Original subtitles

We're sending you back to the future!

Why is time travel fun?

Here we go.

Because who doesn't wonder about the past?

Who doesn't wonder about the future?

Somebody comes back from the future to change what happened.

Are we basically in a movie that's already been shot?

I'll be back.

Time travel stories embrace the potential

that we might open up new timelines, new worlds,

and new possibilities for ourselves as people.

That kind of imagination which can see through everything.

What are we always trying to do when we

tell stories about time travel?

What I'm always trying to do is to touch people

in the heart.

Today, I'm the age you were when you left.

This would be a real good time for you to come back.

If we can go any place we want in time,

time is no longer our jailor.

Every second of our past makes us who we are.

And the idea that we could relive that or view it

from another perspective

is so human, and so spiritual, I think that it touches everyone.

You've basically covered just about

every base in science fiction,

from alien contact, monsters, space travel, everything,

and you executive produced

the "Back To The Future" series of films.

Series. Yeah.

Do you think time travel is possible?

I asked Stephen Hawking that one day,

when I worked with Errol Morris.

How many people get to say that?

But when I was working with Errol Morris

as his executive producer on the documentary

on Stephen Hawking's book, "A Brief History of Time."

I asked Stephen Hawking that question

because "Back To The Future" just came out.

And Stephen Hawking said it's very possible

to go into the future,

but impossible to go back into the past.

Hey, we're time traveling now at one minute per minute.

So he kind of was eluding to the fact that everything in

"Back To The Future" could never happen.

Couldn't really happen.

The classical idea of a time machine in which

you can go into it at one point in time

and come back out the other side at some other point in time,

it's almost certainly impossible.

But what's beautiful about filmmaking

is you don't have to listen to the physicist.

Whether or not time travel exists,

it speaks to that question of free will, essentially.

That's the question we're playing with

when we're playing with time travel.

It opens up all sorts of fascinating

thought experiments about how that might play out.

In the summer of 1980,

I discovered my father's high school yearbook

and that was where the proverbial bolt

of lightning struck.

What if you could go to high school with your dad?

And what if your mom went to the same high school?

Don't I know you from somewhere?

Yes, I'm your density...

Who wouldn't want to be a fly on the wall

on their parents' first date, right?

So in "Back To The Future," a kid named Marty McFly

accidentally goes back in time,

and interferes with the event

that made his parents meet and fall in love.

So Marty has two problems.

One... he has to get back to 1985,

but before he can do that he has to make sure

that he puts the love affair between his father

and his mother back on track.

Everybody has that fantasy... time travel...

And I feel "Back To The Future" just makes it so rich

with possibility, with a kid, this crazy guy, and a DeLorean!

You know, I mean, it's just, my God!

So there have been time travel stories in the past,

such as Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol,"

in which Scrooge travels by means of dream visions

that allow him to visit the past and the present and the future.

In Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court,"

our protagonist is bonked on the head,

and that's what returns him to medieval England.

We never bought that stuff.

We wanted it to be scientific.

It's gotta be via a time machine of some sort.

So, that would be some guy who invented time travel

in his garage,

and that of course is Dr. Emmett L. Brown.

Doc?

Don't say a word!

I just loved this Doc who is feverishly trying to invent

everything he could imagine inventing,

and time travel of course would be the ultimate.

When this baby hits 88 miles per hour,

you're going to see some serious

His excitement about achieving that is incredible.

I loved it.

Mark. Action!

Movies like "Back to the Future"

provide a kind of tutorial about how paradoxes

are things you can play with.

Prior to this point in time, somewhere in the past,

the time line skewed into this tangent,

creating an alternate 1985.

It's necessary for Doc to say it,

not just for the audience to be caught up with the story,

but because he's gotta say...

"I've got to do this because of this because if that happens,

then you've got this going!"

Marty, whatever happens,

you must not let your other self see you.

The consequences could be disastrous.

Excuse me, sir?

He's in total terror that one mistake of judgment

and the whole cosmos could collapse.

This is the thing that every writer always struggles with

in time travel stories.

