In the episode "Fallen Star," Easton plays a washed-up rock star who used to play in front of 80,000 people, and now she plays to small nightclub crowds. She's about to kill herself, when a mega-fan from the future travels back to stop her. It turns out that in the future, not only have they discovered time travel (by inhabiting the bodies of people in the past) but they've also ruined music. Everybody just listens to cookie-cutter bland music — not the vibrant adult-contemporary "quiet storm" slow jams that Ms. Easton belts out. It's a tragedy.

But by preventing Easton from killing herself, the time-traveling fan totally changes the future — it's now a better world for your great-grandchildren to grow up in, because everybody's listening to songs like the one you can hear Easton singing at the end of the above clip. Easton's character still has to die, of course, but luckily her backup singer randomly dies and they're able to transfer Easton's consciousness into the backup singer's body — so she can inspire the world, with lyrics like, "I'm growing stronger/Like a flower in the rain/I can feel the power/I can see the light/I can hear my heart telling me/It's going to be all right."

Debating crime with Plato. Not going well. Considering employing the Sobatic method and applying a thoughtful kick to the face.

And he also encounters some other time travelers along the way:

Theodore Logan, and Bill S. Preston, Esquire, eh? You want a history lesson? I'M THE GODDAMN BATMAN, DUDES!

Expect plenty of bat-puns ("Just invented the Commissioner Gordian Knot.") and ancient mysteries resolved through bat-logic ("The real secret of the pyramids? Ancient Batsignal.").

TimeLostBatman [Twitter via reddit]

Rules. Rules are what I keep coming back to as I think about this book, which won the Hugo in 1958. Is it fair to say that rules are more essential to science fiction than they are to other genres?

I mean, they're essential to any story, outside of outlandish, arty, experimental stuff (and even then, really). But you don't see romance fans or western fans or plain old regular fiction fans getting up in arms over whether the Millennium Falcon can do such-and-such, or whether zombies could really beat Galactus. You don't find Time Lords restricted to twelve regenerations in other genres, or pets you can't feed after midnight, or concerns about "canon." And I suppose that makes sense — rules are what science fact is about, too, and surely some of the same pleasure centers light up whether you're recalling the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition or how a real quark works.

Anyway, rules are what The Big Time lives and dies by. They're as crucial to its success as they are to its failure to have become something larger.

The book's first overarching success comes from circumventing the rules. (And isn't their circumventableness, like, the best part of rules? Nearly every one of Asimov's robot stories is predicated on that notion, anyway.) Leiber, the son of thespians, wrote The Big Time less as a novel per se and more as a play shaped like a novel. Almost all the action takes place in one room that you instinctively recognize as being about the size of a stage, and characters' entrances, exits, and movements across it are noticeably and elegantly choreographed. Plus, two of them speak in blank verse.

And (as io9 commenter Braak serendipitously pointed out this week) plays are subject to less rigorous standards of verisimilitude than, say, novels. So Leiber can get away with things — like skimpy character development — that he might not otherwise.

Most notably, for example, he has a couple who fall in love within minutes of meeting (technically, there's kind of a stalker-y thing going on there, but still, the romance is mutual and quick), and then the male half of it deciding rather abruptly to stage a revolution. It's all very sudden, and it should be jarring, but you automatically visualize it happening in front of you, as if you were in the audience, and you buy it.

Even the subject matter fits the theatrical style, involving as it does a small group of people wrestling with enormous, timeless questions. And they're literally timeless questions here: The cast are soldiers and support personnel fighting in the Change War, a conflict between two factions from the far future, the Spiders and the Snakes. The Spiders and Snakes muster their forces by pulling average people, from as far as a million years in the past and a million years in the future, out of their lives just before they die, bringing them into what's called the Change World, the zone beyond normal time and space. Then they send the recruits to different eras and places to conduct military actions, to change history.

