Welcome back, over here at the Time Travel Nexus we love our time-travel stories and movies. Nothing excites and intrigues us more than a glimpse behind the curtain at some hard temporal science.
In these Popcorn Paradoxes posts we treat the movies as though they were documentaries and ask, what do they tell us about the mechanics of Time Travel?
This time we are watching the merging and rebooting of the Twentieth Century Fox X-Men movie franchises, in the form of the documentary evidence known as “X-Men: Days Of Future Past”.
A Little Background
If you haven’t seen the movie, and aren’t familiar with the X-Men movies (you know, the ones where Hugh Jackman wears a leather jacket and has big metal claws) the background to this movie might be a little important.
Originally, there was “X-Men”, it was quite a successful movie back in 2000 and showed us a world of superheroes who were all Mutants. Mutants had long been the Marvel comic books’ analogy for the Civil Rights movement (and later the LGBTQ Rights). We saw a world that was modern, but plagued by bigotry (on both sides). There were a couple of sequels, but they suffered from plot bloat and creep, that ended up with mutants and humans in pitched battles and most of the main cast either dead or depowered.
In short, the writers had written themselves out of any possible sequels, but they had made a reasonably solid trilogy (which back then was all any studio exec would expect). Someone had the bright idea of doing prequels, and the X-Men Origins series was envisaged, that would let them make more movies and explain where all these characters had come from. They made one Origins movie, about Hugh Jackman’s breakout character Wolverine (who had already in the comics been the breakout character and gone on to be an Avenger, amongst other things). To put it politely, the fans did not enjoy the Origins take on Wolverine and the Origins series was quietly canned.
Fox went away for a bit and had a rethink. They came up with “X-Men: First Class”, similar to the Origins concept, First Class went back to the 1960s to look at what Professor X and Magneto were up to back then. All the roles were recast, the original X-Men cast were not required (except for a single expletive filled cameo by Jackman).
First Class was meant to be set in the past of the original X-Men movie universe, and Marvel called this universe Earth-10005. Although there are some continuity errors that crept into the series created by this prequel (that don’t involve time travel).
Days of Future Past starts out in this universe of Earth-10005, but as we’ll see by the end it doesn’t stay there.
Here be Spoilers:
We’re going to be pulling apart parts of the story and seeing what they tell us about time-travel in the movie universe. It is almost impossible to discuss the movie without spoiling the plot in some way. So I’m going to assume that you have watched the movie.
If you haven’t, don’t come crying to me in the comments that I spoiled the ending for you, when I told you that Wolverine arrives in an altered future, where Jean Grey and Cyclops from the original trilogy are alive again, with no memory of the time in between, because it’s very important to the way time-travel works here.
I’ll also not have any complaining that I spoilered the plot by saying the framing of the plot around undoing the creation of the mutant hunting robots called the Sentinels, appears to constitute a classic Grandfather Paradox. Since if they succeed, how are they going to know that it needs stopping and remember to send someone back to do so? Otherwise what’s to stop Trask from going on to develop them more?
Let’s actually get started by looking at how time travel works here… Not at the end, but at the beginning.
Zen and The Art of Spatio-Temporal Phasing
Kitty Pryde has by 2023 developed the ability to send another mutant’s mind back in time. She and some of the other former students of Professor X (now calling themselves the Free Mutants) are using this Time Travel ability to give themselves warning when the Sentinels are about to attack them.
This means they are constantly testing this ability and altering their recent history. This method of time travel has a powerful deleterious effect upon the brain of the time-traveller. The longer kitty makes them time-travel the worse the effect, to quote her:
“Uh, I can send someone back a couple weeks. Maybe a month. But you’re talking about going back decades. You have the the most powerful brain in the world, Professor… but the mind can only stretch so far before it snaps. It would you rip apart. I’m sorry. No one could survive that trip.”
Wolverine asks, “What if someone’s mind has a way of snapping back? What if they can heal as fast as they are ripped apart?” He might as well have said, “Ooh, try me!”
This mutant ability is pretty bizarre even as the X-Men abilities usually go. Within universe it doesn’t make a lot of sense, since Kitty herself can only project someone back, she herself has no cross temporal connection. The only way I can imagine she learned how to do it is that one day Bishop suddenly remembered the future and told Kitty how she had just sent him back in time.
(A Doylean Aside)
The reason for this is that the original comic book actually had Kitty going back in time, and not nearly so far.
The movie plot was significantly altered from the original books, partially to take advantage of Hugh Jackson’s popularity as Wolverine and more to tie in more with X-Men: First Class, this use of Kitty is a nod to the comic book where Kitty jumps back to the 1980s.
Considering the requirements, I think the writer Simon Kinberg did a pretty good job of shoehorning the story. Especially considering the mutant in the comic book version that sent Kitty back is Rachel Summers, Scott Summers (Cyclops) and Jean Grey’s daughter, who was never born on Earth-10005.
I mean, how do you learn an ability that wipes out your memories of learning the ability? Perhaps Kitty realised it was possible accidently, Bishop does have the ability to know exactly where and when he is (in the comics), so it is possible that they had managed to get a few trial runs in (where Kitty could remember the attempt because nothing had been changed) before they started doing it in earnest.