If you go back in time and something that you do

when you're back there,

causes the death of your grandfather

before he has impregnated your grandmother,

and you therefore cease to exist.

-Right. -But if you cease to exist,

then you weren't around

to get in the time machine in the first place

and to go back in time and do that.

So what happens?

They call it the grandfather paradox.

Now remember, according to my theory

you interfered with your parents first meeting.

If they don't meet they won't fall in love,

they won't get married, and they won't have kids.

"Back To The Future" laid out its rules so clearly,

it effectively taught the movie audience

this is what happens when you change the past,

this is what an alternate timeline might look like.

There are also kind of creepy questions like

what happens when your mom falls in love

with you as a teenager...

The most memorable piece

is Marty's photograph of himself from the '80s,

which he carries around with him back into the '50s

and keeps looking at it to make sure he's still in the picture.

Erased from existence.

So the photograph itself is obviously

incredibly paradoxical.

Because why would his brother and sister be there

if his parents had never met?

And like, why would there even have been a photograph

in the first place?

But nobody ever stops to think about that,

because we've set up this rule that says that

when Marty disappears from this photo,

he's going to fade out of existence.

It's a perfect dramatization of the idea

of erasing yourself from the timeline.

Time travel movies sort of invent

whatever device will create the best story.

"Back To The Future" really set up a mousetrap

to create the perfect kind of suspense.

Time travel opens up a lot of possibilities.

So you can have an alternate history,

you can have an alternate present.

It allows us to change a lot of different weird things

about our reality.

And the possibilities are kind of limitless.

Why is so much of our fantasy, you know our,

our imagination in science fiction genre

taken up with this idea of time travel?

Because we can't do it.

I think it is just wonderful to see it on the screen

and imagine ourselves being in that situation.

I would have loved to be able to time travel.

I mean, imagine to go back and say,

"I'm not going to do 'Hercules In New York.'"

My name is Hercules.

Hercules, Schmercules. Give me the dough!

I mean, it's like, unbelievable.

That's the thing you want to go back and do?

Not meet Jesus, not kill Hitler.

You want to go back and fix that one movie.

This haunts you.

To go to kill Hitler or to go and be back in the Roman days,

it would be really interesting

to be able to time travel.

But the question is,

If you can move back and forth in time,

do we have free will? Right.

Because "The Terminator" movies are kind of about that.

They're about free will.

If somebody comes back from the future

to change what happens down there,

then are we just all puppets of a time line?

I have total faith in you that you will figure it out.

There's an interesting theme in "The Terminator" about

Can we change the past?

Can we change the future?

And what you see is the future coming back to destroy the past.

The Terminator coming back to try to kill

Sarah Connor also brings back Kyle Reese...

Who becomes the father to John Connor

and creates the leader of humanity.

The time machine was a mechanism to put the Terminator

and also Michael Biehn, the soldier, into the past.

That character was sent by John Connor in the future

to go back in time

to protect this girl from the Terminator.

Once they're there, then you have this chase,

who's gonna rescue Sarah Connor or is she gonna get killed?

Science fiction is a great place to ask is our destiny fixed?

Or can we change it?

I didn't do anything.

No, but you will.

The question is are we locked into one series of events?

Like, by the end of the first film,

you realize you're seeing the creation myth

of the thing they've gone back to prevent in the first place.

The 2nd film opens up the possibility

and Sarah Connor speaks to it directly.

Maybe that's not the universe we're stuck in.

Maybe the future isn't written.

Sarah sticks a knife in the table and says,

"There's no fate but what we make for ourselves."

She's been told that she can change the future.

But is that just an illusion?

Are we basically in a movie that's already been shot?

It's already rolled up in the can someplace?

That could be!

You can play it forward and backward as much as you want,

but the ending never changes?

I think that we have control over ourselves

and I think that we have the power to create changes.

Your son gave me a message to give to you.

"The future is not set.

You must survive or I will never exist."

The future is not set.

You know, I mean that's... That's kind of the line...

The future's not set.

And it can be altered.

Should I tell you about your father?

If you don't send Kyle, you can never be.

The point that the film makes is that you can change history.

You can escape the Terminator.

