Daybreak, Journeyman, Tru Calling – any of those sound familiar? For most people, probably not. Television is littered with the broken bodies of one-season wonders that used time travel as a regular plot device. On paper, the notion is great – every week you get to shake things up, mess around with history a bit, replay big events from history, what have you. But most often, these shows don’t catch on with the public (Quantum Leap and Doctor Who are two exceptions that come to mind).
Even though time travel is a tough sell for an entire series, the subject is too tantalizing and downright fun for TV to ignore. These are the top ten time travel episodes from television past and present. But not future. I built a time travel machine to visit the future, but it only travels in real time.
Okay, it’s a refrigerator box with “Time Machine” Sharpied on the side. I’m thinking of painting flames on it, which I understand makes things go faster.
10. Star Trek, “The City on the Edge of Forever”
What, you thought you could get through a list of time travel episodes without a Star Trek episode popping up? One of the most famous of all Trek episodes, “City” takes the crew of the Enterprise back to 1930s New York City, where Kirk tries to track down a paranoid McCoy and falls in love with Joan Collins. No lie!
What’s the twist? Under the influence of a serum, McCoy experiences paranoid delusions and escapes into the past, where he alters history to the point that the Enterprise no longer exists.
9. Eureka, “Founders Day”
At the start of season four, the main characters are thrown back to 1947, when the super-secret town of Eureka was just a military base – a twinkle in the government’s eye. The characters return, only to find that they’ve dragged one of the founders of Eureka with them. It’s purely a bonus that the new character is played by Battlestar Galactica‘s James Callis, who brings his considerable oily charm to the role. I was going to throw in a Heroes episode instead of Eureka, but then I remembered the horrible soul-annihilating experience of watching Heroes, and I didn’t want to revisit that with you.
What’s the twist? The first three seasons of Eureka followed a pretty basic formula: science-y anomaly makes weird stuff happen, problem is solved by the common-sense sheriff and the megabrained scientists. This one shakes up the basic premise of the show when the characters return and find that their brief trip to the past has caused all manner of weird changes to the present. Suddenly Eureka had a seasonal arc on which to hang its episodes.
8. Red Dwarf, “Backwards”
For those of you who aren’t terminal geeks, Red Dwarf was a BBC Two series set three million years in the future, where the human race has been reduced to one man in a mining space ship, where he has adventures with a hologram, a humanoid cat named Cat, and an android. “Backwards” is the episode that hooks people, and as such is usually employed by geeks as a tool to get you to come over and bring Thai food.
What’s the twist? Through a series of events too complicated to explain, the crew of Red Dwarf end up on an Earth in which time runs backwards. At first they use their forwardness to their advantage by starring in a show called “The Sensational Reverse Brothers”, eventually they grow sick of a world in which cause and effect are reversed. I suppose the entire episode is really just an excuse for a series of ridiculous jokes – and really, really unpleasant bathroom humor – but as long as the jokes are this funny, I’m not complaining.
7. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, “Self Made Man”
Time is really the central preoccupation of every installment of Terminator, but the television series turned time travel from a hook into a casual staging ground for philosophical questions about time travel. Unsurprisingly, the show never made it to a third season. “Self Made Man” is a bottle episode and a character study that poses a few questions about the time travel framework of the Terminator world that the movies never had the space to consider. It’s closer in spirit to an old Twilight Zone episode than a Terminator story.
What’s the twist? While spending nights at a library, Cameron (Summer Glau) discovers evidence that a Terminator showed up in the 1920s and is likely still out there. She hunts him down through photos, clippings, old radio broadcasts and film reels. Eventually she realizes that the Terminator in question was sent to the Roaring Twenties in error. This is probably the most exciting research-based episode of television you’ll ever see.
6. X Files, “Triangle”
When you consider how many freaky events and parasitic thyroid-hungry weirdos paraded past David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson on a weekly basis, it’s surprising that they didn’t go to the time travel well more often. But in season six, the writers began to dig away at the theme, producing one of the series’ most entertaining and clever hours in the process.
What’s the twist? Mulder (Duchovny) investigates the strange reappearance of the Queen Anne, which disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle back in 1939. But when Mulder finds the ship, he discovers that it’s still 1939 on board. And he has to foil a Nazi plot. Nazis, time travel, Bermuda Triangle – HOW IS THIS EPISODE NOT THE PRESIDENT OF THE KNOWN WORLD? Think about it.
