jwz’s take on time travel

“If your story is not about time travel, but it has time travel in it, then your story sucks.”
– jwz

He expands:

For example. Stories that are about time travel:
Terminator, Back to the Future, Time Bandits, Bill & Ted, 12 Monkeys, Journeyman.
Their use of time travel is, at least, honest.

Stories that are not about time travel:
Star Trek, Stargate, Lost, Heroes.
Their use of time travel is a crutch or a gag, and all of their time travel episodes are stupid.

I think he’s onto something. I’ve often wished “Lost” hadn’t gone down the time travel rabbit hole beginning in season 2. It seems like it needlessly complicated a story that was already tied in knots. On the other hand Wednesday night’s season finale gave me some hope that time travel and repetition might be subsets of a much larger theme where they would make sense.