The recent film Safety Not Guaranteed and the upcoming film Looper, along with the Doctor Who premiere have reminded me just how much I love time travel as a premise in fiction. It always seems like time travel gives one that swagger that says, "Bow ties are cool." (Sometimes time travelers even say that very sentence out loud.) So, I decided to count down the eight time travelers that I think are the coolest. Which time traveler should be on this list that I forgot? Who do you think should not be on this list? Leave comments below.
I want to start by validating your belief that Hermione is a total nerd before she starts to come into her own in HP and the Goblet of Fire. And since HP and the Prisoner of Azkaban is the third book and Goblet of Fire is the fourth, and third precedes fourth in the progression of ordinal numbers, I'll gladly stamp your opinion: VALIDATED ... But I disagree. Hermione is so cool because she uses time travel to learn more. If I were a wizard attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, I would be absorbing all of the information and getting all of the practice that I possibly could. Listen, Harry may be the chosen one, but he’s not a good wizard. And it’s because he doesn’t apply himself. I would be applying for a time-turner every semester!!! Beyond fitting my own criteria for cool, I will also remind you that Hermione steps up and punches Malfoy in this book. And we all want to punch Malfoy almost as much as we want to punch Joffrey Baratheon. Even more cool points for Hermione.
Phil Connors (Groundhog Day)
Phil Connors is cool because he’s played by Bill Murray. And Bill Murray can’t help but be cool. Phil is stuck in a time loop, waking up each morning at six o’clock, always on February 2, always in a hotel room in Puxsutawney, PA, and always the radio alarm is playing Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe.” What started Phil’s involuntary time travel? What it some Groundhog Day miracle, probably the work of trickster faeries looking to teach a valuable lesson about not discounting the mystical truths conveyed by weather-prognosticating rodents? Or perhaps they want to teach Phil to stop being so cynical and egotistical and learn the value of every moment? I hope so, because that’s what happened. If Phil’s time travel was intended to persuade him to respect groundhog weathermen, then it failed miserably.
After living the perfect day, which apparently involves catching kids falling out of trees, playing the piano, and charming Andie MacDowell’s character Rita, Phil Connors is released from his time loop prison. “Goodbye,” the faeries likely said to Phil adding, “Remember the lessons of this fine Groundhog Day and bone Andie MacDowell. For that is the will of the Weatherhog.”
Dr. Sam Beckett (Quantum Leap)
In the not-to-distant future past of 1995, Dr. Sam Beckett uses himself as a guinea pig for his time-travel experiment and gets himself lost in time. The time travel has to major reprecussions: 1) Sam’s memories about himself and his experiment along with many others are incomplete and 2) The experiment’s AI (Ziggy) registers that something went wrong in the past and it leaps Sam into the bodies of other people who lived during his own lifetime (from around December, 1952 to sometime in 1995 or so) to right the wrong that Ziggy can’t identify.
Sam’s only companion and only link back to his own time is the holographic projection of the womanizing Rear Admiral Al Calavicci that can only be seen by Sam, animals, some children, and the mentally ill. Al tries to feed Sam information to help him right whatever wrong he has to right for the next leap to occur.
Sam is cool because he comes off as confident and charming which are not usually qualities to be found in former child prodigies with a 267 IQ and an eideic memory. Aside from his strange decision to step into his experimental time-travel machine, Dr. Sam Beckett is a pretty happening guy.
Marty McFly (Back to the Future)
Yeah, Marty McFly starts out as a short-sighted, short-tempered teenager with a dorky father that still gets pushed around by grown-up high-school bully Biff Tannen. But can you really remember that? It never happened? Well, luckily Robert Zemeckis filmed the Back to the Future trilogy with some amazing film technology that can capture and retain information from alternate timelines. Thus, we all know the future (2015) Marty McFly whose life really takes a nose-dive after getting into a car crash in 1985 and we know the present (1985 at the end of Back to the Future III) Marty McFly who has learned to control his temper and not let others draw him into something stupid by calling him chicken.