This ability to time-travel mentally does actually do away with a number of problems for the physics involved. No physical matter is travelling in time so there are no causality problems from things existing twice, and it completely removes the chance of a time-traveller meeting themselves. They, by definition, will experience a blackout during the period when they are “inhabited” by their future self. This could mean that the Time-Traveller could travel back without affecting their own timeline at all, if they always had had a blackout that weekend…
Which brings us to another interesting quirk of this form of time-travel: The mind of the time-traveller isn’t just sent back, they have to be held there by Kitty’s power (or Rogue’s later in the Rogue cut), as if they are remotely piloting their body from the future, for the time necessary to do what is required.
It is as if Kitty’s ability isn’t actually technically Time-Travel at all, but that she connects a mutant to their previous nervous system. Like temporal mind-control, straight into someone’s earlier mind. This ability is somewhat explainable within the context of her ability to phase through matter.
Kitty Pryde is better known to comic book fans as Shadowcat, and famously has the ability to ‘phase through solid matter’. This mutant power allows her to alter matter (usually her own body, and anything that she is touching, such as her clothes) so that it can pass (or more correctly phase) through other matter (she effectively must be able to make the electromagnetic fields of her electrons and protons cease interacting with other matter, while still interacting correctly within herself and the matter she is carrying).
Perhaps the easiest way that such a change can be achieved is by some temporal shenanigans, shifting ‘her’ matter forwards or backwards in time by some proportion of the Planck Time (usually considered the smallest usable/observable amount of time we can have) such that it doesn’t have time to interact with matter still in normal time, while still being able to interact with itself. She may even be able to phase an entire region out this way creating a pocket dimensions of sorts.
It would seem logical that if Kitty can phase through time in this way, then she should be able to travel in time herself, sending herself backwards.
In the movie though, that’s not what we see, though. A plausible reason for this, is that she must obey the rules of causality. She can phase backwards, but only a step, she must then proceed forwards at the usual rate. Her arrow of entropy must still run in the same direction. But, as long as she does that herself, she can use her phased state as an anchor to connect the mind of another mutant to itself through larger amounts of time. All the while they are connected the mutant’s past and her present continue to co-exist.
This does involve breaching laws of physical information communication in physics, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, and can’t time travel without a few paradoxes.
The Paradoxes
There are a host of minor paradoxes that can occur, but first let’s deal with the actual Granddaddy of them all: Altering the past such that you have no need, or ability to time travel AKA: The Grandfather paradox.
Early in the movie we see a prime example of this paradox. The Free Mutants are attacked by Sentinels and Kitty sends Bishop back in time. Once back in time he warns the group that they need to leave, causing them to not be there when the Sentinels arrive.
In fact, we actually see Kitty and Bishop vanish from in front of one of the Sentinels, but I’ll come back to that later.
The first issue here is that after they warned themselves to leave, and left. Do they then have to remember to send Bishop back again later, and tell them to leave, or are they already warned? In which case, where did Bishop’s memories of the future, that didn’t happen, come from?
Because this premise is then extended (by a few decades), the whole movie has the same problem. Logan travels back in time to 1973 to save the future of the X-Men from the Sentinels. If he’s successful the Sentinels will never exist, and he will have no reason to travel back in time.
And that’s not the only paradox that we have to deal with, there seems to be at least one Predestination Paradox inherent in the story.
The act of trying to stop Mystique from killing Trask and creating the Sentinels, causes then President Nixon to agree to the Sentinel program. Worse yet, Magneto’s decision to shoot Mystique, so that she cannot be studied in the future by the Sentinels, causes her blood and DNA to be studied by Trask and incorporated into the Sentinels allowing them to turn their limbs into blades and so on (we won’t for the moment worry about how a genetic trait helped a machine do this, it’s outside of our scope).
There’s also an issue where Charles Xavier reads Wolverine’s mind and learns a whole lot of future history (as well as connecting with his own future mind who ‘fixes’ his abilities (presumably earlier than he originally managed on his own).
Charles learns a great deal about how the war with humans went on Earth-10005 (without having to watch all three original movies). This future knowledge represents another Grandfather paradox (or an inverted Bootstrap perhaps), in that the information comes from a future that will not exist now.
The Solution
The most obvious solution to the problem of how this time travel works is the way that time-travel generally works in comic books.
Multiverses.
We’re all familiar with the idea, any change to the past immediately creates a new timeline, an alternative universe to the original, that includes the time traveller who can no longer return to their ‘old’ future. This is normal in comic books to the point where they even have a codified system for identifying universes.
The original universe is officially classed as Earth-10005 and the new universe is known by fans as Earth-TRN414 (the TRN stands for Temporary Reality Number as it hasn’t been confirmed in official marvel publications yet), which also includes the movie “Deadpool” in its timeline).
