One of the most fun aspects of Loki, that they frankly have not done enough of, is when the writers use time travel aspects to explain away historical mysteries. In season one, we learned Tom Hiddleston’s Loki was actually the infamous D.B. Cooper, who robbed an airplane in the ’70s, popped out with a parachute, and vanished for all time. Now, in the second season’s penultimate episode, “Science/Fiction,” the show solved yet another historical mystery, MCU style. One involving the most infamous (and mythologized) prison in American history—Alcatraz.

At the end of episode four of this season, the Temporal Loom exploded, and we learned the different TVA employees who were in the control room, as well as Sylvie, were sent back to their lives before the TVA took them and wiped their memories. Mobius was a single dad named Don who sold jet skis (of course). O.B. was a scientist and an aspiring sci-fi author. Hunter B-15 was a doctor. Sylvie just went back to work at McDonald’s in 1982. But the most interesting true identity of a TVA employee had to be Casey. Turns out, the mild-mannered “guy at the desk” was once a notorious criminal, Alcatraz escaped convict Frank Morris.

When Loki starts time slipping again, Casey appears in 1962, escaping from Alcatraz. We even see the crude dummies the inmates made to appear as if they were sleeping during bedcheck. It’s something that really happened. Casey even says “If they catch us, they’re going to gut us like a fish!” That was a fun callback to season one, when Loki threatened to do the same to him but he had no idea what a fish even was. As they’re trying to escape, a time-slipping Loki appears on the shores of Alcatraz island in San Francisco. He finds Casey, now called Frank, who doesn’t recognize him, along with two other men getting ready to escape in a makeshift raft.

In reality, the two other men were Clarence and John Anglin. They were portrayed by the episode’s directors, Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson. The real Frank Morris was a lifelong criminal who spent much of his life in correctional facilities. Authorities arrested Morris for armed robbery, car theft, and finally, the crime that put him in Alcatraz, bank robbery. However, he had a genius I.Q., and was likely the real mastermind behind the whole escape. Being so smart, it’s no wonder the TVA wanted him as an employee.

Later in the episode, Loki appears to Frank Morris on a beach along with the other two escaped convicts, who made it to dry land. In reality, no one really knows what happened to the three men. Official reports suggest they drowned in the waters of San Francisco Bay, or hypothermia got them. But they never discovered any bodies. Over the past 60 years, some anecdotal evidence points to at least one of the men surviving. We have since mythologized the only successful escape from Alcatraz in pop culture. It was even the subject of the 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz with Clint Eastwood playing Frank Morris.

Frank accepts Loki’s offer to help restore the TVA, even though he doesn’t understand what’s going on. Once he realizes that O.B.’s temp pad can take anyone to anywhen, he even asks if it could take him into a bank vault. Even after doing time in the world’s most infamous prison, Frank still can’t get rid of the urge to rob banks. When one of the TemPads vanishes due to reality coming undone everyone thinks Frank stole it. Hey, when you’re famous for robbery, it’s hard to shake that reputation.

While we saw Frank/Casey unravel at the end of the episode, we have a strong feeling it’s not the last we’ve seen of him. If Loki has taught us anything, it’s that there’s always another branched timeline somewhere.

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Episode three of Loki season two on Disney+ introduced us to a variant of He Who Remains. As a child, this variant, Victor Timely, received a TVA instruction manual in the year 1868. This acquisition of future knowledge led him to become an inventor. In Loki, we meet adult Victor Timely at the Chicago 1893 World’s Fair, where he is presenting his rudimentary version of the Temporal Loom. Timley gets caught up in the time-traveling shenanigans of Loki and Mobius, who travel to his branched timeline to find him. But how is the MCU’s Victor Timely different from the one found in Marvel Comics? So far, the Victor Timely in Loki is a totally different character from his Marvel Comics counterpart—aside from both being variants of the despotic Kang the Conqueror.

Victor Timely, the Victorian Era Marvel Comics Kang Variant

In Marvel Comics, the Victor Timely variant of Kang the Conqueror first appeared in 1992’s Avengers Annual #21. Writer Peter Sanderson and artist Rich Yanizeski created him. In that issue, we learned this Kang variant traveled back to Wisconsin on January 1, 1901, the first day of the new century. Once there, he established the town of Timely. He named it after his newly assumed name, Victor Timely. This small town, with its quaint All-American Victorian feel, would serve as a 20th-century base for his future self. From this chronal vantage point, Timely would eventually evolve into the Prime Kang and make life miserable for the Avengers.

The relatively immortal Victor Timely became an industrialist, turning Timely into a boom town of industry. He became a business rival of people like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. As the 20th century unfolded, Timely faked his death repeatedly. He would then assume the identity of his own son Victor Timely Jr., then Victor Timely III, and on and on. He introduced very advanced technology to unsuspecting scientists of the time. Timely was the man who introduced the concept of androids to Dr. Phineas Horton. The same man eventually created the first android Human Torch in 1939. The Torch, in the comics, would also become the basis for the synthezoid Avenger, the Vision.

Timely, Wisconsin and Kang’s City of Chronopolis

Timely, Wisconsin also became the hub from which Kang would create the city of Chronopolis. Existing outside normal time and space, Chronopolis would serve as a hub for Kang’s conquest of all known time periods. Various eras of history intersected in Chronopolis, only perceivable to Kang himself. It eventually bled into the realm of Limbo, which exists outside of time. It’s something very similar to how the Time Variance Authority functions on Loki.  

The MCU Victor Timely and How He Differs from Marvel Comics’ Version

The MCU Victor Timely on Loki does not seem to be a Kang from the future who has settled in the past. That is, unless they throw some last-minute twist at us. From what we can tell, Loki‘s Victor Timely was born in the 19th century when Ravonna Renslayer and Miss Minutes interfered in his life and created the version of Victor Timely we see in 1893. From all indications, it appears the MCU’s Victor Timely belongs to that time and that he isn’t a future Kang who went back in time. The main similarity between the comics and the MCU is that Victor Timely is an assumed name. We may never know what the true birth names of the Kangs really are.

The MCU Victor Timely may actually evolve into Kang during Loki‘s run and may even be the same version from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. But for now, Victor Timley’s ultimate MCU fate and future are some of the big questions the Loki series sets up. We’re interested in what we’ll learn about Timely going forward.

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Loki‘s first season established the TVA as a place outside of normal time and space. He Who Remains and his servants didn’t age over eons inside the Machiavellian bureaucracy. Mobius wasn’t even sure exactly how long he’d been protecting the Sacred Timeline, since “time moves differently” at the TVA. Combined with Multiversal War, the Citadel at the End of Time, Variants, branches, and pruning it was a lot to make sense of. Now Loki‘s second season is showing we didn’t even know as much as we thought.

What exactly is going on with time at the Time Variance Authority? What does all this new information mean for the MCU’s multiverse? The TVA’s own past, present, and future? Here’s what every episode of Loki season two has revealed about how time does—and sometimes doesn’t—work in the strange world of the TVA.

Episode 1

Time Slipping

Time slipping is when someone is violently ripped through the past, present, and future. It’s supposed to be impossible inside the TVA, a place where magic doesn’t work and countless Infinity Stones are nothing more than colorful paper weights. O.B. and Mobius solved Loki’s time slipping problem by extracting a pruned Loki out of “every strand of time and space.”

The TVA’s Own Linear Timeline

Loki’s time slipping explained why Mobius didn’t recognize the God of Mischief at the end of season one. It also revealed the TVA still has its own self-contained timeline. The organization exists outside of normal time and space, but people in the TVA still live a linear timeline with a past, present, and future.

When Loki went into the past he went into the same TVA’s own past. That was a period when He Who Remains didn’t hide his identity from his workforce. When Loki went into the future it was the same TVA’s future. His travels through TVA time also made it possible for Loki to help save himself from time slipping. He told O.B. about his problems in the past, which made it so O.B. in the present had the Temporal Aura Extractor ready to go.

Mobius attached the Extractor to the most important device in the TVA, machine that weaves entire branches together.

Temporal Loom

The “heart” of the TVA is the Temporal Loom, a device that refines raw time into a “physical timeline.” The death of He Who Remains caused the Sacred Timeline to branch off. Those new strands then began to overload the Temporal Loom, which is not designed to handle that many strands at once.

Read More About Loki Season 2 Episode 1

• How Loki’s Season 2 Premiere Explains Season 1’s Ending
• Does Loki’s Season 2 Premiere Have A Post-Credits Scene?
• Loki’s Post-Credits Scene Ties Into A Classic Thor Comics Location
• Loki’s Temporal Loom: What Is It And What Are Its Marvel Comics Inspirations?
• Who Is Loki’s Ouroboros? Ke Huy Quan’s Character O.B. Ties Into Mythology And Marvel Comics

Episode 2

The Secret Brad Wolfe Life of Hunter X-5

The season premiere saw heavily armed TVA hunters under General Dox’s command go through a Timedoor. Episode two revealed their mission was to blow up all the new branches. One of the Hunters who went on that mission originally was X-5, but Mobius learned he’d abandoned his post entirely in the second episode, which took place immediately at the first within the TVA’s own timeline.

That’s not how much time had passed for X-5, though. He’d left the TVA to make a life for himself as a actor on the Sacred Timeline in 1977 London.

X-5, now known as famous Zaniac star Brad Wolfe, had much longer hair than he had in the first episode. Between his notoriety, success, and lengthy follicles it was clear he lived a long time on the Sacred Timeline even though very little time had passed for his former colleagues in the TVA. The same was true of Sylvie. Despite killing He Who Remains just days prior within the TVA’s own timeline, she’d already established a life on a new branch in 1982 Oklahoma.

Time Discrepancy Between the TVA and Normal Life

The implications of this time discrepancy between normal life and the TVA are terrifying. Someone could theoretically leave the TVA, live an entire life on a branch for many years, and then return to the TVA mere moments after they originally left it. What kind of damage could someone do to the Sacred Timeline if they could do what they wanted for decades before the TVA even knew they were gone?

We’ll have to wait for future episodes to find out. That’s also when we’ll learn whatever else it is we don’t already know about time in the TVA.

Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow him on Twitter and Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.

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In the film Blue Beetle, we learn that industrialist and CEO of Kord Industries, Ted Kord, was once the superhero of Palmera City. Named, of course, the Blue Beetle. For years, he had access to the mysterious alien Scarab. However, unlike Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña), the Scarab did not choose him to bond with. Instead, he studied it, and Ted Kord used the information he gleaned from it to create many gadgets and weapons. Many are similar to those of Batman. But the Blue Beetle mid-credits didn’t just tease the arrival of Ted Kord, but possibly also his BFF, Booster Gold.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, director Angel Manuel Soto addressed the possibility presented in Blue Beetle‘s mid-credits scene. He said, “Ted Kord is still alive, he’s somewhere out there in the universe, and whatever the future holds for our hero is open to interpretation. So, whether that is Booster Gold or Ted Kord or if it is both of them [together], the possibility exists, and it is something that we want to entertain.”

Blue Beetle Ted Kord’s Mysterious Message

At some point, around two decades prior to the events of the film, Ted Kord vanished. He left an 8-year-old daughter named Jennifer (Bruna Marquezine), and his company in the hands of his corrupt sister, Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon). In the mid-credits scene of Blue Beetle, we learn that Ted Kord is not dead. We witness a heavily fragmented video message from him come through on his computer. We don’t see his face clearly, and his voice sounds muffled. But he definitely wants his daughter Jennifer to know he’s still alive out there, and to find him. But where is he?

However, maybe the question isn’t where is he, but when is he. Ted Kord would have probably been in his 30s when he vanished. Maybe 40s at most, especially if he had a young daughter. And although altered by static, you can tell in the film it’s not an “old man voice” we hear. Whoever sent that message isn’t the age Ted Kord should be now. This makes us think that maybe Ted Kord did not just find himself lost somewhere in the world. Maybe he is lost in time.

Could Blue Beetle Ted Kord Be Lost in Time with Booster Gold?

And certainly, judging by the comics, there would be a plausible reason for this. In DC Comics, Ted Kord’s best friend in the world is Booster Gold. A hero from the 25th century, Booster famously time-travels. Booster was a nobody in his time, but with common technology from his era, he figured he could become a wealthy celebrity and superhero in the past. He eventually joined the Justice League International, where he and Blue Beetle Ted Kord became best friends. The two got into many wacky adventures together, and became known as “Blue and Gold.”

In the lead-up to the event series Identity Crisis, Ted Kord uncovered the plans of the villainous Maxwell Lord. And Max later murdered by Ted in cold blood. Booster used his time-traveling abilities to try to save his best friend, which led to a lot of wild time-travel paradoxes and scenarios. Ultimately, Ted Kord realized he must fulfill his fate and die when he was meant to, allowing time to flow properly. Lucky for him, they rebooted the DC Universe a couple of times more, and Ted Kord is now alive and well, and a mentor to Jaime Reyes. So there is a precedent for Ted Kord and time-travel adventures.

