Game News Video Games Reviews & News
Related Articles
17 A Clothes Shredding Glowing Ball
From: The Terminator Franchise
(opens in new tab)
The TDE (Time Displacement Equipment) was created by Skynet so that it could send a Terminator back in time and kill a resistance leader before he grew up to become a trouble maker.
Drawbacks with this model of time machine: It’s a one-way trip; it leaves a circular burn mark on your carpet; and you arrive at your temporal destination naked, because it cannot transport anything other than organic material or mimetic polyalloy (the material the T-1000 is made out of). Though since T-800s does that mean you could take a kangaroo back in time with you and store some spare clothes and a gun in its pouch?
16 An American Diner
From: 11.22.63 by Stephen King
(opens in new tab)
There’s something quintessentially Stephen King about sticking a time portal in something as iconically American as a diner. The reason why there’s a time portal in the diner is never really explained, though the green-hatted tramp that the protagonist, Jake Epping, keeps coming across in the past may have something to do with it. Instead, it’s just a plot device to set up a classic “what if?” scenario. What if you could travel back in time and stop Lee Harvey Oswald from killing JFK? Would you do it? How would you do it? Unfortunately, the unique way this time machine works (see below) makes the task even more difficult…
Drawbacks with this model of time machine: The portal always sends the traveller back to exactly the same time and place – just outside the diner in 1958. You’d think this might end up with multiple versions of the same person running around 1958 if they make a number of journeys back in time (and wouldn’t they all cause a log jam at the exit of the portal?) but no. Each time you travel back, it’s like the first time again. But what you do in the past does affect the future you return to, in the classic “Sound Of Thunder” mode.
The other problem, as Jake finds out, is that because the portal always takes you to 1958, if you do want to stop JFK’s assassination, you have to hang around waiting for five years.
15 A Pendant
From: Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban
(opens in new tab)
Professor McGonagall gives swotty Hermione a Time Turner in The Prisoner Of Azkaban so that she can attend multiple lessons at the same time – which would be some idea of hell for most teenagers. Hermione’s Time Turner takes the form of an hourglass pendant on a necklace. The more you turn the hourglass, the further back you go.
Oddly, while the wizarding heroes are canny enough to use time travel to save Sirius Black and Buckbeat in that book, nobody is bright enough to suggest travelling back to when Harry was a baby and saving his parents from Voldemort. Instead, Hermione gives her Time Turner back to McGonagall, complaining about her workload.
Drawbacks with this model of time machine: It could solve every single mystery and problem in the entire seven books (or eight films) with a flick of the hourglass, so it’s best quietly forgotten.
14 Photographs
From: Red Dwarf
(opens in new tab)
In the third season episode “Timeslides” Kryten creates some mutated developing fluid that brings photographs to life. Then Lister discovers he can walk into the photos!
In case you’re thinking, “But they’re just interacting with photos, not really time travelling,” hold your horses. Lister and Rimmer discover that they can have an effect on the time line; interacting with the past of the photos can change the present. They even inadvertently prevent the assassination of the “leader of the runners-up in World War II,” – Hitler. Lister uses this knowledge to attempt to convince his younger self to take a different path in life (one that doesn’t lead to him being on Red Dwarf), but Rimmer soon throws a spanner in the works.
Drawbacks with this model of time machine: Seeing old pics of yourself when you were younger can be embarrassing enough already, but actually meeting yourself when you had that mullet… urgh! There’s also the problem that you can’t walk further than the area shown in the boundaries of the photos… though as Rimmer points out, “Believe me, there’s a beach shot in Acapulco you wouldn’t want to movie out of.”
13 A Room Full Of Junk
From: Crime Traveller
(opens in new tab)
In this thankfully forgotten 1997 BBC show, that guy who was in EastEnders and is now in Holby City plays a cop – Jeff Slade – who discovers that his colleague just happens to have a time machine invented by her dad stored at home. They decide to use it to solve crime, but because there are so many “rules” involved in this version of time travel, any fun they (or the viewer) might have had rapidly vanishes down a temporal plug hole.
Drawbacks with this model of time machine: Too many to mention, to be honest, leading to endless, repetitive scenes with the stars telling each other, “No we can’t do that because…” But here are a few:
• The time machine never travels into the future because, “You can’t travel into something that doesn’t exist.”
• The machine sends the travellers back a random amount of time, usually around a day, but maybe just a few minutes or as much as a week. But once you’ve been sent back, you have to live that amount of time again. And when that time is up, you have to be back at the machine, or you get stuck in a time loop.
• You must not meet yourself in the past or change the past. It’s never clear what’ll happen if you do. Create a more interesting programme presumably.
• Also never explained is why, if you need to be back at the machine at the same time you first travelled back, the characters never meet themselves using the machine to go back in time. The answer may be as simple as: because the show was bollox.
(opens in new tab)
12 A Groovy Foreshortening Effect
From: The Time Tunnel
(opens in new tab)
Trust the ’60s to come up with the grooviest-looking time machine. You can’t help thinking that if Irwin Allen’s The Time Tunnel TV show had been made another decade, it would have aesthetically reflected those times instead – a psychedelic tunnel for the ’70s, a neon one for the ’80s or an art deco one for the ’30s (hey, maybe there’s an art challenge for you…)
The tunnel itself was clearly the star of the show, a massive, eye-catching, black-and-white icon that remains in the memory long after the stories have faded from your mind (which was about two seconds after the end credits started).
The Time Tunnel, aka Project Tic-Toc, was a secret government project buried in a vast complex under the Arizona desert. Unfortunately, it was about as reliable as First Bus, and in the pilot the government want it shut down as a waste of money. To prevent this, a scientist throws himself into the tunnel, but becomes lost in time. Another scientist enters the tunnel as well to try to save the first, but he becomes lost as well. At which point the government official presumably went, “Told you so,” and asked the bean counters to work out how much money was being wasted on electricity trying to get these two selfish prats back to the present.
Drawbacks with this model of time machine: It doesn’t work, and the actual time travelling looks like a very bumpy affair.
The other problem with the time travel in this show is that the travellers don’t seem to be able to affect the timeline. They arrive at major points in Earth’s history – the Titanic sinking, Krakatoa erupting, etc – but their main mission usually seem to be making sure they’re outta there before they get killed. Oh, sure, they would try to warn people, but it never seemed to do much good.
They also go to the future occasionally – when the budget would allow – but they never seemed to have much affect there either.
The Time Tunnel did translate everything handily into English, though, no matter when or where they arrived.
