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« on: August 18, 2009, 12:09:46 AM »
The idea of trying to somehow "explain" the time travel in DS really baffles me, when you watch the actual shows and they are so vague about how it all happens. I thought one of the writers gave his own editorial comment to the time travel element when he had Prof. Stokes tell Jeff Clark "I am not a travel agent for time!"
The I Ching time travelling was inspired by a section in William Seabrook's circa 1940 book on Witchcraft in which he explores the notion of "atavism" and talks about experiments that were made in the 1920s where people used the I Ching in an attempt to "open a door" on the astral plane and do something along the lines of what, today, many New Age people think of as "past life regression." The instance of the Russian lady who turned into a ravening wolf after she "went through the door" actually did involve the K'o hexagram which was how the time travel was accomplished on DS. Needless to say, this has no connection to anything documented in the Chinese lore about the I Ching material, nor anything remotely connected with quantum physics. It does seem to be connected with some early 20th century occultists' theorizing about "atavism" in human psychology (there's a great entry in the early 1970s "encyclopedia of the supernatural," Man, Myth and Magic, on this).
The first instance of time traveling seemed to occur as a result of the ghost of Sarah Collins intervening at a seance. How this happened was never explained--which I personally thought made it work better as a story. We never knew how it happened, we just know that it did.
I think the "Staircase through time" setpiece in the final storylines, which includes a scene where Julia reads a diary entry from the 1840 Quentin in which he theorizes that time and space are one and the same dimension, *may* be something that can somehow be related to modern speculations in quantum physics... but only in a really vague way.
If you want to give yourself a headache, try reading Warren Oddson's attempt to reconcile how there Barnabas wound up being split into two, with bodies existing in separate time continuums, but without the existing Collinwood continuity being disrupted (I use the term "continuity" here in an extremely loose way).
It's much better, IMO, to just go with the flow and take the stories for what they are--fabulous entertainment!
cheers, G.