There are, as you can imagine, a lot of rules about how it all works. The best is the law of the Conservation of Reality, which states that "when the past is changed, the future changes barely enough to adjust." It just feels true. Others get a little more complicated, and chief among Leiber's achievements is that he explains them clearly enough in a book that's only about 120 pages long, and has room left over to work them first into a mystery (that's the other genre of literature that thrives on rules) with a satisfying solution and second into a story that reaches a fairly profound conclusion.

He doesn't sacrifice the human element for artifice, either. Like the previous Hugo winner, The Big Time tells its story in the first person from the eyes of an entertainer — although rather than an actor, Greta Forzane is an escort whose job is to comfort and pleasure soldiers. I'm not sure you ever really get to know her — she's guarded, even inside her own head — but you do believe she's real, no qualification.

Given all of this (I mean, time travelers fighting an interplanetary war — and speaking in blank verse! — right?), the book seems like obvious fodder for the pop-culture machine. It's not, though, despite moments when the notion of warriors locked in an invisible struggle to determine the fate of humanity, governed by forces beyond their ken, may remind you of, like, Neo and Morpheus and Trinity or some other epic tale. It did me, anyway.

No, though there are sizable aspects to it, The Big Time is really a pretty small book. (And I mean that in a good way.) And frankly, Leiber's system of time travel probably is too complex to translate to the mainstream. But that's OK. This is still a haunting, multilayered, finely crafted work.

"Blogging the Hugos" appears every other weekend. In the next installment: A Case of Conscience, by James Blish, from 1959.

Moff's real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found here.

Bird's "Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels' Generous Offer" starts with the Fab Four accepting Lorne Micahels' joking offer to appear on Saturday Night Live. The performance reinvigorates the band and they start work on another album. For the next few decades, the Beatles collaborate with Michael Jackson (who ends up with a very different legacy), have faux press fights with the Rolling Stones, and protest the War in Iraq. Personally, I'm glad they managed to save The Muppet Show:

December 14, 1980. Having "had a sit back" (Ringo) after Eventually's staggering success and taken time to concentrate on their own projects and personal lives, the Beatles make their first televised appearance as a group since the SNL reunion, appearing on The Muppet Show. (Lennon leaves New York for the first time in six months to do the gig, eventually spending the entire month of December in England.) The episode is the highest rated episode of The Muppet Show in the show's history and the most watched television program of the entire year, beating even the news coverage of the 1980 American presidential election. The undisputed highlight of the episode is the "battle of the bands" between the Beatles and the Electric Mayhem (although Starr says his duet with Fozzie the Bear remains his personal favorite moment). Jim Henson would later say that the Beatles episode "rejuvenated" his joy in working on the show, which by that point he had begun to feel was growing stale: the show continues for another seven seasons.

Read it all the way to the end to see how Ringo pulled the whole thing off.

Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels' Generous Offer [Mightgodking — Thanks to Derek Pegritz]

Image by ~WickedAwsome.

BBC Northern Ireland is currently developing the five-hour series, which stars Tamzin Outhwaite as Detective Inspector Rebecca Flint and Emun Elliott as Dr. Christian King. After a series of images are sent to King's laboratory from space, he realizes that they hint at a devastating incident — one that has not happened yet. He teams up with Detective Flint to solve the mystery behind the images and try to prevent the catastrophe from occurring.

"We knew there was an appetite for a big, bold, fresh take on the cop show," explains Murray Ferguson, chief executive of Clerkenwell Films. "Something that might be different from the traditional formula of investigating a crime that has already taken place.

"So, we began to consider what if we could find a means of telling that story in reverse? Is there an original and credible way of a police team finding themselves with the knowledge of crimes or disasters happening in the future? We wanted the show to feel like it really could happen in the world we all know."

But the writers claim that we'll get some actual science mixed with our cop drama, and they've hired astrophysicist Margaret Aderin to consult on the theories behind the show's titular paradox. There's no date yet for Paradox, but the series will air as five individual episodes.

