On Mon, 1 Jun 1998, Mike "Nelson" wrote:

> No. Let's take Back to the Future as example. He travelled back to 1955
> and screwed up his Mom meeting his Dad. When he looked at a picture of him
> and his brother and sister, the brother began vanishing first, then the
> sister as that is the order in who was born first. The brother was born,
> then the sister, then Marty. The disruption Marty caused in time was
> slowly changing time in the future by affecting what happened closer to
> 1955 first, thus his brother was the first to disappear. Just the same way

The point is: all of this is utterly illogical. ALL those concepts like 
"change", "travel", "slowly", "move" depend totally of our perception
of time. They simply cannot be applied when talking about something
like time-travel and its consequences that affects time itself.

That is the fundamental flaw that makes almost all time-travel plots
so horrendously flawed, TMiL being one of the best (i.e. worst) examples:

The plot deals with the bending and changing of the rules of causality,
with things and events OUTSIDE the "normal" flow of time. Yet the script
writer either is too stupid to realize this or he thinks the audience
is too stupid too understand it and therefore makes extensive use of just
the same "normal" linear-time logic that the basic plot concept defies
completely.



Michael "Brazil" Borgwardt --- Member of #WASHU# and Her would-be guinea-pig.
        Untiring defender of Washu-chan, Asuka-chan and Elektra-chan. 
   A Homepage for Elektra: http://www.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/~borgward/
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