Seven Days is a UPN show whose premise is that the NSA has a time machine that can send one man, Frank Parker, back in time up to seven days to avert disasters. In the pilot, for example, terrorists kill the President and Vice President by crashing a plane into the White House, and Frank is sent back to find out who did it and stop them.
Anyway, though I love the show, the science is pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo that I pretty much ignore most of the time. One thing bothers me, though. The fuel source for the time travel comes from the alien vessel that crashed in Roswell, and it has been stated several times that they can’t use the sphere (the time machine) for less important missions because it uses up a bit of the fuel source each time.
Except it shouldn’t. Frank goes back and saves the USA or the world, in the process creating a new timeline. In the new timeline, the sphere isn’t used for this mission, so no fuel is used. In fact, except for the failed missions, no fuel would ever be used, as the sphere would never be used in the new timeline. If you think about it, since Frank has always succeeded eventually (sometimes it takes two jumps) the people who run the project would never have any experience, because every successful jump eliminates the need for the jump. No one except Frank, in effect, has ever experienced a successful jump, yet they act as if they’ve all been through it many times.
That said, I still like the show. Any other comments?
Not really any comments, I also like the show. I tend to try and suspend my dis-belief when watching something for entertainment. I think that too many people don’t enjoy movies/tv, because they nit pick. Well of course it isn’t realistic, if you want realism, watch the 6 o’clock news.
But my question is, Is the show still on? I haven’t seen it in months, and it used to be on Wednesday nights.
Well, anytime you deal with time travel you have to deal with a certain amount of paradox. In fact, half the fun (to me anyway) of time travel stories is how they deal with the paradoxes.
For your first question, the sphere does use fuel each time because its timeline is separate from the “world’s” timeline. Let me try with bad ascii graphics to show this…
A disaster occurs and Our Heros™ use their time machine to fix it. You wind up with two time lines, like this…
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Disaster No Disaster
The problem is, the sphere has to exist in both time lines. This looks something like…
The sphere essentially travels from one timeline to the other. Its (personal (itemal?)) history includes both the disaster and non-disaster versions. Therefore, it uses fuel.
The same thing applies to Frank himself, btw, which is why he remembers both timelines. He should also be aging faster than the people around him.
As for why everyone else on the project remembers both timelines, you could say something like “since they are in the vicinity of the time machine while it is in operation they are “carried along” with it from one timeline to the other and so retain their memories”. They don’t say anything like that, but it wouldn’t take much pseudo-scientific handwaving to come up with something.
tanstaafl: Nice reasoning, but it doesn’t quite wash. Timeline A: Disaster occurs, Frank hops in the sphere and goes back to before the disaster, preventing it, creating timeline B. If they refurbished this sphere for the next jump and the fuel source was in the sphere, your theory would make sense. But when Frank gets back to the hangar, we find a brand-spanking-new sphere on the launch pad, which is not then sent back. In the modified timeline, the sphere that Frank uses for time travel has never been used. But that brings up a new point. Frank has traveled dozens of times, so there are dozens of spheres from alternate timelines that have to be disposed of. Is there a sphere junkyard? Are they stripped for parts?
Atrael: I pretty much agree with you. I said, more than once, that I like the show. The endless bitching I here about bumpy/smooth heads when discussing another show irritates the hell out of me. If I were to nit-pick, it would be hard to enjoy the show at all. I just wanted to use this issue as a starting point for discussing a show I like.
<<tanstaafl: Nice reasoning, but it doesn’t quite wash. Timeline A: Disaster occurs, Frank hops in the sphere and goes back to before the disaster, preventing it, creating timeline B. If they refurbished this sphere for the next jump and the fuel source was in the sphere, your theory would make sense. But when Frank gets back to the hangar, we find a brand-spanking-new sphere on the launch pad, which is not then sent back. In the modified timeline, the sphere that Frank uses for time travel has never been used. But that brings up a new point. Frank has traveled dozens of times, so there are dozens of spheres from alternate timelines that have to be disposed of. Is there a sphere junkyard? Are they stripped for parts?>>
My guess is that whatever gets sent back through time somehow “replaces” it’s counterpart in the past (Hey, I didn’t write it)…Which would explain why, not only are there no duplicate spheres rolling around, but no duplicate Franks, either.
