We’re a month away to check out Will Wright’s show, Bar Karma. Sadly, I won’t be able to partake in the viewing due to the fact that I only have basic cable at my new place – but I’m sure I can catch it online shortly after. CurrentTV, the station that will be broadcasting the show sat down with Will in a short interview about what to expect. I love time-traveling movies/shows, so I am keeping my fingers crossed this does well. Only time shall tell.
Q: “Bar Karma” is the first of the many possible Creation shows. What’s this show about?
A: The show actually came out of a treatment that the fans synergistically wrote, and it involves a bar that’s displaced from space and time. People come into this bar and there’s this karmic re-examination of their life, and the impact on the world. And in most cases, these people are downstream of the timeline of a very significant impact on the world, and they can figure out what that is when they come to the bar, and in most cases, how to prevent it.
Q: So are they traveling through time? How does this show’s theory of time travel relate to what else we’ve seen in science fiction?
A: Time travel is a very frequent subject in science fiction, and I’ve always been dissatisfied with the way it’s generally handled, so I actually kind of raised my hand at one point and said, “Let’s try to make a time travel thing that has some amount of plausibility.” A lot of times, time travel stories involve paradoxes, the grandfather paradox, etc. When you think about them, they don’t work — what if you go back and meet your mother and then she doesn’t get married to your father and all of that.
So at least right now our basic premise is that we’re not going back in time. We’re branching new universes. The bar is basically a branch off a universe, and thus it avoid any paradox and it can have a sort of continuity in the space-time continuum.
Everything you’ve done back in time, back on your trip, is part of a whole new branch, and original timeline is basically untouched. So if there’s something in the original timeline, typically bad, about to happen, they bring somebody into this bar, and they have an opportunity after interacting with this person to affect the course of the new universe relative to the old one. They haven’t actually changed the future – the old future is still going to happen in the original timeline.
