Episode 101: Transcript
Episode 101: Why We Want to Change the Timeline
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to another episode of Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast that traveled backwards in time from the distant future on a tachyon-infused RSS feed. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction writer. My latest work is the Unstoppable trilogy, Victories Greater Than Death is out now and the sequel, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, comes out in April.
Annalee: [00:00:23] And I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction, and my latest book is Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. And it's all about what archaeology can tell us about why people abandoned ancient cities.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:38] And that book is out in paperback now, and it's so awesome.
Annalee: [00:00:41] Yay!
Charlie Jane: [00:00:41] Go get Four Lost Cities, it’s so great. Okay, so today, we're going to be talking about going back in time, and just messing around. You know, a lot of versions of time travel in science fiction, insist that it is impossible to change the past at all, but we love to prove them wrong.
Annalee: [00:01:00] Yes, we do.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:00] Why are so many people resistant to the idea of being able to rewrite history and why is it just so much fun to prove them wrong and to go back and make changes? To find out, we talked to Terry Matalas, the showrunner of 12 Monkeys, and the second season of Star Trek: Picard, and Keto Shimizu, showrunner of the incredible Legends of Tomorrow. Also, on our audio extra next week, we'll feature more of our exclusive interview with Terry Metallus, including more of his comments about season two of Star Trek: Picard. If you want to find out more about why Q has such a special relationship with Jean-Luc Picard, you only have to throw us a couple of dollars at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
[00:01:50] And by the way, did you know that our patrons get audio extras with every single episode!
Annalee: [00:01:56] What?
Charlie Jane: [00:01:56] Plus, essays, reviews and access to our elite VIP Discord channel.
Annalee: [00:02:03] Wow.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:04] It’s alll amazing, and it can be yours for just a couple bucks a month. This podcast is entirely supported by you, the listeners. So anything you give us goes right back into making our opinions even more correct.
Annalee: [00:02:17] That's right.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:17] Once again, that URL is patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. Now let's go ahead and jump into the timeline.
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Charlie Jane: [00:02:53] So I want to start off with a big warning. There will be spoilers for all of 12 Monkeys, a show that's been finished for a while now. And every episode that's already aired of Legends of Tomorrow in this episode, so… And there's no real spoilers for Star Trek: Picard. But if you're behind on either of those other shows, you might want to jump off now.
[00:03:14] Okay, so there are a lot of people who insist that when you go back in time, you will not be able to make any changes to the past, because it would create too many paradoxes. These people say that if you do manage to visit the past, whatever you do will always have happened so you'll only be part of the status quo rather than having the power to change anything. Or, as the doctor puts it in the 1964 Doctor Who story “The Aztecs”
Dr. Who Clip: But you can’t rewrite history, not one line!
Annalee: [00:03:49] Although of course, Doctor Who doesn't really stick to that idea of an unchangeable past for very long because being able to change the timeline makes for more interesting stories. So how does that work, going from an unchangeable timeline to a changeable one?
Charlie Jane: [00:04:04] We actually have a really good example of that because, you know, the movie 12 Monkeys, which is based on the French short film, La Jetée, is all about not being able to change the past. Bruce Willis goes back and cannot do anything to alter the events that have already happened with the plague and his childhood self and everything else. He's just doomed to kind of go through the motions of what's already happened. But when Syfy decided to turn 12 Monkeys into a TV show, the producers very quickly decided that their version would have a changeable timeline as showrunner Terry Matalas explained to me.
Terry: [00:04:40] It just felt as though if you were going to write that story as a television series, you would need to write it all at once and then go shoot it. You know, you'd have to have every moment mapped out and that's virtually impossible to do. But it also just, it left you without any surprises, when you can't change time, and chances to reinvent the show. And it just felt like that was going to be the core struggle, was, just because you can change the past doesn't mean you should.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:16] I really liked the points he makes in there about there not being any room for surprises because with a timeline that is set in stone, the only surprise can be how things happen, not what happened. And of course, not everybody was on board with the idea of changing 12 Monkeys into a more malleable timeline.
Terry: [00:05:35] Among hardcore fans, on social media, it was, “You missed the point of the movie,” was something that I would read a lot that was tweeted angrily to me. And it's like, no, I did not miss the point.
Annalee: [00:05:49] So wait, why are so many people pissed about this?
Charlie Jane: [00:05:52] You know, a lot of fans really love closed loop time travel, and it can be done super well. Some of the most famous time travel stories have an unalterable timeline, such as Robert A. Heinlein’s All You Zombies, which we've discussed on the podcast before. The TV show Lost expanded the notion that whatever happened, happened, and it can’t be changed.
Annalee: [00:06:13] What happened in the past stays in the past.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:16] Pretty much. And the past is basically a done deal. And that kind of story is very kind of like a puzzle. It fits together neatly and it's kind of cool. And the first Terminator film also has a very closed loop, we're Kyle Reese goes back and just becomes part of the events that have already happened. But then Terminator 2 ends with the timeline being changed, thus proving, as Kyle Reese himself promised us,
Terminator Clip: There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.
