Time Travel

We’re currently watching “12 Monkeys,” a series that originally aired on the SyFy channel in 2015 based on the 1995 Terry Gilliam movie, itself based on “La Jetée” from 1962. Cindy and I both love time travel stories, and after reading generally favorable reviews we decided to give it a try.

So far, so good. It diverges from the source material after several episodes and is interesting and relatively consistent and logical in its use of the various time travel tropes and potential plot contradictions that are so inherent in this genre of science fiction. Reviews also promise a satisfying conclusion to the series as well. Fingers crossed.

One of the major story threads involves the lead scientist who made the original breakthrough in time travel. We learn that the driving force behind her quest to conquer linear time was the death of her daughter during the plague that ravages the Earth ‘s population about 25 years in the past in 2020 (This series was a bit prescient.) She hopes to send time travelers back from her present in 2043 to stop the plague and save billions of people, including her daughter.

In her past, the scientist is with her young daughter in a hospital in a world with extreme lockdowns that has already lost billions of people to a virus. She sits in her daughter’s hospital room unable to do anything to save her, and the severe triage rules then in place do not allow any medical resources to be used to help the daughter, who dies within a few days of getting sick.

The two main characters are sent back to the week of the daughter’s death.  They try to save the daughter several times in several different ways, but in doing so create paradoxes and temporal loops and are unsuccessful each time.

Eventually, however, in one of the repeat loops they learn that her daughter didn’t have the plague after all, but rather a run of the mill infection, and thus her death isn’t a foregone conclusion. They save the daughter, she doesn’t die. But they realize that her mother, the lead scientist, must believe that the daughter did not survive or else she never has the breakthrough that allows for time travel.

One of the time travelers asks the scientist while in the past,

“Is a little bit of happiness better than a lifetime of anything else?”

The scientist answers in the affirmative.

So they save the daughter but keep that info from the mother, realizing that the scientist cannot know that her daughter is still alive if time is to remain unbroken. They bring her to a group of women who have survived the plague and have them take care of and raise her. The lead scientist is removed from her daughter’s hospital room and told that her daughter has died.

The scientist, therefore, lives out the next 25 years believing that she lost her daughter, and of course that feeling of loss is the impetus for everything that follows in her life and for time travel, but at the cost of decades of pain.

The time travelers return to their present and decide to reveal all of this to the lead scientist. They tell her that her daughter, now an adult, is living with the group of women known. The lead scientist says that this can’t be true, that her daughter died 25 years earlier.

“But did you see her?” they ask her. They remind her that she was just told that her daughter had died and that she never actually saw her again due to the plague protocols in place.

There is a reunion between the two, the parent who has been grieving for over 25 years and the daughter neither of who knew the other was alive. There is a little bit of happiness finally.

“Is a little bit of happiness better than a lifetime of anything else?”

I don’t know.

All I know is that I couldn’t bring myself to see Adri at the hospital that morning when I arrived. I didn’t want to see her that way, still intubated, lifeless, cold, lying in a HRP that the nurse had to unzip in order for me to view her.

I just couldn’t.

I struggled, trying to determine what the future me would want that present me to do. Subject myself to that or not? What would I want me to do? What are the costs and benefits?

I just couldn’t. I didn’t think I needed that for closure, and I didn’t want that to be my last visual memory of her. So after 30 minutes of indecision and back and forth, Cindy and I left and went to see the boys and Stephen instead.

So I never saw her that day. The last time I saw her she was alive. I think that’s how I want it to be.

But maybe… just maybe? Since I never actually saw her? I allow myself that fiction occasionally, and I’m okay with that.