Time-Travel in the MCU

I. Introduction
So much rubbish has been written about time-travel in the Marvel Cinematic Universe… especially with respect to “End Game”… that I thought a “historical retrospective”, as it were, might add some clarity.

I love that, in “End Game”, the characters themselves mock other movies’ interpretation of time-travel (e.g. “Back to the Future”), which is hilariously self-referential. But the larger point is that time-travel has been thought-through before, both by (many!) science-fiction writers, and (some) physicists. So I find the (often rabid) fan arguments about what time-travel must or cannot mean, to be… well, “sophomoric” is the polite term. (And while you’re at it, kids, get off my damn lawn! 🙂 )

So… let’s explore the history (heh) of time-travel, and what it could mean for the MCU.

II. History and References
The first (backwards) time-travel story is “The Clock That Went Backwards”, by Edward Page Mitchell, in 1881 — although it is more of a fantasy than science-fiction. The first ‘engineered’ time-machine story is Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau‘s El Anacronópete, from 1887. And, of course, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine” (1895) popularized the notion.

But none of them handled the paradoxes implicit in time-travel. To the best of my knowledge, Murray Leinster’s Sidewise in Time (1934!) was the first to address the problem, by suggesting a “multiplicity of histories” — i.e. the first multiverse!

(While physicists had been struggling with the implications of quantum mechanics since 1926, the first theoretical treatment of the “many worlds” hypothesis did not appear until 1957. Once again, science fiction leads the way!)

Some interesting references with more detail:

III. Can Paradoxes Be Paradoctored? Schools of thought in science fiction

I’ve read a great deal of science fiction that handles time-travel. (I started reading ‘true’ sf in 1968.) There appear to be N general approaches to handling the paradoxes implied by time-travel.

Immutable. You can travel backwards in time, but you can’t change anything, no matter how hard (or how many times) you try. There are a couple of variations:
1. You fail. Something always gets in your way. You try to stop the assassination of Lincoln: your horse breaks a leg. Your gun misfires. In some interpretations, the harder you try, the harder the Universe “pushes back”. E.g. you grab Booth around the neck, and his (previously unknown) accomplice stabs you in the back, and you die. Game over.
2. You were wrong. You go back and kill your grandfather. Turns out your grandmother had another lover…
3. Incomplete information. Poul Anderson’s There Will Be Time (1972) had a lovely variant of this that allowed for both the pre-destination of immutable history, and the free will of the time traveller. You can’t change what you know to be fact… but there’s a huge amount of ‘slipperiness’ in the things that you don’t know — those you can change. (The hero loses to the bad guys, but escapes, goes to the far future, gets a mind-control technology, brings it back to before the loss… and ends up in control of the bad guys after he ‘loses’.)
Healable. You can change the past… but time has a way of ‘healing’ itself. You can stop Lincoln from being killed… but the next day he falls off a horse and dies. Or he learns of the death of a close friend at the hands of the Confederacy… and his policies become more punitive to the South — essentially replicating what happened after his death.This approach doesn’t completely escape paradox, but it softens it. Typically the time-traveller involved remembers the events, but no-one else does.
Ignoreable. Basically, the problem is ignored. Paradoxes happen, deal with it! The intellectual predecessor of “Back to the Future”.
1. Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder (1952) is an early and still powerful work with a deep dystopian flavor. You take a commercial time-travel safari to go back and kill a dinosaur (that was already about to die)… but you accidentally step on the wrong butterfly. Oops! (The story even got adapted into a Simpsons’ episode!)
2. Robert A. Heinlein had a ton of fun with these in By His Bootstraps and All You Zombies — he didn’t walk around paradoxes, he relished them! (‘Zombies’ has nothing to do with modern zombies, and manages to drag in “I Am My Own Grandpa” while he’s at it [the song has diagrams!].)
3. Larry Niven took the idea to its ultimate expression in one of Niven’s Laws: the only stable Universe is one in which time-travel is never invented. Once invented, someone will inevitably go back in time and make a change… that prevents time-travel from being invented. Problem solved!
Paint-over. This is perhaps my favorite, and was explored in detail in David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself. Essentially, time has an additional dimension, call it “depth”. Reality is like a painting in progress. The time-traveller can go back and “paint over” part of the timeline, changing the painting. But the original history still exists “underneath” the extra layer of paint. So there’s no immediate paradox: the traveller is still the sum of all his/her experiences throughout the travelling. Changed history, but don’t like the result? Go back and stop yourself from making the change.
X
Having solved one problem, he added more, and created closed-loops where in (perhaps in homage to Heinlein) the protagonist creates himself. It is a somewhat disturbing and fascinating read that will make your head hurt, perhaps more than any other single time-travel story. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Many Worlds/Multiverse. Finally, of course, we ‘solve’ the paradox problem by evading it completely. Time-travel splits off ‘new’ universes, period. But there are many interesting variations:
1. Sea of universes. Every quantum event splits the Universe. Everything that could happen, happens. Free will is an illusion. Time-travel just hops from one universe to another, no big deal. It’s kind of boring, actually: no room for drama.
  1. Except Star Trek: Next Generation still had fun with it in Parallels!
  2. And Larry Niven (again) has a story where parallel-worlds travellers sometimes return to a universe that is not quite exactly their own, without realizing it. Many travellers suicide, as they conclude that free will really is an illusion, and personal choices are meaningless.
2. Significant events. Mix the “Healable” model with “many worlds”, and you get a Multiverse that splits only when a significant choice or event happens. Time-travel clearly counts! This has perhaps the most room for drama, because it preserves (nay, emphasizes!) free-will.
3. Time-travel only. Universe splitting only happens as a result of time-travel. Or perhaps only when time-travellers change things. Neat, sweet, and complete. But more on that in the MCU section.
4. Sideways in time. “Many worlds” treats Time as 2-dimensional (or higher!), but just makes new time lines as needed. This opens the door to events in one time-line propagating, “rippling” (so to speak) not just down one time-line, but across time-lines. I’m not aware of any stories around this concept, but they’re waiting to be written!

IV. The MCU (finally)

TBW…

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