Annalee: [00:06:45] You know, when I was researching my time travel novel Future of Another Timeline, I started out by talking to a couple of physicists, Adam Becker and Sean Carroll. And my idea was that they would know how time travel would work, and that they would explain the scientific operation of time travel to me. And they both very gently said, no, there's no time travel. And if you look at it from the perspective of physics, you just can't go back in time and change anything. It's just not something that can happen as far as we know. Adam Becker actually added that, you know, in a very kind way, that look, time travel isn't a scientific device. It's a literary device. So when we see it cropping up in stories, we're definitely in the realm of ideas and fantasy. Time travel is something that we should treat more like a cultural or emotional journey, I think. It's not ever something that we're going to be able to describe in scientific terms.
[00:07:46] And that's why I think it's so useful for storytelling, and it raises all these questions about storytelling. So my question for you right now is what happens to a story when you change the past and it leads to branching realities, or new universes, the kind of classic multiverse?
Charlie Jane: [00:08:04] Right. You know, every time you go back and change something, you're just spawning a new universe and the universe in which the original thing happened is still there, it's just that you've shunted into a new path. And, you know, it's certainly one popular idea, but Terry Matalas felt like that gets rid of a lot of the stakes.
Terry: [00:08:20] I mean, it is interesting to look at something like Avengers: Endgame, which they did their time travel in a way that you could have your cake and eat it, too. Where they could change that particular timeline because of infinite quantum universes, which was something that we discussed early on in the writers room with 12 Monkeys is, is that the kind of time travel we're going to do? And we ultimately said, no, we need to stick to this timeline, because then your stakes are infinite. If there's an infinite number of universes, it's hard to care about any one because it all works out in quite a few of them.
Annalee: [00:08:57] Okay, so, what's the advantage of having a single changeable timeline from the perspective of storytelling?
Charlie Jane: [00:09:04] Yeah, what Terry Matalas found is that having one timeline that can be changed allowed him to have different factions in 12 Monkeys who all want to alter the past to suit their own different agendas.
Terry: [00:09:19] If you could tell a story in which you routed for both the heroes and the villains, because they both had a valid point about changing all that. Then, I thought you had something really you could talk about. That your heart could break for both the villains, heroes that would turn on each other, you would understand those turns. That was really important to me, that it didn't feel comic book-y, that you knew the emotional reason they believed what they were doing was right, even though it had universal consequences.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:53] And he argues that time travel is one of the most emotional stories that you can tell because you can visit your own past or moments that are personally meaningful to you.
Terry: [00:10:05] The question you usually get when you're writing a time travel story, or creating a time travel film or television show is, when would you go back in time, if you could. And your first instinct is like, well, I'd go see dinosaurs, or I'd go to the ‘50s. Or I'd go to a specific period of time. But I think if you really only had one shot at it, most people would pick a moment in their own lives, in which they could see or talk to someone they love, either re-experience a moment or do it differently. And I think all good time travel stories usually have that component to it. Marty McFly goes back and gets to see who his parents were, he gets to see their flaws, he gets to see their strengths, he gets to set them on a different journey.
Annalee: [00:10:59] That's so interesting. So why does he think that you can't have those small personal stories of visiting your past without the need to just sort of mess around with history?
Charlie Jane: [00:11:10] You know, I feel like in a way, those two things go hand in hand. You earn the right to do these like little personal emotional stories, by getting kind of outrageous and freewheeling with how you handle the past. In the case of 12 Monkeys, you really saw this happening as the show went on. Having the freedom to screw with the big moments in history allowed them to dig deeper into the small moments. And this culminates in season four, where what you have one of my favorite moments in the show where Jennifer Goines, the character who is played by Brad Pitt in the original movie, is singing Pink's anti harassment anthem, “You and Your Hand” to Adolf Hitler while Cassandra Railly is putting on a dominatrix outfit to gun down Nazis.
12 Monkeys Clip: That's when dickhead put his hands on me. But you see, I’m not here for your entertainment, you don’t really want to mess with me tonight.”
Charlie Jane: [00:12:11] But around that same time, you also have the main character, James Cole, going back and meeting himself as a small child and witnessing the death of his own father. And here's Terry Matalas, talking about how he struck that balance.
Terry: [00:12:23] We're going to have Jennifer Goines sing Pink to Adolf Hitler. Is this the jump the shark moment? And luckily, I don't think it was. There were other moments that people might point to, but it felt like, if we ground it as much as we could around that, and then you did it, the whiplash wouldn't hurt.
Annalee: [00:12:47] Oh my God, whoa. That scene with the Pink song and Adolf Hitler. That's just wow, that's wild.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:54] Yeah, and we'll put a we'll put a link to that clip in the show notes. And so Terry Matalas talked to me a lot about how, in 12 Monkeys, they tried to balance these extreme tones. And it really is a matter of tone, rather than like logistics, or whatever. And part of what helped is that the show goes in a really intense horror direction at times. And there's actually a super creepy time traveling cult that sends people on these scary drug trips, and Matalas felt like having that intense horror allowed him to also include extreme silliness, as well as really profound, intense emotional beats.
Terry: [00:13:30] It always had that spirit, you know, that anything can happen.
