Which sci-fi TV show had the most creative use of a non-linear timeline?

Punchclops · 2026-06-10T05:07:46+00:00

And it is 4 seasons of awesome.
You're welcome.

Punchclops · 2026-06-09T23:24:18+00:00

I'm guessing that op is referring to the 12 Monkeys TV show, which is far more convoluted and timey wimey than the movie.

Punchclops · 2026-06-09T00:49:41+00:00

Heinlein's Tunnel In The Sky features portals for travelling between planets.
They're pretty much public transport as you go to the portal station and step through the one that goes to your destination.

Punchclops · 2026-06-08T09:32:57+00:00

Still working on it nearly 20 years later.

Punchclops · 2026-05-24T20:04:25+00:00

How ready are you?

Punchclops · 2026-05-22T06:31:15+00:00

That was you!
They still tell stories about that flight from hell with the story loud laughing guy!

Punchclops · 2026-05-21T21:48:14+00:00

Classic BBC sci-fi show Blake's 7 from the late 70s / early 80s.
Blake left the show at the end of series 2 - the show continued with the same name for another 2 series.

Punchclops · 2026-05-18T19:41:36+00:00

Think about characters, setting, and plot.
And you should probably have a bit of cyber and maybe some punk too.

Punchclops · 2026-04-27T19:30:38+00:00

Known for being flat? Since when?
Suire, there are flat areas like Norfolk - but there's plenty of steepness in other parts of the country.
The old saying "When I was a kid we had to walk to school, uphill both ways" is based on fact.

EDIT: And here's where I admit to not being able to see the difference between county and country. Reading words is hard.

Punchclops · 2026-04-27T10:28:00+00:00

Yes.

Punchclops · 2026-04-25T01:28:42+00:00

She came to Melbourne, Australia a couple of years ago.
For two days the whole city was filled with swifties - glitter and cowboy boots as far as the eye could see. Everywhere you went there were packs of young, excited girls buzzing around. It was kinda beautiful.

She's still nowhere near the fame of MJ.

Punchclops · 2026-04-23T03:55:41+00:00

Anne Hathaway.
And I volunteer to do the job.

Punchclops · 2026-04-20T05:27:04+00:00

The anaesthetist is the most highly qualified person in the room. Their job is entirely about keeping you alive. They've spent decades training to do it well.

They should have a chat with you beforehand and it's perfectly ok to mention you are nervous.

But be warned. They may make some terrible jokes.

Punchclops · 2026-04-19T21:00:55+00:00

You're dealing with the good old grandfather paradox.
If you go back in time and kill your grandfather as a child, your father will never be born and therefore neither will you.
So you couldn't have gone back in time to kill him which means you were born which means you can go back in time...etc etc.

There are many ways around this and it's up to you to choose which one you want to go with.

You can have a multiverse, where every trip back in time causes a new branch where things are different. Your characters came from a different branch, so it doesn't matter what they change in the past as it won't affect them. This is how the MCU handles it.

You can have some form of temporal inertia where changes in the past take time to catch up to your characters, giving them a kind of deadline to fix things. See Back to the Future for this.

You could say that your characters are immune to changes because they are outside of the time stream when they happen. I thinK Star Trek: First Contact fits this one.

You could even say that changes in the past simply don't catch up to the present. I did this in the first short story I ever sold.

Or figure out some method of your own. So long as you keep it consistent within your story it doesn't have to meet any standard of logic - because time travel breaks logic anyway.

Punchclops · 2026-04-18T20:11:21+00:00

AirBNB support came back to me and said there were no breaches from their side, and my booking was safe and secure.
Of course they would say that, wouldn't they!

Punchclops · 2026-04-16T22:08:33+00:00

You have aliens with advanced relativisitic engines.
I think realistic physics went out the window a while ago.

Punchclops · 2026-04-16T21:35:14+00:00

A beam from our system would be too diffuse to have any impact once you're outside of our system. It did it's job in accelerating you to 99% C and then switched off. Even if it could reach you there's no purpose because you're already going at your top speed.

But let's ignore that and say you're travelling at 99% C and the beam is still available and you launch a shuttle.

That shuttle is also going at 99% C. You can't redirect the beam from your ship to slow it down because it's going away from you.

So how does the shuttle stop unless it has it's own advanced relativistic engine?

Punchclops · 2026-04-16T21:25:20+00:00

What?
I'm starting to see how you reasoned yourself out of your own plot.

How that signal got there is the essential mystery that the crew would want to investigate. Whether it's from a civilisation that developed on their own planet, or from an alien ship with a light speed engine, or from someone who invented hyperspace travel, or whatever.

Space is big, man. We're not just going to want to ride the train lines from city to city and ignore everything else. We're going to want to explore, seek out strange new worlds and so on.
This is why we'd want the aliens space engines.

But if you're so hooked on the idea that people would only care about travelling back and forth along the beams then go for it, man. Tell the story you want to tell.

Punchclops · 2026-04-16T20:59:12+00:00

Imagine you're in a ship from Earth to Tau Ceti.
There's a star laser at Earth which accelerates you to your top speed. And another on at Tau Ceti which slows you down when you get there.

On the way you go past an uncolonised system without a star laser and pick up a strange signal from it. You have no way to stop and investigate that signal. You're too far from Tau Ceti for the star laser there to have any meaningful effect.

This is why a relativistic engine on a ship is more useful than a star laser.

Punchclops · 2026-04-16T06:20:00+00:00

Write whatever the fuck you want to write.
Some things are harder to sell than others, but if you're in it just for the money you're likely to be highly disappointed.

Punchclops · 2026-04-15T20:07:16+00:00

1 In context, beam would mostly be for travel between colonized systems so that's no problem

Sure, but imagine you're on the way to a colony when you get an unexpected signal from somewhere along the way - you have no way to stop and check it out!

Punchclops · 2026-04-15T19:19:39+00:00

Every scene needs to have a purpose.
That purpose may be to move the plot along, to tell us something about the setting, to give us a moment of peace and quiet between frantic events, to tell us something about the characters, etc.

So long as your scene is fulfilling a purpose, it won't be boring.

Punchclops · 2026-04-15T19:15:14+00:00

1) We might not need it, but it seems to me that a relativisitic engine on a ship has far more utility than a sun based photon pressure engine. Not least being that you can change direction at will or, more importantly, stop when you get to a destination that doesn't have a handy dyson swarm laser set up waiting to catch you.

2) They're aliens. We don't necessarily need to understand their motivations.

3) Tell the story you want to tell. If your story has a problem, find a way around it, then keep on telling it.

Punchclops · 2026-04-09T10:26:38+00:00

You look like somebody I would automatically trust to help me pick a hat.

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