in Bill and Ted's case, everybody from Billy the Kid to the philosopher Socrates - or "So-crates" as they call him - ends up being dragged into one of science fiction's less glamorous time machines.
When we first conceived of Bill & Ted, it was Bill and Ted bumming around time in a van.
And it was originally, even before it was called Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, a rough draft was Bill & Ted's Time Van.
Then Back To The Future came out and there was the DeLorean, so we had to change the car.
So the director, Steve Herek, said, "What if we made it a phone booth?" And we went, "OK.
" Unlike the TARDIS, Bill and Ted's phone booth was very much smaller on the inside - both as a time machine and as a working prop.
From a production standpoint, it was a complete nightmare.
I mean, you know, it's like I mean, Reeves and I, I think we called it "the deathbox".
BOTH SCREAM This was not the height of sort of the CGI era.
You know what I mean? So this booth was upended, it was welded to a hydraulic.
It was like something out of a KISS concert.
When the phone booth finally dumps everyone in San Dimas, California, the scene is set for an unlikely culture clash.
The assorted historical bigwigs are completely out of their depth in '80s America and before long, they find themselves thrown into jail.
- SOLOMON: - We had no way to get the guys out of jail, so we're trying to come up with all sorts of ways to do it and, finally, we just said, "Well, what if they time travel, but not in the scene?" Ted, good thinking, dude! After the report, we'll time travel back to two days ago, steal your dad's keys and leave them here! Where?! I don't know.
How about behind that sign? That way, when we get here now, they'll be waiting for us.
- See? - Whoa, yeah! It was a time travel scene that had no time travel.
It was just the conceptual you know, the idea of time travel.
And to me, that was the most fun, actually - coming up with those kind of conundrums.
The way that they played with time, I thought was brilliant.
I mean, it was really brilliant.
There's a lot of really cool, subtle ideas in there, that areyou know, that are profound, if you kind of break them apart.
But all through that lens of, you know, two imbeciles.
HE LAUGHS BUZZING AND WHIRRING Gentlemen .
.
we are history.
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure might seem like a knockabout teen comedy, but its take on Ronald Reagan's America had a gently satirical edge.
We get all these characters from all over the world.
And what do we do? We bring them to a mall.
And so history's greatest minds are offered a glimpse of humanity's evolution - from classical Athens to a California shopping mall.
TICKING But while Bill & Ted's cultural satire was pretty mild, time travel stories have long been a vehicle for sharp social criticism, projecting our own political and cultural anxieties into the far future.
Today we think of The Time Machine as a classic work of science fiction.
But to readers in the 1890s, it felt more like a book of political satire.
You see, Wells was an early and very committed socialist and he was effectively using the time travel story as a way of exploring some of the fears of his fellow Victorians as well as imagining what a future Britain might look like if it continued on its current course.
In Wells's vision, the class divide becomes so profound that humanity splits into two distinct species - Eloi and Morlocks.
"Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, "man had thrust his brother man out of the ease and the sunshine.
"And now that brother was coming backchanged.
" So it is that in the book, the effete, decadent Eloi are effectively the successors of the upper classes, whereas the bestial, subterranean Morlocks are the descendants of industrial Britain's great unwashed.
Wells's provocative take on the haves and have-nots is set some 800,000 years in the future - an awfully long way from the age of gaslight and horsepower.
But as the march of progress continued, the future seemed closer than ever.
And when, in 1924, the Austrian film director Fritz Lang first set eyes on the skyscrapers of New York, it inspired him to make one of science fiction's greatest films - Metropolis.
DRAMATIC MUSIC Metropolis was the first full-length science-fiction film.
It's set in a future city ruled by rich industrialists from their skyscrapers, while the workers toil miserably underground.
Even the elderly HG Wells found it a bit heavy-handed.
It was, he said, in his New York Times review, the silliest film he'd ever seen.
But the city of the future has intrigued science fiction writers ever since, and the shadow of Metropolis's class conflict has never quite gone away.
In '60s and '70s Britain, the future was now, at least, according to the architects and planners who were turning our cities into high-rise utopias.