Annalee: [00:13:35] Wow, that's so interesting. I've always loved the fact that horror can get together with comedy and make something even weirder.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:41] Mm-hmm. And early on, Matalas pushed back against the idea that this should just be a show about going back and trying to stop a plague from wiping out humanity, which is kind of the basic storyline. He wanted it to be bigger and more complicated and more emotional. And we talked a lot about whether you would want to go back and change history. So, for example, the COVID-19 pandemic didn't happen.
Annalee: [00:14:06] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:06] You know, I mean, COVID has cost us all so much. And it's a horrible thing that we've had to live through. But if there was no COVID, would we have not gotten some major advances in medical technology that we've gotten to take advantage of? What would be the unintended consequences of messing around with that piece of our past? And, you know, these kinds of questions get really thorny, but they're also really fascinating to play with.
Annalee: [00:14:30] Yeah, they really are. And the thing is, is that there's also a political dimension to the question of whether we should be able to alter the past. It's really a question about who gets to alter the status quo.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:44] Yeah, who gets to decide what history is, and I talked to Matalas about the fact that many people in real life right now feel as if the past is being altered. They look at stuff like the 1619 Project or moves to take down Confederate statues, and they feel as if history is actually being rewritten, even though many of us would argue that what's really happening is that history is being revealed.
Terry: [00:15:10] Well, for me that always that happened early on in school, where I just remember history books. You'd have your history book version, and then you know, for instance, you'd go and watch Mississippi Burning. Clearly I’m a child of the ‘80s. And one represented something much more horrific than your schooltime history book.
Annalee: [00:15:32] Okay, so now Matalas has taken over as showrunner for season two of Star Trek: Picard, and the trailers so far show that Picard is traveling back in time to 2024. So what did he tell you about how the lessons he learned on 12 Monkeys are gonna affect what he's doing in Picard?
Charlie Jane: [00:15:54] Okay, so it's pretty clear from the trailers and from our conversation that Picard's time travel story is a very different one than than 12 Monkeys. In Picard something has gone wrong in the timeline causing the Federation to yet again become an authoritarian nightmare.
Annalee: [00:16:09] This is like every 10 minutes.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:12] Yeah, if the Federation—
Annalee: [00:16:14] Fascism is just taking over all the time.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:15] If the Federation has become an authoritarian nightmare, it must be Tuesday. And so Picard has to go back and fix it. And he's the only one who can do this for various reasons. And so this is really more about restoring the status quo than like fixing things, changing things for the better. And here's what Matalas said about that.
Terry: [00:16:35] In this particular case, it's pretty bad, where they… it's a dire enough situation that that this is probably a good idea.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:43] But you know, he also stressed that the emotional aspect will remain front and center and that Picard will be confronting his own past, including his personal regrets, which is another way of going back in time.
Terry: [00:16:54] In this particular season, actual time travel and sort of time travel of the mind and heart are something that we investigate. That time travel sort of exists with all of us. That there are moments in time that are so important to us, for bad or good, that we will never… that change our lives fundamentally. Every choice we make is a result of something that happened to us that our brain is stuck in a moment of time about. Whether that is PTSD, whether that is love, regret. So that is something we explore.
Annalee: [00:17:33] Yeah, that's so cool, but also hasn’t Star Trek always had a changeable timeline.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:38] Yes and kind of no. I mean, early Star Trek stories emphasize that only certain people are important enough to make a difference to the timeline. In one early story, the Enterprise crew accidentally kidnaps a 1960s fighter pilot, and Spock says that this pilot has no historical significance. So they don't need to restore him to the timeline, they can just dump him somewhere, you know.
Annalee: [00:18:02] And he gets, no Wikipedia entry. He’s not notable.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:05] No Wikipedia entry for John Christopher. And then luckily for him, it turns out there's a reason they do have to restore him after all. But in another story, Joan Collins plays a 1930s social worker who has a soup kitchen where she lectures people about starships.
Annalee: [00:18:20] As you do.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:20] Yeah, like you do. That's a thing that happened a lot in the ‘30s. Her death is essential to stopping Adolf Hitler and she has to die. It's really important. And so I asked Matalas about this and he said that the new season of Picard definitely comes down on this side of saying that seemingly unimportant people can actually have a huge impact on the timeline.
Annalee: [00:18:41] Love that.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:43] And just a reminder that we'll be releasing more of my interview with Matalas, including his thoughts on the relationship between Q and Picard as an audio extra on our Patreon.
Annalee: [00:18:54] I cannot wait to understand Picard and Q and the depths of their feelings for each other.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:59] I know.
Annalee: [00:18:59] All right, we're gonna take a short break and when we come back, we'll be talking to Keto Shimizu, showrunner of Legends of Tomorrow.
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Charlie Jane: [00:19:12] Today we want to talk about Sidenote, the podcast hosted by Greg Brown and Mitchell Moffit of AsapSCIENCE.
Annalee: [00:19:21] Mitch and Greg are the co-creators of AsapSCIENCe, a YouTube channel where they make science make sense.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:27] On their weekly podcast, Sidenote, they explain the up to date science behind all kinds of stuff, such as how brain fog works, why the James Webb Space Telescope is so awesome, and it is really so awesome. And also, whether eating ass is safe.
Annalee: [00:19:44] They always ask the right questions and they're incredibly fun to listen to. They go on hilarious tangents with comedians, celebrities, and experts to ensure that you are entertained while also learning a lot.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:58] Subscribe to Sidenote by AsapSCIENCE wherever you get your podcasts. That way, if anyone asks what's happening in outer space, or inside your brain, you can tell them.
