TIME IT WAS A-CHANGIN' (HOW SCIENCE FICTION SHOWED TIME, THEN AND NOW)

(...with a few PLOT SPOILERS, albeit old ones, along the way - for ‘Doctor Who’, ‘Star Trek’ and the ‘X-Men’ films...)

Time Was Hard Then...

Time isn’t what it used to be.

But don’t take my word for it. Look to the first season 'Doctor Who' episode 'The Aztecs' (1964), where Barbara sets about cleaning up the past. Leading to the Doctor's well-known imploring response: "But you can't rewrite history! Not one line! What you are trying to do is utterly impossible.” He doesn't say “not one moment” but “not one line” - as if history is inscribed, an immutable book of law not written by human hands.

True, this firm rule would be subject to erosion even before the end of the Hartnell era. And yet not broken. When time stops being immutable, it's assailability just becomes a problem. Time needs Lords in the form of Lord Protectors, or someone will run off with the course of it. In the second season episode 'The Time Meddler' (1965) the now absent Barbara has her interventionist role given to an adversary.

As every fan knows, the Monk is the first Time Lord after the Doctor to appear on the show. (Though their species is not yet named.) And as he attempts to alter the outcome of the Battle of Hastings, every Britisher's idea of a pivotal date, the Doctor struggles to stop him. In short, a new character has to be introduced to suggest a new conception of time, like a new chess piece with an extra manoeuvre attached to it.

To show that time worked in similar ways in the Sixties, whether you were on GMT or Pacific Coast Time, let's turn to the 1967 'Star Trek' episode 'The City On the Edge of Forever'. Coming across the Guardian, a portal to time, McCoy (driven briefly mad by a plot device) leaps headlong into Earth's past. The episode follows Kirk and Spock trying to catch and stop him. It ups the ante considerably on 'Who' by taking them to a past within living memory. (Something too easily forgotten when we watch that episode now.) Its Ten Sixty Six is World War Two. And arguably we have both a Time Meddler in McCoy and a more unwitting Barbara in Edith. Whose pacifist inclinations, though as noble as Barbara's, will impede the defeat of the Nazis. Literally too good for this world, she has to go.

And in this case the sanctions for failure are worse. Worse even than the Nazis winning the War. Spock suggests “there could be some logic to the belief that time is fluid, like a river, with currents, eddies, backwash.” Yet the all-clear is sounded by the Guardian announcing “Time has resumed its shape.” Yep, shape. Time turns out not to be like water, capable of running down different paths, but a solid object like a tram on a line. And when you come off a tram line you crash.

As the M0vie Blog points out: “We discover that the non-existence of the 'right' reality is equivalent complete non-existence. McCoy’s trip back in time doesn’t create an alternate universe, it creates a dead and empty universe... there is 'no stardate'. Kirk’s log suggests that there is no reality because this reality has ceased to exist. 'For us, time does not exist.' … There is nothing. 'Earth’s not there,' Kirk tells Uhura. 'At least, not the Earth we know. We’re totally alone.'

“It’s telling that those two statements ('Earth’s not there' and 'not the Earth we know') are treated as equivalent. As far as Kirk is concerned, there is no possibility of Earth beyond the Earth that they know.” (Okay, as any fan knows Harlan Ellison's original script followed more the river metaphor of time meandering off course. We're going with the broadcast version here.)

Both stories add a fillip by adding costs to the restoration of time. Time is hard in the twin senses of the word. The Doctor's defeating of the Monk will lead to the slaughter and subjugation of the Saxons he meets, goodly folk all. In Edith Kirk is given a love interest he then has to let die. Both are essentially sacrifices to the correct passage of time.

And just as time is fixed, there's a sense that stories about it need be too. The implication is that there’s more space in space than in time. While the universe is broad and so contains scope for adventure, time travel is too narrow a form for much boldly going. There really is only one time travel story, because that story has already been written and we’re living in it.