Who Could Play Blue Beetle Ted Kord in James Gunn’s DCU?

The mid-credits Blue Beetle scene does a lot of teasing when it comes to Ted Kord and Booster Gold, but not a lot of revealing. Recently though, director Angel Manuel Soto shared his dream casting for Ted Kord should the Blue Beetle appear again. He shared with The Digital Fix, “My dream cast for Ted Kord has always been Jason Sudeikis… But at the end of the day, it’s about who’s best for the character, who loves what we’re trying to do. And who’s willing to see Jaime Reyes’ story continue.”

For now, of course, no casting has been determined. But it does feel like there will be a place for Ted Kord in the future of the DCU.

Blue Beetle and Booster Gold in the DCU Could Lead to Justice League International

James Gunn has stated that Blue Beetle will have a role going forward in his new DCU. Even if the mid-credits tease never finds resolution in a Blue Beetle sequel, there is a Booster Gold series coming in Chapter 1 of the DCU, “Gods and Monsters.” What if Ted Kord was sucked into another timeline thanks to Booster, perhaps the new one that will be established in Superman: Legacy? This would allow the Blue Beetle characters to make the transition into the new DCU, without negating anything that happened in the film.

A Blue Beetle/Booster Gold connection already would make for a perfect setup for an eventual Justice League International project. Because with Ted Kord confirmed alive, and Booster Gold and Green Lantern Guy Gardner confirmed for the DCU, not to mention a new Batman, we have half the JLI core membership right there. And here’s where we’re really putting on our tin foil hats. Jenny Kord said her mother, who was Brazilian, died under undisclosed circumstances when she was six. What If she didn’t die, but also became lost in time, and Ted went looking for her? And what if she’s core JLI member Fire, a Brazilian heroine who controls powerful green flame? There’s a lot of room for Gunn’s DCU to take threads dropped in Blue Beetle and run with them. Here’s hoping we get to see these all play out.

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This season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds gave us everything. A musical episode. An episode about post-war PTSD. An amazing courtroom drama. And a time-traveling crossover where the crew of Lower Decks met the crew of Pike’s Enterprise. That episode was definitely a highlight of the season, and it got us thinking. What other famous starships could meet Pike and his crew in some Star Trek time travel crossover?

While Strange New Worlds is episodic for the most part, we don’t see anything stopping the creators from doing a multi-part story where the Enterprise encounters her namesake starships via time travel shenanigans. What those shenanigans are, we’ll leave that to the writers. But here are some other crews we want to see interact with the Anson Mount’s Captain Pike and his Enterprise crew in future seasons of Strange New Worlds.

The Kelvin-Timeline Enterprise Crew

Look, we get it. This one’s a long shot. But as every year passes, it seems less and less likely that we’ll get a final Star Trek movie in the Kelvin timeline. How many directors has Paramount announced only for nothing to happen? We’ve lost count. But at a recent Star Trek convention, both modern Spocks, Strange New Worlds’ Ethan Peck, and the Kelvin timeline’s Zachary Quinto, appeared on stage together. The two seemed very chummy, and it got us thinking. Why couldn’t Pike’s Enterprise encounter the alt-universe’s Enterprise?

Not only would an episode like this provide closure for the Kelvin timeline Enterprise crew, but it would give us a glimpse into their future. Since it might be cost-prohibitive to bring back the entire cinematic Star Trek crew, particularly Chris Pine and Zoe Saldana, maybe just limit it to characters who have counterparts on Strange New Worlds. For all we know, John Cho’s Sulu is Captain Sulu 10 years after Star Trek Beyond. This is one that’s least likely to happen, but also the one we’d want to see the most.

The Enterprise-B, from Star Trek: Generations

Ah, the Enterprise NCC-1701-B. We only encountered this Excelsior-class starship once, at the start of the 1994 film Star Trek Generations. In the year 2293, we saw her on her maiden voyage under the command of Captain John Harriman—the first Enterprise in 30 years without Kirk in command. An earnest but clearly inexperienced guy, Alan Ruck portrayed Captain Harriman. Sadly for Harriman, his guest of honor, Captain Kirk (William Shatner) died on the Enterprise-B’s first mission. Well, at least to the galaxy at large he did.

So, what was it like being the Captain of that particular Enterprise? Canon tells us that the Enterprise-B had a long and successful voyage. But no matter what accomplishments he made, could her Captain ever live down being the guy who lost a Starfleet legend on his first day on the job? This is a character study we want to see! Let’s be real, the Enterprise-B probably won’t ever get its own movie or series, but a fun time travel adventure where Captain Pike gives his eventual successor a much-needed pep talk? We’re there. Especially if that Captain is Alan Ruck.

The Enterprise-G Crew from Star Trek: Picard, with Captain Seven of Nine

We encountered the newest Federation flagship, the Enterprise-G, at the end of the final season of Star Trek: Picard. Captained by Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan), with first officer Raffaela “Raffi” Musiker (Michelle Hurd) and with Sidney La Forge (Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut) and Jack Crusher (Ed Speleers) as officers, fans are dying for them to get their own series—one Picard showrunner Terry Matalas has called Star Trek: Legacy. But nothing is officially in development, and sadly, we may never see that series come to life.

But we need at least one adventure of the crew of the Enterprise-G with Captain Seven at the helm. Why not a time travel adventure, where Captain Pike gets to see how far into the future his legacy goes? Star Trek famously did a “backdoor pilot” in the ‘60s for a show that never happened. Hopefully, an episode like this could be a backdoor pilot for an eventual Star Trek: Legacy. If nothing else, we’d have at least one adventure with Captain Seven and her gallant crew.

Captain Worf and the Enterprise-E

The Enterprise-E was under the command of Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) in the films Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Insurrection, and Star Trek: Nemesis. Eventually, when Picard became Admiral, Worf (Michael Dorn) became her new Captain. Her final fate was shown as “classified.” In Picard’s final season, all we know about what happened to the Enterprise-E was that it was nothing good, and Worf said, “That wasn’t my fault.” Could this classified mission be a time travel one? Not only would this episode finally give us a Captain Worf adventure (long overdue), but it would solve one mystery left dangling in Picard’s final season. Besides, who doesn’t want to see Worf and La’an (Christina Chong) be badasses together?

The Enterprise-C from Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Yesterday’s Enterprise”

We only ever encountered the Enterprise-C in one episode, in the Star Trek: The Next Generation adventure “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” In that fan-favorite story, the Enterprise-C, while trying to save a Klingon outpost from Romulan attack, is thrust 22 years into their own future, where they meet Picard and the Enterprise-D crew. The C was under the command of Captain Rachel Garrett, played by Tricia O’Neil, the first female Enterprise Captain in the franchise’s history,

We eventually discover that the Enterprise-C must return to its own time and fulfill its destiny, which is to be destroyed while saving the Klingons. But presumably, that Enterprise had many adventures before that. Obviously, you’d have to recast Captain Garrett, but we’d love to see a proper Enterprise-C adventure where it doesn’t end in her death. And to anyone who says more than one time-traveling journey for this Enterprise is too much, I remind you of every time both Kirk and Picard time-traveled on their starships. Multiple time travel incursions just come with the name Enterprise.

George Takei as Captain Sulu on the U.S.S. Excelsior

In the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, we learned that Hikaru Sulu was the Captain of the U.S.S. Excelsior. He helped Captain Kirk on his final mission, which saw the peace treaty form between the Federation and Klingon Empire. We later saw Captain Sulu in the Voyager episode “Flashback,” which took viewers back to those events. But George Takei is a national treasure. He may be 85 now, but as anyone who follows him on social media knows, he has not lost a step. Who’s to say he’s not still in command of the Excelsior decades later? Although we hope by this time he’s at least Admiral Sulu. Let Strange New Worlds give Sulu a victory lap around the stars.

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Star Trek fans just received a surprise gift. Paramount+ dropped the seventh episode of season two of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds early, after a Comic-Con premiere. And this wasn’t just any episode either. In “Those Old Scientists,” we saw the 2D animated lead characters of Star Trek: Lower Decks, Ensigns Brad Boimler and Beckett Mariner, not only go back in time to meet the Enterprise crew, but also move from animation into live-action. And played by their actual voice actors, Jack Quaid and Tawny Newsome, respectively. Luckily, they both look pretty close to their animated counterparts in real life. Here’s how the first epic (but also low-key) crossover between live-action and animated Star Trek shook out.

How Did the Lower Decks Characters End Up in the Strange New Worlds Timeline?

This crossover episode actually began in the animated world of the late 24th century, on board the U.S.S. Cerritos. For the uninitiated, that’s the main starship on Lower Decks. The ship arrives at Krometh B, where an ancient time travel portal was first discovered by the Enterprise 120 years prior. They task the away team with checking if the portal is still functioning, simply because there’s no record of it working for over a century. Ensign Tendi, an Orion, insists however that her people actually discovered the portal, not the Enterprise. Despite what any historical records might say.

The portal has not worked in over a century. However, Boimler is excited to interact with anything discovered by the crew of the original Enterprise. Well, original Federation Enterprise, as he later points out. (This will matter later). While analyzing the portal, he realizes that there are traces of a rare alloy called Heronium. Boimler’s fumbling around then results in the machine activating, sending him back in time to the 23rd century. Right into the era of Strange New Worlds. And right away, he meets the Enterprise away team of Spock, Una, and La’an. They’ve just arrived on the planet too.

What Happened In This Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds Crossover Episode?

Now onboard the Enterprise NCC-1701, time-tossed Boimler, who worships the heroes of Starfleet history, is star-struck in meeting them. Especially Captain Pike and Number One. Boimler constantly almost breaks the temporal Prime Directive. Accidentally, he gives way too much information about the future to people in the past. Boimler nevertheless befriends Enterprise crew members, and tries to set up a surprise birthday party for Captain Pike. Orion scientists, who actually discovered the portal, then beam it onto their ship. Boimler helps to provide information for Pike’s crew to get it back. But when they attempt to send him back to his proper time, things go awry yet again. Boimler’s friend Beckett Mariner then appears in the past too.

With two future people on board his ship, Pike doesn’t know quite what to do with them. Mariner fangirls over meeting Uhura. But Boimler worries they will both become stranded in the past. In a moment of bonding with Pike, Boimler realizes they both idolize Captain Archer of the NX-01 Enterprise (famously of Star Trek: Enterprise). Then it hits him. Starfleet actually plated the first Enterprise with a Heronium alloy. The exact metal needed to make the portal work and send them back home. And since tradition demands that one piece of an old ship needs to be incorporated into the namesake version, some Heronium alloy exists on board the current Enterprise. And with that discovery, Boimler and Mariner can use the portal to go home. But not before Spock gives them a “Live long a prosper” salute. One final moment for Brad Boimler to geek out about.

Is It Likely That the Lower Decks Characters Will Return Again to Strange New Worlds?

Time travel happens pretty much all the time in the Star Trek universe. Someone sneezes and they are in another century it seems. So while there’s nothing suggesting that the Cerritos crewmembers will ever encounter Pike and company again, there’s nothing really stopping them from having another encounter either. After all, there are other crewmembers of the Cerritos who still could appear in live-action. Of course, the Enterprise from Strange New Worlds could also travel forward in time, arriving in the 24th century, becoming animated themselves on Lower Decks.

Other crossovers that involve time travel could see the Enterprise crew meet a live-action version of the crew of the Protostar from Star Trek: Prodigy. Or, the Enterprise encounters the crew of a future namesake, the Enterprise-G. That was the starship under the command of Captain Seven of Nine seen in the Picard series finale, and which has Jean Luc Picard and Beverly Crusher’s son Jack as a crewmember. Fans are clamoring for a spin-off series from Picard called Star Trek: Legacy, but in the meantime, it sure would be fun to see the NCC-1701 come across the NCC-1701-G out in space. In the Star Trek universe, anything can happen as long as portals, wormholes, or a warp-speed slingshot around a star are part of Trek lore.

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In the history of Star Trek, one villain still always rises to the top as the galaxy’s GOAT: Khan Noonien Singh. Ricardo Montalban first portrayed the genetically enhanced tyrant in the 1967 Original Series episode “Space Seed.” He then returned with a vengeance in the seminal 1982 classic Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. One of the main characters in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is Khan’s descendant, La’an Noonien Singh (Christina Chong). It was only a matter of time before Khan himself appeared in the series. However, Strange New Worlds brought in Khan in a different way. And it might have officially changed Star Trek canon as we know it.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Khan Is Just a Little Kid

The second season episode “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” has La’an and an alternate timeline version of James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley) travel to the 21st century, specifically 2024 Toronto. Eventually, the pair learn that an undercover Romulan time traveler (Adelaide Kane) has been in the past for decades, all in an effort to change human history, by slowing down scientific progress. Her plan was to destroy a cold fusion reactor, which would destroy the city of Toronto. This Romulan first strike would have officially started the human/Romulan war well over a century early, erasing the existence of the Federation in the 23rd century. Much like the Borg in First Contact, the Federation’s enemies tried to erase the Federation’s existence by meddling with humanity’s past.