Behind the scenes of BBC's upcoming sci-fi series Paradox [The Geek Files]

The quest to observe the Higgs boson has certainly been plagued by its share of troubles, from the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider in 1993 to the Large Hadron Collider's streak of technical troubles. In fact, the projects have suffered such bad luck that Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto wonder if it isn't bad luck at all, but future influences rippling back to sabotage them. In papers like "Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal" and "Search for Future Influence From LHC," they put forth the notion that observing the Higgs boson would be such an abhorrent event that the future is actually trying to prevent it from happening.

"It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck," Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, "Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God." It is their guess, he went on, "that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them."

Nielsen and Ninomiya recognize that the theory sounds pretty crazy and that other projects involving a lot of delicate technology — such as the Hubble Telescope — have gone through their own periods of apparent bad luck. But their theory — wild as it is — is situated in current research in theoretical physics and time travel. If the observation of the Higgs boson would result in calamity, they claim it isn't outside the realm of possibility that someone from our future might exert influence on our time to stop it:

While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn't be trying to make one.

The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate [NY Times — Thanks to Boas_MC]

After talking to Quaid earlier today, we couldn't help watching him as the 1960s Queens everyman in Frequency, where his grown-up son starts babbling at him over the radio about baseball scores and who's going to die when. The son (played by Jim "Outlander" Caviezel) manages to save Quaid from dying in a warehouse fire, but through a kind of twisty movie logic, this leads to Quaid's wife being killed by a serial killer the following week. It never fails: You mess with the timelines, you get serial killers. It's all worth it for the above clip, where Caviezel has to explain the situation to Quaid. Who just takes it on board, because he's a mensch.

David McCandless created this visualization as part of his upcoming book of chart porn, The Visual Miscellaneum. Here, he charts the temporal paths of different TV and movie time travelers (Doctor Who was omitted for the sake of sanity, though he hasn't ruled out making a separate chart for the Time Lord), and, just for fun, imagines what might happen if time travelers who landed in the same year happened to meet up (I suspect that, despite his ingenuity, Marty McFly would not fare well against the Terminator). McCandless did feel that his research revealed one key deficiency in time travel stories: nearly all time travel journeys he mapped originate and land between the years 1900-2100.

[Information is Beautiful via Reddit]

As with the fantastic posters we showed you before, these helpful warnings are the work of Amy Kate Martin, whose Flickr stream includes bumper stickers for two dueling brands of clones. ("The You You Always Wanted" is one slogan.) This time around, the posters are warning against loose robots, careless changes to the time stream, and burning the whole prehistoric world down. The 826 Los Angeles store sells time travel goodies, and also teaches literacy and writing skills, since temponauts may actually need to be able to read the instructions on their time-capsules. Just maybe.

These new posters are available for just $19.99 each, or $69.99 for all four. [826 L.A.]

ABC claims it has been working with Kauffman for years on a possible small-screen adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger's novel. The plan is for the romance between Clare and the time-traveling (and, incidentally, television-allergic) Henry to unfold over the course of several seasons, with individual episodes having their own story lines.

Normally, I'm all for adapting novels for television and giving them more room to breathe than they get in a feature film, but with The Time Traveler's Wife, I'm much more hesitant. The novel is such a self-contained animal, constantly folding in on itself and exploring the predestination paradox created by Henry's time travel and the tragic consequences of his condition, making it much more suited to a miniseries or feature film than a long-form television epic. And Journeyman, Fox's now-defunct series that also focused on involuntary time travel, worked because it was an adventure and mystery story, and its time-traveling protagonist was able to alter the timeline with his actions. Henry is, by comparison, leading a fairly ordinary life, and can alter nothing. But I suspect that, in a full-length series, Henry's time travel would be an incidental part of his character, and we would be seeing more of a How I Met Your Mother where the romantic lead occasionally happens to visit younger and older versions of his wife.

'Time Traveler's Wife' Series Travels to ABC [The Wrap via /Film]

Goldberg, a physics professor at Drexel University, and co-author of the upcoming book A User's Guide to the Universe: Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes and Quantum Uncertainty, says that amidst the current glut of more fantastical time travel dramas — in which he includes Lost, Star Trek, and Heroes — The Time Traveler's Wife is a breath of relatively accurate air.