But many science fiction writers had a rather stronger sense of scepticism, as well as a much greater grasp of reality.
They knew that today's dreams are often tomorrow's nightmares.
And nobody dissected all this more acutely than Britain's dystopian laureate, JG Ballard.
People have accused me, and accused most science fiction writers, of being rather pessimistic because they're always warning of dangers ahead.
But I think, if you, you know .
.
a sign painter who putspaints a sign saying, "Dangerous bends ahead, slow down," isn't a pessimist.
I mean, he's merely giving an accurate warning of, you know You don't think you're writing, "Dangerous bends ahead, speed up"? That's a Yes.
Of course I am, actually, in some ofin some of my books.
In 1975, Ballard set his sights on the concrete tower blocks so beloved of Britain's optimistic architects.
High Rise imagines a future block isolated from the outside world.
Here, the residents are organised according to their social standing, from bottom to top.
But as the power cuts and petty grievances escalate into violence, class divisions turn into class war.
If you'd been reading High Rise in the mid-'70s, perhaps by candlelight during an unscheduled power cut, you might well have wondered just how far off Ballard's dystopian future really was.
Writers like Ballard conjured haunting, even chilling images in their readers' minds.
But the defining vision of the city of the future came from the cinema, in British director Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi noir, Blade Runner.
Scott's portrait of Los Angeles in 2019 owes much to the skyscrapers and airships of Metropolis.
But it also blended the industrial northeast of his boyhood with the bustling alleys of Hong Kong.
Somewhere in this vast, infernal city lurks a group of rogue androids known as replicants - and they are being hunted down by a blade runner, a detective who specialises in unmasking the androids hidden in the shadows.
Basically, the noir side of the sets, right, werewere Ridley going .
.
"It looks too new.
"Can you do something to it? Take a sledgehammer to it.
" - MAN: - So, I read the script and got the definite idea that it was sort of a crappy world.
So, I thought, "Well, I can do that.
"You know, I'm a designer.
"I can manufacture a dystopian world.
" HAUER: It's a vision where not everything works very well.
But we know that.
Why would the future be different from now? Half the things we make don't work or are nonsense.
It's a mess, you know? Life's a mess.
- MAN: - It wasn't a brand-new idea.
Even Star Wars got some of it in.
Things were old and beat up in some places.
But Ridley caught that sense of "The future is already old.
" The name we came up was, uh"retro-deco".
And the other one was "trash chic".
Blade Runner's unforgettable look made it THE benchmark for all visions of the future.
But Ridley Scott's liberal use of the rain machine also helped to hide the stage trickery used to make Syd Mead's vehicles look realistic.
When the Spinner lifts off in the rain, the reason he had rain is because it comes down vertically and it helped to hide the wires holding the prop up.
The film's real achievement lies in the way it conjures a credible, three-dimensional world, complete with its own futuristic way of dressing and talking.
Indeed, the actor Edward James Olmos even devised a whole new language for his character, Gaff.
When I walked in there, I talked gibberish.
I justyou know, I just put a bunch of sounds together of different languages.
HE SPEAKS GIBBERISH "What?" Of course, nobody understood me.
In this scene, Olmos uses his invented language to identify Detective Deckard as a former blade runner.
Lofaszt! Nehogy mar! Te vagy a blade, blade runner.
" - He say you blade runner.
- Tell him I'm eating.
But the chef's translation doesn't quite capture the jumble of European and Asian obscenities that Olmos had strung together.
I say, "Lofaszt! Nehogy mar! Te vagy a blade runner!" And, uh, which means, "Oh, big horse dick, you are the Blade Runner.
" The people who knew the languages would just roll on the ground and fall out.
They couldn't believe that somebody had said that, you know? With its melting pot of languages, its teeming streets and post-industrial architecture, Blade Runner has to come to define science fiction's dystopian vision of the future.
It was based on a novel, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, first published in 1968 by the Californian maverick Philip K.
Dick.
"I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ "and I experimented, "and I finally found a setting for despair.
"So I put it on my schedule for twice a month.
"I think that's a reasonable amount of time "to feel hopeless about everything.
" Philip K.
Dick was one of science fiction's genuine greats.