But time travel is not about history

and it's not about time travel,

it's about accepting responsibility

for all the possibilities in your own life.

The idea of taking the wrong turn

and making a correction later on,

it's not a new idea in science fiction.

It's not even a new idea in the movies.

"Looper" is one where you're essentially trying

to not change the world,

but change your world, change your life.

In "Looper," the time traveler is a hit man.

Wouldn't you know?

He's a hit man played both

by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis.

When you agree to be a Looper,

it's not a long-term job.

There's not much of a future in it.

One day, you know that your future self

is going to show up in front of you...

and you're going to have to shoot it.

That's gonna be his final hit.

To kill himself.

And he, and all of the other loopers,

enter into this bargain.

And you have to do it.

If you don't do it it's a really big problem.

The older one, the Bruce Willis character,

knows the whole story.

But the younger one is learning for the first time what's...

What's going on.

And he naturally has a few questions.

So do you know what's gonna happen?

I don't wanna talk about time travel

because if we start talking about it

then we're gonna be here all day

talking about it, making diagrams with straws.

Talking about time travel.

It makes you go crazy.

And the option of going through a conversation like that

with you at a younger age would make you even crazier.

Move, damnit.

Time travel is a device that

story is using to tell a story about human nature

and how humans treat each other and why.

Move.

Then I saw it.

If "Looper" is a story about how violence

perpetuates more violence, to me, the lesson is

that you just create more problems and worse problems.

I saw it... and the path was a circle.

It's kind of about changing your own destiny.

And it's kind of about how your destiny

is always being shaped by people more powerful than yourself.

And how do you really get out of a dark cycle?

The movie is pointing out another way to end that cycle.

So I changed it.

It is an existential dilemma.

A lot of time travel is very philosophical in that way.

Joe finally takes control of his life by ending it.

Why are we fascinated by time travel?

Well, you know people very often ask me

why am I interested in time, I say,

"Well, because I've always lived in it."

-Yeah, right. -It's... I'm... we are.

We feel very trapped in it.

It's like, we try to hang on to the moment.

We take photographs of everything, right?

We desperately want to hang on to

this reality and it recedes.

What time travel allows us to do is to say,

"Okay, but what if we could?

What if we could preserve that moment.

What if we could revisit that moment, genuinely?"

Well, that's all science fiction is about... What if?

What if we could travel through space,

what if we could travel through time?

What makes "Interstellar" so compelling

is that the filmmakers devised these turns of plot

to create a real classic family story

with the deepest possible emotions.

Fundamentally, "Interstellar" is about

the human cost of time travel.

It's a deeply and intensely personal drama,

and the story of what happens

when a father is separated from his child.

I said stay!

No, I'm coming back.

When?

Will he go and save humanity

or will he stay with his daughter instead?

I mean, by the time I get back, we...

We might even be the same age.

Murph.

You have no idea when you're coming back?

"Interstellar" projects us into a near future

in which the world has gone through

an enormous global catastrophe.

Nelson's torching his whole crop.

Blight?

They're saying it's the last harvest for okra.

Ever.

I play Cooper's father-in-law.

Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, a former astronaut,

who by several turns of plot,

goes shooting into outer space.

We've got to move to another planet or we'll not survive.

"Interstellar" is an unusual time travel film

because instead of building a literal time machine

and having it be about an invention,

it's about the way time works in space,

the way that it speeds up or slows down

depending on wormholes and gravitational pull.

I think there are all sorts of different ways

of looking at time travel,

and when I came to do "Interstellar,"

which is not a time travel movie but has that element in it...

It does fold time at the end. It does.

-You still approached it very rigorously. -Yes.

By going to some of the top experts.

It was a really fascinating part of the process

because Kip Thorne who was one of the original...

-Caltech I think. -Caltech.

And Kip is one of the great minds in physics.

What he taught me is that once you can grasp

those physical concepts as concepts of astrophysics,

they offer you this great launching pad

for story possibilities

to do with relativity and all these things.

-Time dilation. -Exactly.

There are two forms of time travel.

There's the time travel that is probably impossible

and that's going backwards.