Looking at the theories developed by Albert Einstein, Hugh Everett, Igor Novikov, and Kip Thorne, Goldberg creates a checklist for accurate time travel rules ("You can't visit any time before your time machine was built." "You can't kill your own grandfather."), and explains how well The Time Traveler's Wife fits within those rules. The verdict: the story bends the rules a bit, but in a somewhat justifiable way, and comes out leagues ahead of most popular time travel tales.

One point I wish Goldberg had addressed is whether nudity is a prerequisite for time travel, because personally when they build the time machine, I'd prefer to arrive fully clothed.

Time-Traveling for Dummies [Slate]

Criminal Activity

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger: Involuntary time travel comes with plenty of disadvantages, not the least of which is finding yourself suddenly and unexpectedly naked without any money. Fortunately, the predestination paradox can be a handy survival tool. Time traveler Henry often finds himself sent to the same points in time and space as his younger self, and teaches him how to find clothing, pick locks, and steal wallets. It's sort of like illicit father-son bonding, just with himself.

The Joy of Sex

The Time Traveler's Wife: Another unexpected side effect of time travel is that a horny, adolescent Henry is every now and then confronted with a nearly equally young, equally horny duplicate of himself. This makes for some rather spectacular instances of masturbation, but it's really awkward when his father walks in on him.

—All You Zombies— by Robert Heinlein: The Unmarried Mother was an intersex, though apparently female, teenager who was seduced by a mysterious older man. Many years and a sex change later, she, now he, is sent back in time, where he meets and makes love to a very familiar girl.

The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold: Daniel Eakins is the sort of time traveler who throws caution to the wind, sampling all that time travel has to offer: foiling assassinations, visiting great moments in history, and using his knowledge of the future to bet on the ponies. So it's no wonder that when he meets up with the same- and opposite-sex versions of himself, he tends to get it on with them.

Futurama: Bender's Big Score: When the alien nudists get a hold of the time travel code tattooed on Fry's rear end, they're mostly interested in stealing artifacts from 20th Century Earth, although they do at one point take a time out for Nudar-on-Nudar nookie.

How to Win a Fight

The Kid: Russel Dritz's dirtbag ways may go back to his childhood, when he was picked on by bullies and lost his mother to illness. When Rusty, his younger self, ambles into Russel's life, he finds there are some subtle ways that he can change the past. First on the agenda: Getting the kid into a boxing ring so he can learn how to throw a punch.

How to Become Rich and Powerful

Back to the Future, Part II: The 2015 version of Biff decides that all of his troubles would be solved his he had been extremely wealthy in the past. So he steals Doc Brown's time-traveling DeLorean and, with a 2015 sports almanac in hand, travels to 1955, when he gives the almanac to his younger self. And it seems to work: Biff is rich beyond his wildest dreams, he's quietly had his rival George McFly murdered, and he's married to George's now artificially-endowed widow Lorraine. Of course, it all goes to hell when that pesky Marty McFly appears on the scene.
Gargoyles "Vows:" In move that revealed the entire series as one big predestination paradox, David Xanatos travels back in time on his wedding day to give his younger self a collection of priceless gold coins, along with instructions on how to invest the proceeds from their sale. Is it cheating? Probably, but in Xanatos's mind, it makes him the very definition of a self-made man.

By His Bootstraps by Robert Heinlein: When Bob is pulled thirty thousand years into the future by a slightly older, though no wiser version of himself, he discovers that humans have become a primitive, compliant people. Diktor, a fellow native of the 20th Century, explains that a technologically advanced person could easily become king of these sheep-like folks, and gives Bob a list of 20th Century items to bring to the future. Bob complies, but travels to a point ten years before he meets Diktor. It takes Bob a shockingly long time to realize that he's in a Heinlein story and that he is himself Diktor.

How to Win the Girl of Your Dreams

Futurama: Bender's Big Score: Fry is distraught when Leela, the love of his life, is won over by an older and more mature stranger named Lars. When Lars is revealed to be Fry's older (and this time wiser) duplicate, Fry should probably recognize that he could woo Leela if only he'd successfully reign in his adolescent nature. But it being Fry, he fails to take the lesson to heart, and quickly moves on to another girl.