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Charlie Jane: [00:20:14] And so now we're incredibly lucky to be joined by Keto Shimizu, who's written for Arrow and The Flash and has been the showrunner of Legends of Tomorrow for the past few years. Thank you so much for joining us, Keto.
Keto: [00:20:25] Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:29] Yeah, so one of the things I love about Legends of Tomorrow is that it kind of adopted this motto of screwing things up for the better, is the thing that people often say on the show. And where does that idea of kind of messing with the timeline for good come from? And like, why do you have so much fun with that in the show?
Keto: [00:20:46] Well, first and foremost, we love having fun on our show. We do believe that the times being that they what they are and people, you know, being confined to their homes, or just not being able to live as fully as we'd all like. It’s important for us to be creating content that has joy and hope. Not without its darkness, but really, ultimately about overcoming that darkness.
[00:21:19] And the motto of screwing things up for the better really kind of came from the show's own identity crisis that happened at it’s start. And as we were getting into season three we introduced this entity called the Time Bureau and the Time Bureau was sort of the antithesis of our scrappy heroes. It was this well-constructed organization, very bureaucratic, very clean, very crisp, no mistakes allowed. And the Legends really needed to shine through as the antithesis of all of that. And I actually think that's sort of the season where they really wholeheartedly embraced that, yes, we 100% screw things up. But ultimately, we try to end up better than the place we began, even if it's a very bumpy road to get there and some things get broken. But hopefully, they're things that were meant to be broken, or at least recreated in a way that is better for more people.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:27] Yeah, even as far back as season one, there's like the Time Masters who are trying to control everything and lend, you know, Leonard Snart has to sacrifice himself to basically gain freedom to have your own timeline and generate your own destiny. So one of things about Legends of Tomorrow is that it kind of is a spin off, to some extent, of The Flash. And in The Flash, Barry Allen tries to go back in time and save his mother, which causes the Flashpoint alternate timeline.
The Flash clip: [00:22:54] I wasn't in a great space and I felt like the only way I could fix that was to run back in time and save my mom.
You stopped the Reverse Flash from killing your mom?
Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:09] And it feels like The Flash constantly warns in every episode against going back and messing with the past in any way, because it'll just cause problems. It's too difficult. It's too hard. The Flash is very conservative in a weird way about changing the timeline. So what's it like going from that super strict prohibition to more of a kind of anything goes situation?
Keto: [00:23:31] Well, for me, and I think, for the writers on our staff, and I think, ultimately, for the identity of the show, we have to live in a version of anything goes, because otherwise we don't have a show. We are a show that is based on a group of people who traveled through time, and are propelled to do that for X, Y, and Z. So if we were too conservative, we just wouldn't have a show. We wouldn't be able to do anything. So there's sort of the fundamental reason why that needs to happen on Legends. But also, I think, it comes from our characters and our characters are people who are passionate and impulsive, and badly want to make things better where they can. But our show is also this sort of a cascading collection of obstacles that keep coming in front of our heroes. So we have one problem that the Legends go and they fix, but in doing so, they create a new problem. Again, we need these story engines to perpetuate the continuation of the story. Otherwise, it would end. And it’s like, if the timeline was just dandy, and nothing was going on, then it’d be like, “Okay, guys. I guess we can all go home.”
Charlie Jane: [00:24:58] Nobody wants that.
Keto: [00:24:58] Just dust off [crosstalk]. So there's a story reason for why both we have to be able to jump in there and do this stuff. But also we've had to construct this ongoing set of problems that our heroes have to continually face involving time travel.
Annalee: [00:25:20] Yeah, one of the things I really like is that even though the characters are able to change the timeline, especially when it comes to their own pasts, it's really hard. Like, there was a whole arc where Zari is trying to find this loophole to save her brother Behrad from dying, basically. And it's really tough. It’s not like she’s like, boop, I went back and now everything's fine. It feels like it's harder when it comes to these sort of personal or emotional changes. Can you talk a little bit about that, like, why you guys decided to make that part of what you write about is how people are changing their past and what that's like?
Keto: [00:25:58] Well, ultimately, it has to cost you something. It has to… if it was so easy for us to just go and edit our own lives there wouldn't be any growth. There wouldn’t be any evolution of us as human beings, and certainly not for our characters, and our characters are all about that journey. They're all about that growth. And that's one of the reasons why we're so drawn to the most difficult nuts to crack and bringing them onto the ship. Because then it's such a wonderful journey to be on as we slowly peel down those layers and get into the heart of what that person is about and what they're struggling with and giving them that wonderful place to move towards in becoming a part of this found family.
[00:26:49] So yeah, it has to be hard, it has to. Otherwise, what's the point? That’s not where our show lives. It has to perpetuate this growth. And for Zari, in particular, that was a multiple season journey for her. She didn't do that even in just one season. And same with Amaya, it took a couple seasons for her to resolve this. And that's really important to us, especially for Zari, because her fundamental journey was about letting go of her own involvement in saving her brother. She literally had to sit it out.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:31] Right. She had to stay on the ship.