When Kirk and La’an put a dent into that plan, the Romulan agent goes to Plan B. She goes to the Noonien Singh Institute for Cultural Advancement. There, she plans to kill a young Khan (Desmond Sivan) who is around 10 years old. Her temporal computations predict that Khan would grow up and usher in a “dark age” on Earth, which allows the utopian world we know in Star Trek to emerge. So if Khan dies, Earth might never climb out of the darkness he causes. La’an kills the Romulan agent, saving young Khan, her own ancestor, and thus restoring her timeline. So how does this all change Star Trek canon? For the answer to that, we have to go back to 1967.

Star Trek’s 1960s History of the 1990s

In the canon of Trek, the history of the 20th century played out differently than in the real world. In the episode “Space Seed,” Star Trek revealed that great progress in genetic engineering in the late 20th century occurred. Eventually, a group of genetically engineered people, led by Khan, took over the governments of the world in 1992. By the year 1993, Khan and the augments had control of 40 nations. That’s a large chunk of the known world. They were eventually toppled, and Khan and several of his augments were exiled into space in suspended animation in the year 1996 on a sub-warp speed sleeper ship.

Captain Kirk then awakened Khan in the 23rd century, and he tried to take over the starship Enterprise. Spock described the crew of Khan’s ship, the S.S. Botany Bay, as relics of “…the mid-1990s. The era of Earth’s last so-called World War.” Dr. McCoy also gave the Third World War another name—the Eugenics Wars. Kirk finds a way to defeat Khan, and exiles him and his crew to the planet Ceti Alpha V. Some 15 years later, Khan escapes his planetary prison and attempts his revenge on Kirk. These events are familiar to anyone who has seen The Wrath of Khan. Spoiler alert, Khan fails, although Spock does briefly die.

Star Trek and Its Contradicting 20th and 21st Centuries

Star Trek canon has tried to ignore the events of Khan’s timeline, which has a given date for the events of his early life, ever since the 1990s came and went. In later chapters of Trek where various crews travel to the late 20th century Earth, there’s no mention of a dictator like Khan. Mind you, it’s never implied that Khan ruled over America. All these stories— Star Trek IV, the Voyager episode “Future’s End”— only visited the United States. One might infer that Khan was just being an evil tyrant off-screen on some other continent.

However, in Star Trek: First Contact, they imply heavily that World War III took place in the 2050s, not the 1990s. But the Picard season two finale, which took place in the year 2024, showed one of Data’s ancestors pulling out a file with the name “Project Khan, June 7, 1996” on it, suggesting Khan’s life took place in the ‘90s. So what gives? Maybe when it to modern Trek, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. But Strange New Worlds might have produced a retcon that explains away these inconsistencies with one big gesture.

The Time Travel Solution

It seems now that Star Trek canon is pivoting towards merging the Eugenics Wars and World War III as one event as originally suggested. With that event firmly in the 2050s, it makes sense that Khan would still be a child in 2024—although the writers of Strange New Worlds could have hand-waved the whole thing away. But the Romulan time traveler messing with Earth’s history mentions, “This was all supposed to happen in 1992!” She says they have fought entire temporal wars, changing the past. However, certain elements, presumably like the Eugenics Wars and Khan, keep reinserting themselves into the timeline.

This exposition dump in the episode may seem like just a big Star Trek in-joke at first, but it could actually explain every Khan-related continuity inconsistency away. Some time traveler’s meddling in the past changed things so that the emergence of Khan and his fellow genetic augments now occurs later than originally intended. So, maybe everything we knew about Khan we learned in “Space Seed” was true, at least at the time. At least until some Romulan meddling changed things into the way we know them now. Now, if only Strange New Worlds can explain why the swanky lounge on the Enterprise went away by the original series time.

The post How STRANGE NEW WORLDS Just Rewrote Important STAR TREK History appeared first on Nerdist.

You know that futuristic city we saw in the trailers for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, located within the Quantum Realm? That was almost certainly the MCU’s version of the city of Chronopolis. In the comics, Kang the Conqueror ruled this kingdom, located outside of time. Chronopolis appeared mainly in comics that Marvel published during the ‘90s. Judging from the Ant-Man trailers, Chronopolis contains highly advanced technology, likely from Kang’s MCU origin point in the far future. Clearly, it’s a place Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) is very familiar with—and did not want to return to. Here’s the backstory of the historic city of Chronopolis. Or should we say, a city made of history?

What Is Marvel’s City of Chronopolis?

In the pages of Marvel Comics, Chronopolis was the city that Kang called home. It first appeared in 1992’s Captain America Annual #11. The epic Avengers Forever mini-series in 1998 featured the destruction of Chronopolis. The layout of the city was circular in shape, and like the mythological Atlantis, a giant clear dome structure protected it. Inside, Chronopolis contained access points to all the different time periods Kang had conquered in the Marvel universe. The full map of Kang’s Chronopolis is below.

Each part of Kang’s kingdom was a slice of a specific time period. So one section looked like ancient Egypt, while another appeared as Victorian England, and so on. One could only go back and forth between parts of the city via hidden portals. But this free movement was not something an average citizen could do, and was largely reserved for Kang himself. The heart of the Chronopolis’ ability to function was the immensely powerful Forever Crystal.

Where Is Marvel Comics’ Chronopolis Located?

Chronopolis was located in Limbo, the pocket dimension that exists outside of time. Originally, Chronopolis occupied the same spacetime as another one of Kang’s first strongholds, the town of Timely, Wisconsin. After licking his wounds following an early battle with the Avengers, a variant of Kang’s went back in time to January 1, 1901, and founded the town of Timely. (The name itself was an in-joke, as Timely Comics was the original name of Marvel Comics).

From Timely, this Kang Variant, known as Victor Timely, created futuristic technology from his era of origin, in the hopes of gaining control of the following century. It’s where the advanced technology used to create the original Human Torch of the ‘40s, as well as many Hydra weapons, originated. Eventually, another Kang variant used this same location; he built Chronopolis there. Only it was “out of phase” with Timely and imperceptible to most regular people.

Was Marvel Comics’ Chronopolis Connected to the Quantum Realm?

In the comics, we knew the Quantum Realm as the Microverse. (There are all kinds of legal reasons the MCU version of a sub-atomic universe had a name change, mostly pertaining to a 1970s action figure line). Chronopolis was not located in the Microverse/Quantum Realm, but instead in the furthest outskirts of the realm of Limbo. Although, it was also partially located in “our” reality as well. But it looks like the MCU will give Chronopolis a change of address and place it in the Quantum Realm.

LEGO Marvel Super-Heroes‘ Chronopolis

In the game, LEGO Marvel Super-Heroes 2, a version of Chronopolis appeared composed of different points in time from famous Marvel locations. This was similar to Battleworld in the 2015 Secret Wars series. The locations included Avengers tower, Medieval Europe, the planet Xandar, Asgard, the swamp home of Man-Thing, and many more. There was even a whole new map of Chronopolis, which you can see above. We’re guessing that in the upcoming Avengers: Secret Wars, Marvel Studios will combine a version of Chronopolis with Battleworld, transforming it from a city to a whole planet. LEGO may yet inspire the MCU and soon, Chronopolis could be a key setting in it as well.

A Quantum Realm Chronopolis in the MCU

Ant-Man and the Wasp

We first saw hints of Chronopolis in a “blink and you’ll miss it” scene in Ant-Man and the Wasp. It’s hard to make out, but one can see the domed Quantum Realm city in that Phase 3 film. Although never outright stated, the fact that Janet Van Dyne seemed to have clothing and gear that she didn’t go into the Quantum Realm with suggested that there was a civilization in the Quantum Realm. We just didn’t get to see it in that film.

Loki Season One

In Loki, He Who Remains, himself a variant of Kang, lived alone in a Citadel at the End of Time. Was that Fortress the remains of Chronopolis? We’re not entirely sure. However, the Chronopolis we saw in Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania trailers sure seems similar to Loki’s Time Variance Authority in the season one finale. All the giant statues of Kang certainly gave off similar vibes. It would not surprise us to see similar monuments dedicated to his own greatness in Quantumania’s Chronopolis. Kang’s ego spans millennia, after all.

Chronopolis in Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania and MCU Phase 5

From what we saw in the trailers for Quantumania, there are several large rings that circle around buildings in Chronopolis. Many fans think that means both Shang-Chi’s Ten Rings, as well as Ms. Marvel’s bracelets, have a connection to the tech we saw in Chronopolis. There are also what appear to be lots of alien races present. (Although “alien,” as in from another planet, might not be the best description here). We’ll discover the truth about the MCU’s version of Chronopolis, and just how much the Quantum Realm city has in common with its Marvel Comics counterpart when Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania hits theaters on February 17.

The post What Is the Quantum Realm City of Chronopolis? Kang’s Marvel Kingdom, Explained appeared first on Nerdist.

Deadpool and the Incredible Hulk both know two things. One is the awesome opportunities that come with time travel. The other is that Daylight Saving is dumb. What’s not dumb, though, is the “epic” PSA Christopher Lloyd offered about what “time” really means.

It’s not only his role in the Back to the Future trilogy that makes him an expert, though. At 83 years old he knows “life is about moving forward.” And damn if he doesn’t have the gravitas to turn an otherwise silly video into something memorable.

Of course, when they’re not worried about the clock, actors also have to worry about finding clever ways to promote your new film. Which Ryan Reynolds continues to do in ways only he can.

This strangely moving promotion definitely qualifies. As do the other special videos Reynolds has shared for The Adam Project. Like one with his young co-star Walker Scobell selling Kraft Mac & Cheese with a side of crass.

That’s not quite as touching as Christopher Lloyd’s screed about time. But it’s still an important promo whether you see the film this weekend or not. Because while you watched it, at least you didn’t have to think about losing an hour of sleep on Sunday. And moving the clock forward is dumb. Unless you have a time machine.

The post Christopher Lloyd Shares a Time PSA with Ryan Reynolds and Mark Ruffalo appeared first on Nerdist.

Levy discussed why his partnership with Reynolds works so well. As well as why this movie sees its star give a performance unlike anything fans have seen from him before. And Levy also explained why The Adam Project, which is ultimately a wish fulfillment fantasy that every viewer, no matter the timeline, can relate to, was so personal to make.

(Note: This interview has two very minor spoilers, which aren’t even really spoilers if you’ve seen the trailer.)

Nerdist: This is your second, of what you have said will be many, films with Ryan Reynolds. How did your experience working together on Free Guy help you in directing him this time?

Shawn Levy: Ryan and I hit it off pretty instantly and Free Guy was a joy of a collaboration. I suspect that the benefit of Free Guy is that it gave us so much mutual trust. And the reason that Ryan’s performance in The Adam Project is so uniquely emotional and open is, I think, partly the result of the trust we have in each other. There are scenes in The Adam Project where Ryan gives a performance unlike any he’s given in any movie. And I think it’s because he knows that  I am a safe place and my set is a safe place. And he can bring that authenticity and trust that I’m gonna respect it and honor it.

What new things did you learn about him while working on The Adam Project?

SL: It’s not that I learned he was a straight-up killer actor, but I was reminded of his chops, his abilities as an actor in completely un-comedic ways. I know that he’s like a Jedi Master of comedy and timing. But in The Adam Project he taps equally into dramatic and emotional tones. And he is f***ing great. Increasingly I really feel like Ryan and I have made back-to-back movies where there’s a certain Capra-esque/Jimmy Stewart quality to him. Where he’s relatable but fundamentally good and sweet. And that is who Ryan is. I feel lucky that I’m getting stories and this relationship that allows me to capture that onscreen.

It’s funny you say he’s a Jedi Master because you seem to want to give him a lightsaber in every movie. (Note: Free Guy featured a lightsaber. A weapon seen in The Adam Project trailer, which is definitely not a lightsaber, is compared to one by a character.)

SL: I know. One time literal. This time most definitely not. So Star Wars and Lucasfilm please don’t sue me. Probably like everyone of my generation, and decades on either side of my generation, Star Wars is so profoundly influential to me that I can’t help but weave that stuff into my work.

You’ve worked with some huge stars before. Really big names, big casts. And this cast is also loaded. What are the challenges and what are the advantages of directing prolific, well-established, well-respected actors?

SL: I’ve been pretty lucky. I suppose the risk and the pitfall is if you’re working with huge stars there’s always the chance they’re going to come at you with huge ego. And consequently be less than direct-able. I’ve been lucky, because whether its been Steve Martin, Ryan Reynolds, Robin Williams, or Ben Stiller, all the celebrities I’ve directed over the years, I’ve happily found that they all still want to be performers and actors.