How to Travel Through Time

The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter: In Baxter's sequel to H.G. Wells The Time Machine, we learn that the Time Traveller didn't build his device completely unaided. A mysterious benefactor gave the Traveller a sample of a radioactive substance to study, a substance that ultimately makes time travel possible. Of course, like all mysterious strangers in time travel stories, the Time Traveller's benefactor is, in fact, an older version of himself.

How to Save the World

Heroes "Five Years Gone:" One of the great things about the power to travel through time is that if you get that whole "save the world" business wrong the first time, you can just keep trying. And Hiro Nakamura has the added benefit of traveling through time to change events himself, and leaving instructions for his much less bad-ass past self.

Doctor Who "Time Crash:" The Doctor meets up with himself a great deal, if for no other reason than two or three or five Doctors are better than one. But sometimes it's just to ensure a little predestination paradox magic. The Fifth Doctor watches the Tenth Doctor create an artificial supernova that cancels out a giant hole in fabric of reality. Naturally, the Tenth Doctor only knows how to do this because he watched himself do it when he was the Fifth Doctor.

Doctor Who "The Parting of the Ways:" Rose Tyler gets her own predestination paradox going when she looks into the heart of the TARDIS. The TARDIS gives her the power to transcend time and space, letting her leave the message "Bad Wolf" to herself in the past that ultimately lead Rose and the Doctor back to this time and place.

Teen Titans "Titans Tomorrow:" When the Teen Titans travel to the future, they're eager to see what they're like as adult superheroes. But the future is unexpectedly bleak, with many of the Titans turned to violence and destruction, tearing the United States in two and turning the Western half into a police state. Fortunately, the Titans are able to learn from their future selves what set these events in motion, and are able to prevent their dystopic future.

Babylon 5: To add another wrinkle in the predestination paradox, Jeffrey Sinclair finds that his entire life is being guided by his future self from the past. Sinclair eventually learns that he is the great Minbari historical figure Valen, and Sinclair must eventually travel back in time, become Valen, and write the prophesies that will guide Sinclair's life in the future. Fate, or proof that his talents transcend time and space?

The Time Traveler's Wife opens August 14. And hopefully we'll get a bigger version of that poster soon. For now, you can watch the trailer in high definition over at Yahoo. [via RopeOfSilicon]

The time-travel episodes of Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego are pure win, especially the idea of Carmen impersonating Marcus Aurelius without anybody noticing. And I love that Ivy, the detective sent to track down Carmen along with her snot-nosed brother, manages to pwn this massive dude in the Arena. "Goddess of strength," indeed. Why don't more time-traveling villains come up with such amazingly byzantine schemes?

First of all, before I get hate mail/comments about the Doctor Who thing, here's what I mean. Yes that show's hero travels around in a time machine, so in a sense every episode is about time travel. And yet, most Who stories use the TARDIS to set up the story and then we're done with it. Doctor Who has done relatively few shows where time travel is fundamental to the story - "Day Of The Daleks" comes to mind, and so does "The Girl In The Fireplace" - whereas Trek has dipped into the time-travel-story well on a super regular basis.

1) Time-travel can change history - but only if you mess with someone "important." The very first Trek time-travel story is "Tomorrow Is Yesterday": the Enterprise accidentally kidnaps Air Force captain John Christopher, and he gains knowledge of the future that could change the present. (Kirk and Spock almost just remove Captain Christopher altogether, but they discover that his son heads a mission to Saturn. Christopher, himself, is totally worthless and wouldn't be missed.)