Though there had already been another Star Trek time travel story, 'Tomorrow Is Yesterday' (1967) (with a similar emphasis on restoring time's path), 'City' seems to explicitly reject the notion of time travel as a motor for adventure stories. It ends with the Guardian intoning invitingly “Many such journeys are possible. Let me be your gateway.” To which Kirk's response is, and I quote, “Let's get the hell out of here.” While 'The Aztecs' ends with Barbara in impotent fury - “What is the point of travelling in time and space? You can't change anything – nothing!”

Of course in the Hartnell era the premise was for 'Who' to alternate historical stories with science fiction. But what did historical really mean? ’Star Trek’ essentially turned time into space, with eras manifesting as planets. So we get episodes set on the Roman planet, the Nazi planet and so on. And ’Who’ is not really that far from this.

'The Aztecs' was a tragic drama which foregrounded time travel to rub our noses in inevitability. But successors are more likely to be adventure stories, merely bookended by set-up bits of time travel, thereby sidestepping any serious consideration of it's consequences. Or be played as comedies which are virtually genre parodies. ’The Romans’ (1965) probably does both.

And when the historicals ended, even that tangential connection went. For most of it's history, Old Who was largely uninterested in time travel as a source of stories, merely as a magic door to set the next adventure up. (I have previously described the Tardis as a Narnian wardrobe, but it's possible Lewis showed more interest in the ramifications of time porting than the Doctor.)

With all the differences between 'Who' and 'Star Trek', why should their conceptions of time be so similar? The answer is – their time. The Doctor's inviolable rule of time now seems to stem from another time. A world where you never stopped wearing school ties even when exiled to outer space, where square jaws did their duty, where planning committee meetings were brought to order - a world of jobs for life, of clear-cut career paths, of children growing up to replace their parents.

‘Planning’ became a keystone word for the post-war era, as a positive alternative to what was sometimes called “the anarchy of the market”. Le Corbusier had said “the plan is the generator. Without a plan there is disorder, arbitrariness.” And though he’d said it in the Twenties, this was the period the notion came to fruition. Twin examples would be the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, which effectively switched on planning permission as a requirement before development, and the New Towns movement, which sought to develop integrated and holistic communities from scratch.

The point isn't that we planned, people have always planned. The point is that we lived within plans made by Planners. And our lives became circumscribed by those plans, our thoughts channelled by blueprints. We passed through an ordered world, and knew our place within it. You leave school and start work. You work from nine to five. You retire at sixty-five. Of course you do. Perhaps it's summed up by the sample Chumbawamba used on their song 'Timebomb'. Allegedly from Disney, and hence aimed as a guide to children, it intones cheerily “you don't tell time, time tells you”.

...Then Time Started To Wime... (History Is Rewrites)

Things would reach the opposite extreme... well, with New Who. Compare the Doctor's quote above to this one from 'Blink' (2007): “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.”

And the “timey wimey” perhaps reached it's crescendo with 'The Big Bang', (2010) where the lines of time are rewritten and re-rewritten so frequently you think it must have been scripted on an etch-a-sketch. As Amy so rightly says “okay kid, this is where it gets complicated.” (So complicated, in fact, that kid she's talking to is her younger self.)

As of course it would. If Lucarotti's script to 'The Aztecs' reflects the rigid world of jobs for life, Moffat's mirrors our contemporary 'flexitime' era – of abstract labour, zero hours contracts and perpetually shifting goalposts. Even those of us in permanent work sit under ceaseless reorganisation; fall too deeply under its shadow and 'permanent' may well turn out to not have been permanent after all. We have come to coin the term 'always on', ostensibly about the devices our parents would patrol the house and diligently unplug at the end of every evening, now kept on perpetual standby. And yet of course under advanced capitalism it's us who are always on - we are the accoutrements of those devices and not the other way round.

Once-rigid boundaries between work and home life have been eroded by a combination of globalisation and technical innovations such as laptops and tele-conferencing. An increasing number of workers on ‘flexible’ contracts now wait for the next text calling them in for a shift, or cancelling at the last second. Those in salaried work find themselves checking their Blackberries in their supposed 'leisure' time, knowing an instant response is expected any time of day or night.

