(For the extreme spolierphobes out there, if you haven’t seen the movie or have no idea what I mean by a Groundhog Day Episode, please beware of spoilers below.)
There are lots of television episodes that follow the basic premise of the movie Groundhog Day — a character or characters relive the same day/time period over and over and over and over again until someone pushes a button, says the right thing, learns the right lesson …
I know its evolutionary ancestry has Capra-like roots, but would be surprised if the short-time-period-repetition plot device is as young as Groundhog Day the movie. But I can’t think of an earlier use — can you?
(As much as I love the (relative) Board stability, how awesome would it have been if the hamsters glitched and triple-posted the OP?)
A Star Trek: TNG episode is the only one that comes to mind. The number 3 was somehow used to finally break the loop, with Data convincing the Captain to listen to Riker (with the three pips on his uniform) and do something different than the many previous times.
I just came in to say that the “Cause and Effect” episode of TNG is probably the most popularly well-known example to predate Groundhog Day. Groundhog Day was probably already in production when that episode aired in 1992.
It’s not exactly the same thing, but similar – Norman Spinrad’s short story “The Weed of Time” features people trapped in a span of time that they are forced to go over and over through. The difference is that they are free to revisit at any point within the allotted stream, and they can’t change their actions – they only get to “watch”. And the span is their entire lives. Weird story.
One aspect of the Groundhog Day, which is mentioned at the TV tropes site, is that the story really goes on for a long time. Somewhere around ten years. It would have been interesting to see this have been brought a bit more clearly, because it gives a layer of frustration to the various suicides. As it is, it feels like more like Phil takes his life because he’s experimenting and knows it won’t carry consequence anyhow.
I remember seeing a one-act play in the 70s or 80s where a couple try to pull off a conflict-free family dinner. Every time they hit a snag, they reset. I don’t recall the title. The repitition and the couple’s timing fuel the humor.
It was also based on a short story published in 1973.
After a quick look on Wiki and a general Google around, it seems that the earliest work to use a time loop as a plot device may be Malcolm Jameson’s Doubled and Redoubled in 1941.
There are lots of television episodes that follow the basic premise of the movie Groundhog Day — a character or characters relive the same day/time period over and over and over and over again until someone pushes a button, says the right thing, learns the right lesson …
I know its evolutionary ancestry has Capra-like roots, but would be surprised if the short-time-period-repetition plot device is as young as Groundhog Day the movie. But I can’t think of an earlier use — can you?
As a plot element (though not the basis for the whole book) we can probably push it back a further ten years to British author Charles Williams. I think it was “Many Dimensions” (1931). The characters get their hands on an artifact which, among other things, allows them to travel in time, but it doesn’t take their whole bodies, just their essence/soul/spirit.
Which, of course, being transplanted back into their physical minds at the state they were in in the past, everybody loses all memory of future events, including the fact that they’ve time-travelled at all, and as they move forwards to the point at which they previously decided to travel back in time, inevitably they make the same decision again, leading to a totally infinite loop (absent a Deus Ex Machina which, ISTR, does actually occur)
