What are time travel stories really about?

On Edith Keeler, Gabriel Bell, and the Borg Queen

This week, in my “Star Trek and Social Justice” class, we discussed the famous Deep Space Nine two-parter “Past Tense.” Set in an alternate version of 2024, it portrays a world where the poor and homeless have been relegated to prison-like Sanctuary Districts, where their basic needs are met and they are otherwise left to their own devices. Although things have not quite reached that extreme in our present, the scenario is a reasonable extrapolation from our society’s tendency to see the visibility of the poor and homeless as the problem to be solved, rather than poverty and homelessness themselves. Our heroes’ accidental time travel leads to the death of Gabriel Bell, who will play a major role in making the plight of the Sanctuary Districts more widely known and ultimately in dismantling the system. Captain Sisko winds up standing in for Bell and getting history back on the right track—but gets in trouble when Starfleet Command realize that now the picture of Bell in the history books bears a striking resemblance to Sisko…

Earlier in the course, I had them watch the first major time travel episode, “City on the Edge of Forever.” There, an accidental drug overdose drives McCoy mad, leading him to jump into a time portal and mess up history really badly—Hitler winds up winning World War II. They don’t initially understand what McCoy did, but ultimately they figure out that, ironically, the decisive action was to save the life of Edith Keeler, an activist who runs a homeless shelter. So irresistible is her charisma and saintliness that she would go on to convince FDR that war is not the answer, leading to the triumph of Nazism. Despite falling in love with her, then, Kirk realizes that the only way to restore the future is to allow her to die.

In a post on the Daystrom Institute, I had suggested that “Past Tense” is an implicit critique of “City on the Edge of Forever.” In fact, I claimed that if I told you these two stories and didn’t tell you when they aired, most would guess that “Past Tense” is the earlier iteration and “City” is the ironically darker-grittier reimagining of the trope. The discussion there went very strangely, with one participant talking himself into the position that the underlying message of both episodes is the necessity of violence. So I was interested to see what my students, who presumably do not have all of Star Trek memorized and are not instinctively allergic to the more “literary” style of analysis I brought to bear on the episodes, would think about the comparison. As it turned out, it fell flat for them as well. They could see what I was saying, but didn’t seem to be able to take it anywhere.

It was admittedly a Friday, late in the semester, and it was the first day we were discussing only one single story (albeit one twice as long as the others we had been discussing in pairs), so I figured it might be just a matter of running out of steam. So I simply asked them: if you could go back in time to change something, would you? And what would it be? This opened up into a broader discussion of what the time travel theme is really about. For instance, I claimed that I would go back in time and kill Christopher Columbus, who is probably responsible for a greater number of deaths than anyone in human history. But then I stepped back and reflected that time travel is always about preventing something that went wrong, not intervening in a positive way. Why didn’t I say I would go back to 1491 and vaccinate everyone in the Western Hemisphere against smallpox, for example, or give antibiotics to the ancient Babylonians, or whatever else? Why always killing Hitler rather than sending back a good charismatic leader who can reshape society for the better?

The answer, I think, is that time travel is about regret. The reason we’re always undoing something negative is that those are the situations where we vividly imagine how things would have gone differently—in a way, we have all already lived many alternate timelines of our own lives. When I put it in those personal terms, students admitted that they would be tempted to go back and undo things that they regretted or avoid painful experiences, but many of them expressed a basic conservatism similar to the Star Trek trope of always necessarily restoring the timeline. Those events contributed to who they have become, so that changing them would be tantamount to altering their own fundamental identity.

I felt differently at their age. When I was on the verge of graduating from my small Christian college, I came to think of my choice of school as the biggest mistake of my life (not wrongly!), and one night as I was falling asleep, I had such an intense fantasy of going back and undoing it that I woke up sure that it had somehow actually happened. No such luck! But over two decades later, I am a time travel conservative—as painful and difficult as my path sometimes was, it still led to an improbably rewarding career and, even more, a loving relationship like I never would have imagined I could have had. No short-term gain by past me would be worth losing that.

So I now think I was wrong: the fantasy of going back and standing in for the change-maker is in fact the more counter-intuitive version of the time-travel story. The one where you realize that a painful loss is “baked into” who you are is indeed the more direct exposition of the kind of catharsis we are looking for from time travel. (On the topic of catharsis: if we ever get a drink together, ask me about my theory that Oedipus Rex is the first time trave story.)

This brings us, of course, to the Borg Queen, who is involved in a truly crazy number of time travel plots. In First Contact, where we first learn of her existence (in a retcon, itself a form of time travel for franchise storytelling), we see both versions of the time travel narrative. The “Past Tense” version is more obvious, as Riker leads the crew in the effort to step in and save Zefrem Cochrane’s fateful warp drive test so that the Vulcans will make First Contact on schedule and usher humanity into a utopian era.

More subtle is the “standard” fatalistic time travel trope, where Picard needs to come to terms with the fact that the most traumatic experience of his life—his abduction and assimilation by the Borg, who forced him to lead an attack on Starfleet—was necessary to put him in a position to save history. He relieves his experience of the Borg stealing away everything he was through his experience of the Borg stealing away the entire history of his civilization—a vertiginous telescoping of the personal into the world-historical that echoes Kirk’s predicament in “City.” This isn’t about losing the perfect girlfriend, though. It’s about realizing that the bad controlling girlfriend who made you turn against all your friends is a part of you whether you like it or not. (And here we can perhaps understand why the Borg Queen is bizarrely shunted into the story of Picard’s childhood regrets about his mother’s suicide in Picard season 2. Perhaps!)

We could say that a similar doubling is going on in the finale to Voyager, which marks the end of Star Trek’s ’90s Golden Age. There we get one last time travel story to wrangle the Borg Queen, featuring two Janeways—one from an alternate future, who refuses the trauma of losing Seven of Nine on the long journey back to the Alpha Quadrant and uses time travel to get her past self back sooner, and another, “ours,” who must decide how to respond to her future self’s intrusion. In the end, Future Janeway gets everything she wants and more—not only is Seven of Nine safe and sound and the trip back to Earth cut by decades, but the Borg suffers a crushing blow when she destroys their travel infrastructure—but at the cost of being assimilated, permanently, by the present day Borg. I am unsure how much weight to put on this reversal, which could be considered the most extravagant example of Voyager’s tendency to create variations on familiar Star Trek themes that are so ultra-baroque they threaten to collapse into madness. Yet the fact that Future Janeway loses herself in the act of altering her past, even for the better, could be taken as confirmation of the fundamentally tragic character of time travel in Star Trek.

And this might explain why two more recent time travel plots—namely Enterprise’s Temporal Cold War and Discovery’s leap into the distant future—don’t seem to work. Due to their prequel setting, the Enterprise characters’ actions really are constrained by events in the distant future, and the Temporal Cold War writes that dilemma directly into the text of the show. But that is, at best, superficially clever and it certainly fails to resonate with anything outside of Star Trek itself. As for the latter, transporting the Discovery and its crew to the distant future is, once again, more about franchise management than any organic exploration of meaningful themes. But perhaps you’ll disagree—and if so, feel free to join the discussion in comments!