As Mark Fisher put it in 'Capitalist Realism', “[Capitalism] is a system no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to reinstall them on an ad hoc basis. The limit of capitalism are not fixed by fiat, but defined (and re-defined) pragmatically and improvisationally… To function effectively as a component of just-in-time production you must develop a capacity to respond to unforeseen events, you must learn to live in conditions of total instability.” Or alternately read the tweet below. The only certainty which is left us is uncertainty.

Perhaps what's most interesting about this comparison is that it’s the old certainties which are shown most negatively. Suggesting perhaps that popular culture of the past was more willing to critique its society, perhaps surer of the hand that fed it. Lucarotti emphasises how his 'hard time' represents a hard life, a fatalistic world in which history is a given fact, something which simply happens to us. We have no agency, the measure of us lies in the degree of stoicism by which we accept this. Whereas with Moffat's 'soft time' we are encouraged to see our post-Fordist times through it's own eyes.

Ostensibly, ’Big Bang’ is about the collapse of time, which is at least formally presented as a threat. (In a strange way it’s conceptually, if not tonally, similar to the David Lynch film ’Inland Empire’, 2006, where reality has become so hole-ridden that it’s effectively falling to bits.) But it’s more an adventure park, a setting for a rollicking ride. It’s not scary so much as invigorating. The sense that the Doctor’s doing what he’s always done, just in a more concentrated dose, is underlined by the way old adversaries like the Daleks can guest star.

Ultimately, his adventurous leaps through time-streams represent the follow-your bliss era, where life appears as a bubbling series of glittery baubles ready for the daring to grab. Amy can settle down and get married yet still travel the universe, while previous companions such as Jo Grant or Leela were forced to choose.

This rests upon the masquerade that this brave new world somehow offers us flexibility, when that's precisely the thing we're giving up. We neither settle down nor travel. We learn to live with precarity. Yet when we discover this we assume we have no other option than to blame ourselves. We must have somehow been insufficiently modern, unable to grasp the opportunities offered, too retrograde for this brave and dazzling new world.

The concept of there being paradoxical “fixed points in time” may seem a get-out for plot cheats... well it is a get-out for plot cheats. But it also adds to this picture. Time flexes whenever we are told it is, then fixes again as soon as we are told that. Particularly for your next shift which, by the way, is now starting in twenty minutes.

But for a closer peep under the hood than allowed by the flamboyant, frenetic 'Big Bang', let's turn back to the earlier 'Blink' - the episode in which Moffat first introduced us to the “timey wimey”. This is but one of many storylines which at first resemble puzzle adventures. We're presented with a bizarre, seemingly incomprehensible string of events and try to find out what led to them.

But, as we discover, they have no cause – they simply happened. Moffat is fixated with predestination paradoxes. Let's be clear, these are not inherently Post-Fordist and in fact precede time travel stories themselves. But their use here is their causal loops. Events do not lead to other events but turn out to begat themselves. Like subatomic particles in quantum physics, causal loops handwave away the seemingly counter-intuitive. Things are the way they are because that is they way they are.

For example, in 'Blink' by making the video the Doctor changes nothing – he simply fulfils his role. Ultimately, time here is not mutable, it's still something that happens to us. Time still tells you. It just tells you any damn thing any damn time it feels like. And therefore the basic premise of the heroic individual, that through smarts or muscle he changes things, is implicitly undermined.

And the causal loop even precedes time wiming, like the acausal mulch from which it grew. In The Parting of the Ways' (2005), at the end of the first series, the transformed Rose states “I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself.” (Equally significantly, Moffat has kept up Davies' similar penchant for prophecies and predictions. Which might otherwise seem the preserve of hard time.)

We should also note that the predestination paradox is also referred to as the bootstrap paradox. Which relates to the American expression bootstrapping, a contraction of the saying ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’ or “to better oneself by one's own unaided efforts”. This expression is a favourite of those who like to argue that social outcomes are simultaneously causes. “Why is there poverty? Because of the poor! Surely they bring it on themselves by being so poor in the first place” is itself a form of a predestination paradox.

