Plot synopsis
Jim is a young American businessman, who finds himself sporadically slipping backwards and forwards through a hole in time. He always arrives next to his ‘time-twin’ James ‘Biggles’ Bigglesworth, who is a WWI fighter pilot.
Biggles’ superior officer, Colonel William Raymond (Peter Cushing) explains, “Apparently, the hole in time goes both ways. It opens when one or the other is in mortal danger.”
Jim never knows when he will move from one world to the other, but a bolt of lightning usually accompanies the time travel. Anyone or anything that he happens to be touching at that moment gets transported through time with him.
My comments
There are two time-travellers, one making return trips to the future and the other return trips to the past. Each trip, they are helping to save the other’s life, so their trips are significant in terms of causing the timeline to diverge away from the original for good!
Summary of time travel
Each time Jim makes a return trip to the past, he changes the timeline by saving Biggles’ life; but he always arrives back to an unchanged present. This could indicate a model of time with a converging timeline, which means the past would be open.
Biggles, on the other hand, starts his trips in Jim’s past and only makes return trips to Jim’s present. He is able to change Jim’s future by saving his life each time. This points to an open future, as Biggles appears to be changing it.
A more likely possibility is that these trips are causal loops: each trip was meant to be and will always be that way, so so they are changing nothing. This means there is a fixed past and future with no divergence of time.
If Jim’s era is taken to be the present, then both Jim and Biggles would travel along the following timeline but in opposite directions.
Category of time travel
Fantasy: finding portals.
Model of time
Closed past, closed future with a fixed timeline with causal loop.