That means that Wolverine left Earth-10005 and headed back to 1973, immediately creating by his different reactions the new Earth-TRN414. It also means that everytime Kitty sent Bishop back to warn themselves in 2023 Bishop was creating a new universe, too…
Only if that’s true, why do Kitty and Bishop vanish when they’ve altered the timeline? That shouldn’t happen. They should just get killed, but also be safe because in another universe they’d already left.
There’s a solution to that problem though.
A single mutable timeline.
Where Bishop or Wolverine are actually altering the past of the universe they are in. In cinema, it is a common shorthand within science-fiction that vanishing is because the past has been successfully changed.
Remember the entire point of this time travel is to change the past, not just spawn a new universe. Single mutable timeline’s like this mean that the original is lost. But then we’re back to having the causality issue of having to send the traveller back to warn of something that isn’t going to happen anymore.
The goals and events we see are inconsistent and muddled, they point at both a single mutable timeline without causality issues and an immutable spawning multiverse timeline, at the same time. An impossibility…
The Real Solution
The real solution, as usual, is that the filmmakers accidently hinted at something they didn’t really intend. Someone didn’t entirely think through the results of having evidence of both sorts of time travel, maybe because they weren’t decisions made by the same person (filmmaking is largely a collaborative effort).
Putting that aside, how can we reconcile the ‘preferred’ multiversal solution with the changing single timeline that the vanishing creates? Preferred in this case by Marvel, the fans and particularly Bryan Singer who does not want the original trilogies retconned out of existence.
I could invoke that the movie must therefore be told by an unreliable narrator, in this case, presumably Wolverine. The character has demonstrated that he doesn’t have the best memory from time to time, and we could therefore explain away the various inconsistencies between this, and the other movies, by essentially saying that Wolverine is forgetting or misrepresenting something, but I think that is a copout. What we see is meant to be an accurate depiction of what Wolverine experienced, not some tall tale version of it that he tells the kids in the dorms one night.
There is another clue that Kitty tells Wolverine early on, :
“Basically, your body will go to sleep while your mind travels back in time. As long as you’re back there, past and present will continue to coexist. But once you wake up, whatever you’ve done will take hold and become history. And for the rest of us it’ll be the only history that we know. It’ll be like the last fifty years never happened, in this world, in this war. The only person who will remember it is you.”
If Wolverine were being sent back in a Single Mutable timeline, any action he takes to alter the past should immediately impact Kitty and him in the present. Where as if he was spawning a new universe that was unconnected to the original then it couldn’t ‘become history’, it would just be the history of a new universe.
That means Kitty must be creating a new Parallel universe, perhaps as a pocket universe, where things can be altered, but the original universe causality cannot be directly affected by the changes. Then, when the connection is broken, Kitty’s power immediately cuts and pastes the pocket universe back over the historic original.
It may not be Kitty’s power that directly does this, it may be a natural consequence of no physical time-travel taking place. Perhaps the two timelines are so physically close together that they are naturally attracted to each other and merge.
However, I suspect that Kitty’s power is directly to blame for this merging, as she phases the two histories together, and that has always been her power. I can even believe that this would explain some of the inconsistencies that we observe in the past (such as Trask and Stryker being different actors), because those differences come from Wolverine’s and Kitty’s minds, which are creating the pocket universe. It also goes some way towards explaining why time keeps trying to play out the same way (the old ‘a pebble cannot disrupt the river of time parable’) as Kitty’s power tries to preserve as much of her continuity as possible while allowing the change to take place.
It could even explain the positive changes that appear to occur at the end, where once dead X-men are recovered and Wolverine is now “Professor Logan”. Neither if these seem plausible from the point of view of the original trilogy of movies, but would be consistent with Kitty (and Wolverine’s) unconscious desires.
Of course, the new altered timeline is also being guided by a Professor X, who has seen the future (he may not have all the insight of Earth-10005’s Wolverine, but a lot more than Earth-TRN414’s). That helps the new universe to not fall back into the ways of the old universe, after all Professor Logan remembered nothing of the original universe (at least consciously for 50 years), so he couldn’t change the history anymore, only what the other Wolverine had set in motion would continue, including giving Professor X the psychic kick from himself.
So we have a created parallel universe that is grafted back over the original, all the chronology and causality of the new reality resides entirely within Wolverine. He created the new universe, and is the only information preserved from the original. The only question remaining is what happens to Professor Logan now that he has been replaced by the original Wolverine? Is he wiped from existence entirely?
Well, it’s hard to say, the potentially chronological sequel, Logan is canonically set on a different Earth to any of the other movies, it is possible that Wolverine’s healing factor may start to repair the ‘lost’ memories, giving him knowledge that his body had experienced, even if his mind hadn’t, but it wouldn’t be the first time his friends and colleagues had known him to suffer from amnesia (even if he was no longer shot in the head by Stryker as in Origins).
TL;DR
What happens in the movie, while it looks a lot like time travel, it isn’t really. Instead it is the result of Kitty Pryde creating a pocket universe, and then phasing it into the past to alter history. Making it more like a retcon edit of the universe than an actual time-travel event that would just create a new universe in the Marvel multiverse.
CJ Moseley
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