Then you have time travel, which is not only possible,

but already a feature of our world,

which is time dilation forwards.

In science, there's this thing called the "twin paradox,"

which basically says that if my twin gets in a spaceship

and goes traveling at, near to the speed of light,

and then returns to Earth,

when my twin gets back to Earth, my twin

will be younger than I am.

That's a form of time travel.

And that is actually brilliantly illustrated

in the movie "Interstellar."

Go, go, go, go, go.

Seven years per hour here. Let's make it count.

"Interstellar" explored, in the most advanced way,

how time travel really might work.

When they go to the water planet,

time works differently.

They come back to their ship,

and the guy who stayed on the ship has grown old.

I've waited years.

How... How many years?

By now it must be...

23 years, 4 months, 8 days.

"Interstellar" suggests that time travel will always

have a certain kind of tradeoff.

So on the one hand, the scientist's ability

to travel through space and time is essential to saving humanity,

but the fact that he has to go on this journey

in the first place, and to be separated from his daughter

for most of her natural life, suggests the very real cost.

Hey, Dad.

Hey, Murph.

You son of a bitch.

There are moments when Matthew is allowed to see his daughter,

by, video stream.

It's absolutely heartbreaking.

You once told me that when you came back,

we might be the same age.

And today, I'm the age you were when you left.

This might be a real good time for you to come back.

People talk about, "My kid was born, and I blinked,

and then I sent them off to college."

The movie is literally about that.

The sacrifices that go along with whatever it is

that you've given your life to,

at the expense of these moments with your family,

which I think is the very poetic part of "Interstellar."

So if "Interstellar" explores the human cost of time travel,

"Primer" does something very similar,

but it does so in a different way.

We have two everyday engineers

who accidentally create time travel.

Anything?

-Is this normal? -I don't know.

Some people think it's the most credible,

complicated, time travel movie.

It's done on a very low budget.

Do you know who directed that?

Shane Carruth.

He's in it, he's lovely in it.

What's it doing?

I don't know if I'm making it up...

These two guys, Abe and Aaron,

keep investigating this phenomenon.

There's this weird anomaly that shows up.

What they finally realize is that they have

created a space

that you can travel through time in.

So they take this, and create a bigger box,

big enough for a human to be in.

When they do this, they use it for really mundane

and very human purposes.

One uses it to play the stock market.

And time travel ends up pulling the friends apart.

I just want to know what box you used.

You built the one for you, right? Just the one?

Yeah. How many do you think I made?

They are suspicious of each other

and they're also deceiving each other

because something about going back in time

affects their brain,

and they do start losing their minds.

Like many other movies, "Primer" does indeed suggest

that there is a cost to time travel,

and in this case the cost is both emotional and physical.

What's on your hand? Are you bleeding?

So when we start seeing our characters show up,

and they've got, you know, bloody ears,

and they lose the ability to write,

their right-handed writing looks like their left-handed writing,

there's something going on mentally that

they are paying the price with.

The time-travel story, it's a kind of Faustian tale.

The bargain with the devil.

Everything is a barter.

If you sell your soul to the devil,

you can have everything you ever dreamed of.

But eventually you pay the piper.

Who doesn't wonder about the past?

Who doesn't wonder about the future?

How many times has that game been played, you know,

if you could go back in time, where would you go?

Can you remember the first time you ever heard of time travel?

"I think ancient Greeks must have had time travel.

Isn't there some time travel thing in Shakespeare?"

Right? But there isn't.

Time travel is new. Time travel is a new idea.

Before H.G. Wells, it didn't exist.

What Wells gave the time travel story was the machine.

The idea that somebody could build a machine

that would do for time what rocket ships would do for space.

And the idea was just irresistible.

It's literally true that the words "time" and "travel"

in English were never used together before H.G. Wells

invented this character that he called...

The Time Traveller.

My grandfather, H.G. Wells, wrote that in 1895.

This is a first edition of "The Time Machine."

Firstly, he was writing anything he could sell.

The novels that we now know,

which are these great science-fiction novels,

came after he'd spent years writing as a journalist,

but there was an enormous amount of kind of revolutionary science

going on at the time.