It seems just as likely that we all know Marty McFly is cool. He plays the guitar, he rides a skateboard, he invented skateboards, he was the first Calvin Klein underwear model, he inspired his father to become a science fiction author, he stood up to Biff (and his grandson Griff and his great-grandfather Buford “Mad Dog”) multiple times, he got his dad to stand up to Biff, he wrote “Johnny B. Goode,” he saved Doc Brown’s life, he’s really good at Wild Gunman, his skateboarding skills translate into hoverboard skills, he came up with a scheme that made Biff Tannen filthy rich and powerful, he fixed that, Wester Union delivers him seventy-year-old letters in the middle of a road, in the middle of nowhere, he went back in time to save Doc Brown’s life again, he popularized the name Clint Eastwood (but not fighting with ghost Obama), and his Wild Gunman skills translate into real-world shooting skills. Also, he learned his lesson in the end: if you have an undefined relationship with a brilliant theoretical physicist who invents a time machine, you can fix your parents’s inadequacies by encouraging your father to violence in the past and you can have some extra time and experience to mature in order to prevent yourself from making a single poor decision which will make your future life suck.
T-800 Model 101 aka The Terminator (Terminator)
After Skynet initiates and creates worldwide destruction to save itself, it captures some surviving humans to build factories which Skynet then uses to produce various lines of cyborg soldiers. One of these lines is the T-800 Model 101. These Terminators appear externally to be human--albeit an Austrian body-building human who has trouble enunciating in English--and are effective at catching survivors off guard.
At the same time that Skynet is amassing an army, some survivors form the Resistance to protect humans and to destroy Skynet. Led--and authorized--by knowledge and training imparted to him by his mother (Sarah Connor), John Connor eventually emerges as the leader to gain victory for the Resistance, only to discover that Skynet has worked out a way to time-travel and has sent a T-800 Model 101 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) back in time to kill Sarah Connor before John is ever born. John sends back another member of the Resistance named Kyle Reese to protect his mother. Reese succeeds at saving Sarah Connor, and, just for extra credit, succeeds at impregnating her, creating John Connor in the first place.
The Resistance eventually reprograms another T-800 Model 101 and sends it back in time to protect a younger John Connor from Skynet’s prototype liquid metal Terminator designated T-1000. Sarah Connor discovers through the T-800 that Miles Dyson will create the microprocessor that makes Skynet possible, and decides to kill him to prevent Skynet’s creation. Dyson reveals that the microprocessor which he has been designing is reverse engineered from pieces of the T-800 that was sent to assassinate Sarah Connor. Sarah, John, Dyson, and the protector T-800 blow up Cyberdyne Systems (the creators of Skynet). Finally, Sarah, John, and the protector T-800 defeat the T-1000 by knocking it into a vat of molten steel, after which John throws the components from the assassin T-800 into the vat and Sarah lowers the protector T-800 into the vat, eliminating the technology that Cyberdyne needs to create Skynet.
As an emotionless, calculated killer, the assassin T-800 earned a lot of cool points. The assassin T-800 spoke only eighteen lines of dialogue in the first film, almost all of which pertain to his mission and many of them are well-known (“Are you Sarah Connor? ... [gunshot]” “Your clothes. Give them to me.” And of course, “I’ll be back.”) But it was the protector T-800 that really cemented the Terminator as a cool time-traveler. The protector Terminator begins to learn and exhibit a humanity. Because of his interactions with the young John Connor he learns that there is some value to superfluity and even gain a sense of humor. The protector Terminator utters fewer iconic lines, but he definitely comes off as even cooler than the assassin Terminator.
Phillip J. Fry (Futurama)
How is a delivery boy a with a below-average intelligence, and lacking maturity and ambition a cool time traveler? What if I were to tell you that Fry is his own grandfather? What do you have to say to that? ... What? ... How is that not cool? Well, despite what some stubborn readers may think, the fact that Fry is his own grandfather is, according to all scientific texts, super cool. (Did that not help my case?)