And mostly they want to trust that their director has their back. If you can earn that trust they’ll give you the good shit. They’ll give you the weird shit. Guess what, they’ll give you some takes that suck because they know that you’re not going to do them wrong. And, if you get the trust of a star who also is inordinately supremely talented, that makes one’s job a dream come true. And this job is my dream come true. Twelve year old me dreamed of this life, so I feel very fortunate to be living it.

A time travel movie means there will be time travel movie obsessives like me who are looking at it closely. Were you at all intimidated by making sure there were time travel rules that were followed and made sense?

SL: Yes and asterisk. I am not a time travel genre wonk. In fact, I believe my exact words to (screenwriter) Jonathan Tropper, as he was explaining the time travel rules to be ad nauseam, were, “JT, I don’t f***ing give a shit. Make it watertight and make it as f***ing simple as possible so people can enjoy the ride. “That was my North Star mantra and that’s what I aimed to do. I hope as someone who does know and care about that stuff you will tell me the science and the rules are pretty sound.

I thought it made sense and I thought it was easy enough to understand.

SL: You can describe my fist pump of gratification. (Note: It was a standard style fist pump, the kind an un-showy golfer might bust out after a big putt.)

This film is a sci-fi action thriller, but like so many of your movies it’s core is a very personal, very touching emotional story about family. Including how we remember our parents, both good and bad. You’ve previously said you had a “rough childhood,”  where certain aspects “were great, and other parts were real spotty,” including “tough spans of time, in terms of struggles” your mom went through. How did your own experiences influence you while making a film that is literally about going back to your childhood and seeing your parents again?

SL: Well for one thing I think that the traumas and challenges of my own childhood taught me early how important it is to make peace with those struggles. And to make peace with those resentments that accrue as a result. Because once I was an adult I realized, “Oh, if I hold on to this anger and resentment forever, I basically have no chance at being a happy functional adult.” And I’d like to enjoy my life as much as possible. So to make a movie where it’s quite literally about revisiting your childhood with empathy and being liberated as a result, that’s important for all of us. And it’s certainly been important to me as an individual, so I felt really lucky to make a movie that was so intimately connected with struggles and themes that Ive personally navigated.

Is that what attracted you to the script?

SL: Definitely, yes. I think I was that lonely kid who struggled sometimes with a childhood that was far from ideal. And I would have loved the comfort of knowing it was all gonna turn out okay. I then, as an adult, needed to forgive my parents for their imperfections. And Ryan came to this movie with similarly personal stakes. In regards to his own dad, in regards to the way his brothers and he rallied around his mom. So yeah, we brought a huge amount of ourselves to this movie and that’s why it was so cathartic to make it.

I was very emotional watching this movie. I’m also a huge sucker for the trope of going back and talking to people who are gone. Was it as emotional for you making this film when you removed yourself from the role of director?

SL: Yeah. I mean, I can fairly confidently predict that one of those scenes that maybe accessed you in that way was the scene in the bar. Where you have a grown man talking to his mother who doesn’t realize she’s talking to her son. And that was—I just got goosebumps, actually—because that day no one on that set had dry eyes. It was so beautiful, both in terms of their performances, Jen Garner, Ryan Reynolds, but just the idea of it. It’s a fundamental human yearning that we never get to satisfy. We can not go back and say the unsaid. So the idea of being able to do that I think is universally resonant.

What do you hope more than anything viewers take away from this movie?

SL: I hope, once again, as with Free Guy, they’re reminded of the delight of an original film. Because there’s the possibility of the unexpected and surprise. I know they’re going into The Adam Project thinking it’s one thing, only to learn, I think, that it’s several things.

And that’s the other thing I hope that they’ll see. Movies don’t need to be about only one thing. They don’t need to be only about the laughs, only about the spectacle. I love those Amblin movies of my youth that were formative, obviously, for so many of us. But were high concept, mixed with technology, mixed with spectacle, mixed with wish fulfillment and warm heart. Those are the kinds of movies I love. Those are the kinds of movies I want to make.

The Adam Project premieres on Netflix March 11.

Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow him on Twitter at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.

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Before Stranger Things 3 premiered, producer Shawn Levy said the season would draw inspiration directly from Back to the Future. The show did then feature numerous Easter eggs from the iconic film. Including Maya and Steve watching and commenting on it. However, the hit Netflix series didn’t use the movie’s signature element: time travel. That is, unless it did without us knowing. Because promos for Stranger Things 4 have raised the possibility time travel has already come to Hawkins and will play an important role in the upcoming season. And if it does, it could have change everything about the past, present, and future of everyone in Hawkins.

Netflix

Who Has Time for All These Clocks?

The announcement promo for Stranger Things 4 (released two years ago) features an eerie trip through the woods of the Upside Down. The dark dimension’s vines overtake the show’s logo, like it covers everything there. That includes an unlikely item – a tree with a clock in it. It’s the incessant ticking of that clock, followed by its ominous bells, that replaces the monstrous noises of this sinister world. As the trailer ends with a note “we’re not in Hawkins anymore.”

On its own the promo works as an extension of the Stranger Things 3 finale. The season ended with Joyce moving her sons and Eleven out of their small, demon-filled town. But the imagery of that embedded tree clock has taken on a whole new meaning with additional season three trailers. All of them have featured clocks, memories of the past, or both.

Eleven Returns “Home”

Stranger Things’ original human villain, Matthew Modine’s Dr. Martin Brenner, seemingly died in the season one finale. However, in season two his former employee claimed the man who raised and exploited Eleven still lived. While he might have secretly been behind the Russians’ plans in Stranger Things 3, he has yet to reappear in the present timeline since his possible death. (Modine’s season two scene was not real.)

But Brenner’s presence is hard to miss in a Stranger Things 4 teaser. It features the now decrepit and abandoned Hawkins Laboratory when it was still fully functional. That’s where Brenner kept powerful children like Eleven prisoner. It’s also where she accidentally opened a door to the Upside Down. “Papa” can be seen in the trailer walking the halls of the lab as his voice calls out to Eleven.

The promo hints at Brenner’s possible return. And it presages Eleven’s past playing an important role in the new season. But like the announcement trailer, when taken as a whole with the show’s other trailers her past life might not be that distant from her current one.

The Clock and Cruelty of Creel House 

The season four announcement teaser featured a clock. The Brenner promo featured a flashback. And now Stranger Things 4‘s newest trailer features both. It introduces Creel House and the photogenic family that lived there during the ’50s. Their picturesque life seemingly became a nightmare when it was touched by the Upside Down. As the trailer hints at a story that has elements of The Shining, The Amityville Horror, and IT.

By the time Hawkins’ young heroes find it in the ’80s, the house is abandoned. It stands as a grim reminder of the terrors that felled the family of four who once called it home. We don’t know what the characters of Stranger Things 4 will be looking for in that house. But we know they will find an old clock there. One similar to that seen in the announcement teaser. It not only tick-tocks over the latter half of the trailer, it becomes the primary focus of the promo at the end. It sits in the attic like a forgotten obelisk in a town center. Rays of broken light fall on it, before it’s suddenly standing in the Upside Down bather in red light that turns dark. And as the camera gets closer, it finally breaks at the center.

As far as meaningful symbolism goes, time literally breaking is as direct as it gets. And if this house is/was a gate to the Upside Down, these many clocks indicate that door might lead to more than just a place. A possibility that has major implications for a portal Stranger Things 4 has already introduced.

A Door Across Space, and Also Time?

The Russians built a powerful, dangerous machine under Hawkins’ Starcourt Mall. With more time it would have opened a permanent gateway to the Upside Down. Instead Hopper and Joyce Byers destroyed it, with Hopper giving his life to the cause. But Netflix didn’t wait long to let us know Chief Hopper survived the season three finale. (A development it hinted at in a Stranger Things 3 post-credits scene.) He’s alive, though possibly not that well.

The Russians’ device transported Hopper across a vast swath of space, from Indiana USA to the Soviet Union. How it worked is unknown. But it has shown that their are powerful, unexplained forces at work in this universe even beyond monsters and alternate dimensions. And if you can open a door across space, why can’t you also open a door across time?

“When” is Chief Hopper?

Shawn Levy promised direct connections between Back to the Future and Stranger Things 3. He didn’t promise they’d end there though. What if that machine didn’t just send Hopper to another place? The recurring flashbacks and hyper focus on clock imagery of Stranger Things 4 raises an obvious question: what if that machine also sent him to another time?

There’s so little we know about the Upside Down and what it is. It’s a dark mirror dimension that flips our world on its head. Why would time work the same way there as it does in the human dimension? The series has already shown us portals to other worlds exist. It has now introduced a portal to cross within worlds. Why couldn’t the Upside Down also be have a door to another time within those worlds?

Netflix

Stranger Things 4 keeps hinting at the reality of time travel. If the show introduces that ability to its story, it could lead to some major returns. Both good and bad.

B-B-Back from the Dead?

If you live in Hawkins, Indiana you do not want to have a name that starts with the letter “B.” It’s the surest sign you won’t survive an encounter with the Upside Down. Prominent “B” deaths include fan-favorites and all-around good people Barb and Bob. As well as the detestable Billy and Brenner.

Netflix

If you learned the Upside Down was a way to bring someone—whether it be your friend who died because of you, your mom’s kind boyfriend who saved your family, your step-brother who was more empathetic than you first thought, or a man who once wielded incredible power and influence—would you risk it? Would you go back in time and save them? Even if it meant passing through an evil world? Is this how Brenner is still alive? Not because he survived his encounter with the demogorgon, but because the Russians went back and got him from the past?

Messing with time is dangerous even without involving the Upside Down. But the past might also be the only thing that can protect the present.

A Return Trip to Hell for Eleven 

Netflix

Changing history or saving people aren’t the only thing someone from Hawking might want to find in the past. They might need something important from a previous era. Something that might be the difference between survival and annihilation. Eleven potentially lost her powers in season three. Thus far her and her skills have been the only things standing between the Upside Down and her world. When that dark dimension comes calling again, an actual return to Hawkins Lab where she mastered her powers might be the world’s only hope. That teaser might not be a reminder of what happened before and where Eleven comes from. It might be a sign of what’s to come and where she is going.

Stranger Things 4 doesn’t premiere until 2022. But it’s future might reside in the past.

Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow him on Twitter at @burgermike, and also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.

The post Why STRANGER THINGS 4 Could Involve Time Travel appeared first on Nerdist.

A time-traveling epic, Dark is centered around four families in the woodsy German town of Winden, and the way they’re intricately linked throughout three generations. As the mystery deepens and long-held secrets come to light, Winden residents find themselves embroiled in a massive time-travel conspiracy as pawns in a centuries-long battle between good and evil.

Coming in at just three stellar seasons, here are just a few (largely spoiler-free) reasons it’s time to add Dark to your Netflix queue.

It has a thrilling premise

Julia Terjung/Netflix

The series kicks off with the disappearance of young Mikkel Nielsen in November 2020, during an outing to an eerie cave with his elder siblings and their friends. This particular cave, of course, happens to lead to a wormhole underneath the town’s nuclear power plant. While the disappearance rocks the Winden, as the latest in a string of missing children, it bears a striking resemblance to the mysterious vanishing of Mads Nielsen, Mikkel’s uncle, 33 years prior. The big question isn’t where Mikkel is; it’s when.

The series is grounded in humanity

Stefan Erhard/Netflix

Dark is a deeply ambitious exploration of the oft-covered time travel genre, but whether the series actually works hinges on its sprawling cast of characters. Dark has a lot of major players—featuring the Tiedemann, Doppler, Nielsen, and Kahnwald families in 1953, 1986, and 2019—but the series never gets bogged down with exposition. Each character serves a specific and important purpose, furthering the narrative and deepening the mystery. Dark never loses focus of its characters, either, keeping their motivations and emotions at the center of the narrative. Specifically, the series masterfully uses grief to fuel character’s decisions, with repercussions reverberating through time. 

It has a consistent depiction of time travel

Stefan Erhard/Netflix

Time travel is a well-worn concept in film and television. But, oddly, it’s not often that a series adheres to its own rules so diligently. (The rules themselves are relatively spoiler-heavy so I won’t get into specifics—but watch the show and find out!) Its methodology is clear and consistent, which makes the often dense and purposely muddled timeline slightly easier to follow.

Dark also takes a more existential approach to the genre, exploring the relativity of time, and the often cyclical nature of endings and beginnings. Further, the nature of the series’ time travel logic also examines the consequences of trying to change or interfere with the past.

It has a perfectly haunting score

Netflix

Dark is a delightfully unsettling series, posing major questions about human nature and paradoxes while also rooting us deeply in small town drama. So it’s only fitting that the series is accompanied by an incredibly haunting score. Ben Frost’s eerie score, which often gives off an ominous Twin Peaks vibe, adds a foreboding element to every scene. The score, and use of vocal percussion, keep viewers on their toes—making it the perfectly spooky companion on this existential journey.