That still doesn’t explain the fuel, though. I mean, if the fuel is being “burned” in the future, the fuel in the past would still be there. And if the fuel was on the Sphere, it would have been used before it arrived in the past, and any leftover fuel would just replace any fuel already in the past, and still be usable!
I’m sure the writers, bless their hearts, didn’t even think this far ahead, but perhaps one could rationalize that the energy the sphere’s fuel was converted into travels back into the past, as well, and replaces the pre-used fuel?
In time paradoxes like this, I always use a tool I call “temporal graying”. It works on the assumption that the timeline(s) are self-preserving, ignoring any “flaws” that would otherwise seem to be paradoxes (like the infamous “travel back in time and kill your younger self” paradox) by “blurring” them together to allow a cohesive and continuing flow of time.
Think of the two timelines intersecting, due to the time travel. In that brief fraction of a femtosecond of time, the two timelines simultaneously exist. Rather than having “duplicates” from each timeline coexist, all of them are “blurred” together into a single timeline (again, just for that fraction of a femtosecond). Beyond that point on the timeline, a completely different timeline is created, different from the other two (although they continue to exist). Characteristics from both timelines exist in that timeline.
A lot of pseudoscience, I know, but at least I didn’t use the word “quantum”. And it explains how so many supposed paradoxes exist, AND it explains why characteristics of both timelines seem to exist.
And as for the fuel thing… there was one episode where a Gray had somehow gotten into the base (I came in at the middle of the show, so I don’t know HOW he got there, or under what circumstances), and by the end of the show it was revealed that the Gray knew what had happened in both timelines, implying that their technology exists in a sort of non-linear state (outside of time, basically). In short, there is only a finite amount of fuel for ALL timelines to use. However, in order for this to work, one would have to assume that “our” timeline (that is, the timeline we see in the show) is the “main” or “mother” timeline, and all others are secondary, and don’t tap into the fuel supply.
When Frank jumps to an earlier time, he and the sphere from the earlier time both disappear. In the pilot, the first time he jumped, they were not expecting him and all they knew was that he has disappeared from the asylum he was being held in. They certainly did not know they had chosen him to be the time pilot.
And that illustrates the fact that they didn’t actually remember the different timelines. Only Frank did. They had to take his word for it about the missions and what happened. I can’t think of anytime during the run that anyone but Frank remembered anything.
Lok, I understand that nobody except Frank remembers the timelines. But look at the scenes where a new jump is being made, and the people behave as if this is a routine occurrance for them, when only Frank has ever experienced a successful jump. They should behave as if every time they’ve done this, it was a failure, beacuase for them, it has been.
SPOOFE, Rancoth, that makes sense regarding Frank and the sphere. I still think the fuel should be inexhaustible so long as each mission is successful.
I don’t see how the fact that they don’t remember the old timeline means they have only experienced failures. They know jumps happen, because the sphere and Frank disappear. They have to believe Frank when he tells them why he jumped, but they can and do get evidence backing up his stories when they bust the various bad guys.
So while they may not remember it, they do know it works, that he really is traveling through time. At least that is the way the evidence points for them.
Of course they know about the previous timelines, and they don’t have to even beleive Frank; they have the sphere he traveled in which they read data from to improve the process, as has been a plot point of more than one show.
However, there’s a difference between knowing something intellectually, and actually having experience with it. The people on the Backstep team know about the successful backsteps, but they’ve never experienced one, and moreso, can never experience one. No matter how many successful backsteps there have been, they should be behaving as if it’s their first experience, because it is.
I’m sure that, A: they’ve ran tests on the sphere before, and B: sending an object back in time does not automatically destroy the timeline that sent the object. From that we can speculate that they HAVE used the sphere in tests, and have managed to gather ample evidence from those tests - and subsequent jumps by Frank - to improve their backstep performance.