Keto: [00:27:34] She had to stay on the ship. And then because she couldn't stay out, she ended up sort of unwriting her own place because she had to be there. She had to be there. And that was sort of like the last test. It was like she loved Nate so much. She had to go be there for him in that moment. Yeah, it was really about her understanding that she had to trust other people to step in and make this thing happen in order to undo the horrible world that she came from, which included of course, her brother, Behrad, and her parents dying. So yeah that was that was Zari’s growth, she went from being a total loner, who didn't trust or let anybody in, to someone who would let a bunch of crazy people put on this insane show to make the world more tolerant. Which is just bonkers. Like, again, if Zari had heard that that was going to be the solution to making her world a better place when she first met the Legends, she would be like, pass. Hard pass.
Annalee: [00:28:46] No.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:47] Yeah, no.
Keto: [00:28:47] I am not getting on that ship with y’all. That’s insane.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:52] It’s really true. And speaking of Zari, I feel like a major turning point in how Legends of Tomorrow deals with time travel is when Zari is supposed to take Helen of Troy home, basically to the Trojan War, but she's just like, I'm gonna take you to the Amazons instead.
Zari: [00:29:07] According to the historical record, you disappeared halfway through the war, but that didn't affect the war itself. So I found you a loophole, same time that you're from just a different place.
Oh.
Hacked history.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:22] Do you feel like that's the moment where it's kind of proved that it's possible to change history as long as you're surgical or careful or whatever?
Keto: [00:29:30] Yeah, thatwas a really important moments in our show where we wanted to open the door to how we could make these edits and make these small changes that wouldn't completely overthrow the timeline and set everything into chaos, but would make someone's life better, where the Legends could allow that to happen. And yeah, so that was a big moment for us and something that we've continued to try to take opportunities to do whenever we can. And then it's like, okay, taking the focus sometimes away from the big moments in history and the big people to, how can we make this one person or this one family, their life just a little bit better and not completely overturn the applecart. So yeah, that's something we really wanted to start doing at that moment and have continued to try and do.
Annalee: [00:30:29] So we often joke on the show that time travel is a very gay sub-genre. And we're just wondering, is it a coincidence that as the Legends have been taking more of a cavalier attitude toward changing history that the show has also become a lot more explicitly inclusive of a lot of sexual minorities, including, now we even have an asexual character, alongside our lesbian, bisexual, gay heroes?
Keto: [00:30:58] Is it? I didn't know that. I didn't know that time travel was considered a gay sub genre, but…
Annalee: [00:31:02] Well… it might be a pet theory of ours.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:04] It’s only us [crosstalk]
Keto: [00:31:05] Okay, [crosstalk] that's specific to you, got it. Okay. I love it. I love that. I'm like—
Charlie Jane: [00:31:13] I mean, to be fair, one of the most famous time travel novels is The Man Who Folded Himself. So… I don’t know.
Annalee: [00:31:17] It's not that it doesn't come up a lot. And also, Doctor Who has gotten more queer over the years, so there's something there, but we're not really sure what it is. So we just thought we'd ask you and see what you thought.
Keto: [00:31:31] No, it’s very interesting. I mean, I think for us, it really has become a matter of representation and having these positive portrayals of characters who identify these ways because, for us… There are several writers, myself included, who identify as bisexual. And so it's like, we want to see that on screen, we want to tell those stories. And we want to have characters who are well-rounded and complicated and flawed, also have this piece of them as part of their character, but not defining that character. That's always been very important to us is that, that's not the label that you first see, when you see Ava Sharp, that's probably not the first thing you think of. You’re thinking, okay, she's type A, she's very organized, she's a little nuts about cleanliness, she’s incredibly loyal, incredibly strong, like a badass boss. And she's a lesbian, but that's not the defining thing about her character. And so often you see in the shows that that is sort of the first thing you know about this person. It’s like, they’ll practically come on screen and be like, “By the way, I'm gay.” And you're like, okay, but like, what's your voice? What's your childhood trauma? What’s your, there are all these other questions.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:00] Are you a clone? Are you a robot?
Keto: [00:33:03] Yeah, yeah. Are you alien? Like there's so many questions that we would ask first, then. Were you last season's villain, because then you're definitely coming on board with us. But, again, for us, having these wonderful characters who we adore so much, and who we try so hard to give multiple layers of depth to, to also have that their sexuality is X. For us, that's very important. And to have a character who is beloved, also have this thing about them, I think is a more effective means of representation than having the giant, glowing letters above them being like, “GAY!”
Annalee: [00:33:52] Every time they walk around, a sparkly rainbow kind of trails behind them.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:57] Yeah.
Keto: [00:33:57] Yeah, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:00] So one of the things I love about the current season of Legends of Tomorrow is that it's kind of making it explicit that there's a kind of cruelty and not being able to change the past. You have these evil robots who are kind of snarling about like, ah, they helped this singer to not die. Oh, they integrated this factory early, they're terrible. They save people from Chernobyl.
Legends Clip: Guys, don't stop this, all these people. They're gonna live.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:27] Why is that a cruel thing, to not be able to go back and kind of make things a little bit better for the people who've been trampled on by history?