Just in time for the (fictional) apocalypse, the final season of Dark comes to Netflix on June 27.

Featured Image: Julia Terjung/Netflix

The post DARK Is the Existential Sci-Fi Series You Should Be Watching appeared first on Nerdist.

In the most recent episode of “Doctor Who”, a new character seems to have changed the entire course of the show’s history! What kind of time travel shenanigans could explain this? Dan untangles the timelines in today’s Nerdist News!

How do YOU think this all fits into the timeline? Tell us in the comments!

The post Did Doctor Who Just Reveal a Secret New Doctor? appeared first on Nerdist.

It was confirmed at Comic-Con that when Star Trek: Discovery returns, the show will be thrust 1,000 years into the future. WAY past where any Star Trek series has ever gone before. But time travel is a Trek staple, and has some of the best episodes of the franchise have dealt with crazy temporal adventures. Here are our picks for the top ten Star Trek time travel episodes from the franchise’s 53 year run.

Note: TOS is official Trek-shorthand for the The Original Series, TNG is The Next Generation, DS9 is Deep Space Nine, while VOY is Voyager.

10. “All Our Yesterdays” (TOS)

This last season of TOS isn’t great, buy this one is a stand out. After the Enterprise encounters a planet on the brink of dying due to an imminent nova, they discover that its inhabitants have all traveled into their world’s past to save themselves from annihilation. Spock accidentally travels into that world’s Ice Age thousands of years in the past — an era when Vulcans were very much NOT in control of their emotions. And these new emotions are made even more complicated when he meets a young woman who sparks his human feelings to awaken.

9. “Yesteryear” (TAS)

TAS only ran two seasons and doesn’t get the love it deserves, but this episode is widely considered a standout. A sequel of sorts to the original series’ “City on the Edge of Forever,” this chapter finds Spock time travelling into his own childhood on Vulcan. Posing as his own distant cousin, adult Spock saves his younger self from death, ensuring his own future timeline remains intact. Unlike any other TAS episode, elements of this one are referenced in Spock’s TNG appearance “Unification,” as well as JJ Abrams’ 2009 big screen reboot.

8.  “Year of Hell” (VOY)

This two parter aired in Voyager’s fourth season, and put Janeway and her lost crew through the ringer in ways they never had before. Voyager finds itself the undergoing several changes to its timeline, as an alien ship commander attempts to re-sequence history in a way that only benefit him. Sometimes all the time shenanigans are pretty confusing in this one, but it was still one of the more inventive Voyager episodes. If it were made today, this two parter would no doubt constitute a whole season’s worth of episodes.

7.  “Little Green Men” (DS9)

The alleged 1947 Roswell, New Mexico UFO incident has sparked many, many sci-fi stories. But one of the most creative riffs on the Roswell legend came in this fourth season episode of DS9. In this episode, the show’s resident Ferengis Quark, Rom and Nog are accidentally thrown back in time on the way to Earth and crash in (you guessed it) Roswell. The greedy and capitalistic Ferengi find themselves relating far more to the less than perfect humans of the 20th century than their squeaky clean future counterparts. Mostly played for laughs, this is still a super inventive and delightful episode.

6.  “Tomorrow is Yesterday” (TOS)

TOS did the time travel thing a lot, probably due to the fact that it helped save on budget. One of the earliest examples was this episode, which finds the Enterprise hurled hundreds of years back to the ’60s. There, they encounter an US Air Force pilot and beam him aboard the ship to save him from the destruction of his aircraft. Realizing they can’t send him back now due to his knowledge of the future, this creates an ethical conundrum for Kirk, the first time in Star Trek history we get an inkling of the Federation’s strict rules about time travel.

5.  “Endgame” (VOY)

Although not as great as the TNG finale, the Voyager finale episode also uses time travel to great effect. In this chapter, Kate Mulgrew plays a much older Admiral Janeway, decades into that character’s the future. It’s revealed that it took Janeway 23 years to bring her ship back home to Earth from being lost, a journey which cost the lives of many over the years. Unwilling to accept her present, Janeway travels back in time and concocts a plan to bring her ship home much sooner than it originally did, thus meeting her younger self in the process. All this cool time travel stuff, plus the Borg too! Not a bad way to go out.

4. “All Good Things” (TNG)

The TNG series finale, “All Good Things” isn’t just the best of all the Star Trek series finales, but arguably one of the best series finales of any show ever (and a huge influence on Avengers: Endgame.) This two hour final chapter has Q shuffling Picard backwards in time to solve a universe ending threat. At first, Picard finds himself back in the events of the show’s pilot episode, and then jumps 25 years in the future, thus giving fans a glimpse into the future lives of the Enterprise crew. The perfect mix of high concept sci-fi and emotional character growth, “All Good Things” remains the gold standard for series finales, and a great time travel yarn.

3. “Trials and Tribble-Ations” (DS9)

“The Trouble with Tribbles” is one of the most beloved episodes of TOS. And for Star Trek’s 30th Anniversary, the producers of DS9 decided to pay homage to the episode by having their characters actually travel back in time into the original classic episode itself. This was all accomplished using then-cutting edge technology, and recreating the original 60s sets and splicing in the DS9 crew right alongside Shatner and Nimoy. The whole episode is essentially a light-hearted romp, but it’s pulled off perfectly. And remains pure joy to watch for Trek fans decades later.

2. “Yesterday’s Enterprise” (TNG) 

Talk about an episode that has everything. This third season TNG ep fills in gaps in Trek history, gives us an alternate universe version of the Enterprise crew, AND gives a former cast member (Denise Crosby) a proper farewell. When the Enterprise-D encounters their predecessor the Enterprise-C travelling 22 years into the future escaping destruction, the current timeline is changed into one of endless war.  Does Picard send the previous Enterprise back in time to certain death, ensuring the “proper” timeline is restored, or is keeping them alive potentially dooming the Federation in the present? All this, plus Worf laughs for the first time in the series!

1. “The City on the Edge of Forever” (TOS)

Not only the best time travel episode of Star Trek, but almost universally regarded as the best episode of Trek, period. This late first season episode was written by legendary author Harlan Ellison. It tells the story of what happens when Kirk and his crew encounter the ancient and powerful Guardian of Forever, an alien construct which can transport beings back into any time period. But when a temporarily insane McCoy travels back to the ’30s, he does something that fundamentally destroy’s Earth’s future. Kirk must follow him back to Depression-era New York and undo what McCoy did, and in doing so he meets the love of his life. Heartbreaking and brilliant, this is Star Trek at its very best.

Images: CBS

The post The 10 Best STAR TREK Time Travel Episodes, Ranked appeared first on Nerdist.

We’re in the Endgame now, so if you have not seen Marvel’s latest Avengers adventure beware this video contains MAJOR SPOILERS.

However, if you’ve already seen the epic conclusion to the Infinity Saga, you probably have a few questions as to how exactly the Avengers plan worked out. Thankfully Kyle has assembled his own science gauntlet and is here to break it all down on this week’s super sized episode of Because Science!

Learn More:
THE PHYSICS OF TIME DILATION: https://users.sussex.ac.uk/~waa22/relativity/Explaining_Gravitational_Time_Dilation_Geometrically.html
SPACETIME PYTHAGOREAN THEOREM: https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0407022.pdf
TIPLER CYLINDER: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipler_cylinder
SOLUTION TO THE GRANDFATHER PARADOX: https://medium.com/@roblea_63049/escaping-the-grandfather-paradox-f12a25951179
RULES FOR TIME TRAVELERS: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2009/05/14/rules-for-time-travelers/
TIME TRAVEL IN PHYSICS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel#Time_travel_in_physics
SELF-CONSISTENCY PRINCIPLE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel#Self-consistency_principle
SPACETIME TWIN PARADOX: https://phys.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/University_Physics/Book%3A_University_Physics_(OpenStax)/Map%3A_University_Physics_III_-_Optics_and_Modern_Physics_(OpenStax)/5%3A__Relativity/5.5%3A_The_Lorentz_Transformation
SPACETIME INTERVAL: https://brilliant.org/wiki/spacetime/
TIME DILATION FOR VELOCITY IN MINKOWSKI DIAGRAM: https://web.stanford.edu/~oas/SI/SRGR/notes/SRGRLect3_2015.pdf

The post The Avengers: Endgame Timeline Explained (Spoilers) appeared first on Nerdist.

Co-director of Avengers: Endgame Joe Russo answered some nerdy, nerdy questions about time travel and alternate realities in a recent interview, and Amy’s got the best bits here for you to enjoy on today’s Nerdist News!

What are some of your lingering questions about Endgame? Let us know in the comments below!

The post Co-Director Joe Russo Answers Those Lingering Endgame Questions! appeared first on Nerdist.

The following contains MAJOR SPOILERS for Star Trek: Discovery season two, episode nine, “The Red Angel.” Please be cautious before you boldly go reading further.

In this week’s episode of Star Trek: Discovery, “The Red Angel,” the season-long mystery of just who the mysterious winged figure appearing across the galaxy finally gets answered… and the answer reveals a time traveler is behind it.

The Red Angel joins a long list of Star Trek characters who have traveled through time, several of them even had several adventures in history. Presented below is our ranking of the seven best temporal travelers in the franchises’s fifty-three year history.

Alexander Rozhenko – Star Trek: The Next Generation “First Born”

Lt. Worf’s son, young Alexander, was probably not the most popular character on TNG. To be fair, no one likes little kids that enter a show late into their runs (call it “Cousin Oliver Syndrome.”) He was always disappointing dear ol’ dad by wanting to be more human, like his half-human mother. But in this season seven episode, we encounter a Klingon warrior named K’mtar, who is later revealed to be a time-travelling Alexander from forty years in the future, who decides to come back to insist his dad train him in the ways of the Klingons, in order to prevent his father’s future assassination.

Mark Twain – Star Trek: The Next Generation – “Time’s Arrow Part II”

The TNG crew didn’t travel around in time nearly the amount as the original series crew did. But in the two-parter “Time’s Arrow,” the Enterprise-D crew travels back to 19th Century San Francisco after Data’s head is discovered in a cave beneath the city in their present. Through various time travel shenanigans, one Samuel Langhorn Clemens also goes through a portal to the future. At first, the old codger can’t believe that in the future, poverty, prejudice and war have been eliminated on Earth, but he eventually comes around to see the future turned out alright after all.

Captain Benjamin Sisko – Star Trek: Deep Space Nine “Past Tense,” “Trials and Tribble-ations”

DS9 did a bit more time travel than TNG did, and Captain Benjamin Sisko was at the forefront of some of the best of those stories. In the season three episode “Past Tense,” Sisko travels to Earth in the year 2024, where homelessness is a rampant problem in the United States, particularly in San Francisco (Trek was always uncannily accurate at predicting the future). He became a key figure in history, and helped changed government policy even! That episode was a bit of a downer, but in “Trials and Tribble-ations” he got to travel back to the events of one of the most beloved episodes of the original series, “The Trouble With Tribbles,” and even got to shake hands with Captain Kirk.

Captain Rachel Garrett – Star Trek: The Next Generation – “Yesterday’s Enterprise” 

In one of the best episodes of the entire franchise, The Enterpise-C, one of two starships named Enterprise between the time of Captain Kirk and Captain Picard finally appears, having time-traveled some twenty years into the future. We meet her Captain, Rachel Garret, who narrowly avoided destruction for herself and her crew by Romulan warbirds by escaping into the future. But by her dodging her fate, she changed the Enterprise-D’s present for the worse, so she makes the tough call to sacrifice her life by going back into time and facing certain death. After this one appearance, we would have been down to see an entire series about Captain Garrett.

Captain Kathryn Janeway – Star Trek: Voyager – “Endgame”

In the final episode of Voyager, Admiral Janeway travels back in time some twenty-five years to confront her younger self, and to find a way to ensure that her crew gets back home to the Alpha Quadrant far sooner than they were originally meant to. And as an added bonus, to also put an end to the Borg threat once and for all. Admiral Janeway argues with her younger self for a lot of this episode, but in the end, Voyager’s long exile is cut short by years, and so Admiral Janeway’s breaking of time travelling rules and regulations ended up being well worth it.

Quark, Rom, and Nog – Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – “Little Green Men” 

In one of the more amusing episodes of DS9, the titular space stations’s three Ferengis–bar owner Quark, his brother Rom, and Rom’s son Nog–head to Earth to send Nog to Starfleet Academy, but as often happens in Star Trek, there are temporal vortexes and quantum entanglements, and the three Ferengi end up crashing their ship in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. As the three aliens try to get by on 20th century Earth, the greedy aliens realize that they have a lot more in common with humans from back in the day than with their money-less, more enlightened 24th century descendants.