Reading his books often feels like a hallucinogenic experience - rather like being thrust into the future after downing a bucket of LSD.
But perhaps that's hardly surprising, because Philip K.
Dick was immersed in the psychedelic counter-culture of late '60s San Francisco.
He claimed to have had visions of life in ancient Rome and even to have been possessed by the spirit of the prophet Elijah.
And he believed that he was getting messages from outer space.
Philip K.
Dick was a marvellous science-fiction writer.
He had an uncanny intuition for turning contemporary America and the global situation in the '60s and '70s into science fiction metaphors, where he uses the ordinary devices of science fiction, like robots, time travel, aliens, telekinetic powers and the like, all jumbled together in a mash that doesn't make logical sense and feels sort of like a dream, and yet it seems to capture the way life felt both in the 1960s and even now.
Philip K.
Dick's work endures because his unsettling, paranoid vision of the future still feels remarkably prophetic.
He was writing about state surveillance, virtual reality and the dangers of technology not just years but decades ago.
His tomorrow often feels uncannily like our today.
For all Philip K.
Dick's eccentricity, his themes of obsession, surveillance and mistrust were rooted in the political realities of his '60s heyday.
This was the era of the Cold War, an age haunted by the fear of nuclear Armageddon.
And the shadow of the bomb hangs over perhaps the most extraordinary time travel film of all, made in 1962 and composed almost entirely of still photos - La Jetee.
- FILM'S NARRATOR: - The human race was doomed.
Space was off-limits.
The only link with survival passed through time - a loophole in time - and then maybe it would be possible to reach food, medicine, energy.
This was the purpose of the experiment - to throw emissaries into time, to call past and future to the rescue of the present.
The brainchild of a reclusive French artist, Chris Marker, La Jetee tells the story of a prisoner from a post-apocalyptic future who's sent back in time to save mankind.
WOMAN: The world's been destroyed and the time traveller's being sent back to essentially restart everything.
It's one of the most amazing things in time travel or, for that matter, cinema, because, of course, it's done entirely in still images, and it has this circularity and this power that it derives from its minimalism.
La Jetee might have remained a brilliant curiosity of French new wave cinema had it not been for the scriptwriters David and Janet Peoples, who adapted its doom-laden time travel narrative for Hollywood.
They called the new film Twelve Monkeys.
We started to talk about what it would be like to do the movie from the point of view of one of those guys you meet on the street who tells you the world's coming to an end and all of this stuff.
And looking at him, you think that's absurd and everything, But what if you were in his shoes? He knows the world's coming to an end.
He's seen the facts and is persuaded of it and has the reality to deal with it.
Like La Jetee, Twelve Monkeys focuses on a survivor from an apocalyptic future.
Bruce Willis plays James Cole, sent back in time to find the source of a virus that ravaged mankind in 1996.
That is if anyone will believe him.
This is October, right? April.
What year is this? What year do you think it is? - 1996.
- That's the future, James.
Do you think you're living in the future? 1996 is the past.
David and I both had worked, as very young people, in state institutions, not completely different from the one that is in Twelve Monkeys, and it was often very difficult to tell who was sane and who was insane.
Our main character could have come from the future or he could have simply invented this construct that allowed him to survive.
Although James Cole knows the fate of humanity, his own is less certain.
The film shows him being haunted by a recurring nightmare from his childhood in which he sees a man being chased and shot down in an airport - a strange, unsettling scene borrowed directly from La Jetee.
The idea of the man seeing his own death is a powerful dramatic trick that came from La Jetee.
FILM'S NARRATOR: He ran towards her.
And when he recognised the man who had trailed him since the camp, he knew there was no way out of time.
And he knew that this haunting moment he had been granted to see as a child was the moment of his own death.
One reason writers and filmmakers love the subject of time travel is because this allows them to explore some pretty heavy themes within an eminently crowd-pleasing format.
Where else, after all, would you find Bruce Willis channelling French existential angst about a child having a premonition of his own death? But then, Bruce Willis is a bit of a time-travel veteran.