Darwin was talking about the history of human life

in terms of millions and billions of years.

Archaeologists were doing the same thing.

Humanity was developing a longer view of time than ever before.

When I speak of time, gentlemen,

I'm referring to the fourth dimension.

H.G. Wells, "The Time Machine,"

his character goes forward in time,

no problem there.

Going back in time... Entirely different thing.

If you go back in time, then you start running

into all sorts of issues with causality.

And that's the view that's expressed in the phrase,

the butterfly effect.

A tiny change, a tiny perturbation in a complex system

can have enormous and unpredictable consequences

in a fairly short time.

And it starts with

"A Sound of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury.

The basic idea of the story is that you can

travel back in time, but you're going to be

on this suspended platform and you can shoot a dinosaur

but it has to be one that was going to die anyway,

so that you don't change anything in the future.

And this fairly arrogant game hunter steps off

and kills a butterfly...

And comes back and his future has turned into

this kind of dystopian version of his own world

that he barely recognizes.

Bradbury creates these deep metaphors

that give shape to a lot of the way

I think people have subsequently

understood ideas like time travel.

If you change a butterfly in the past,

the entire future might be different.

When writers of time travel stories

consider the logical implications

of everything that happens,

they get tied up in these paradoxes.

Robert Heinlein is the first writer to get the pleasure

and peculiarity of time travel paradoxes

and how they can be exploited again and again and again.

He sees that the problem with time travel stories

isn't a problem, it's an opportunity.

He wrote stories like "All You Zombies,"

which has nothing to do with zombies, by the way,

but it has to do with probably the most completely confusing

and delightful science fiction time paradox story there is,

which was made into the film "Predestination."

I can do this, I can change my past.

Yes, you can.

Have you ever thought about changing yours?

I never deviate from the mission.

Predestination is about an intersex time traveler

who starts life as a woman...

Is forced into gender reassignment, becomes a man.

That man then travels back in time,

falls in love with his female self,

that female self then has a child

which ends up being the creation of themselves.

So it's an intersex time-traveling

incest love story.

And in fact "Playboy" magazine rejected the story

because all the sex made the editor queasy,

the editor of "Playboy."

Well, I think it had to do with the idea of having sex

with yourself to create yourself,

which is kind of crazy

that "Playboy" would have an issue

with something like that.

But it was 1959.

Well, it's the age-old question...

Which came first the chicken or the egg?

Yeah. We say the rooster.

Some things are predestined, right?

I made you who you are, you made me who I am,

it's a paradox, right?

But it can be para-doctored!

We've had time travel in science fiction movies

for most of the 20th century, so I guess the question is why?

Well, because what you're doing is exploring possible futures.

You're exploring the decisions that we make now.

It enables us to imagine what the future will be like

or what the past would be like if we interacted with it.

It's incredibly important way of exploring potential futures.

The future is now.

So many science fiction movies are about these brilliant

scientists and astrophysicists, biologists.

And "Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure" is not.

No way!

Yes, way Ted!

In a way, "Bill & Ted" becomes important

just because it's so different from everything else.

It makes you think what is wrong with us,

the people writing these films, if we can't imagine

the future as anything but awful?

Two dudes can be the heroes, man.

Ready Ted?

Ready Bill?

Let's go back into history!

Alex Winter and I became Bill and Ted.

Bill S. Preston, Esquire, Ted Theodore Logan.

Excellent!

Bill and Ted are idiots.

And our teacher tells us that if we don't pass our history exam

we're going to fail out of school.

The lady in that car over there said

that Marco Polo was in the year 1275.

So it's not just a water sport. I knew it.

If they fail Ted's dad is going to send him to military school,

and if they're separated their band

will never form and save the world.

Someone from the future shows up and says,

"We're going to help you."

Do you know when the Mongols ruled China?

Perhaps we can ask them.

Bill and Ted of course can accept everything.

Dudes, you guys are going to go back in time!

-Yeah! -They're kind of like

these modern fools, of kind of an eternal optimism.

We had a funny moment, Chris Matheson and I,

when we wrote it we were not involved

in the casting of the film,

and didn't know who would play Bill and Ted.

