Time travel has been a major feature in fiction, from novels to film, since H.G. Wells introduced his “Time Machine” in 1895. It accounts for literally billions of dollars in content.
The climax of the 23 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “Avengers:Endgame,” includes time travel as the central plot device, and brought in $2.8 billion dollars at the box office worldwide. That was for that single film.
Time travel features in mega-franchises like Back to the Future, Outlander, and Lost, is on Disney Channel and Netflix, and is the central premise of a television franchise that premiered when I was an infant, the BBC classic Doctor Who. That premiere came the day after JFK was assassinated, which caused a delayed start and low viewership, so the series might have never gone anywhere, an alternate timeline many of us would prefer not to imagine. As it was, the series caught on, running until 1989, then rebooting in 2005 and still going strong.
The Doctor, “Who” is not his last name, it is only just the Doctor, is part of a species of time traveling extraterrestrials called Time Lords. They also have the ability to regenerate into new bodies, convenient for a series approaching sixty years running with one main character, Since 2017, the Doctor has been played by Jodie Whittaker, the first woman in the role. Oh, and the Doctor is unambiguously good, though sometimes flawed. I guess even time traveling extraterrestrials have their baggage.
In today’s first reading, one of the Doctor’s time traveling companions, the completely human Amy Pond, has made the decision to travel through time to be with the man she loves. She gets a message to the Doctor through her daughter, and asks him, for the Doctor was a him at that point, to travel back in time and tell her younger self a story, one filled with hope, one promising adventure.
This totally messes with the rules of time travel, of which there appear to be three, though they get broken all the time. The first is that you should never meet another version of yourself. The second is that you should never use time travel for personal gain. This is how you tell the heroes from the villains in these things. And the last is that any change you make in the past can have unexpected and sometimes catastrophic consequences in the future, including eliminating your personal future.
The Doctor does visit young Amy Pond, and the power of the story prepares her for her future adventures.
Today’s gospel reading is also about the power of story, potentially opening us up to an alternate future for Christianity and therefore all of history, for it involves the early struggles of the church to figure out what Jesus meant.
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