He returned to the genre in the 2012 film Looper, which was something of a psychotherapist's fantasy - a dreamlike story in which the hero discovers that his chief adversary is actually his own younger self.
This time, Bruce Willis plays Joe, a hit man at the end of his career who's been sent back in time to be killed - a process known as "closing the loop".
- HE FIRES WEAPON - Aagh! But after surviving the first attempt on his life, Joe proves a reluctant victim, leading to a memorable showdown in a diner with his assassin - the younger version of himself, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
I can't let you walk away from this diner alive.
This is my life now.
I earned it.
You had yours already.
So why don't you do what old men do, and die? - JOHNSON: - When I first came up with the idea for Looper, I could have very well framed the notion of old man, young man having it out as a father-son conversation.
In some waysin many ways, that conversation in the diner IS a father-son conversation.
It's, "I'm not going to turn into you.
" But you take it into the science-fiction realm, suddenly you have time travel involved, he's come back, and he's literally saying to him, "I'm not going to turn into you," there becomes something where we've seen that conversation a thousand times on film and we've probably had that conversation in our lives, but, suddenly, it's in this new context and you have to .
.
your ears perk up and you have to lean forward and process it on a different level.
So, do you know what's going to happen? You've done all this already, as me? I don't want to talk about time-travel shit.
Cos if we start talking about it, then we're going to be here all day talking about it and making diagrams with straws.
Time travel doesn't make sense.
Time travel is never going to make sense.
You can really muck yourself up if you start actually thinking, "I'm going to be the guy who gets time travel right.
" I think you have to let go of that very early and just say, you know, "I have a story "that I think is worth, uh worth telling.
" In a final time-bending twist, Joe's younger self realises that the only way to take control of events may be to end his own life.
Looper's ending plays very cleverly on a basic human desire - our yearning to be in control of our own destiny.
Indeed, from Looper's futuristic criminals to HG Wells's inventor and Doctor Who's Time Lord, time travel stories often have the same basic premise - that through the power of science, we can make time do our bidding.
Alas, in reality, time is the one thing that none of us can ever escape.
We are all, of course, time travellers, moving inexorably forward one day at a time, whether we like it or not.
But what if, one day, the clock stopped, leaving us stuck in a single moment doomed to repeat ourselves for all eternity? OK, campers, rise and shine.
Groundhog Day is the story of disgruntled weatherman Phil Connors, played with sardonic relish by Bill Murray, who's fated to relive the same day again and again and again.
Honestly, the whole point of it, to me, was, "What if a person lived longer than one lifetime?" Any movie can show a person living one lifetime, and do they? What if they're still they're 70, 75, 80 years old and they're still acting like a teenage adolescent? They never got it, they never outgrew it, they never got beyond it? And so I was saying, "Oh, OK.
For some people, it's like that.
"But what if they had another lifetime and another one after that? "If a person could actually live that long, "would they change, "or are they condemned to be who they are no matter what?" What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered? That about sums it up for me.
For a very funny film, Groundhog Day offers a surprisingly bleak look into the darkest corners of the human soul.
To break free of the cycle, Phil Connors is driven to a succession of violent suicide attempts - crashing a truck, electrocuting himself in the bath, even jumping from a tower.
And yet, each time, he's miraculously resurrected to begin the day again.
This is perhaps the ultimate nightmare - a time loop in which it seems nothing ever changes.
But very gradually, something does begin to change - Phil Connors himself.
JANET PEOPLES: It was both a morality tale and a romance.
And sometimes when a film uses any device over and over again, you get tired.
But each time, they just did it so that it was better and better, as our guy learns his lesson, finally.
MUSIC: "I Got You, Babe" by Sonny and Cher At last, Phil learns to live out his Groundhog Day differently, more considerately.
Only then does he escape the time trap and no longer wakes up alone.
Before it's earned, our money's always spent - RADIO ANNOUNCER: - Oh, please, not again.
- ANNOUNCER 2: - That is a great song! - No, it's not.
- Don't listen to this man, he - RADIO SWITCHES OFF - SHE GROANS - Mmm! It's too early.