We had flown to Arizona where we were shooting the movie

and we were at a McDonald's in line,

and we saw a couple of kids in front of us

and goofing off and we were like,

"Those are the guys,

that's who should be playing Bill and Ted!"

And later on that day we met Keanu and Alex

and those were the guys that were in front of us

at McDonald's and we were like, "That's perfect."

And you know of course we are bequeathed

a time traveling phone booth by George Carlin

and set upon a mission through spacetime.

We collect all the various characters from history

because that would be the most awesome report

you could have would be to actually have the real

people there.

We love toying with all these paradoxes.

And one of my favorite parts of the "Bill & Ted" movie

is when all the historical figures are in jail

and they can't get out.

Can we get your dad's keys?

Could steal 'em! Good thinking dude!

After the report we'll time travel back to two days ago,

steal your dad's keys and leave them here.

See?!

Yeah!

So after the report we can't forget to do this

otherwise it won't happen.

Ted is like connecting to his future self

through his present self to know

where his future self will want to hide the keys

because the future self already knows what the past self did,

but the past self doesn't know what the future self did,

but he knows the character.

Come on, Ted.

We've got some historical figures to rescue.

And it perfectly encapsulates the absurdity

of the time travel paradox.

You just have to remind yourself to have done them in the past

and they will be done in the future.

And I just thought that was terrific.

It just says, yeah, don't worry about it.

It's pretty fascinating honestly how rare

"Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure"

is in the grand history of sci-fi films.

To have a sci-fi film that says, "This is just fun!"

is an incredible strange relief.

No way!

It's not the only science fiction film

to have fun with time travel.

In fact, this comedy was the first to popularize

a particular form of time travel called the time loop.

Rita, I'm re-living the same day over and over.

Groundhog Day. Today.

"Groundhog Day" uses the device of a time loop

as a way to explore ways you need to work on yourself

before you can grow up and have meaningful

relationships with other people.

When I was first brainstorming ideas,

I actually wrote on the little index card,

"time machine."

But I didn't really know what was going to be involved

or how it was going to work.

Phil? Phil?! Phil Connors?

Phil Connors, I thought that was you.

Hey, how are you?

I just thought, "Okay, whatever it is the rule is,

he can remember, but nobody else can remember.

So for them it's just the same day.

And for him it's part of a long, long, long repetition of days."

And the audience learns to expect that,

and can begin to sort of map the day along with the character

and see if they can figure out

how to get out of this time loop before he does.

The real time travel machine, is your brain.

In here, we're constantly recoiling

through different versions of ourselves, memories,

and daydreams, alternate paths,

where we might end up somewhere different.

Do you ever have d�j� vu, Mrs. Lancaster?

I don't think so, but I could check with the kitchen?

And this is what the time travel story crystallizes for us.

It's a model of consciousness,

which is constantly reeling with ultimate freedom through time,

and then finding itself stuck, once again, in the real world.

In the first stretch of "Groundhog Day,"

Bill Murray knows everything that's gonna happen to him,

he can make that work to his advantage.

And he does it in the way an adolescent would,

just having fun and also becoming kind of sociopathic.

You don't really care about the other people.

They are objects in your life.

And then it moves on to a depression

where he finally decides to kill himself.

And he finds that he cannot even do that.

This is Tom, he worked in the coal mine

until they closed it down.

This is where he, for the first time

starts to notice other people,

and realizes that they have lives, too,

and that he's part of a community

and by seeing himself differently,

he actually opens up a whole new world to himself.

Hello, father, let's get you someplace warm.

The wonderful thing about being stuck in a time loop,

it makes us look at our lives in a fresh way

which is one of the great things that movies can do,

and especially science fiction,

because it can so immediately place you

in a different time and place.

Maybe we all do need a time travel movie

to make us a better version of ourselves,

but I hope that we're not stuck as long as he is.

Anything different is good.

My name is Doctor Who.

It's not, is it?

I like it.

You don't know it yet.

But in a short time, you will trust me with your life.

"Doctor Who" is a very British, slightly eccentric

extraordinary series

that's been running for more than 50 years now.