The Crew of The Enterprise – Star Trek: The Original Series – Way Too Many Episodes To Count

While the more modern Star Trek series tended to not lean on time travel as a crutch, the same cannot be said for the original series. Kirk and co. traveled so much through time, that by Deep Space Nine’s era, Starfleet’s  Temporal Investigations dubbed James T. Kirk “a menace.” Either by traveling to the ’60s by accident (“Tomorrow is Yesterday”) or on purpose (“Assignment: Earth”) or through the Guardian of Forever (“The City on the Edge of Forever”) Kirk spent a lot of time in the 20th century.

Spock doesn’t get off Scott free either, as he also traveled thousands of years into the past in the third season episode “All Our Yesterdays,” and even met himself as child in “Yesteryear.” And old Spock’s traveling back to before Captain Kirk’s birth resulted in the whole JJ Abrams movie timeline.  Of course, the entire crew famously went back in time to ’80s San Francisco and also saved some whales. Temporal Investigations was right, these guys were a menace to the time stream!

Images: CBS / Paramount Pictures

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Marvel has always been extra vigilant about spoilers especially with Avengers Endgame, but could their own Nick Fury have let the cat out of the bag? Kyle has the reveal (WITH SPOILERS) on today’s Nerdist News!

Do you think he revealed too much? Let us know in the comments below!

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Retcons: if you’ve played any LARP in the past decade, this is a loaded word that often means tons of drama, headaches, and staying up outside till 3 AM to resolve the botched scene. Officially, a retcon when something has gone terribly awry and the entire scene needs to be rewound, and played out again. Whenever I’ve seen major retcons, it has been because of a player death (or several), due to power misuse or misinterpretation of a power. In tabletop roleplaying games, it happens less often because player-vs-player is often not allowed but it still creeps in occasionally.

Fortunately, there are some creative GM tricks we can employ to make this whole process less of a chore. Everyone’s time is valuable and wasting it on a terrible night of replaying a scene is nobody idea of a good time, yet letting the error stand will make everyone unhappy. Even worse, when players frustrations reach an all-time high they (rightfully) walk away from the game entirely. So here are some tips to make these bad scenarios a little more bearable.

Make It An Event

Fatigue makes people cranky. So don’t run a retcon session immediately after the game to “take care” of the problem. Snap judgment calls can only further compound the problem and players (and you) have already been immersed for a while. We often hear the excuse that scheduling problems mean it has to be done ASAP, but truly, nothing HAS to be done. For the love of everyone’s sanity, take a game session breather and just wait. Doing so will allow you the storyteller to take a good hard look at the rotten bag of noodles you’ve been handed and how to best untangle them.

Now you may need to schedule a special session outside of the regular game week on another night and that’s okay. Invite people over for some drinks, get some special dinner for everyone, and hang out as friends before diving in. This is a critical phase if the reason for the retcon is due to PVP. Everyone needs a moment to reconnect as friends and prevent game session bleed. What we don’t want is for players and staff members to devolve into out-of-game arguments or feel that their concerns aren’t being heard—and this method stacks the deck to avoid that.

Add Additional Content

A more tabletop-oriented tip (but still applicable to LARPs) is to add additional content to the scene. Whatever you are retconning has already been played out and the second time around, dice may fall differently. Sheer mechanics, correct power usage, and the randomness of games provide a modicum of variety. Yet adding in some fresh content either leading up to the scene, or even after, takes the sting out of wasted time. Think of it like an alternate ending or a how-it-should-have-gone scenario.

Additional content becomes even cooler after the storyteller has had a chance to think of world reactions. NPC’s and monsters may have far cooler reactions and death scenes, and consequences can be immediately thrust to the forefront. It’s not often storytellers have a chance to make better choices, so don’t let it go to waste. Plus the added scenes and reactions can make the retcon fork off in a completely new direction that makes everyone happier with the outcome.

Toss Out Rewards

If your players stuck with you through a retcon scene, it’s not the time to be stingy with experience, loot, or favors from NPC’s. Make it rain like it’s the holidays upon them. Everyone just went through a few ordeals and since they stayed committed, surprise them. When you’ve had the pain of character loss, arguments, an extra session, and more time spent just to get things on track—a little extra benefit goes a long way. If possible, reward the entire game for the Kerfuffle rather than the exact players involved as well. Doing so will create more trust among everyone that when retcons do come up; there is a reason to stick it out.

The one case where rewards may be inappropriate is due to gross misuse of metagaming information, cheating, and toxic out-of-game behavior. A retcon being run for this scenario is to repair the damage done by players who are (and should be) already removed from the game. In this case, an extra few experience points isn’t going to make anyone happier. So your rewards should be more personal, like taking the victims of player toxicity out to dinner if you can or allowing them to play a different character of a restricted class or race. Letting the old burn down and rewarding them with future character options can create excitement to move on.

What’s your biggest retcon story? Let us know in the comments below!

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• The Thin-Blooded Conspiracy in VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE
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Featured Image by: Unbound by Charles Urbach

Image Credits: Festival of Drifting Souls Legend Of The Five Rings Fantasy Flight, Critical Role

Rick Heinz is the author of The Seventh Age: Dawn, and a storyteller with a focus on LARPs, Wraith: The Oblivion, Eclipse Phase, and many more. You can follow game or urban fantasy related thingies on Twitter or Facebook.

The post Rewind and Retcon With Grace Using These GM Tips appeared first on Nerdist.

The incredible Mamoru Hosoda’s latest film Mirai hits select theaters this week, and its story about a magical garden that functions as a gateway for time travel got me excited to revisit some of my favorite anime time travel stories. With so many options out there, it’s easy to find yourself entangled—quantumly or otherwise—in a whole realm of titles. So on today’s episode of The Dan Cave, we’re gonna tachyon a few options for you with a rundown of the best time travel anime you need to put in your eyeballs.[brightcove video_id=”5972309587001″ brightcove_account_id=”3653334524001″ brightcove_player_id=“rJs2ZD8xâ€]

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

Image: Madhouse

If you could you go back in time and fix minor mistakes in your life, would you do it? As much as I’d like to think I have self control, I would be screwing up the time stream more than a barrel of butterfly poison in a heartbeat. And that’s exactly what Makoto Konno does in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. And like so many Ashton Kutchers before her, Makoto discovers that altering her actions can lead to terrible consequences, especially for those around her. What follows is Makoto using a limited number of leaps through time to try and fix what she managed to break before time itself is irreparably broken. As for me, I’d probably run out of leaps on some trivial nonsense like changing what appetizer I ordered the other night to something tastier. How was I supposed to know the calamari was a bad choice?!

Steins;Gate

Image: Funimation

Let’s be honest, if I didn’t include this, it would open up a rift in space and time as we know it because Steins;Gate is one of the best time travel anime in every reality. It’s he story of a self-styled mad scientist, Rintaro Okabe, who invents weird gadgets in the “Future Gadget Laboratory,” which is really just an apartment he shares with his pals: the ditzy Mayuri and the horned up hacker Daru. Together they create the most ambitious crossover since Catdog: the Phone Microwave. Except this doesn’t just let you nuke Hot Pockets through the power of emoji; it lets you send text messages back in time. What follows is a tangled web of love, lies, and murders most foul as they begin altering the flow of time as we know it. Mostly it’s a case study in why you should be extra careful the next time you send someone a regrettable late-night text. These things are literally called D-Mails. I mean, come on.

Mirai Nikki

Image: Funimation

Do you ever have conversations with yourself? I spend what scientists call “an uncomfortable amount of time†talking to myself in the car every day. But that’s just my overactive brain. When high school student Yukiteru Amano talks to his imaginary friends, Deus Ex Machina and Murmur, they turn out to be the god of space and time and a servant of the gods, respectively. Yukiteru is gifted a diary from this deity that is filled with entries about brutal, bloody battles that take place in the future. They describe a horrific battle royale between Yukiteru and 11 other people who possess these mysterious diaries. Fortunately for Yukiteru, his classmate Yuno has sworn to protect him, and murders basically everyone who tries to come for him. Unfortunately for Yukiteru, she is also madly in love with him and may have some ulterior motives. All of this just makes me deeply grateful that I deleted my LiveJournal before it could plunge me into a competitive slaughterfest.

Thermae Romae

Image: Discotek Media

Not every time travel anime has to be about preventing the apocalypse. Sometimes they’re about being a fish out of water enjoying new experiences. And that’s exactly what happens in Thermae Romae, the story of a Lucius, an ancient Roman architect who designed bathhouses that is suddenly transported to modern-day Japan where—surprise, surprise—he has the time of his life at Japanese bathhouses. And much like luxuriating in steaming hot water, it’ll leave you feeling nice and toasty inside.

Occult Academy

Image: A-1 Pictures

In the year 2012, aliens invaded planet Earth. Faced with certain destruction, mankind sent time travelers back to the year 1999 in order to prevent the coming apocalypse by destroying an artifact known as the Nostradamus Key, which triggers the eventual alien invasion. It’s up to Maya, the headmaster of the titular spooky high school, and a time traveler named Fumiaki to hunt down the key, and wind up fighting everything from demons to mothmen to chupacabras along the way. So in other words, this is the true story of Bizarre States.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Image: Aniplex of America

Fighting evil by moonlight, horrifying everyone who watches it by daylight, never running from a real fight, this absolutely isn’t sailor moon. Madoka is an incredible, subversive take on the magical girl genre and while it isn’t a time travel anime per se, time travel does factor into the plot in a way that will genuinely surprise you and leave you reeling long after the credits roll. That is, of course, if you haven’t already been thrown for approximately 45,000 other loops by this frequently surprising and surprisingly freaky series.

Orange

Image: Crunchyroll

What would you do if you got a letter from yourself in the mail? I’d probably try real hard to remember if this was some sixth grade project and when I realized it wasn’t, I’d probably start freaking out. When it happens to high schooler Naho Takamiya, she is skeptical until enough corroborating events happen to prove that it’s from her 26-year-old self in the future. The note is full of tips on how to correct small mistakes in her own life, but more importantly it contains a warning about a transfer student named Kakeru. Be careful around him, it urges, as he is not around in the future. From that cryptic warning springs a heartfelt, humorous and highly enjoyable shoujo romance that wins points for style if not for originality.

Zipang

Image: Geneon Entertainment

One of my favorite books when I was younger was William R. Forstchen’s The Lost Regiment, which tells the story of a Union Army regiment from the Civil War getting transported to an alien world. Zipang checks off many of the same alt-history boxes with its tale of a platoon of modern-day Japanese soldiers who suddenly find themselves transported back in time to World War II. With their knowledge of world history and their advanced military strategy, they could feasibly win the war for Japan. But the Japan of World War II is much different than the one they left behind. And despite their intentions not to get involved or alter history, things go to hell in a handbasket faster than I can eat my body weight in takoyaki, which in case you don’t know is uncomfortably quick.

Re:Zero – Starting Life in Another World

Image: Funimation

Subaru Natsuki is having a terrible, horrible, no-good very bad day. After leaving the convenience store, he finds himself ripped from the world he knew and transported into a fantasy land. He befriends a half-elf girl named Satella…only to get murdered by a bunch of goons. When Subaru wakes up, he isn’t in some sweet hereafter; rather, he is living the same day over and over again. Can he use his knowledge of history to avoid getting killed, or is he doomed to be the world’s saddest and meatiest GIF of all time? You’ll just have to watch to find out.

Nobunaga Concerto

Image: Fuji TV

The best history teachers really know how to make the past come alive. Unfortunately for Saburou, his teacher sucked and he had no interest in Japanese history. Which is unfortunate because before he knew it, Saburou found himself transported back in time to the Sengoku Era, dropped at the feet of none other than Oda Nobunaga, the legendary legendary Japanese daimyo who attempted to unify Japan during the late sixteenth century. Even weirder? The two look almost identical. And before he knew it, Saburou was no longer a high school student, but the stand-in for one of Japan’s most high-profile military figures. The rest, as they say, is history. Specifically historical fiction.

Erased

Image: Aniplex of America

Some people possess incredible abilities. Usain Bolt can run faster than anyone on Earth, Kyle Hill can climb like a spider monkey, Kid Rock can smell a pig from a mile away. And in Erased, manga artist Satoru Fujinuma can travel back in time moments before something horrible is about to happen to him so he can try and prevent it. When his mother is suddenly and brutally murdered, Satoru finds himself transported back in time all the way back to 1988, when he was in elementary school. This time, he has a chance to prevent a very different tragedy: the abduction and murder of one of his classmates, Kayo Hinazuki. And when it’s done, you’ll find yourself wishing you could travel back to a time before you’d seen it so you can watch it all over again for the very first time.And those are some of the best time travel anime of all time! But tell me—which is your favorite? What would you add to this list? Let me know in the comments below.