5. Quantum Leap, “The Leap Home/The Leap Home, Part II”
Along with Doctor Who, Quantum Leap is the big exception to the time travel television rule. Instead of using time travel as a gimmick to spice up an episode, it’s the entire premise. For five seasons, Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) jumped from body to body, righting wrongs and chatting with a holographic projection of Dean Stockwell. That sounds kind of fun, actually.
What’s the twist? The roster of Beckett’s bodies included a female rape victim, a chimpanzee and Lee Harvey Oswald. But since I’m such a fan of recursion, I vote for “The Leap Home” two-parter, in which Bakula’s character leaps into his own body as a young man. Instead of solving other people’s problems, Sam attempts to repair the lives of his family and friends, with complicated results.
4. Fringe, “White Tulip”
Many of Fringe‘s best episodes feel a bit like time travel because they feature a parallel universe, but only once has the show explored time travel. “White Tulip” isn’t essential to understanding to understanding the overall arc of the show, but it’s an outstanding meditation on grief and memory, and our desire to overcome the mistakes of the past.
What’s the twist? Peter Weller (Robocop!) plays Alastair Peck, a scientist who has transformed himself into living time machine. After one of his time leaps kills a passel of passengers in a subway car, the Fringe team tracks him down. Of course, it’s tough to catch someone who can leap backwards in time repeatedly. Eventually they discover that Peck is trying to jump back to a crucial moment in time and save his fiancee from a fatal accident. Except they discover nothing, because Peck’s leaps into the past constantly erase the timelines in which his original crime was committed.
3. Lost, “The Constant”
At a certain point, most shows past their best before date, when the original premise begins to disintegrate and the characters no longer feel original or organic. Paradoxically, this is the point at which some of the best episodes of the show crop up, as the focus shifts from forging solid and even arcs to producing intermittent spikes of brilliance. This is certainly the case with “The Constant,” probably the most memorable episode of Lost from its last few seasons.
What’s the twist? Desmond Hume has come unstuck in time. In fact, “The Constant” is the first episode of Lost that doesn’t use flashbacks or flashforwards to tell the story. Instead, the show embeds its chronologically jumbled story technique into the structure of the episode. In other words, Desmond – and not just the audience – is the one jumping around to various points in his life. But the best moment of “The Constant” comes when Desmond is able to communicate across time to his long-lost love Penny. It’s a rare moment of emotional payoff in a show that was often too preoccupied with its own convolutions to tell a satisfying story.
2. The Twilight Zone, “Walking Distance”
One of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone ever, perfectly encapsulating the anxieties of the post-war age and digging deeply into nostalgia. A dissatisfied businessman finds himself at a gas station one day within walking distance of the town where he grew up. But when he goes for a stroll to visit his old stomping grounds…
What’s the twist? … he discovers that they really are his old stomping grounds. At first he’s pleased to discover his childhood town, but when he attempts to tell his young self to enjoy his fleeting youth, things unravel quickly.
1. Doctor Who, “Blink”
Did I say that time travel shows rarely last? Clearly I wasn’t counting Doctor Who, which originally ran from 1963 to 1989, took a short break to get its bearings, and hit the ground running in 2005. Although Who regularly deals with time travel, the show rarely exploits the opportunities for narrative games that arise from being able to mess with chronology.
Like Red Dwarf‘s “Backwards,” “Blink” is a gateway episode for most current-day Who fans. Carey Mulligan (pre-Oscar nomination) stars as Sally Sparrow, a young woman who finds inexplicable events piling up around her after she visits a ruined manor on the edge of town. “Blink” is one of the smartest, tension-filled and entertaining hours of television you will ever see.
What’s the twist? Where do I start? Sally Sparrow stumbles on alien creatures that look like statues when you observe them – but the moment you take your eyes off them, they come alive and zap you back into the past. As Sally’s friends and romantic interests begin to vanish, they start sending her messages from the past. Complicating everything is a DVD easter egg with The Doctor conducting a one-sided conversation that may or may not hold the key to defeating the aliens. Wibbledy-wobbledy.
What are some of your favorite time travel episodes? How about movies? The field is wide, wide open.
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