And it involves a charming, peculiar Time Lord.

We're time travelers. We tread softly.

He's an alien who has come down to protect us

from the rest of the universe by traveling through time

and by interacting with real historical events

in both the past and the future.

We're unarmed.

You wouldn't open fire on an unarmed civilians would you?

It wouldn't be the first time.

Chuggles, now!

I love "Doctor Who."

Over the past 50 years there have been a total

of 12 Doctor Whos.

Each new performer brings his own thing to it.

I've seen literally every episode of "Doctor Who"

that's ever been made from "An Unearthly Child,"

which was made in 1963,

all the way up to the current Peter Capaldi Doctor Whos.

You are the dark side, you are an enemy of the Daleks.

Yes, I am.

Exterminate!

I grew up with the show.

I lived in a tenement in Glasgow in Scotland,

and through these flickering little blue images

I'd be taken to other planets with strange creatures

with wonderful imaginative designs.

Do you think you're the first to try and kill me?

And also there has always been a kind of B-movie element

to it, which I've always loved.

Is everything out here evil? Hardly anything is evil.

But most things are hungry.

Hunger looks very like evil from the wrong end of the cutlery

or do you think that your bacon sandwich loves you back?

I think one of the things that's appealing

about "Doctor Who," is there's a tradition of English humor

which suggests that the future is all a joke.

He's a Time Lord, yes.

And he can travel back and forth in time,

and he does it in absurd ways.

Time And Relative Dimension In Space.

TARDIS for short.

The Doctor's time machine, the TARDIS,

is one of the best ever because it invokes

the playing with physics

that is going to be necessary to travel through time and space

because his machine is bigger on the inside

than it is on the outside.

So your box can move.

We can go anywhere we like.

He always has a human companion.

And he brings that companion

along with him on his adventures.

-Where are we? -The end of the road.

The last planet.

He seems to have a special place in his heart for humans.

Picking individual ordinary people

and showing them all of time and space

and giving them a broader view on life.

He's the Doctor. What do doctors do?

They heal sick situations, sick people.

But why do you have to destroy?

Can't you use your brains?

Only one race can survive.

This senseless evil killing.

The first actor, the wonderful William Hartnell, became ill

and couldn't carry on with the show.

So they came up with this rather brilliant idea,

which is that the Doctor has the ability to reconstitute himself.

This has allowed this show to last

because we change the lead actor every three or four years,

which no other show does.

It has all these other levels of philosophical

and reflective nature

that make it very, very rich.

People always ask me what is it about the show

that appeals so broadly?

The answer I would like to give

and which I'm discouraged from giving,

because it is not useful in the promotion of a brand,

is that it's about death.

And it has a very, very powerful death motif in it.

Which is that the central character dies.

Doctor, let it go.

Time enough.

And I think that is one of its most potent mysteries.

Because somewhere in that,

people see that that's what happens in life.

You have loved ones, and then they go,

but you must carry on.

There are a lot of ways in which time travel stories

sneakily are about eluding death.

Time is what kills us, after all.

Time is a bastard.

There's something that speaks to our souls about time travel

where there's a fatalism involved

that is reassuring somehow.

Right. Because it tells you that the mistakes

were always gonna happen. Yeah.

I mean, one of the fascinating things...

I was explaining to my kids the other day...

That if you look at the idea of a telescope.

Telescope is a way of looking back in time,

and not just space. It's a time machine.

It's a time machine.

And you look at the smallest star, the further away,

the further back in time you're looking.

And theoretically you could make more

and more powerful telescopes,

and you can look further and further back in time.

It's just a mind-boggling concept.

Theoretically the sun could have gone out

seven and a half minutes ago and we just don't know yet

'cause it takes light a while to get here.

Exactly. Let's hope not.

But that idea of looking back in time

as you look out into the world,

the fact that everything we see in this room

when you look around, you're looking back in time.

I think the potential is limitless

for time travel stories...

Chris, thanks for doing this.

No, thank you for having me.

-It's exciting to talk about. -Okay. Good.

All right, give us a cut then.

I'll give you a cut. Done.

Going home. Done.