And in "City On The Edge Of Forever," a drug-crazed McCoy accidentally changes history so the Nazis win World War II, and as a result in the present, the Enterprise no longer exists. (This also seems to be the theory of time travel the new movie espouses, without getting too spoilery.) And of course, in the movie First Contact, the Borg temporarily succeed in going back and changing history, so that the 24th century Earth turns into a Borg hive — until the Enterprise goes back in time and stops them. Also in Deep Space Nine's "Past Tense," Sisko travels back to 2024 San Francisco, where he accidentally causes the death of civil-rights leader Gabriel Bell. Sisko winds up taking Bell's place, and Bell's picture in all the history books changes into Sisko's. Similarly, Sisko goes back in time to prevent a Klingon spy from assassinating Kirk in "Trials and Tribble-ations."

Also, people in alternate futures are able to go back and prevent their futures from ever "happening" in the DS9 episode "The Visitor" and the Voyager episodes "Timeless" and "End Game."

2) If you travel back in time, your mind will revert to its past state. Also in "Tomorrow Is Yesterday," the Enterprise drops off Christopher at the exact moment they originally kidnapped him, and somehow this leaves him with no memory of the intervening events. (Even though days have passed for him, he sometimes loses all memory of them.) And in the episode "All Our Yesterdays," Spock travels back in time thousands of years to a barbaric ice age on another planet. And even though it's still the same Spock, he suddenly starts reverting to barbarism and acting like a crazay old-school Vulcan, with the heated desires and unbridled rage.

3) You can travel back in time, but you'll just become part of established events. In the episode "Assignment Earth," the Enterprise once again travels back to 1968 Earth, and this time Kirk and Spock try to stop the mysterious Gary Seven from launching, and detonating, a missile to stop the Cold-War arms race. Kirk and Spock nearly stop Gary Seven, but in the end, it turns out the missile blows up exactly 104 miles above Earth - just where it "always" did. So Kirk and Spock's time-traveling interference was "always" part of events. Also, in the TNG epsiode "Captain's Holiday," Picard destroys the super-magical device, the Uthat, that aliens from the future have stolen and brought back in time. And then the aliens say that Picard's decision to destroy the Uthat was already in their "historical records." Also, I'm guessing the Voyager episode "Future's End" belongs to this rule as well, because Henry Starling "invents" a whole bunch of technology that we always had in the 1990s, thanks to his exposure to 29th century tech.

4) Sometimes you have to travel in time just to make things happen the way they're "supposed" to. In the Next Generation episode "Time's Arrow," the Enterprise crew finds Data's severed head in the ground, dating back to the 19th century. As a result of this, Data goes back in time. Later, Guinan tells Picard that he needs to be part of the away team that goes back to 19th century San Francisco, because she remembers meeting Picard back then. Later, Data is decapitated, and his head winds up in the ground. Picard remarks that history is "fulfilling itelf." But at the same time, FutureGuinan won't tell Riker how to save Picard, for fear of changing history. So which is it?

5) Past, present and future are one. This seems to be the message of "All Good Things," the Next Generation finale. Picard's mind starts to "slip" from his present-day self to his "Encounter At Farpoint" self, and himself 25 years in the future. In all three eras, Picard journeys to the same point in space, where he orders a tachyon scan... which inadvertently creates a time/space anomaly that grows bigger the further back in time you go, so that billions of years in the past, it destroys the whole Alpha Quadrant. It seems as though Picard is seeing all three time periods as the same, with a unified causality, so that if he changes something in one era, it affects both other eras automatically. Ditto in "Tapestry," where Picard is able to make changes to his youthful mistakes from Starfleet Academy, and they instantly alter his life in the present. (This version is probably pretty similar to #1.)

6) If you blow up a time-travel device, all of the changes that a time-traveler has already made to history will be undone. This is the operating principle in Voyager's "Year Of Hell Part 2," where Janeway blows up the Krenim time machine and suddenly everything is returned to the way it was before the Krenim started meddling with time-travel. Also, Enterprise had a long-running storyline about the Temporal Cold War, in which four different groups from the future, including a future Federation, compete to change history. Eventually, the temporal shenanigans get crazier and crazier, with people going back and killing Lenin, and one alien engineering a timeline where the Nazis win World War II (it's always the Nazis winning World War II.) And at last, Captain Archer and his crew face Vosk, the biggest time-violator, in the alternate Nazi-dominated past, and succeed in destroying his temporal conduit. As soon as the device is destroyed, everything returns to normal.