Keto: [00:34:34] For us, it really came down to two very different approaches to interacting with the past. One comes from this very strict and sort of, again, by the book, an almost fascist outlook on what has come before and what has been recorded and what is the definitive, quote unquote, “recorded history.” What is the timeline supposed to look like? How do we keep this safe? And it's a very rigid and unbending outlook to both the world and this work that they have to do. So that's where evil Gideon and where the robots are coming from, is this just very rigid and unable to evolve view of how things are supposed to be. And we wanted to contrast that with who our Legends are, which are a group of people who have evolved, and exist to change and to grow and to be challenged and people come, people leave, people, they have their story arcs, and then they're done. And then someone else comes. Especially in this season, where we had our 100th episode, really wanted to celebrate how far this ship and this group of people have come since that first episode. And if they were as rigid, and as unbending, as evil Gideon / the robots were, we would never have gotten this far. And a lot of that has to do with these characters opening their hearts and being vulnerable, and accepting their own faults and hypocrisies, and challenging themselves in these in these really big ways, in order to get to where we have gotten.
[00:36:44] We liked that a lot of that comes from these interactions with people in the timeline, and with situations and with points in time where we've had to take these massive risks in order to help somebody else you know, to put someone else above yourself. And that is of just, it's a very compassionate approach to traveling through time. And it just feels so much more interesting and certainly for us in this sort of stories that we want to tell, celebrating those qualities of a hero, that someone is emotional and can really connect with people and identify a situation where they could make something better, and to do it, regardless of whether that is how it was supposed to be or not. And our characters are really people who, when faced with situations like that, are not going to be able to ignore an opportunity where they can make someone's life better. They're just not. And those are the types of people we want to write and to celebrate.
Annalee: [00:38:06] Yeah, that's so awesome. I wanted to talk a little bit about another really interesting thing that happened this season, which has to do with the idea of the fixed point in history. There's been a lot of talk in the show and I think this is a larger trope in time travel stories, that there are certain fixed points in history that you just can't change, like, you can't kill Hitler, because even if you try to go back, your gun will jam or like, you'll slip on a banana peel. Or if you try to prevent the outbreak of World War I, in this case. So what I thought was so great is that we had this episode where all these time travelers are trying to prevent World War I from happening by intervening in this one specific incident. And instead of having it be that there's some kind of temporal force out there, that's just gonna stop you, like that’s just gonna, like I said, make you slip on the banana peel. You guys wrote it, so that actually, it's this white dude in a top hat, who's kind of slipping in and preventing people from changing the timeline. And I'm wondering if you could just talk about that and why you wanted to kind of poke holes in that trope, in particular, the fixed point trope.
Keto: [00:39:18] In a lot of ways it was to open up our mythology, because we had, back in season two, or something, Rip say very definitively, you know, blank is a fixed point, you cannot go there, you can absolutely not do that. And as he really [crosstalk] this notion of like—
Charlie Jane: [00:39:36] Rip.
Keto: [00:39:36] If there's a fixed point, just stay the f away, like don't do it. And so we shut it down. You know, we just said okay, there are these giant moments in time, and they are forbidden. There are no fly zones, you cannot. Do not. Just don't go, don't engage. And the Legends have been sort of operating under that assumption ever since. So if something's sort of labeled fixed point, it's like, okay, okay, we're not gonna, we're not gonna go there. And they haven't really had to go there, to these places. They’ve been drawn to all these other sort of smaller, but still important events that they've had to steer back on course. For us, this notion that time could heal itself is a little constrictive, because then what have we been doing for seven years? I’m sorry. If it was really gonna be okay without us, then why have we been going through all this trouble?
Charlie Jane: [00:40:38] Because time is like cement.
Keto: [00:40:41] Well, yes, there's that too, which is like the hand wavy, like, please don't dig into this too much. We really, yeah, we just really wanted to open up this notion of like, why do we not go to fixed points? And who controls them? And we liked that initially, you think, yes, this is time fixing itself, because this is moment is that important. And that’s that. You just have to accept that. But we wanted, of course, to have the Legends spin on it, which is like, no, it's not actually time fixing itself, time is just a thing. It's like, you could mess it up, and it would be messed up. However, we wanted to set up that there's this other organization at work here, that they put these fixers in these places to make sure that nothing ever changes in these particular moments. So it's like a residency for time super heroes. You're stuck there and you do it, so that's why we had Thawne as our fixer, in this case, be the person who's running out a sentence for his own crimes against the timeline, in this way. By being a fixer in this location and reliving this day over and over and over again. We thought it was really a fun thing to set up and something that we can poke more holes that at the end of the season and into the next. These questions, that it’s like, well, who put these people here? And who else is is out there doing this particular job? So, yeah, you know, there's a lot of reasons I think why it felt right to move past that trope in our show. But largely, it's for more story.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:38] Yeah. So first of all, my heart just did a little happy dance because you said the words into the next season, which is something that I've been waiting to hear news about. I'm like, please give us more.
Keto: [00:42:48] We don't have news. And that's the truth. Like, again, I wish so badly that we at least knew that—
Charlie Jane: [00:42:56] Oh, man.
Keto: [00:42:56] —season eight was gonna happen. We don't. We literally don't. We're still in a weird bubble. We’re still in the bubble.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:03] We're gonna do an old school, like sending packets of peanuts to people campaign.
