The Red Dwarf episode “Timeslides” sees robot crewmember Kryten discover that a jar of photographic developing fluid has mutated and makes it possible to enter photographs and interact with the people in them. Main character Dave Lister then takes advantage of this by giving his 17-year-old self the idea for an invention called the Tension Sheet that made its creator a multi-millionaire, changing history so that he becomes the product’s creator and lives a completely different life.
The element in this episode that had the most bearing on the script for Butterfly is specifically how things change after history is altered. After the crew return from the photograph, it takes a moment for time to adjust to the changes followed by Lister, Kryten, and other crewmember the Cat fading away thanks to their lives taking a different course, but remaining crewmember Arnold Rimmer and supercomputer Holly’s memories remain the same.
The idea I drew from this is for Future Jeff to have an object that would have never come into existence if the timeline he is trying alter had not happened, and an indicator of his success or failure in changing time would be if the object still existed or didn't change in some way.
As well this, I closely studied the scene where Lister meets his younger self to think about how a person might react to meeting themselves such as embarrassment at the immaturity of their past self or disappointment at their future self not turning out as they’d hoped.
The episode also features examples of the butterfly effect in action as Kryten and the Cat disappear after Lister changes his past because he was indirectly responsible for creating the Cat’s species and rescued Kryten from a crashed spaceship. A second instance of the butterfly affect similar to the one that Future Jeff is trying to achieve in my film is that Rimmer’s (who is a hologram simulation of a dead man) failed attempt at giving himself the idea for the Tension Sheet causes some unexplained change somewhere in his life that causes to him to survive the radiation leak that originally killed him and he no longer exists as a hologram.
This is an excellent example of the butterfly effect in action as it shows how even the smallest change to the past can cause an enormous change at some point later on in time.
Red Dwarf - Series 3 Episode 5 "Timeslides" (BBC2, 1989 Dir. Ed Bye)
The Butterfly Effect - Director's Cut (2004, Dir. Eric Bress & J Mackye Gruber)
A Sound Of Thunder - Ray Bradbury (Collier's, 1952)
A Sound Of Thunder is a science fiction short story by American author Ray Bradbury that was first published in the June 28th 1952 edition of Collier's, an American magazine that was originally published from 1888 to 1957 and relaunched in 2012.
The story takes places just after a political election where incredibly right wing candidate Deutscher has been defeated by his more moderate opponent Keith, and focuses on a hunter named Eckels who goes on a guided safari to the past to kill a tyrannosaurus rex. The rules of the safari are that, in order to avoid tampering with history; Eckels can only kill an animal that was about to die anyway, must remove the bullets from its corpse afterwards, and must not step off of the levitating path he has been set on.
Eckels loses his nerve at the sight of the dinosaur and ends up falling off the path. After returning to the present, Eckels and his guides discover that the English language is slightly different and that Deutscher won the election instead of Keith. On closer inspection, the guides find a squashed butterfly on the sole of Eckles' boot and realise that he has irreparably changed history. All by killing a single butterfly.
Although my film will follow broadly similar themes to A Sound Of Thunder, the scale of interfering with time will be much smaller for reasons of both practicality and narrative, and will effectively take the opposite approach to altering time as changing the future is the protagonist's main goal.
Released in 2004, The Butterfly Effect is a psychological thriller about a man named Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher) who frequently experiences blackouts during his childhood, leaving him with large gaps in his memories. On the advice of a psychologist, he keeps journals from the age of seven and, upon rereading them as an adult, he discovers that he has the ability to travel back in time and briefly take control of his body at the point in his journal that he reads from.
He uses this ability to go back to his childhood and alter the tragic events such as paedophilia and manslaughter that afflicted his childhood and that of his friends but soon discovers that, no matter what he changes, something terrible will still happen.
As well as reading into chaos theory and time paradoxes, this was my primary tool for exploring how the Butterfly Effect and other aspects of chaos theory could be explored onscreen, despite The Butterfly Effect being a two hour film while my own film will be ten to fifteen minutes long.
While the film contains multiple instances of the Butterfly Effect, the clearest and most prominent one occurs towards the end of the film when Evan interferes with his 13-year-old self and his friends destroying a postbox with a stick of dynamite. An action which killed a woman and her infant child, and traumatised his friend Lenny to the extent that he was institutionalised and rendered incapable of functioning on his own as an adult. Evan prevents the deaths and Lenny's trauma but is caught in the explosion, creating a future where he is wheelchair-bound and has no arms below his elbows.
Also in this future, Lenny is in a relationship with Evan's love interest Kayleigh thanks to Evan's injuries causing them become closer, and Kayleigh's brother Tommy (who was incredibly violent in the original timeline) has become a devout Christian because stopping the deaths made him a very spiritual person. The most direct changes in this new timeline though are that Evan no longer has any journals after the age of thirteen because he was physically unable to write them, and that his mother has terminal lung cancer because the stress of Evan being disabled caused her to chain smoke for seven years.
This skilful realisation of the butterfly effect as a plot device inspired me to make edits to the script for Paradox and make time paradoxes a more prominent part of the narrative as opposed to them merely being used to drive the story forward as was the case in earlier drafts of the script.
Lister meets his 17-year-old self and realises how irritating he was.
Lister fades away after successfully altering his past so that he invented the Tension Sheet.