Quoted from FrankM The king was assassinated, and the attempt to save him wiped most of the British Empire off the map. I know, I should have written about something important, but sometimes I like to stop and take my time with a small detail

You're missing my point. Before any of the action/drama in the script takes place we have already established that time travel is possible. This means that we already know the future can be changed, so when bad things happen you can just fix them.

Congrats on the top 3 finish.

Quoted from Warren You're missing my point. Before any of the action/drama in the script takes place we have already established that time travel is possible. This means that we already know the future can be changed, so when bad things happen you can just fix them. Congrats on the top 3 finish.

You are correct that reliable time travel sucks the stakes out of things. There's one particular scene in Infinity War that set my teeth on edge, and an episode of the Ninth Doctor that made me wonder why he didn't routinely jump into his own past screw-ups.

However, with this prototype, affecting a desired change in the past is roughly like performing surgery by hurling rocks over a wall at the patient. As Rene put it, this is a cautionary tale. (Edit: You can also think of it as the answer to the time travel paradox: any civilization that invents time travel invariably screws up its own past so that they can't invent time travel.)

Even with that entered for the defense, the mere existence of time travel in a world conjures up all sorts of what-ifs that the writer cannot easily dismiss. Especially not in five pages.

The promised fixed-up version has a new name, so it’s over in a new thread as Ripple Effect.

Thanks again everyone for your time and feedback.

Good rewrite. I didn't totally get what was going on with the first version. I stayed with this one the entire ride.

I don't remember the "ripple" analogy being so clearly drawn in the first version. But, it's an excellent piece of screenwriting.

Quoted from PKCardinal Good rewrite. I didn't totally get what was going on with the first version. I stayed with this one the entire ride. I don't remember the "ripple" analogy being so clearly drawn in the first version. But, it's an excellent piece of screenwriting.

Thanks. The original script is still at the head of this thread, and there’s a very good reason the ripple analogy didn’t seem so clear the first time...  because it wasn’t clear