Note: I realize there are at least a dozen or so other Star Trek episodes that involve time travel, which I haven't referenced in this article. You'll have to take my word for it that I considered all of them, and decided they fit in with one of the theories of time travel I mention here.

All screencaps are from TrekCore.

Tennant already filmed a scene, from his final episode, where he says goodbye to 1970s traveling companion Sarah Jane Smith and her adopted son Luke. But now Tennant is back in Penarth, where Sarah Jane's house is, and so is his time machine, the TARDIS. This could just be another pick-up scene from his Doctor Who episode, except that Tennant is wearing a different outfit. Also, rumor has it he was at the script read-through for the third season of Sarah Jane's spin-off show, the Sarah Jane Adventures.

Here's hoping he will turn up in at least one episode of Sarah Jane's show — it's his last chance, after all. I have no clue when her next season will air, or whether it'll be before his own final episodes. It would be terribly, terribly naughty of Tennant's Doctor to say his final goodbyes to Sarah Jane, regenerate into Matt Smith and then have an earlier version of himself pop up to have one last adventure with her. (Or maybe it's the other way around. He would have an adventure with her, then go back to say goodbye — accidentally arriving at an earlier point in her timeline? Either way, confusing!) Set pics by Mali. [Planet Gallifrey]

Talking to Film Journal, McG explained what he thinks will happen in his second Terminator film:

I strongly suspect the next movie is going to take place in a [pre-Judgment Day] 2011. John Connor is going to travel back in time and he's going to have to galvanize the militaries of the world for an impending Skynet invasion. They've figured out time travel to the degree where they can send more than [just] one naked entity. So you're going to have hunter killers and transports and harvesters and everything arriving in our time and Connor fighting back with conventional military warfare, which I think is going to be fucking awesome. I also think he's going to meet a scientist that's going to look a lot like present-day Robert Patrick [who famously played the T-1000 in Terminator 2], talking about stem-cell research and how we can all live as idealized, younger versions of ourselves

All I can say, is whoa. I don't even know where to start.

Actually, I do know where to start: throwing out the Terminator series' most iconic rule for time travel — that only living tissue can travel, and anything covering it gets shredded — seems like a really weird notion. If you can send a Hunter-Killer back in time, what can't you send back? At what point do you shred the space-time continuum so much that nothing makes sense any more? Also, according to Terminator 3, Judgment Day happens in 2004. So what moves it forward seven years?

I'm also wondering what happens to make Skynet so desperate, it's willing to invade the past in such a dramatic fashion. I could be wrong, but isn't one of the cornerstones of the series that Skynet treads somewhat carefully about tampering with the past, lest it undo its own rise to power? There could be a clue to the ending of Terminator Salvation in there somewhere — maybe John Connor does something that puts Skynet in a no-win situation?

Or maybe McG's just yanking our chains?

Meanwhile, here are some pics from Yahoo that I don't think we've posted before:

1. Your mother falls for you.
When Marty McFly heads back to the Fifties in Back to the Future, I'm fairly certain winning his mother's affections wasn't on his to-do list, especially since he needs her to fall in love with his father in order to be, you know, born in the first place. Also because it's his own mother. It's bad enough as a teenager to have to contemplate your parent's love life; the last thing you really want is to become a participant. And Marty McFly might be a lot of things, but he isn't the guy from Reason #2, who . . .

2. You fall for your own mother.
Sure, Oedipus did it, but we all know how well that went. So when Lazarus Long, the protagonist of Robert A. Heinlein's Time Enough for Love, finds himself doing just that, he should have an inkling it's a bad move. Long accidentally jumps into 1916 when he'd been aiming for the Twenties, and he falls in love with his own mother. In order to avoid the object of his affections, Long enlists in the army and ends up a combat soldier in World War One. (Un)fortunately, he survives and returns to consummate his love. Awkward. (Basically, he manages to end up fighting in war that he didn't really want to and still manages to do his own mother. This makes a strong case against time travel right here.)