One of the takeaways for people is just a realisation that this first day that he experienced, that was so awful, that was so terrible, that was the worst day of his life ever, was the same day that he experienced at the end, the same day that it was presented to him that turned out to be one of the best days of his life, and the only thing that changed was him.
Groundhog Day is basically a modern morality tale, and it clearly owes a lot to that supremely sentimental Victorian time-travel fable A Christmas Carol, because at heart, Bill Murray's weatherman is essentially an updated version of Dickens's Ebenezer Scrooge - a world-class killjoy dragged around past, present and future until he changes his ways.
The idea of a character who finds himself at the mercy of time and obliged to make a difference inspired one of television's quirkiest and most entertaining forays into time travel - the American series Quantum Leap.
MAN: It all started when a time travel experiment I was conducting went a little ca-ca.
A cult favourite on BBC Two in the early '90s, the series follows the adventures of Dr Sam Beckett, the brains behind a secret government time-travel project.
My character, Sam Beckett, invented this ability to travel in time.
Because funding is being cut short - something everybody can relate to - he's forced to jump into the machine before it was really tested, and can't get home again.
- AS SAM: - Anyway, here I am, bouncing around in time, putting things right that once went wrong - a sort of time-travelling Lone Ranger with Al as my Tonto, and I don't even need a mask.
Oh, boy.
Due to a glitch in the Quantum Leap time machine, Sam becomes lost in the recent past, destined to keep leaping into different moments in time and into the bodies of different characters - the ideal way to give audiences a new surprise every week.
I would plug in a hairdryer and cause the blackout that's hit the east coast back in 1960whenever that was.
In a restaurant, somebody's choking, and Sam takes and does the Heimlich manoeuvre, and then somebody says .
.
"Lucky he was around, Dr Heimlich.
" You know? MUSIC: "The Times They Are A-Changin'" by Bob Dylan Oh, the times, they are a-changin' What sets Quantum Leap apart is that Sam, its time traveller, actually inhabits the body of another person in another era.
So, Sam isn't just wandering around another time.
He actually becomes another person.
And in each episode, he has to correct a mistake or an injustice before he can move on from the time in which he's trapped.
Sometimes Sam's journeys are excursions into pure nostalgia - for example, when he saves the life of a '50s test pilot or when he wins a baseball game in the 1960s.
But the writers soon realised that they could use the concept to explore the moral fault lines of modern America.
- BAKULA: - There was an episode where I was pregnant.
Now, all of a sudden, though, I'm in the body of a cadet who may or may not be gay, and there, in the premise of that episode, you have social issues.
Sam even discovered what it was like to be black in the Deep South of the 1950s.
There's gotta be some mistake.
- MAN: - Biggest mistake you'll ever make, boy.
Ain't that right, Toad? For Sam, and perhaps for the show's producers, time travel offers an opportunity to redress the injustices of the past and even to rewrite history with a happy ending.
The exception, though, was a story inspired by a real-life encounter between the writer, Donald Bellisario, a former marine, and one of the most notorious figures in American history.
BELLISARIO: I went into the supply shed and sitting cross-legged on the floor behind the counter was a man.
And he was reading Pravda.
Now, this is 1959, January.
You're a marine, you're not reading Pravda HE LAUGHS .
.
in 1959, January.
And I asked him why he was reading it and what he was getting out of it.
And he starts spouting all this communist propaganda.
And he and I almost got into a fight over it.
I had another guy grab me and say, "Hey, hey, hey.
"Come on.
" And he said to me, "We ignore him.
He's harmless.
" I'll never forget that.
"We ignore him.
He's harmless.
" That "harmless" man was Lee Harvey Oswald, and Bellisario's chance encounter inspired an episode plunging Sam into the chaos of the Kennedy assassination - a historic tragedy that even Sam can't correct.
But the story ends with a twist.
Sam's mission was actually to save Jackie from the assassin's bullet.
- RADIO ANNOUNCER: - The President's wife, Jackie Kennedy, was not hurt.
- She walked into the hospital - Thanks, Al.
Time travel stories such as Quantum Leap have tended to focus on the voyager's destination and his adventures once he gets there.
But by the end of the 20th century, writers were beginning to explore the emotional consequences, not just for the traveller but for those closest to him.
