One of the new episodes of Futurama, “The Late Philip J. Fry,” has the time-traveling protagonists kill Hitler… and history ends up virtually unchanged, to the point that, as of the year 3000, circumstances are completely identical as when they left. Hilariously, when they are forced to do it again later in the episode, the Professor misses Hitler and somehow kills Eleanor Roosevelt by mistake, resulting in a universe in which everything is… still identical (albeit shifted ten feet down).
Fantastic episode, by the way. Futurama does time travel paradoxes better than anyone. It’s on Netflix Instant Watch now if you missed the initial airing.
To do it well it would have to be incredibly complicated (how do you account for the disappearance of a key historical figure that influenced so many others?)
The TV shows or movies would have to have things turn out the same in the end (thus giving rise to the stealing of the gypsy baby next door) so the series can continue
The majority time travel stories want to teach you a lesson, and that lesson invariably is “don’t mess with history”. There are only 2 ways that lesson could be taught, either history remains the same or it goes bad (never better)
At this point, I would think a brand new TV series with the premise that the protagonists are going through history changing it for the better would be a kick-ass if crazily complicated concept. Imagine a show that begins where an organization deliberately goes around killing evil people throughout history with a time machine, and by the end of the series, the world is transformed into a utopia
What if one of the protagonists was an actual time traveller, but the other is actually a hologram being projected from the future that only the time traveller can see and hear?
I don’t mean little things like the stuff from Quantum Leap. Big things, killing Hitler, Stalin, curing the Black Plague before it starts, that kind of thing. And each episode would have the consequences of the past episodes
Orson Scott Card wrote a novel called Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, where civilization was going to end (via runaway climate change and natural resource depletion), but they (c. 26th century) discovered time travel and sent people back to help out the Amerindian civilizations so that they would be ready for the Europeans. I personally found it too-pat in concept and execution and the characters uninteresting (and Columbus unbelievable), but that would be an example of “making right what once went wrong.”
A short story could skip over the first two. Same for an AU episode in a TV show where that fitted in.
The last one is the difficult bit, partly because, even if you could get rid of certain big things like the Holocaust by getting rid of one key figure - a reach, but plausible if written well - it would still be difficult to imagine a world that was otherwise better.
It would be interesting in that there may never have been an Israel, perhaps, which might have changed the politics of that region, which would change all sorts of things, but does anyone at all know enough about that to write a story that gels with the writer, let alone the audience?
And it’s a political minefield. Imagine writing a story that suggested a better world without the existence of Israel, even if it were founded on European Jews not being exterminated en masse.
There was a segment of one of the Simpson’s Halloween shows where Homer was trying to fix a toaster, and accidentally invented a time machine. His actions in the past caused various extremely funny consequences in the present. I can’t do it justice; you really need to see it.
The game Red Alert started off with a Hitler-erasing premise. I don’t know if it counts as a worse future or a better one, but it’s not quite nuclear apocalypse.
Eh, World War II still goes forth as scheduled, except both sides get nukes, the Russians end up with indestructible super-tanks, and even the Allies’ secret weapon destabilizes the space-time continuum with almost every use. The only plus side is that it might have averted the Holocaust (but who knows what atrocities Stalin was able to get up to).
I don’t think it’s fair to say that the result was “basically the same” –
The antisemites used the contraceptive properties of the well to quietly render infertile the entire Jewish population and every other group they didn’t approve of. The fact that they did it without violence allowed them to do a much more thorough and complete job. There were “survivors,” but the survivors were unable to create a new generation.
Why kill a baby, when you could sterilize any one of someone’s ancestors? Skynet’s time travel sector should have been all about castration and hysterectomies.
“And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until it takes your balls.”
I remember that one too. As I recall, the time traveling nanny ended up throwing herself and the baby H. to their deaths, but someone else working in the household bought a baby from a Gypsy and it was raised to become…Hitler. Nurture vs. nature.
Except some stupid subplot about a key that might or might not be magic that kept the evil spirits away that Time-Nanny had with her when she jumped. There was a bit of an implication that because Time-Nanny jumped with the magical key, Gypsy-Baby-Hitler was possessed by eeevil-spirits.