(2B. You are your own mother: Heinlein also wrote the short story titled "—All You Zombies—" in which the protagonist somehow manages to be both his own mother and his own father due to a lot of relatively convoluted circumstances, including emergency sex changes and baby-stealing. Thus convincing me that sexual relations and time travel do not mix.)

3. Your mother thinks you're having an affair with your father.
Actually, "Father's Day" (Series 1, Episode 8 of Doctor Who) gives out a whole laundry list of reasons you should never voluntarily go back in time to meet your parents. Rose wants to be there for her father, Pete, on the day he dies, but when she saves him, she seriously messes up time and Reapers (flying creature who eat temporal paradoxes for lunch—literally) descend. When she and her father meet up with her mother, her mother, Jackie, assumes Rose to be her husband's hot young mistress. Rose's father explains that, no, Rose is his daughter, and Jackie reads it as one of those "Surprise! I have a secret lovechild from my dark secret past" things, à la an episode of As the World Turns. Pete hands Rose her baby self, but Rose having physical contact with another her causes further paradoxing. (Perhaps an addendum to the rules of time travel should be, "Don't touch yourself.") Actually, this whole situation is starting to sound like a soap opera. But with paradox-eating monsters.

4. You disappoint your mother and she doesn't even know who you are.
In Episode 4 of Life on Mars (UK), Sam Tyler, still stuck back in 1973, runs into his own mother, Ruth, while trying to take down a gangster named Stephen Warren that has half the police force in his pocket. Warren even tried to pay off Sam, who takes the money very, very reluctantly. When he learns that his mother's having money trouble, he tries to alleviate his guilt by offering her the money. She is, of course, offended, additionally reading him as one of those dirty bribe-taking cops. Lucky for Sam, she has no idea he's her son, so her opinion of Sam Tyler hasn't been lowered any. Just her opinion of a cop she thinks is named Bolan. (Who knew that Sam was a glam rock fan? Additional note: In the equivalent episode of the US remake, Sam's mother is named Rose. That's right. Rose Tyler.)

5. Dramatic Irony
In "In the Beginning" (Supernatural, Season 4, Episode 3), the angel Castiel (who I notice dresses exactly like Loomis from the original Halloween film) sends Dean Winchester back in time to 1973, telling him to "stop it." Stop what? He really doesn't say. And I'm noticing that 1973 seems a popular year to meet your parents. Anyway, Dean meets his father, John, and basically tells him which car to buy, before running in to his mother and learning that (Surprise!) she comes from a family of hunters, and (Surprise! Irony!) it's a lifestyle she would never wish on her own future children. Which is, of course, part of the appeal of John: he's not a hunter, just a nice, normal guy. Again with the dramatic irony. Anyway, by the end of the episode, she's made a deal with the Yellow-Eyed Demon that seals Sam's demon baby fate (and her own doom) in exchange for John's (nice, normal, non-hunter) life. After which, Castiel shows up and tells Dean he couldn't have stopped that from happening anyway. He just told Dean to try in order to prove that you can't. Methinks Castiel needs to find less jerktastic ways of proving his points. But, hey, at least Dean got an experience that O. Henry probably couldn't have written better.

6. Your mother-daughter meet-up becomes a bad after-school special. Literally.
In 1977, Francine Pascal of Sweet Valley fame wrote Hangin' Out with Cici, a Young Adult novel that tells the tale of an adolescent girl named Victoria who thinks that her mother is too strict and doesn't understand her. Clearly, her mother has no idea what it's like being thirteen. One day, however, she finds herself suddenly in the past, where she meets a cool girl named Cici, who's apparently the most awesome new friend Victoria could have asked for. It's no surprise, then, that Cici is Victoria's mother, who does in fact know what being thirteen is like. Touching, right? So touching, in fact, that in 1981, it was made into an ABC Afterschool Special, entitled My Mother Was Never a Kid. I figure the lesson was supposed to be something touching about parental relationships, but what it really teaches you is that time travel can happen anytime, anywhere, without warning or reason.