[00:43:09] Yeah, so final question before we let you go. Thank you so much for spending so much time with us. Final question. So when we talked to Terry Matalas, from like, Star Trek: Picard, he kind of talked about time travel of the heart and mind and people kind of revisiting their own past just through thinking about them, but also through going back. And obviously, this season, you have the story of Gwyn, who's the inventor of time travel, and it's all about his PTSD and grief. And it's beautifully handled. What are the kinds of emotional stories that time travel allows us to tell? And how is time travel, a kind of a metaphor for confronting our own past?
Keto: [00:43:42] I think time travel stories, if done well, will always be deeply emotional. I think that it's such a wish fulfillment in a way, but also a wonderful pall of like, doom and dread. If you do it another way, depending on which way you're looking, and I think that it's, again, I think, it is always a metaphor, or it should be, for your own story, and being able to revisit moments or even revisiting moments deep in the past. Like, I mean, one of my favorite movies of all time is Back to the Future, and that's exactly what that's about. I think that, for us, one of the reasons we spend so much time traveling into the past as opposed to go into the future is first of all, the genres are way more fun being in the past, but also because they're just deeply emotional. You really get to explore these wonderful issues of identity and your forefathers and your mistakes and your losses and things like that, that are just such compelling storytelling devices and aspects of a person.
[00:45:03] So, I think for us, if a story doesn't emotionally impact one of our characters, then we're not going to tell it. We’re not going to go to a particular point in time just because it's a cool genre and we want to do that genre. It's like, okay, if we do go here, how does that affect our characters or a character, if we just want to focus on one? And why is that important? Why are we here? And what does this particular genre reveal about a character? Or how does it challenge a character? So I think, for Legends, it's always about the emotion. That's where every story begins. It's the emotional journey, or EmoJo, as we call it, as we're breaking [crosstalk]
Charlie Jane: [00:45:50] EmoJo! Oh my God.
Keto: [00:45:53] That's a term we coined on Arrow, back when I was on Arrow, and I'm going to take it across every show I ever, ever showrun because it really is the heart of every story, of every episode. And in our case, since we have so many characters, we often have multiple EmoJos, for [crosstalk]. But you know, it is about, okay, that's where the building bricks of every story that we do starts. So yeah, I think time travel in our case is completely entwined with, emotional growth.
Charlie Jane: [00:46:35] Wow, well, I'm gonna start using the word EmoJo all the time, now. That’s like just—
Annalee: [00:46:40] I want to use, like, EmoJo YOLO.
Charlie Jane: [00:46:43] No, no you’re not, no you’re not.
Annalee: [00:46:44] Okay, sorry, that is now illegal.
Charlie Jane: [00:46:47] That is not happening. That is not happening. Oh my God. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us, Keto. Can you just tell our listeners where people can find you online?
Keto: [00:46:55] Oh, sure. I am on Twitter, occasionally, and I’m @ketomizu. Also on Instagram, which I do more often because I take lots of pictures of my baking projects and my children and various other things, but that’s where I am.
Annalee: [00:47:15] I love that.
Charlie Jane: [00:47:15] Cool.
Annalee: [00:47:17] Thanks again.
Charlie Jane: [00:47:17] Well, thank you so much. This was wonderful. And have a great weekend and everything.
Keto: [00:47:21] Thank you. You too.
Charlie Jane: [00:47:22] And fingers crossed for season eight.
Annalee: [00:47:23]Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:47:23] Oh my God!
Keto: [00:47:24] Yeah, fingers crossed.
Annalee: [00:47:25] We need the EmoJo.
Charlie Jane: [00:47:28] We do need it, so badly. Oh, my God.
[00:47:31] OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Charlie Jane: [00:47:36] So finally, we wanted to answer a question from one of our amazing Patreon supporters. If you're supporting us at the $10 level or above, you can ask us questions and we'll answer them on the podcast. Here's a question from Christina Taylor Berry[sp?]. Christina writes, “If you were the subject of experimentation by aliens, what rights or protections would you want to limit their transgressions?”
[00:48:02] That's such an interesting question because, of course, there's no law governing aliens. There's no, there could be interplanetary law, for all we know. There could be a law in space that governs what you're allowed to do with people that you kidnap from less sophisticated planets. This isn’t really a question of law. It's a question of ethics, in a way and obviously, I'd like to not be kidnapped by aliens, unless they were really cool and they were going to take me someplace really interesting. But the experimentation part is like a deal breaker for me.
Annalee: [00:48:31] It has to be consensual, right? The thing I love about this question is that it kind of assumes that there's some kind of interstellar or interplanetary body that would be regulating alien experimentation.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:46] Or that you can have a contract that the aliens are like, we're going to experiment on you. Here's the, let’s negotiate.
Annalee: [00:48:52] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:52] Almost like negotiating a scene in like a BDSM scenario, like, we're gonna experiment on you, but you can negotiate with us about… I mean, maybe there's a thing where it's like, they want to feed you chocolate for a day and they'll take you to a different planet at the end of it. And it's like, well, okay, how much chocolate am I willing to eat and how nice of a planet am I going to go?
Annalee: [00:49:18] I also think that we kind of have a model for this at a lot of universities, there's a human research subjects board.
