In addition to being a pretty neat story, this episode makes generous use of FLAME SUIT STUNT.
I really wanted the subtitle to be some kind of hilarious La Jetee pun, but I don’t know enough French.
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Monster of the Week
The Complete Cartoon X-Files
This is clearly a cautionary tale. Don’t invent time travel!!
Love the snail things in the last panel. Oh, and a knight riding a triceratops is awesome.
I thought it was a cautionary tale not to invent an easily injectible toxin that turns a human body into a Roman candle.
I assumed the “snail things” are meant to be ammonites
Oh, good call, yes. very possibly.
Or maybe… Omanytes. PRAISE HELIX
Oh good, you’re here. There’s work for Death of Going Back In Time And Murdering Yourself!
Larry Niven wrote an essay back in the day about how in any universe where time travel was both possible, and could result in changing history, it would never be invented. His reasoning was that if it did get invented, history would end up getting changed and re-changed repeatedly until eventually there’d be a change that prevented time travel from ever having been invented. This timeline would naturally be rock-stable. In this way, the universe would always end up naturally resolving into a timeline where time travel was never invented.
I read that when I was a kid, and I’ve never been able to take time travel paradox stories seriously since. Either the timeline is metastable, and history can’t be changed (i.e. only “stable loop” type paradoxes are possible), or changes cause timelines/universes to fork instead of overwriting themselves, in which case changes would have no paradoxical effects (because the causality chain of origin still exists parallel to the currently occupied one). By corollary, “stable loop” paradoxes could only occur in universes with metastable, non-forking timelines.
‘The Theory and Practice of Time Travel,’ in ‘All the Myriad Ways.’
That’s what the Guide to SF Chronophysics calls Niven’s Theorem (in the list of Quasiscience Axioms).
Chronny the Quantum Butterfly says: Only YOU can prevent the total catastrophic breakdown of linear causality. Give a dime. Don’t fuck with time.
Ro-Man! Aw yeah!
I cannot! Yet I must! I must! Yet I cannot!
PARADOX!
No love for the cowboy riding the wooly mammoth? I would pay good money for the opportunity to dress up like a cowboy and ride a wooly mammoth.
If they can ever start cloning them, you may get your wish! Failing that, there’s always photoshop!
pew pew!
I love how Mulder is like a little kid in these things.
The Statue of Liberty bites the dust. . .again.
Kudos on Scully not remembering stuff she did (aka Gillian’s memory)
Whenever I watch this one, I never get why the old dude version of science guy doesn’t wear glasses but the young dude version of science guy does. I’m chalking it up to young dude science guy being a hipster.
I love how this episode is great at pointing out continuity stuff that they almost never mention in the majority of the seasons; not only is Scully also a physicist (who apparently speaks German), but Mulder has a photographic memory and can repeat Scully’s thesis verbatim while Scully completely forgets she even wrote it.
They have Lasik in the future?
…So I’m lost. What, precisely, is so awful about Panels #2 and #12? – Aside from the Statue of Liberty thing, of course, but the rest of it looks pretty [fragrant] awesome there.
I’m not even sure if not inventing time travel would’ve stopped that stuff – just throw in renfaire people and engineering/genetic engineering people and you could easily get most of the stuff there.
PRAISE THE HELIX
I’m going to watch this episode tonight and I’m already preemptively sad that there won’t be any dinosaurs.
Having watched the episode, I have a renewed appreciation for WTF Dinosaur in panel 3.
Incidentally, I couldn’t find an index for this comic, so I went ahead and created one myself: http://kontext-away.com/MotW.html
If you find any errors in the links or typos, then let me know at blog@jwgh.org .
Love the bookends, and the dino in panel 3!
I know, late for the party…but are those “Nausicaa” god-warriors in the background of the second panel? :O