The Outer Limits: "Patient Zero"

I really enjoyed this episode of the Outer Limits because I found it very interesting and the way of time travel was pretty cool. Basically, there is a group of people from a time period of the plague, a deadly disease that is killing everyone. This group of people decides to send a man back in time to kill 'patient zero' so that the plague never starts. They send the man back in, what you could call a time machine. It is surrounded by coils and when he is send back it looks almost as if he is electrocuted and there are flashes of light. He seems to go through some pain that goes away quickly. The man, who is sent back, has lost his wife and child to the plague and is very eager to kill patient zero. When he gets to the past, he is run over by a car, and patient zero, who is a girl, comes to his rescue. He is taken to her house where he eats dinner there and sleeps. He slowly begins to learn more about her and realizes she is a good person and can't seem to kill her. When he does not go back to the future when expected, another man is sent back to finish the deed. The first man then finds a way to stop the plague without having to kill anyone, and has the rest of the day to do it. The doctor that patient zero has to come into contact with to start the plague, is beat up by him and told not to see patient zero ever again. This would stop the plague from happening. But the second man coming from the future then tells the first that his plan was right, but in doing it, he became patient zero. To become patient zero, you had to come into contact with the bodily fluids of three people, all of which he did. The episode ended with the first man being killed. A question that I had was, if he died in the past, then wouldn’t his child never exist?  I thought that this story demonstrated a good way to use time travel, which is to stop a worldwide epidemic.

Short Story: "The Garden of Forking Paths"

First of all, I did not really like this story at all. This is mostly because it really did not make any sense and did not have any time travel involved. The first half of the story is talking about a man who decided to spend his life building an 'infinite labyrinth', which turns out to be in the form of a novel. He writes a letter to his descendants and says that it is 'to various futures (not to all).' This means he is talking about the forking of time, which is the possible future’s time may have. This may not be true, just what I got out of it. This idea is very interesting to me. Something that I thought was really cool was when a man is talking about an infinite book. He said the only reason it could be infinite, was by being circular, and having the last page identical to the first. I think that this was really interesting, but it does not have anything to do with time travel. Back to the infinite labyrinth, it is represented by a garden of forking paths, which is all the possible outcomes, all happening, creating forking paths. I think that this is saying that time can be going in many different possible ways. Also, the story talks about time being, "an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times." This again relates to the forking paths and how time is always going and creating new times, in which we may live in one or many of them, but not all, I think. It also says, "Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy." I think that this is a cool idea, kind of talking about alternate dimensions, which I think that it is unlikely to happen. Another intriguing idea is when one guy talks about how around them surrounds invisible humans, all of which exist in different dimensions and are he, and the man he is talking to. This is actually kind of freaky, but also is probably not true. This story was very confusing and did not make a lot of sense. But I did mention the things I got out of it that had to do with the subject of time, even though there was no time travel. The things I did mention, I thought were good ideas but one question I had was, if there are so many dimensions, and we possibly live in more than one, would you remember the one you lived in before?

Timeline: The Movie

This movie I thought was very because I liked how it involved scientists actually discovering time travel in a way that is realistic. Scientists were trying to send objects from one place to another, by what they called 'faxing'. This was not intentionally supposed to turn into time travel; they just wanted objects to be sent to different places, in the same time. One time, they decided to try a real person, which worked. They did this multiple times, when the man never reappeared. They used multiple cameras, and when they checked them, they realized the man was not only sent to the wrong spot, but to the wrong time. This, I thought, was very cool. Somehow or another, they found out that the machine used, created a wormhole, which was opened by the machine and sent the man back to the past. The scientists gathered information that if the time machine was used multiple times, one time while travelling, you could obtain damage to your bones and kill you. They do not mention this to the group of people they recruited to travel back in time to retrieve the man. In this group of people, is his son. Another interesting part of this movie was that, to get back to their present time, they had these little gadgets called 'markers'. They wore them around their necks and when they wanted to return home, they would press the button. The only set-back was that the markers had time limits, and when the time went out.... they could not get back. Also, you could not get back if you lost it. When the group of people gets there, they realize that it is right before the French attack the English in the fourteenth century. This means there is a lot of war and the majority of the people from the future are killed. They spend most of the movie trying to get the man who was sent back in the first place, and trying to get back to the present. Along the way, they discover things that were in ruins in the future, and saw them in their actual time. I thought that this was very cool and that it would be something really awesome to see. This could be potentially a reason to create and use time travel, which is to get more information about our past. I think that this movie demonstrates a way that time travel could actually happen realistically, which is by an accidental wormhole. We all know how weird this Universe can be and all the weird things that it does and crazy stuff it has.

The Outer Limits: "The Man Who Was Never Born"

I thought that this episode was very interesting and had a different method of time travel that did not include a time machine, but a spaceship instead. A man is travelling through space and seems to hit some sort of time-barrier that brings him to the future. He lands on the planet that was Earth. He finds that it is deserted accept for a strange man with a face that looks anything but human. The strange man explains to him that the human race was almost extinct because of one man who messed with alien and human genes. They decide to go back in time and correct this problem. When they are in the spaceship, the human from the past dies which leaves the human from the future, Andro, alone to land on Earth. He uses 'hypnotic suggestion' so that people won't see what he actually looks like. He ends up falling in love with a girl who turns out to be the mother-to-be of the man who caused all of the problems. Andro meets the father to be of the guy also, and causes a scene at their wedding and runs away. The lady follows him and tells him that she never thought she actually loved the other man.  Andro tells her who he actually is, and why he is there, so she convinces him to let her come with him back to the future. When they get back into the spaceship, Andro starts to disappear because, by taking her with him, he creates a world in which he never existed. This episode again supports the idea of changing one little thing in the past makes a whole new future. I think that the idea of a wormhole of some sort or barrier could exist somewhere in the world, maybe in space, like in the episode. This would be a very cool discovery, but could be a possible problem or have a dangerous outcome, like this one happened to have. But, if it saves the human race, I guess it would be worth it.