This would seem to match other contemporary depictions of time travel. But let's do the same as before and focus on one example of cross-Atlantic congruence - 'Hot Tub Time Machine 2' (2015). No, only kidding. Let's pick the X-Men film 'Days Of Future Past' (2014), not least because it references an old 'Star Trek' time travel episode. (Though the one it uses is 'Naked Time, 1966.)

Yet it does the very opposite, raising the concept of locked, determined time only to dispel it with a waft of superstring theory. Victory comes through the future being rewritten before our eyes. Even scenes we've sat and watched throughout the movie become retrospectively undone. The empty room, non-existence, the terrible fate in 'City On The Edge' here demonstrates escape - and thereby success. Virtually the closing line is “the future is never truly set”.

But the main reason to pick this film is that it's not as embracing of modern conditions as 'Big Bang'. It's not the future being presented as “a dark despotic world”, so much as the sense of it as a cul-de-sac which we need to back out of in order to make it never was. And we need to do that not from now but by heading back to the Seventies, the decade before neoliberal 'reforms' first kicked in. There's a branch of history to be sawn off, despite it being the one we're sitting on. The paradox here is that it's the malleability of time which allows the escape from modernity.

Uncertainty is Certain

And there would seem a connection between all this and post-modernism's repeated critique of “meta-narratives”. Nobody, but nobody, now believes history has a plot structure like a Hollywood movie, which makes you wonder what those po-mo-ers are getting so vexed about when they tell us that all the time. But more importantly, too often this 'critique' merely replaces the teleological with its literal opposite - the tautological. We know we are at (to use Fukuyama’s phrase) the end of history, because the past is now all in the past. And we know we were always going to end up here because we have done.

...all of which is quite an accurate description of the paradoxical world of flexitime as we encounter it, a bewildering blizzard of unexpected events floating above an underlying sense that this will never change. Though some of the provisions of the post-war era still formally exist, the world they stemmed from seems remote to us now. We do still have some sense that to plan was in itself a plan, that once there was a social order which people had decided upon, even if precisely how could happen has been wiped from our conscious minds.

But in essence that is the very thing which now seems remote to us. The new world seems to have simply arrived. It's no longer somewhere where the wrong people give the wrong orders, and so can conceivably be opposed. Now shit simply happens, and we must adjust.

When the post-war consensus was first challenged by neoliberalism, the rhetoric was not about opposing one social model with another but unfettering the market from the ‘red tape’ of regulation. In its early days, when it still needed selling, it was sold to us as something which would release us from the nine to five routine. But it was to prove victorious, winning almost every one of its battles. So it increasingly became presented as an inescapable fact.

One of the ostensible benefits of capitalism is choice, that we can choose where we live or work to a degree not previously conceived of. And yet ironically so much is now held to be fixed and immutable. Jobs for life, guaranteed incomes, universal benefits, national health care… all now suddenly ‘impossible’ dreams. Perhaps what's most weird is that its never held to be something weird. In this way neoliberal 'flexi time' becomes just as fixed as old hard time.

Arguably, both of these conceptions (hard or soft) are in their own way reactionary. In neither of them does time travel broaden the mind or create any kind of conceptual breakthrough. Both are just metaphorical routes by which the era's own comprehension of time can be underlined. (Just as fictional journeys to other times or places are so often used to reinforce how universal our way of life is.) Perhaps some of that is inevitable. But there's a broader point...

Marx asserted that we make history. Notably, neither of these options offers us that chance. Shit still happens either way - just in differing forms. First because it's tough shit, shit set in stone, it's always been that way and so it always will. Then the shit hits the fan, flying everywhere in completely unpredictable patterns. Because it simply does. As things sped from one extreme to the other, that short-lived wooshing sound we heard marked our liberty passing us by.

Coming later! Hartnell’s final season will form part of our Autumn schedule...