Spoiler Alert: Gravity Falls Time Travel

Gravity Falls was a popular animated TV show with only two seasons. Even with its small amount of episodes the series quickly gained a following. The show centered around twins Mabel and Dipper Pines as they explored the oddities of the town Gravity Falls. The town had anything from gnomes to minotaur's living in it and each episode had something new to offer. One recurring theme of the episodes was time travel.

Time travel is a tricky topic that a lot of shows and movies have tried to tackle, both successfully and unsuccessfully. It’s a favorite plot mechanism of many science fiction stories even though it’s something we honestly don't know anything about. It's very easy to mess up time travel. They’re are several types that people imagine but if you don't stick to one type it can become confusing or boring. The two types I'm referring to are linear and butterfly effect.

For those who are familiar with the “Back to the future” movies, they take a butterfly approach to time travel. In one of the movies Marty goes back to the past. During his stay he makes several changes that change his future. For example, during the course the movie he comes between his parents before they meet causing him to almost stop existing. The concept of the butterfly effect was thought of by a meteorologist in 1960 named Edward Lorenz. He used it to explain how little changes cause massive differences in his weather predicting program. This could be anything from hurricanes to a little rain. Guess that’s why the weather man is almost wrong. It was then adapted into a movie with the same title that used the phrase to explain time travel. This is the type that most media choose to use. It gives them an easy plot and it's easy to brush plot holes aside using time travel as an excuse.

Gravity Falls, however, took the road less traveled. They chose to use linear time travel in every way for their episodes. Linear time travel means that whatever you do in the past won't cause disasters in the future. Like the name suggests, the concept toys with time being a line and when you travel you are only moving to points up or down that line. This was proven in the episode “The Time Traveler's Pig” in season 1. The entire episode Dipper and Mabel are traveling back and forth in time so Dipper can win a carnival game and stuffed animal for his crush, Wendy. The game is a simple ‘throw the ball and knock over cups’ game. Unfortunately, the first time he throws the ball it hits Wendy in the face, giving her a black eye.

That’s when the twins meet Blendin, a time traveler from the future. They steal his method of time travel and the chaos begins. One thing to note is that even the tool that Dipper and Mabel acquire to time travel shows this. The device looks like a plain old tape measure but when you pull out the tape it shows dates down the line, the farther you pull the farther back in time you go.

It also only allows you to travel back in time from the point you currently exist. The time traveler, named Blendin, can travel back from the future but there isn’t any notch that allows Mabel or Dipper to travel to the future. Each time he goes back Dipper tries to prevent the future he started in. Sometimes he changes the angle he throws the ball, other times the words he says before throwing, he even changes where he stands. Sadly nothing works and only causes small changes.

I know what you’re thinking, “But I thought linear time travel meant that nothing changes?”.

This theory of time travel actually involves something called “anomalies”. Anomalies are minuscule changes in the timeline. Take a flat piece of paper for example, the paper representing the timeline. In linear time you want to change what direction the paper ends by bringing the two left corners to each other while it’s still flat. It’s hard to do and when you try, it causes wrinkles and bumps in the paper. These are anomalies and the more you bring the corners together, or more you try to change the future, the bigger these anomalies will become. In fact, Blendin’s entire purpose for coming to the past was to stop a series of anomalies that would happen. By doing so he allowed Dipper and Mabel to find his device and inadvertently caused the anomalies to happen. The biggest thing that reinforced the idea that they used the concept of linear time comes when you rewatch a specific three episodes before Blendin and his time traveling tape measure was introduced. If you know what you’re looking for you can see Blendin in the background of those episodes, picking up items left behind by the twins time traveling adventure. It’s a really cool easter egg that just shows how much thought and time was put into this show.

All in all I’m extremely impressed by how well they showed time travel. They kept it from being too overwhelming and consistently followed their own rules.

That’s all for this week! Don’t forget to comment if you have anything to add and suggest any theories that come to mind and you want to see.