Charlie Jane: [00:49:27] There is.
Annalee: [00:49:27] And it’s a review board that looks at any experiment that's being done on humans, because, of course, how did we get the idea that aliens might experiment on us? Huh, it might be because humans have been experimenting on each other for a really long time. As we often point out, science fiction is really about the present. And a lot of these fantasies about alien experimentation really crop up during the Cold War after the revelations about Nazi experiments during World War II, and revelations later about the Tuskegee experiments that US doctors did on Black people who had been diagnosed with venereal disease, and they decided not to give them penicillin just to see what would happen. That's the Tuskegee experiments, most notably not done by Nazis, but just regular Americans. Or maybe Nazi-Americans.
Charlie Jane: [00:50:17] Yeah, I mean, it's like…
Annalee: [00:50:20] Yeah, not great, in fact, horrible. And so I think that we have these fantasies that aliens will come and do that to us. And then we, of course, in the real world, have invented these review boards to prevent things like the Tuskegee experiment, and lots of other terrible experiments.
Charlie Jane: [00:50:39] Yeah. And of course, I mean, it's just like HG Wells, when he wrote War of the Worlds he was imagining aliens doing to us what we've been doing to each other. And that's the common thing. I mean, when we lived in Boston in the early 2000s, when, Annalee, when you were at MIT, we used to see these ads on the subway for like, these things where it was like brain studies where they would study… Basically, you would be locked in a room for days and not allowed to sleep. And I had friends who actually signed up for these things, because it's like, I get 50 bucks for just going someplace and being studied. And then it's like, oh, actually, they're not gonna let you sleep for three days, they're gonna make you eat a lot of weird stuff. They're gonna, poke you and prod you and it's actually a really, it's actually a tough 50 bucks to earn, I think. And I actually—
Annalee: [00:51:21] Although, to be fair, some of them did pay a little bit more than $50. I think it really depended on the experiment. But yeah, it would be like Harvard University seeks people who are willing to not sleep for four days.
Charlie Jane: [00:51:33] I mean, but the thing is, they would never say in the little ad, what the experiment was. I had friends who were like, oh, it sounds like it's really easy and then they'd show up, and it would be like, yeah, we're gonna suspend you from the ceiling by your ankles for like a month. And like, you know.
Annalee: [00:51:47] Luckily the IRB said that was fine.
Charlie Jane: [00:51:50] I feel like in the Boston area in like, 2002, Boston University, Harvard, a bunch of these other places, were doing a ton of these. It was weird. Anyway, so the point is, I would want informed consent.
Annalee: [00:52:00] Me, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:52:02] I would want the aliens, I would want payment, which I'm now fixated on this idea of just like drop me on a really cool planet that's not earth because I’ve seen a lot of this planet. I'd like to see a different one. So I'm willing. Aliens, if you're listening to this, I am willing to negotiate with you about a reasonable course of experimentation that ends with me going to live on a really cool planet. Just putting that out there.
Annalee: [00:52:26] Well, as long as you can get back, I don't want you to go live on another planet.
Charlie Jane: [00:52:30] I mean, you can come with me. I don’t know. Also, my cat has to come with me.
Annalee: [00:52:33] I would miss. I would miss coffee. I feel like that that might be an Earth-only thing. So yeah, I think we need an institutional review board.
Charlie Jane: [00:52:41] We do. We do.
Annalee: [00:52:41] We need an interplanetary or even intergalactic panel that reviews this stuff. And also, the experiment needs to be clearly stated.
Charlie Jane: [00:52:54] Mm-hmm, informed consent.
Annalee: [00:52:53] It can’t be like, oh, we're gonna put you in a warm room and it turns out that the room will have no gravity and so you'll be barfing for four days. It needs to be very, very clear. So I guess the answer is, yes. We're willing to do experiments as long as there’s good oversight.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:08] Sign us up.
Annalee: [00:53:09] Yeah, so thank you, Christina. And thanks to anyone else who's supporting us at the $10 or more level, you can pop your questions in on Patreon and we will answer them as best we can if we know the answer.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:21] Yay. So we're at the end of another episode of Our Opinions Are Correct, or are we at the end? Possibly, we're just going to loop back in this episode will repeat endlessly. I mean, in some kind of Groundhog podcast scenario.
Annalee: [00:53:32] And we’ll just keep re-recording it over and over again. You never know.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:36] I mean, stranger things have happened. But we think this is the end of the episode. And if you just randomly found us you can find this podcast at any place that podcasts are found. If you listen to us on Apple podcasts, please leave a review. It makes a huge difference. And like we mentioned at the start, you can also find us on patreon patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect and on Twitter at @OOACpod
[00:54:02] Thanks so much to the valiant, the indefatigable, the incredible Veronica Simonetti, our engineer who, you know has been just robotically struggling with Pro Tools today. Thanks to Women's Audio Mission, where we record this episode. And thanks to Chris Palmer for the music and thanks once again to you for listening.
Annalee: [00:54:18] Thank you!
Charlie Jane: [00:54:18] And we’ll we'll be back in two weeks or if you're a patron we'll see you on Discord.
Annalee: [00:54:24] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:54:24] Bye.
Annalee: [00:54:25] Bye.
[00:54:25] OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.