Philosophy In Television (Part 3): 11.22.63

". . . the past doesn't want to be changed.  There are times when you feel it pushing back . . ."
--Al Templeton, 11.22.63 (episode one)

11.22.63, based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, explicitly distances itself from the type of storytelling that denies a forward flow of events from past to present to future, defying longstanding trends in entertainment that portray the relationship between past and future in a backwards or otherwise impossible way.  Its tale of a man utilizing a bizarre characteristic of a present day building to travel to the 1960s offers a time travel system without the same contradictions that have become fairly standard.  Its supernatural tale is thus able to potentially help philosophically muddled viewers who have accepted the contradictions of other works as "hypothetical possibilities" better understand the true nature of time.

The show follows a teacher named Jake Epping as he is introduced to the ability of a neighbor's closet to transport him to the same location at a specific time in October of 1960.  Al Templeton, the man who owns the diner with the closet in question, says that each time someone goes to the past, only two minutes have passed by the time they return, no matter how long they might have stayed in the 60s.  Actions performed in 1960 can change the future; however, returning to the past resets whatever actions were taken in the last visit to that part of the timeline.  If a time traveler wanted the changes to remain, Al insists, they must not return.  The stakes of a successful attempt to change the past in the desired way are too high to undo them with a subsequent visit.

Al hopes that Jake can prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy and thus avert the Vietnam War.  He needs Jake to first stay "undercover" for three years, discover if Lee Harvey Oswald truly did shoot JFK, and stop the killing from ever occurring.  Of course, since 11.22.63 acknowledges that the past necessarily leads to the future and thus shapes it, unlike the logically impossible kind of time travel described (but not shown) in something like Avengers: Endgame, none of the same obvious contradictions and therefore impossibilities that plague plenty of other mainstream time travel stories blemish the Stephen King adaption.  One thing that 11.22.63 does work into its story of time travel is the way in which vital events can be genuinely thwarted and yet still occur or almost occur for a reason other than the causal chain stopping.

X-Men: Days of Future Past and Terminator: Dark Fate have included a similar concept in their plots, with particular events of an apocalyptic nature either occurring even after their first iteration was averted or being discussed as if they might be inevitable, even if the surrounding events are changed.  11.22.63 shares this story element, as Al warns Jake not to "fuck" with the past or else it will "fuck" right back with him.  In both of the formerly mentioned cases, decisions made out of free will only changed the circumstances around how the key events eventually came about.  In 11.22.63, it seems as if free decisions can still prevent some obstacles to the mission, only for others to replace them.

No event, not even the creation of the universe and of time itself, has to happen.  There is nothing about a particular event that cannot not be part of reality in the way that the truth of logical axioms is inherent in all possible realities where other aspects are different.  Perhaps an attempt to postpone or prevent a certain event will somehow lead to it.  Perhaps something that truly was stopped will happen for an unrelated reason.  Nonetheless, in no case it logically necessary for a specific occurrence to happen instead of another logically possible event.  Two things make the future malleable and allow for this: the fact that anything that is logically possible could happen even if most possible events will not and the ability for humans to make decisions.

I have yet to see a work of entertainment specifically point out how merely visiting the past would not dramatically transform the future on its own without a time traveler going beyond merely observing.  After all, an atemporal or omniscient being (like God) could see the future without affecting it because observation is not manipulation.  Even a human who traveled from the then-present to the past will not necessarily have affected anything more than trivial events simply by going back in time.  At the very least, 11.22.63 does not succumb to the popular errors of having past events hinge on future events happening first (as in The Terminator, Interstellar, and Blair Witch) or Endgame's impossible concept of the past not impacting the future, which the plot of the film itself contradicted.  It just shows that altering the past could be a process with "pushback."