As I noted last Saturday, the Terminator franchise has so far failed at time travel because it conflated soft and hard magic systems. Technology in science fiction serves the same function as soft and hard magic systems in fantasy, and I’ve chosen the word conflate intentionally.
Essentially, the writers of these films were trying to introduce a bunch of rules while attempting to keep everything mysterious. But the simple truth is that, while a writer can probably get away with this to an extent, as a story grows larger, it becomes impossible.
In discussing the successes and failures of the previous films, I’m attempting to demonstrate how this trick progresses and its ramifications for the overall story. Keep in mind that the writers didn’t know from one movie to the next whether there would be a sequel. So, a patchwork of a magic system was slopped together as they limped along.
Things must get bigger… but there’s a catch
But there was also an underlying motivation behind all the additional rules and characters: escalation. After all, simply having a robot from the future appear and try to kill someone over and over again would get repetitive. So each movie has to offer bigger and more complicated scenarios than the previous one: more robots, more time machines, more timelines. With all these additions come new rules that are pasted into the plot to justify them. But — whether from laziness or lack of time—the writers didn’t know how to weave all the new elements into the existing ones. They’d add a random rule and shroud it in mystery in the hopes of creating a situation that seemed more dangerous than the last.
The tactic of shrouding the story rules in mystery and creating escalation only works with soft magic systems. Usually, the story’s focus is on something other than the system. The magic or tech is just a means to an end, and the real story is about something else altogether.
Take the escalation in The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Gandalf’s powers are a classic example of a soft magic system. The Witch King is one of his antagonists. In the book, Gandalf and the Witch King have a standoff at the gate of Minas Tirith. Readers have no idea what these characters powers mean that they can and can’t do. And they’re not supposed to. The point of the standoff is to emphasize the turn in the battle when the Rohirrim unexpectedly arrive, ending the climatic showdown with Gandalf by forcing the Witch King back onto the battlefield.
For all the audience knew, the two wizards could’ve leveled the city, so it was perhaps best to not have them fight at the gate. The escalation in that situation comes from the fact of not knowing. There, the ambiguity plays into the narrative’s favor.
What if…
If the writers of the Terminator franchise had understood the use of ambiguity, one thing they could’ve done is had a completely different group from Skynet send a robot into the past. Perhaps John wound up a world leader of some sort instead of a military leader. Perhaps he ends up building a T-800 of his own for sentimental reasons. Perhaps a competing faction copies what he did and builds another Terminator based on his T-800 as well as a time machine. Thus he now must, once again, send a T-800 into the present to defend his past self.
I’m not saying this is a great plot, just a coherent one, one that keeps the time machine a soft system. It doesn’t add additional rules to the overall story, just more characters. A clever writer could further raise the stakes by calling into question the type of leader John is going to become, now that he no longer has a war to fight.
Why you can’t just add rules to a hard system
Adding random rules without paying attention to what’s already been added can’t work with hard systems because the rules are intricately connected to the plot. The issue arises because writers do not understand how the rules of a hard magic system work. They might broaden the world on the surface, but what they’re really doing is narrowing the focus of the plot onto the character. This is done by tying the rules of the system to the character’s development, and at the same time, using the rules to establish the severity of the threat.
Two things are happening at once. The bad guy has some power tied to the magic system that makes him unbeatable in the character’s current state. So, the character must learn some new thing that requires a journey of self-discovery. At the end of this process, he finally defeats the bad guy, as well as overcoming his own limitations. The stakes are not raised by going bigger and simply broadening the world; they’re raised by intertwining the rules with more than one thing: the power system and the self-discovery.
For example, in the novel series The Dresden Files (2000 and following) the readers know Harry Dresden’s skillset. He usually comes across a new foe who’s worse than his last foe. That requires him to learn something new, and at the same time, he learns something about himself. If he pulls a random trick out of his hat at the eleventh hour, it’s usually out of desperation. Each time author Jim Butcher does this, he must foreshadow the new ability in some way; otherwise, the reader will feel cheated.
How the rules of hard magic change the system
Furthermore, the rules of a hard magic system don’t just grow the world; they also narrow it. That is because they set new limits. They tell the audience not just what can happen, but what can’t. But whether the rules create new horizons or limit the possibilities, they are always focusing the story, usually on the character. They’re not just adding more for the sake of more.
In the Terminator franchise, no one understands the time machines. Nobody explains how they work — and yet more rules about time are added with every film. This goes on until everything is complete chaos and the franchise collapses under the weight of its own contradictory rules.
Does the butterfly effect escape the time travel problem?
Stories that utilize the butterfly effect — minor changes created in the past due to time travel create monstrous effects down the road — are not as prone to contradictions as the Terminator franchise. But they still suffer from the same flaw: the rule is being used to create mystery but the theory is a hard magic system. That is because the theory, right or wrong, embodies a definite mechanism: step on a butterfly in the past; alter the present.
The problem is, the theory is too broad to be applied effectively in a story. If catastrophic changes happen because someone stepped on a butterfly in the past, what happens if someone just kicked up dirt? And so on. The writers using this theory seem to think that the more complex something is, the more mysterious it is, when really all they’re doing is muddying the plot.
The movie The Butterfly Effect (2004) got around this problem in two ways. The film basically turned the time travel into magic instead of making it a form of technology and they limited the domino effect of the changes created by the protagonist’s interactions with others. This is the only film I’ve seen that treated the butterfly effect in a semi-believable way.
In short, hard magic systems, used correctly, narrow the story’s scope. The story is normally about a character using the rules to solve a problem. The rules are never used just to broaden a world or introduce an antagonist.
I would argue that a hard magic system serves as more of a telescope on a character than anything else. Soft systems use ambiguity to raise stakes; hard systems use the rules to connect the world with the character. But to use the rules to build such a connection requires that the writers understand the mechanics of their system. The writers of the Terminator series clearly didn’t, so they tried to, in a sense, cheat by conflating complexity with mystery. In so doing, they created contradictions. I’ll discuss how to tell a time-travel story the right way next Saturday.
Here’s the first essay on my series on time travel:
The pluses and the perils of time travel in science fiction. Time travel can be treated as a form or hard or soft “magic” but it is important not to confuse the two. Soft magic is vague and incidental; hard magic imposes rules on the story. Too often in science fiction, these rules get broken.
And the second:
Time travel: How and why the Terminator series worked — then didn’t Part 2: Time travel works well enough as a soft magic system but time-travel stories run into problems when it is treated as a hard magic system. Terminator 3 crossed into hard magic territory when it added the concept of fate to time travel, which means that specific rules began to matter.
