Oh no... It's a Time Loop

    It's the time you have all been waiting for. The big reveal. The curtain over the whiteboard of my idea is about to be pulled off for the entire world to see. Get yourselves ready, because it is wild. 

    Two words: TIME LOOP 

    Okay, enough jokes (never enough jokes). Let me explain. The basic concept is that there is a girl who is trapped in a time loop of a therapy session. Everytime she gets in her car to leave the complex, she instantly reappears back in the thearapists office inexplicably. Now, my team and I haven't come up with all the details yet, but I think what we need to do most right now is do is to learn more about time loops. 

The "Science"

    From what I have been reading, time loops are a subject for contingency. Obviously this is not a real occurrence (as far as we know), but there are several theories and ideas as to how they could occur. One of the recurring theories involves something called at Closed Time Curve (CTC), which is when a segment of linear time is essentially taken out of the time steam and made so that the endpoints meet up together to form a circle. This is often something that film and video game developers turn to when attempting to create a plotline following a time loop.

    But, some have found issue with this as a valid explanation for a realistic time loop. one reason is that the CTCs are often depicted as being depended on one person either dying or falling asleep. It is often not explained whether the world keeps on moving with the protagonist or if everyone in the timeline is reset. It are these circumstances in which CTCs are not a great explanation. For a CTC to work correctly, everyone in the timeline - or at least the protagonist - would have to be unconscious for a long time to wait until time itself moves backwards, running through all the events in reverse, which could take an ungodly amount of time. 

    Another explanation that was posed as an opposition to the CTC is the idea that time is not necessarily looping, but that time is breaking of at a specific point an infinite amount of times. Now, I understand that is kind of confusing, so I have included a video explanation derived from my research. 

    Now, this one has overall less application and research backing it up, but it is a theory out there that I think would work best for my purposes. The idea of two major events in the protagonists life setting of a major scientific event sounds like an extremely compelling story that has a lot of room for character development. 

In Television and Film

    Time loop movies and shows can either be a completely cheesy gag that has no real substance to it or it can be one of best pieces of media that has ever been created, there is no in between. 

   One of the better time loop movies I watched in research for this project - recommended to my by my teacher - was Palm Springs (2020 dir. Max Barbakow). When I stated watching this movie, I genuinely had no expectations of what I was getting into. All I knew is that it had to do with a time loop. I had no idea I was going to fall in love with Andy Sandberg and Cristin Milioti. 

    

    This film all takes places on a wedding day that Nyles, the boyfriend of a bridesmaid, has been reliving for God knows how long. When he accidently drags the sister of the bride into the same time loop, effectively trapping her. 

    One thing that I love about time loop movies that this film does really well is showing the impacts of being stuck in a loop on the human mind. My favorite part is when they both lose any semblance of right and wrong and just start doing the most insane things with no repercussions. Like this scene below. 

    This relates to the concept of nihilism, which is the philosophy that there is no meaning of life. Those who follow this philosophy are devoid of religion or morals, which is typically what happens in these film. As seen in the clip above, our two protagonists, Nyles and Sarah, have been in the time loop for quite some time and have resorted to tormenting the people that inhabit their loop. This obviously plays for some good comedic moments, but it also shows the mental impact these people are facing when they have deemed their lives devoid of meaning. 

    The topic of nihilism is something the would definitely depicted within my film opening. Personally, if I was stuck in a time loop of the same therapy session, I too would lose all sense of meaning. Now, how nihilism will be shown, I have not decided yet, but I will incorporate it in some way.

    Another time loop film that is most definitely not a comedy is Edge of Tomorrow (2014 dir. Doug Liman). My mom is utterly obsessed with this movie, so I have been forced against my will to watch it many, many times. This movie combines all of the classic science fiction tropes: aliens, the future, and time loops. A triple threat if you will. But for now, let's just focus of the time loop element. 

    In a future where the Earth has been invaded by nearly invincible aliens, a military agent gets killed in combat thrusting him into a time loop where he must relive the same terrible battle and death every day. Now, he must try to use his knowledge of the battle to defeat these terrible creatures. 

    What i enjoy about the time loop elements in this movie, which is sometimes a common occurrence in the these kind of films is that the main protagonist has one person they are always trying to find.

    Alright Emily Blunt, I see you and your calisthenics. Seriously though, this scene is a good representation of how throughout the film Tom Cruise's character is constantly coming back to Emily Blunt's character. In every iteration of the time loop, they find each other and every time she helps him. This ultimately helps drive the plot forward, bringing something new to each iteration of the loop, and each time the audience and the characters get new information about their situation. 

    Therefore, to give the overall film a kind of plot and to give the protagonist of my film any dimension and growth, there needs to be a character to which they always go to for help. I do not think that that person is the therapist, but maybe someone else in the office. 

    I wasn't going to talk about anything else after this, but when writing about how there is always a person that the protagonist goes to, I could not help but think of The Good Place (2016-2020, creator Michael Schur). This is not an inherently time loop based series, but there is a pretty big chunk of the show where our main characters keep getting their memories erased in a time loop fashion. Also, just don;t read this part if you have not watched The Good Place because I will be spoiling the show immensely and I would not wish that upon my worst enemy. 

    This series follows a woman named Eleanor Shellstrop, a morally underdeveloped person, who has died and gone to the afterlife, or what they call The Good Place. At first she is excited for her new home ,but then realizes that she definitely does not belong in The Good Place. To try to secure her spot there, she recruits a nervous philosophy professor, Chidi,  to teach her how to be a good person. 

    Like I said, this show is not directly about time loops, but (here are the spoilers), after Eleanor deciphered that her and her friends were actually in The Bad Place, their demon architect, Michael, has to reset their memories a bunch of times (802 to be exact). This show is also a good example of the consistancies that can exist in each new iteration of a time loop.

    Above is just a silly little compilation of everytime Eleanor realizes that she is not in The Good Place but in The Bad place. This compilation is actually really good to see altogether because it shows how things could be different in each iteration of a time loop, but that there will always be some things that never change. There is another clip that I could not find for the life of me where Michael tells Eleanor that in every reboot of the neighborhood she would always realize that she didn't belong, always realize she was in The Bad Place, and that Chidi would help her be a better person every time. 

    This example proves that it is important to have hard set consistencies, things that will happen in every single loop. This tell me that I have to have either an event or object that will reoccur every time. The only difference is that in this show, the characters memories get wiped every time, whereas in my film, the protagonist will retain her memories. But, I think we can incorporate what The Good Place does without the memory erasure element. 

    Now that I have all this lovely information about time loops, I can create a time loop mechanic that works best for my purposes. I can include elements from all of the media products I discussed, but also use the "scientific" background knowledge to try to make the mechanic make as much sense as possible (hopefully). 

And now for the movie quote of the day... (but it's from a TV show)

"I'm telling you, Molotov cocktails work. Anytime I had a problem and I threw a Molotov cocktail, boom! Right away, I had a different problem." - Jason Mendoza, The Good Place (2016)

Sources:

- Creative, V. (2021, September 15). The science behind (and in front) of timeloops. Vox Creative Next. https://next.voxcreative.com/ad/22676555/time-loop-science-deathloop-video-game

- Saleh, B. (2023, February 9). The physics of Time Loops. climbing the giant - The Physics of Time Loops. https://climbingthegiant.com/posts/physics-time-loops/