After being cryogenically frozen for 1000 years, former pizza-delivery boy becomes future-present package delivery boy working for his thirty-times great nephew in the year 3000. Somehow the energy released by a supernova combines with an energy created when Fry puts a metal popcorn tin in the microwave and sends the crew of the Planet Express delivery ship back in time to Roswell, New Mexico, 1947. Fry runs into the man he believes is his grandfather (Enos) who is a hapless soldier stationed at Roswell Air Base. Believing his grandfather--and, therefore, himself--is in danger, Fry attempts to keep Enos safe which leads to Fry inadvertently killing him. Confused when he doesn’t cease to exist, and attracted to the woman he once believed to be his grandmother (Mildred) but now believes to not be his grandmother, he and Mildred get down to business in the bedroom. Afterwards, Fry discovers that Mildred is his grandmother and he just impregnated her with his own father (Yancy Fry, Sr.)
Wait, that’s not all. Because Fry “did the nasty in the pasty,” he lacks the delta brainwave, which allows him to save the Earth on one occasion and the universe on another occasion.
Plus, Fry’s a nice guy and he says funny stuff on the regular. So, he’s cool guys. Trust me.
Ash (Army of Darkness)
Imagine if you were to update Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by rewriting the titular yankee as a demon-slayer with a chainsaw for a hand and a 1980s-era science textbook and replace Morgan le Fay’s innocuous sorcery with a host of Deadites controlled by the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis. Yeah, you just turned a classic into a...classic-er?
Ashley “Ash” Williams was just going on a little spring break getaway with four friends--including his girlfriend (Linda)--to a cabin in the backwoods of Tennessee, when they discover the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis (aka Naturan Demanto, aka Book of the Dead) and a recording of an archaeology professor reading incantations from the book. Playing the recording releases demons that proceed to possess and eliminate everyone but Ash, who throws the book into the fire. However, this only briefly slows the evil force.
The next day another group of people--including the aforementioned archaeology professor’s daughter (Annie), her research partner, and a helpful young couple--arrives at the cabin, only to find themselves falling victim to the same fate as the others. Ash’s right hand becomes possessed leading him amputate it himself. Annie helps Ash attach a chainsaw to the his right wrist and eventually recites a spell from the book opening a portal that sucks in the demonic force, Ash, and his 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 and drops all of them in fourteenth-century England.
While there Ash fights off an evil version of himself and employs modern scientific knowledge to help lead Lord Arthur’s army to victory against the Deadites. According to the restored original ending of Army of Darkness, Ash falls asleep in a cave and awakes to a post-apocalyptic future world.
But Ash wouldn’t be Ash if he weren’t played by Bruce Campbell, whose face is so indelibly connected with the character that he is the artistic model for comic book and video game portrayals of Ash. It’s impossible to tell where Bruce Campbell stops and Ash begins.
The Doctor (Doctor Who)
Being the last surviving member of a two-hearted race that can perceive the past, present and all possible futures is pretty cool on its own. Throw in a millennial lifespan, extreme intelligence, telepathy, the ability to regenerate his dying body, and fluency in baby and horse, and you’ve got a pretty high potential for awesome. Toss in a time machine (the TARDIS) and you’ve got the coolest guy to ever travel through time: The Doctor.
Currently--in that relative timey-wimey sort of sense--the Doctor is approximately 1,200 years old (“A Town Called Mercy) and in his eleventh incarnation. The Doctor has had numerous traveling companions and visited countless moments in time and areas in space throughout the program’s 787-episode history, and there is no end to his journey in sight.
As I haven’t had experience with every incarnation, Doctor Who fanatics might scoff at my opinion. Still, the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) is my Doctor. The Tenth Doctor has gained a good handle on the trauma of the Last Great Time War and is dealing with the guilt of being the one who ended that war by destroying the majority of the Daleks, his own people and his own planet, the loneliness of being the last of his kind, and the burden of being in love with a human who he will have to watch grow old and die long before himself. Despite all of that, the Tenth Doctor adds an extra spark of humorous madness and lust for life that was less apparent in his previous incarnation. (Don’t get me wrong, I love Christopher Eccleston and everything about the way he portrayed the Ninth Doctor).
Which incarnation of the Doctor is your favorite?
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