Remember the show “Voyagers!”? Old show from when I was a kid, a guy and a boy traipsed through time ‘fixing’ history?
Here’s the thing, something I just now realized: they were completely wasting their time.
One theory of time travel says that when you travel into the past and tweak things in history, you are in fact simply creating a new, branching timeline that contains the results of all of the events in the past that you changed. In fact, you could say that there is no way to actually travel back into your own past, because the simple act of doing so changes your history (even if you don’t actually do anything) and creates a new timeline. The timeline you left is completely unaltered, you have simply created a new future for yourself.
So by that theory the Voyagers are wasting their time. They travel into a past time period, see that something is wrong, and try to fix it. But wait! This isn’t their past, it’s simply a past with them in it. What they’re really doing is not “fixing” their timeline but attempting to create clones of their timeline along other, parallel timelines. Holy shit!
Realistically though, they are the cause of each “error” in time that they encounter. Toss out the above theory and let’s say that they are somehow magically able to travel back into their own past and change history. Here’s my question: how in the hell can history be progressing along the “wrong” path? What happened, happened. It’s already happened, it’s not like a thing happens and then once you move past it through time it keeps sitting there happening over and over like a CD player set to repeat one song, just waiting for someone to visit and make sure things are OK. Are we to believe that had the Voyagers not arrived to fix things then history would somehow go horribly awry, all by itself?
That is obviously impossible since the Voyagers have a handbook telling them the “proper” course of history, meaning that it had to have happened at least once and hence if you just leave it the fuck alone it should be just fine.
Or is that true?
Maybe the Voyagers aren’t time-travelling do-gooders after all? Maybe they actually use their “guidebook” as a road map changing history to suit their own future? Like Biff in Back To The Future 2 when he finds the book of sports facts and gives it to his past self to make his future self rich, they are bouncing around in the past in order to further their own economic or social motivations.
In this scenario Phineas Bogg (and other Voyagers like him) are simply stooges told that they are “fixing” time when in reality their guidebook is nothing more than an outline for future global domination. Why else would they (the Voyagers in charge, “The Man”) choose someone as ridiculous as a pirate from several centuries ago to travel and change history? Because he’s not only uninformed about the true course of most of human history, but he also lacks the critical thinking necessary to even wonder why he would be doing such a thing.
It’s fortuitous then that he loses his guidebook and needs to take along Jeffrey Jones. Without his guidebook he has no idea what he should be doing to “fix” history, and relies on young Jeffrey to tell him the true course of events. The problem is, Jeffrey is telling him what actually happened, not what the Voyagers want to happen.
So, when they jump into the middle of the French Revolution and see a red light on the Omni, it’s because another Voyager has probably already been there and has changed the past according to the directives in the Guidebook. Phineas and Jeffrey then unknowingly set things right again.
So it would seem that they were not in fact wasting their time, they actually were saving history as we know it. They just didn’t realize that they were undoing temporal damage done by other Voyagers in the process. I guess we owe them a debt of gratitude.