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Dan Casey is the senior editor of Nerdist and the author of books about Star Wars and the Avengers. Follow him on Twitter (@DanCasey).

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Going back in time to fix grave mistakes is an imagination playground. Everyone has had the thought or seen it in a medium of their choice, and most often, with a healthy amount of nerdy critique over broken universes. Let’s move beyond the obvious Dr. Who and Back to the Future references and fall into more Looper territory with this article where I’ve got some tips for running games based on time travel.

Fixing mistakes is only one way to approach time travel in a tabletop games. A critical character has died and without a means of resurrection, they race back in time to save their companion. Or even rewind time by a few rounds in an epic combat. Yet you can also use time travel to gain power, or even exploring history of your setting—and revealing untold legends. Before the characters destroy your setting and break the universe with time paradoxes, here are some tips to make GMing time travel easier.

Start With A Fixed Point

In one of my recent campaigns, designed to stretch out over a thousand year dynasty, I knew upfront that time travel was going to be a focus. Rather than start at year one, and jump forward, I started in year nine-hundred and ninety five and had the players constantly go backwards (along with many antagonists who were doing the same). The goal was to change the outcome of this thousand-year period in its final years, and after each adventure the characters would return and see what changed.

By having a fixed iconic point for your time-traveling storytelling you reduce the strain on all the note keeping. By trying to keep track of both the past, and the future time hoping you’ll drive yourself insane after only two or three adventures. Going forward in time, witnessing the outcomes, and returning to change it is also viable. I prefer going backwards myself as a narrative, but in both cases there is a fixed point and your characters are going in one direction. Keep it that way. You need at least one grounded point in order to drive home any storyline impact.

Time Protects Itself

Once players start flinging around wish spells and meddling with past events, you may find yourself struggling to keep certain major plot events always in place. If the Fire Nation never attacks, there is no campaign to play in the first place and characters will probably end up being farmers. You can get around this with a bit of GM handwaveum. Time isn’t a hard fast set of events, but rather more like a rubber band (daylight savings time anyone?), so it’s okay to write in a few fateful events that pass one way or another.

Let’s say that the City of Stars needs to fall for your campaign to launch, for one reason or another, it’s just that vital. If the City of Stars is sacked by an opposing army, and the players go back in time to stop the army before they march, have the city fall by economic ruin months later, or a great plague. Chances are your players will see this as a challenge, and even try evacuating everyone in the town and relocating them… and maybe you say as a GM that counts for what you need, and thus is the canon event going forward. This doesn’t mean the future outcome doesn’t change drastically, losing a city to a siege versus a great plague sweeping the land will have a great impact on the future, but in both cases the triggering event will still happen.

Breakout The Chalkboard

Once you are fully mired in the campaign of time travel, it’s time to break out the tinfoil hats and chalkboard. As a storyteller, this is the time you sit back and let your players theorycraft their own storylines to great effect. If you’ve done your job well, you’ll be equally invested in mapping out various time-break points and an alternate plot scenes. Like many Final Fantasy games, you’ll figure out just how many ways you can throw Wedge and Biggs into every place they travel back or forward to.

Get an actual chalkboard or dry-erase board and create a visual map of the storyline for both you and your players. There are a handful of writer tools on the internet available for digital pin-boarding storyline ideas, and even a public bullet list in the D&D Beyond Campaign Manager tool will work. As long as you and your players can sit around and visualize the board the theorycrafting will flow. Add in some gaming cocktails and a bottle of wine, and perfecto! Just don’t ever try to explain your crazy game in a public—without your tinfoil hat.

So how have you broken your world with time travel before? Let us know in the comments below!

Looking for More Useful GM Tips?

• Mash-up the Dread System in your tabletop RPG’s to increase tension.
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Featured Image by: Hyperlanes published by  Scrivened LLC

Image Credits: Rifts Board Game by Rogue Heroes

Rick Heinz is the author of The Seventh Age: Dawn, and a storyteller with a focus on LARPs, Wraith: The Oblivion, Eclipse Phase, and many more. You can follow game or urban fantasy related thingies on Twitter or Facebook.

The post GMs: Our Best Tips For Handling Time Travel In Your RPGs appeared first on Nerdist.

Almost 15 years on, Lost remains one of the most divisive television shows ever, a sci-fi mystery box rich with references, monsters, time travel, and spiritualism. Its mysteries eventually grew beyond its own storytelling capabilities, and the series ultimately suffers for it. But that doesn’t change Lost‘s impact; love it or hate it, it changed network television forever. It also launched the career of Damon Lindelof, who went on to create The Leftovers, one of the greatest television series of all time. Both shows share mystic DNA, filtering stories about higher powers, death, and the meaning of life through a diverse array of damaged characters.

Lost spanned six seasons, and almost every episode packed some kind of grand-scale emotional punch, or a shocking twist in the ever-evolving story of this mysterious island and the plane crash survivors who land there and attempt to understand why. There are plenty of episodes to choose from when making a master list, but here are 12 that defined the language of Lost and made it such a unique and exhilarating television experience.

1. “The Pilot” (SEASON 1, EPISODES 1 & 2)

Contrary to popular belief, J.J. Abrams didn’t have much to do with Lost beyond its initial conception and the pilot episode. But he did give the show its cinematic identity. The first episode is pure pulpy adventure. A plane crashes on a remote Pacific island; a terrifying-enough experience on its own, made worse by their total isolation, a monster stalking the jungle around them, a polar bear, and a radio tower containing a 16-year-old transmission that was never received. The essence of what Lost is and would be is perfectly contained in this two-parter, establishing its large cast, and its larger ambitions.

2. “Walkabout” (SEASON 1, EPISODE 4)

This is the episode that really changed the game, and showed the true specialness of Lost‘s format. Island weirdo John Locke is treated to an off-island flashback that reveals that the hunting guru was actually a paraplegic before the crash. The island has afforded him a second chance, imbuing him with a spiritualistic knowingness his fellow survivors haven’t yet been enlightened to. Lost‘s flashbacks were a core part of its structure, and “Walkabout” showed the power of what they could do.

3. “Do No Harm” (SEASON 1, EPISODE 20)

Early on, Lost earned a reputation for being totally unafraid to off its key cast members. That started with this season one entry, when Boone fell victim to his injuries and island doctor and de facto leader Jack was unable to save him. No one expected Ian Somerhalder, one of the show’s most recognizable faces, to die off so soon, but Lost never cared about pretense. Its body count would only increase after Boone’s passing, though thanks to the island’s mystical properties, the actors usually returned in some fashion later on.

4. “Orientation” (SEASON 2, EPISODE 3)

Season 2 is when Lost‘s modus operandi started to show, and “Orientation” made a lot of suspicions very clear. After the survivors dig up a hatch in the middle of the jungle and enter it, they find an enormous underground bunker containing a man named Desmond, who has been instructed to push a button every 108 minutes. The button-pushing is meant to “save the world,” Desmond tells them. Whatever that means. “Orientation” also properly introduces us to the Dharma Initiative, a team of scientists who studied the island until a mysterious “incident” derailed their work. “Orientation” sets the mood for the next chapter of Lost, offering up enough answers to satiate, but enough question to keep us pressing on.

5. “The Other 48 Days” (SEASON 2, EPISODE 7)

At different points in its run, Lost would introduce a new set of characters on the island, an attempt to keep the show fresh, and to give us new people to connect with. This episode revealed the survivors of the tail-end of the plane, who crashed on a different part of the island. Both sides thought the others were all dead, and spent 48 days in brutal conditions – the tail-enders especially. “The Other 48 Days” introduces a lot of characters who end up dying and not mattering much, Michelle Rodriguez’s Ana Lucia specifically, but it set up a formula that would be deployed better later on, with the introduction of Ben and Juliet, and the freighter folk in Season 4.

6. “Exposé” (SEASON 3, EPISODE 14)

This is a controversial pick, but let’s be clear: “Exposé made it clear that Lost‘s creators were in on the joke. The show took some heat early on on Season 3 for attempting to backtrack and tell stories about the less-important survivors. That idea didn’t gel well with audiences, who saw it as a distraction, and so midway through the season they killed these characters off in a fantastically over-the-top, winking fashion. Nikki and Paulo were always boring and tertiary, so the flashback made them ridiculous diamond-stealing criminals, and the island story saw them bit by a paralyzing spider and buried alive by the main survivors who can’t stop asking “who are these guys again?” Lost loved to let you know when it was being self-aware and copping to its mistakes. “Exposé” is its most gleefully unnecessary episode, and we love it for that.

7. “Through the Looking Glass” (SEASON 3, EPISODES 22 & 23)

Midway through its run, Lost completely flipped the script. Those flashbacks you thought were so secure? How about we introduce flash-forwards, and don’t tell you that what you’re seeing is the future until a balls-out coda in our third season finale? That’s exactly what Lost did, pulling the rug to reveal that the disheveled off-island Jack scenes were actually Jack of the future; he was rescued, along with Kate, who pops up in the final moments to completely melt our brains into goo. How did they get off? What happened to everyone else? Has there ever been a TV mind-fuck so utterly epic? Luckily, the on-island story was equally compelling, though totally devastating, and ties back to the flash-forward reveal: Charlie sacrifices himself to save Desmond and let him know that the boat they believe is on its way to rescue them is actually full of traitors. His death and the flash-forwards re-energized the show and opened up a whole new world of storytelling possibilities.

8. “The Constant” (SEASON 4, EPISODE 5)

Every Desmond-centric episode of Lost is important, but this Season 4 output is its most successful, and arguably the series’ best-ever work. It distills everything that’s great about Lost; a sci-fi element telling a very human story that is mostly contained but also edges the story forward. In this case, we see Desmond, his consciousness bouncing through time, who is reoriented when he’s able to speak on the phone to his long-lost love, Penny. Their conversation is one of the show’s most beautiful moments, bombastically emotional but for all the right reasons.

9. “La Fleur” (SEASON 5, EPISODE 8)

Lost got heavy into time travel in Season 5, testing the waters of how totally weird this show could be. It had a lot of fun with the concept, which was best-utilized in this Sawyer-centric episode. Sawyer was always a popular character, but seeing him take on a leadership role in the “past” – which was, thanks to time travel, his future – was a real treat. It made the whacky stuff feel grounded, and centralized new dynamics in the cast, including Sawyer’s relationship with Juliet, which blossomed into romance.

10. “The Incident” (SEASON 5, EPISODE 16 & 17)

Like “Through the Looking Glass,” the Season 5 finale once again completely re-arranged the show’s formula. We’re introduced to the mysterious and ancient Jacob and Man in Black in the episode’s opener, and then we witness the “incident” hinted at since Season 2. During the detonation of an atomic bomb, Juliet implodes in an attempt to reset time. The episode ends with her sacrifice and a flash to white, setting in place the flash-sideways concept of Season 6.

11. “Ab Aeterno” (SEASON 6, EPISODE 9)

Lost flashed into the deep past a few times in the final seasons, but never so effectively as it did here with Richard. He first popped up in Season 3 in a shroud of mystery, and his origins are finally revealed here in a flashback that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. However, the episode fully illustrates that when Lost is at its peak, realism doesn’t matter. Richard’s story, like Desmond’s in “The Constant,” is grounded in love. He’s the island’s oldest inhabitant after Jacob, an ageless relic of a mystic order he’s pledged to and can’t escape.

12. “The End” (SEASON 6, EPISODE 17 & 18)

A lot of your devotion to Lost will depend on how you feel about its finale. Many hate it for not offering up the answers they expected, while others are able to connect to its character-driven message: the people who change our lives are more important than the celestial answers we seek. It’s a hard swallow for a show that was all about set up and very little about payoff. But if you can get past that, the beauty of the finale can sink its hooks. Lost, for all of its brazen weirdness, was ultimately a show about accepting people, and yourself. (And no, they weren’t dead the whole time.)

Images: ABC

Essential Episodes Of Our Favorite Shows

• 9 essential episodes of Angel
• The 10 most essential Game Of Thrones episodes
• 10 essential episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer

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Superman has many powers, but one of his most iconic scenes features one of the craziest with his reversal of time! But could this power be far more deadly to everything? Kyle takes it for a spin on this week’s Because Science!

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Time travel is one of the most popular plot devices in science fiction, with the trope appearing in everything from Futurama to Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake. But just like ice cream at Baskin Robins, or the quarks that make up atoms, time travel stories come in many different flavors. If you’re curious about tasting them all — or at least an extensive collection of them — YouTuber minutephysics has you covered with his latest video, which demonstrates the different ways characters can interact with their past, future, and alternate selves.

