Almost everyone has seen a movie or TV show that uses time travel. It’s one of the most ubiquitous branches of pseudoscience that storytellers like to use. There are varying types of time travel, from the do-over, to the “just visiting”, to the sandbox mode of time travel. Different people have used this malleable device in different ways over the years, and naturally, there is always the issue of “what story has the best time travel application?”
This question, difficult to answer on its own, shows a major issue with time travel in fiction: everyone thinks they know what it should look like. Because time travel deals with an aspect of science that we all experience (time and the flow of time), there is this assumption by people that they can tell a bad time travel story. I have always maintained that a good time travel story is one that establishes its rules and maintains an internal logic consistency, as well as can be expected anyway. So, Back To The Future, Terminator 2, even Looper all count as “good” time travel stories (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is the best but, story of another time).
There are bad time travel stories, and I mean *bad*. CW’s The Flash is the first one that springs to mind. There is no form of logical consistency with the rules of time travel, and for the most part, it seems like the writers are just making it up as they go along. A bad time travel story, much like any other bad plot device, can shatter the suspension of disbelief because now you’re not invested in the story being told, but you’re instead focusing on how what the character just did should be impossible based on the rules that you yourself set down.
Everyone thinks they know how things should work. This applies even more so to time travel. But as it always is, the general audience is mostly clueless about time and the varying methods that it can be manipulated for the story. It’s imperative on the writer to know what his rules of time are, not “generally accepted convention”. This is fiction after all. You make your own rules.
Time travel can be a tricky beast. If not executed well, it can kill your entire story. But if you get it right, you can unlock storytelling avenues you never even knew existed.
