SONICHU: So, the plan is, we get there five minutes earlier, we wait in the sphere to stay undetected, and just after the Crystal hits younger Chris, I dash out and grab it and return to within the sphere. Not totally creative, but okay.
CHRIS: I’ve often pondered and observed the idea of time travel, and the idea of changing the past for a better future/our present. After much pondering I’ve realized that if we were meant to tamper with the past, it would only go unoticed, as if the trip back was originally supposed to happen in the first place. Like if we went back to prevent the mishap at *Target, I would still likely have to take the punishment anyway, pointless.
Caption: *See Sub-Episodes 7 & 8
SONICHU: I get it, dad, like in the “Futurama” Roswell, NM episode, it turned out Fry was his own grandfather. Freaky and messed up. Or in the “Bender’s Big Score” movie, with Fry trying to live his missed Y2K life, he still had to end up in Y3K anyway. Good matching storyline.
CHRIS: Yes, I agree, although Megan Marie Griffin strikes me more fondly, television-wise.
SONICHU: Why doesn’t Magi-Chan offer his input on the conversation? Cat got his tongue?
MAGI-CHAN, MAYBE?: 001100010010011110100001101101110011
It may not be that creative a plan, Sonichu, but it seems like rational enough a plan that it’d work, a first for Chris.
The topic of time travel brings up a lot of deep, existential questions that the mind of Christian Weston Chandler can’t even fathom, much less answer. I don’t exactly know what Chris means when he says that if he’d gone back in time to prevent the incident portrayed in the Off Target Sub-Episodes that he would still have had to take the punishment for them; if he went back in time to stop himself from loitering at Target he would have never gotten arrested for them, so no, he wouldn’t have had to take the punishment.
Sonichu connects these musings to two episodes of Futurama, the aforementioned Bender’s Big Score movie and the season 3 episode “Roswell That Ends Well”, an episode where the Planet Express crew are catapulted, thanks to the energies from a supernova interacting with electricity from a sparking microwave, back to 1947 Roswell, New Mexico, where it turns out the spacecraft that allegedly landed there was their own and the alien allegedly discovered was company physician and lobster monster John A. Zoidberg. In the episode, Fry hangs out with his grandfather-to-be Enos, accidentally getting him killed. Realizing his days are numbered since he rewrote his own existence, he consoles Enos’s grieving widow and gets her pregnant with the man who would become his own father, thus rewriting himself back into history, albeit now as his own biological grandfather. I think Chris is somehow worried about that happening here or something.
Chris drifted off in the middle of Sonichu’s speech into daydreaming about Megan Marie Griffin, only daughter of Peter Griffin and someone Chris really loves mass debating to. Chris, of course, immediately changed the subject to what animated women he finds hottest, of course. But Magi-Chan is too busy trying not to get all three of them killed to think about stupid shit like that. I find it a little interesting that Chris chose to use her seldom used full name, he really seems to have a thing for full names.
That string of binary (I can’t figure out exactly who’s saying it) is lifted directly from Bender’s Big Score. In that movie, Bender utilizes the code, which has been tattooed on Fry’s ass, to summon a time sphere (which looks an awful lot like the time sphere here just green instead of blue) that will allow him to travel back in time. Unlike the blue sphere here, it will only allow the user to go back and can’t bring them back to the present. The time code from that film offers the premise of “paradox-free time travel”, an idea that I’m sure was appealing to Chris. The binary code isn’t meant to spell any word; at one point in the movie Fry has to read it through a mirror so it was designed to be, when divided into six lines of six, it could be read the same but reversed on a mirror. Herein lies a fairly confusing problem though - why would Magi-Chan’s psychic powers utilize a binary code?
While we’re on the topic of Bender’s Big Score, here’s a little tidbit from the DVD commentary: Futurama resisted the urge to do time travel stories until the Roswell episode because, according to series producer David X. Cohen, “Whenever you watch a sci-fi movie or TV show with time travel, generally as a sci-fi fan you get mad.” While obviously there is no real time travel to fact check against, time travel plots leave plenty of plot holes open and even the best writers forget some glaring mistakes. Remember that those are professional sci-fi writers saying that time travel plots are too complicated even for them. Someone like Chris getting a hold of a time travel plot, and we’re all doomed.