And in 2003, this became the premise for an unashamedly tear-drenched best-seller, The Time Traveler's Wife.
This is the intimate story of the relationship between an artist, Clare, and Henry, a librarian who's afflicted with an extraordinary illness that he can't control.
"Suddenly, you are intensely nauseated and then you are gone.
"You are throwing up in some suburban geraniums "or a wooden sidewalk in Oak Park, Illinois circa 1903, "or a tennis court on a fine autumn day in the 1950s.
" "You are standing, naked as a jaybird, "up to your ankles in ice water in a ditch.
" I imagined time travel as a very stressful thing.
Um, the diseases that I had in mind were epilepsy and schizophrenia, both of which take a strong toll physically.
It did seem as though something so extreme as a shift through time, a bodily shift, would not be comfortable.
It would have to be wrenching andand unnatural.
At the time that I was thinking about all this, this was 1997, and the race to decode the human genome was very much on, and it was in the news all the time.
And I thought, "Yeah, that's it.
It's a genetic disease.
" Henry's illness is called chrono-impairment, a rare genetic disorder that can quite suddenly, without warning, whisk him through time.
What seemed so fresh about The Time Traveler's Wife, at least to its fans, is that it takes a classic science fiction conceit and invests it with a much deeper human resonance.
So, we experience Henry's fear and confusion as, again and again, time chews him up and spits him out.
And we share Clare's yearning and rage at his sudden and prolonged absences.
This is time travel as a story of love and loss, as pure human melodrama.
I had this very strong visual notion about this old woman in a room, with a cup of tea, waiting for somebody.
And I immediately thought, "Yeah, that's what this is about.
"It's about all that time that a time traveller's wife would spend "waiting and wondering where her time traveller might be.
" TICKING Even Britain's favourite time traveller hasn't been able to escape the emotional consequences of an eternity wandering up and down the time vortex.
Once upon a time, being a companion in Doctor Who meant screaming, wearing a mini-skirt and asking, "What's happening, Doctor?" But when the series was revived in 2005, the writers were very keen to show the Doctor and his friends grappling not just with the Daleks, but with the most terrifying foe of all - relationships.
That hand of yours still gives me the creeps.
And as in The Time Traveler's Wife Come with me.
.
.
it's the Doctor's relationship with his human companions that reveals the heavy price a time traveller might have to pay for his remarkable gift.
- How many of us have there been travelling with you? - Does it matter? Yeah, it does, if I'm just the latest in a long line.
As opposed to what? I thought you and me were Well, I obviously got it wrong.
He can have these very intense relationships with his companions, uhand yet, he will always outlive them.
I've been to the year five billion, right, but this - no, this is really seeing the future.
You just leave us behind.
Is that what you're going to do to me? So, he can have these relationships that give him solace and comfort for a while, but ultimately, he will always be wandering alone through eternity.
I don't age.
I regenerate.
But humans decay.
You wither and you die.
Imagine watching that happen to someone that you What, Doctor? You can spend the rest of your life with me.
But I can't spend the rest of mine with you.
I have to live on.
Alone.
Well, the essence of Doctor Who is, in some ways, kind of tragic, because the Doctor will always have companions, the Doctor will always find these wonderful strays and bring them onto the TARDIS or try and build up some life with them, and he always knows that, um, they'll die.
They're like pets.
The only constant is the boy and the big blue box.
And so the Doctor is left to wander alone, his endless journey a reminder of the emotional price we all pay as we move through time.
Ever since HG Wells's gentleman inventor first cranked up his time machine, science fiction has offered us a glorious array of bizarre contraptions and bewildering paradoxes.
Aagh! Time travel has allowed writers to ask nostalgically, "What might have been?" and rather more chillingly, "What might lie ahead?" And for me, time travel is the most beguiling and the most poignant science fiction concept of them all.
Just imagine if you could go back to the day of your birth, to the moment your parents first met.
Imagine you could be there at your great-grandparents' wedding day or the first Christmas or the last days of Rome.
Imagine that all it took was to press this button.
You would, wouldn't you? CREAKING AND WHIRRING