Minutephysics, who’s deconstructed many other heady topics such as the physics of teleportation and the problems with cloning, uses his latest video to delve into a less science-focused and more story-focused analysis of the different types of time travel timelines in popular science fiction. It’s noted below the video that this exercise is meant as “an explanation of how time travel functions in different popular movies, books, & shows – not how it works ‘under the hood’…”

To that end, the video breaks down the stories of Planet of the Apes, Ender’s Game, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Primer, Back to the Future, Looper, Groundhog Day, the video game Braid, and the YouTube Red sci-fi series Lifeline, in an attempt to determine which type of time travel structure has the most “logical consistency.” Minutephysics defines logical consistency in this context as a proper handling of freewill (“time travel to the past, where you can’t change the past”), and only having one timeline (as opposed to many timelines when characters time travel and make new universes).

He ultimately claims that Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban most effectively handles the time-travel plot device, but it seems like there are too many great examples of time traveling in science fiction to ever make a fully objective call. Primer on the other hand, that’s without a doubt the most confusing, nobody questions that. So many time machines.

What do you think about this breakdown of time travel in science fiction? Do you have a favorite time travel structure? Was Primer actually very easy to follow for you? Let us know in the comments below!

Images: Universal

Where We’re Going, You’ll Need More Posts

• Futurama’s Billy West voices Back to the Future scene as Fry and Professor Farnsworth
• LEGO enables self-lacing sneakers
• Secret Science Nerds: Robert Zemeckis

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Jeff Lewis likes his coffee, but he’s not a fan of tasteless, boring water. To alleviate this, his first boost is Spindrift Seltzer, delicious sparkling water. Then, he boosts Travelers, a unique time-traveling show on Netflix. Last, he boosts GoNoodle, an app for kids with song and dance!

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The thing about time travel stories is that there are infinite implications in even the basic premise–far more than could ever be covered in a single feature. Time, ironically, limits the possibilities. There’s only so much you can get into within two hours.

Erased, though, an enthralling work of magical realism, shows all the deeper depths TV can explore with more time. It follows a twenty-something cartoonist, Satoru, whose mind transfers back into his 11-year-old self. What’s the reason for this most peculiar do-over? Well, as a boy, Satoru may have been witness to key details of a murder mystery that’s remained unsolved since the late 80s.

Aspects of the premise should be familiar to genre fans; recalling the time travel plots of Peggy Sue Got Married and Frequency, among others. However, Erased gets to live in its premise far more, really showing how strange reliving childhood would feel. Being an anime, it’s actually even freer with its fantasy. Often, the conventional wisdom for genre TV is that a premise can’t have too many “buys.” If the story is set in a realer world, the audience can’t be expected to wrap their heads around more than one fantastical concept. That would simply stretch their suspension of disbelief too far. Taking full advantage of the “buys” animation already affords, though, Erased adds an intriguing wrinkle to Satoru’s situation.

The hero’s jaunt into the past is actually a much bigger demonstration of a strange ability he’s already had (albeit on more of a parlor trick level). In these “revivals,” he can rewind time by a few moments and prevent little catastrophes just after they’ve occurred. The contrast of these little fixes with his journey to yesteryear seems to make a more impactful point about how our histories are really just comprised of many little moments which can hold major significance, even decades later.

The catalyst for this chronological crisscross comes when a visit from Satoru’s mother, Sachiko, leads them both to realize a man who was convicted of killing Satoru’s classmates 18 years ago may have been framed. Just when they think they’ve discovered the true culprit’s identity, though, Sachiko is mysteriously murdered, and Satoru is himself framed for the crime. It’s at this most shocking moment that the cartoonist’s biggest-ever revival occurs.

With a patient pace, the show takes proper time to linger on all the details one would have to deal with, suddenly living 18 years in the past. Satoru adjusts to his changed body, and the reality that he has to rely on car rides to get around because he isn’t old enough to drive, anymore. And he is incredibly elated to see his mother again–alive, well, and much younger. His adult mind’s eye for detail allows him to notice things he totally missed before, like the telltale bruises on his classmate, Kenya; a troubled girl he knows will eventually disappear.

It later turns out that Satoru can go back and forth between the past and present. Changes he makes to events in his childhood turn out to have profound effects on his adult life. Facts he learns at age 29 then enlighten his 11-year-old self about what’s happening around him. Neighbors who seemed trustworthy turn out to have frightening motivations, and vice versa.

As with any time travel story, trying to explain all the twists and turns in a brief summary can make it sound rather convoluted. However, the added space of a full-length series truly allows for some rich, subtle complexity; all while always keeping things clear. Erased asks pointed questions about regret, memory, and destiny, and it’s allowed to address those questions with answers that are just as thought-provoking.

Do you have a favorite anime from last year? Sound off in the talkback.

Image Credits: Aniplex of America

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Star Wars The Force Awakens shows us an aged Han Solo, but is he actually older than he looks? Thanks to the Milennium Falcon and the Kessel Run, he could be. Kyle explains on this week’s Because Science!

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If there’s one thing the anime medium can’t get enough, besides  unnatural hair colors, it’s science fiction. Series and films about technology, aliens, and the future are a dime a dozen so I’ve rounded up 5 television series to hit any science-fiction lover’s sweet spots.

Ergo Proxy

Photo Credit: Funimation

Set in a world where society is run like the gears of a clock, and androids known as AutoRevis are commonplace, investigator (and Evanescence lead singer lookalike) Re-L Meyer is tasked with discovering who or what is causing the once docile AutoRevis to gain sentience.

With its sleek cyberpunk art style, pressure cooker pacing, and mature story-telling; Ergo Proxy is the kind of series that rewards a viewer willing to pay attention and think, at least more than in your average Shonen fight fest. That said, there are plenty of great action sequences to spice up this methodical cyber noir. If you’re a fan of Blade Runner, Dark City, or Asimov styled robot stories with a dash of action, give Ergo Proxy a try.

Parasyte -the maxim-

Photo Credit: Sentai Filmworks

Based on a classic manga series, Parasyte tells the story of Shinichi, a normal high school student whose right hand gets possessed by a shapeshifting parasite named Migi. As other members of Migi’s race start devouring humans left and right, Migi and Shinichi must  work together to stay alive.

Parasyte isn’t the most sophisticated show but there’s something refreshing about its simplicity. Migi and Shinichi are enjoyable leads, while the grotesque parasites and the fights between them make for bloody good fun.  It’s like a love letter to classic body horror/alien invasion sci-fi films such as John Carpenter’s The Thing, or Invasion of The Body Snatchers that still throws in its on little twists on the formula. If you can stomach ruthless violence and nasty body transformations,  Parasyte -the maxim- will easily satisfy your space monster appetite.

Steins;Gate

Photo Credit: Funimation

Steins;Gate centers on Okabe Rintarou, an arrogant, wanna-be scientist who accidentally discovers how to send text messages to the past. Okabe is quick to use the tech to improve the lives of himself and his friends, but when a shadowy organization pursues him and his loved ones for the tech, things get ugly fast.

Such is the premise of Steins;Gate, a critically acclaimed anime based on the critically acclaimed visual novel.  Steins;Gate is great; not only is it one of my favorite variations on the rules of time travel, but it is a truly great story in its own right. It’s a slow build, but it’s cast proves to be a batch of deep, complex characters, and the story poignant yet with room for some silly but not jarring humor. If your looking for a Doctor Who or Back To The Future style story with a little more bite, Steins;Gate is a must see.

Serial Experiments Lain

Photo Credit:  Funimation

Serial Experiments Lain is weird. Very weird. I’m still trying to get an exact grasp on the series. The story starts with Lain, a cripplingly shy high schooler who receives an e-mail from a deceased classmate, inviting her to the online world of The Wired. From there, things go off the rails and into the void of deep space.

Lain is weird, and yet at the same time it is undeniable. Each episode is a puzzle, leaving you to unravel just what is happening amidst the haunting visuals and music. If you do manage to get a grip on Serial Experiments Lain, the series has some frighteningly resonant critiques on our internet age that still ring true today. If you’re not afraid of a lot of mind-warp in your science fiction, give Lain a try.

Space Dandy

Photo Credit: Funimation

If Lain is a futuristic nightmare, Space Dandy is a whacky space-traveling dream. From the minds behind Cowboy Bebop, Space Dandy is a light-hearted romp about Dandy and his loyal space crew as they hunt for unknown aliens with plenty of Zombie apocalypses, robot battles, and musical numbers along the way.

Space Dandy reminds me a lot of Men In Black or Galaxy Quest.  Stealthily clever, deceptively heartfelt, yet always loud and proud with it’s presentation and off the wall humor. It’s the kind of sci-fi that doesn’t ask hard questions but let’s you escape into a vibrant world of slacker heroes and incompetent evil empires. If you’re looking for something to lighten your mood at the end of hard week,  Space Dandy is just the ticket.

There were a number of great series and films that I didn’t include (Akira, Cowboy Bebop, Ghost In The Shell, Evangelion, etc.) and I didn’t even touch the Mech/Giant Robot genre because it deserves its own article. I only had 5 slots, I wanted to reserve them for shows I felt need more love.

All these series are available through Hulu, Funimation and Crunchyroll. Feel free to share your own Sci-Fi anime recommendations in the comments below. Until next time.

Featured Image Credit: Funimation

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If you’re looking for high quality indie sci-fi comic books that are just getting started (1-3 issues published so far), read on. These titles all feature superb story-telling and impressive art, and each has a unique style fitting into a different sub-genre of science fiction. Every series below is a creator-owned project published by Image Comics. There’s enough great stuff here that sci-fi fans are sure to find something to enjoy.

Bitch Planet
Kelly Sue DeConnick (story) & Valentine De Landro (art)
Latest issue out: #3

In a dystopian future, women who are deemed “non-compliant” are shipped to an off-world prison planet as punishment for not fitting into the tightly-defined rules and expectations of an earth starkly ruled by sexist men. Writer Kelly Sue DeConnick cleverly uses a seemingly exaggerated exploitation style to bring home truths about gender inequality in the real world we live in.

Each issue also has an essay on feminism at the end that rivals the high quality of the story preceding it. At turns emotionally touching and rage-inducing, each installment of Bitch Planet will leave you thinking about it’s implications well after you’ve turned the last page.

Chrononauts
Mark Millar (story) & Sean Gordon Murphy (art)
Latest issue: #1

Two scientist bros attempt to be the first humans to travel back in time, with the whole world watching (à la the first moon landing). Mark Millar moves us through the first issue quickly, with some hints of the main characters’ back story and a cliff-hanger implying this story will be as much about the past as it is the sci-fi future. The art from Sean Gordon Murphy is sharp and detailed, in some panels communicating a lot with few, or no, words to aid the images.

Chrononauts is likely to compare well with other classics of the time-travel adventure genre, and it looks like it may also join them on the big screen: a day after the first issue came out, news broke that Universal Pictures has already optioned rights to the movie.

Descender
Jeff Lemire (story) & Dustin Nguyen (art)
Latest Issue: #2

A group of strange machines launches devastating attacks on a system of advanced worlds. A boy android wakes up on a derelict mining colony after a 10 year slumber to find that all of the people have died. Writer Jeff Lemire connects these two events throughout his first two issues of Descender, slowly building suspense as he reveals bits of information about his main character. I’m hard-pressed to decide which I like more, the story or the the beautiful water color art by Dustin Nguyen it is told through. Expect to see more of Descender even if you don’t pick up the comic book: Sony acquired the film rights to the title before the first issue even hit the stands.

Invisible Republic
Gabriel Hardman (story & art) & Corinna Bechko (story)
Latest Issue: #1

A reporter arrives on a planet that has just seen the collapse of it’s dictatorship, and discovers a journal from the ruler’s unheard of female cousin, telling the true story of how his reign started. Husband and wife team Gabriel Hardman and Corinna Bechko describe their series as about “revolution, the nature of power, who gets to record history and what that implies,” as well as “the influence of geography on politics, and how family, loyalty, and love can trip logic, even when empires are at stake.”

Sound ambitious enough? Hardman and Bechko really pull you into the world they’ve created and get you invested in the characters in the short space of a single issue. Expect this sci-fi political epic to deliver.

Southern Cross
Betty Cloonan (story) & Andy Belanger (art)
Latest Issue: #2

Alex Braith boards the spaceship Southern Cross, bound for Saturn’s moon Titan to recover the remains of her sister, who died in a mining accident. But she’s also looking for answers about how exactly her sister perished and why. In this book, Becky Cloonan has written a horror/mystery of the first order, using a large spaceship as her setting, with no shortage of shady supporting characters to keep things interesting. Andy Belanger’s art is the kind you really want to pay attention to – not because things won’t make sense if you don’t notice the details, but because you get so much more out of the book if you do.

Have you already checked any of these out? What did you think? What new indie sci-fi comics do you think we missed? Are there any sci-fi classics you’d like to see get some love in a future post?

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Christopher Nolan’s INTERSTELLAR pulls real life theories to show a fantastic vision of space travel. But how does the science work out? Can we really turn wormholes into a time machine? See it on this week’s episode of Because Science.

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